I recently had a Morning Circle with my new third grade class. Their question for the day was to tell everyone what they wanted to be when they grow up. The response that really shocked me was when one of my students said “I don’t want to be anything when I grow up.”
Now why would someone say that? Why would that hit me hard? Her passion and curiosity have not been formed and she is almost nine years old. Passion and curiosity are two things not only us, adults, need, but also our students. Thomas Friedman (2016) once said, “You give me a person with a high passion quotient (PQ) and a high curiosity quotient (CQ), I’ll take them over a kid with a high intelligence quotient (IQ) seven days a week.” Friedman is also the one who coined this formula that states PQ + CQ > IQ, meaning it is better to have passion and curiosity over intelligence. Intelligence is not the “be all, end all” of everything.
To discover an individual’s passions and curiosities, you may go through a questioning process, perhaps with Warren Berger’s types of questions (What, What If, Why). By asking and forming these questions, you can eventually find out what he or she wants to pursue in life.
So, going back to my student, what is the issue? Why could she not share a passion of hers like one of my other students who said she wanted to be a vet due to her interest in animals? Take a look at my final creation of the semester and find out what I could do to increase my students’ passion and curiosity quotients.
References
Parson, Arcadia. (2019, December 20). Passion quotient and curiosity quotient formula. [Photograph]. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/techwithparson/status/1208052185889681408
Runnymede Capital Management. (2016). Tom Friedman's advice to millennials [Video]. Runnymede Capital Management. http://blog.runnymede.com/tom-friedmans-advice-to-millennials.