Keep Asking Until It Makes Sense: Five Steps to Understand Any Problem

"Keep asking until it makes sense" is usually said as a compliment to a curious child, but it's really a method. Getting a problem from "I can't do it" to "I understand it" takes five steps, and each one is a question you can ask out loud. Here they are, worked through with a classic elementary school puzzle: a cage holds some chickens and rabbits. There are 35 heads and 94 legs altogether. How many chickens and how many rabbits are there?

Step one: What is the problem asking?

Put it in your own words without looking at the original. If you can't, you haven't understood the problem yet, and the later steps will be wasted. For the chickens and rabbits, it comes out as: two kinds of animal, we know the total number of heads, we know the total number of legs, and we have to work out how many of each. If you can get that far, you're already halfway there.

Step two: Where am I stuck?

"I can't do this one" is a question nobody can answer. "Where am I stuck?" is one they can. Children often get stuck at "there are two kinds of animal mixed together, and I don't know where to start." Once you've said where you're stuck, you can ask about that exact point, rather than having someone explain the whole thing from the beginning.

Step three: Why does this step work this way?

The explanation goes: suppose they were all chickens, work out the number of legs, compare it with the actual number of legs, and the difference is the extra legs that belong to the rabbits. What your child should ask isn't "How do I calculate it?" but "Why suppose they're all chickens?" The answer: once you make that assumption, the two kinds of animal become one, and the problem goes from two unknowns to one. That "why" is worth more than this problem, because you can use it again on a different one next time.

Step four: What if the conditions change?

You know you've understood when you can change the conditions and still solve it. What if you suppose they're all rabbits? What if it's tricycles and bicycles instead? What if the numbers of heads and legs were different? At the end of each explanation, Duowenwen offers two or three "keep asking" prompts like these, and your child picks one to follow. Any choice works, because each one stretches the problem further.

Step five: Can I explain it to someone else?

The last step is to explain it to a parent or a classmate. Wherever you get stuck halfway through is where you haven't understood, so go back to step three and ask again. A child who can explain clearly why you suppose they're all chickens has really understood this problem. One who can only say "I get it" will be stuck again the next time the problem changes.

Next: tonight, take a problem your child got wrong and have them start at step one. See which step they get stuck on.