I’ve been making students do this for a few years and it is probably time I complete my own assignment. I 100% stole this (with permission) from Andy Gilbert. Each fall, I require new doctoral students to start generating lists of wonderments. Here are some of mine:
- I wonder how strong communities develop online, among people who have never met in person (nerdfighteria, the maker alliance, YouTube machinists, etc.)
- I wonder how children can have such clear personalities from the day they are born
- I wonder what meaning is
- I wonder why I see so much hypocrisy in higher education
- I wonder what drives people to strive after excellence in their thing (whatever that thing may be)
- I wonder why I so often hear people use the word “just” in talking about their thing (e.g., ‘That’s just my hobby’)
- I wonder if we are living and computer simulation and whoever is running it is getting bored (hence the past 6 years)
- I wonder why gaslighting works – why we humans are so easily manipulated to disbelieve our own experience
- I wonder whether other people experience sensory information (color, sound, music, taste, smell, etc.) differently from me (e.g., is my red the same as your red?)
- I wonder why some people are less tolerant of ambiguity than others
- I wonder whether higher ed has developed a reliance on accountability systems that undermines individual responsibility
- I wonder why Westerners (or, at least, Americans) are so quick to dichotomize complex issues
- I wonder why the Tyler rationale is taken as common sense in U.S. education
- I wonder why some people who are not (yet) very good at a complex task get discouraged by seeing others excel at that same task
- I wonder why some people who are not (yet) very good at a complex task get motivated by seeing others excel at that same task
- I wonder why some people who are not very good at a complex task are dismissive of people who excel at that task
- I wonder how people learn to invent instructive problems for themselves to solve
- I wonder why I (perhaps we) gain energy from effort put into meaningful work
- I wonder why some people are okay with being assholes
- I wonder how to set healthy boundaries
- I wonder what makes people get invested in their communities
- I wonder what makes people get invested in the lives/needs of other individuals (like Laura’s house renovation project)
- I wonder how to cultivate possibility as a way of teaching
- I wonder how poets get so much meaning into so few words
- I wonder why it is so hard to take my own advice sometimes
- I wonder why people use the word “just” when they talk about things they love to do – as in “it’s just my hobby”
- I wonder what intuition is and how it works
- I wonder what genuine apprenticeship would look like in graduate education
- I wonder if you can have stories without language
- I wonder why oak doesn’t absorb liquid (dyes) like other woods
- I wonder if I can learn to code for Arduino by having chatGPT generate examples for me
- I wonder why so many things that are good for our wellbeing (laughing, crying, hobbies, etc) are so often viewed as un-serious
- I wonder why I seem to get more (and better) thinking done when I am doing some other, familiar, routine task
- I wonder why I seem to need less sleep in the summer
- I wonder if wonder is a basic need of human beings
- I wonder what Arunio Cloud will enable me to do
- I wonder why design changes I am forced to make when materials are not available for my first choice so often result in a product that seems more “me”
- I wonder how tasks that involve a lot of skill (e.g., wood turning) become relaxing – even mindfulness practices – once you are good at them, but require intense focus to learn
- I wonder if artsis understand the world better than scientists do
- I wonder if meaning is a verb
- I wonder if higher ed is still relevant
- I wonder how we come to know the standards internal to the task
- I wonder if a person can have agency without a sense of possibility – and if so, what is the result
- I wonder how many of the things we view as discoveries were already or previously know by other people in other places
- I wonder how grown-ups can learn technology-related hobbies like robotics, coding, internet of things, etc.
- I wonder if possibility is part of hope
- I wonder how I became so convinced of the importance of community in learning when my own schooling experience was so individualistic
- I wonder what we are wrong about
- I wonder why people can pursue ideas so persistently, even if they seem like they have no practical value until they develop a ton of expertise (e.g., knot theory)
- I wonder if I could use podcasts or other social media in place of textbooks
- I wonder why standardization has become such an appealing concept in education
- I wonder why individual people find meaning in such individual ways
- I wonder what is meant by “possibility” in the field of possibility studies
- I wonder how formal educational institutions can learn from communities of practice that have emerged via the increasingly connected world of the past 2 decades
- I wonder if knowing is more verb than noun
- I wonder what is good
- I wonder if humans really are the only animal that laughs – or crys
- I wonder how we can share in meaning when none of us can ever really know another person’s experience
- I wonder how competition for students (i.e., tuition dollars) will affect higher education in coming years