Clues to Happiness
This was my "can't miss" lecture -- I used it first for a class, it being the activity most likely to succeed.
The question was, how do you know whether someone is happy or sad? The class exercise was to think of as many clues as possible, which I wrote on the board.
However, I also tested each of the answers as they were given.
Kindling
("Kindling" is what you do if and when the class does not immediately start answering your question.)
My class didn't immediately start suggesting answers. So I asked if they could know if their friends were happy or sad. Could they know if their parents were happy or sad. I took opinions and actually discussed this a little. This got people thinking about how they know if people are happy or sad.
That worked. If it hadn't, I would have had someone walk into the classroom and try to act happy or sad. The first goal would be for the class to guess if they were happy or sad. The second question would have been for the class to list things the student did that made the student look happy or sad. (In retrospect, this is also a very good exercise for checking the completeness of any list.)
Testing Answers
Answers that Aren't Answers
Um, you have to know what to do with the answers. First, sometimes people say that they are happy or sad. This wasn't what I was looking for. I was looking for all of the nonverbal ways that humans have of communicating happiness and sadness. Actually, none of my students suggested this. If they had, I would have counted it as correct. I would then have discussed/pointed out what they already know, which is that it isn't perfectly reliable. And, if it was the first guess, I would have pointed out that they can know someone is unhappy even when the person says they are happy. That of course implies other ways of knowing whether someone is happy or not.
"Smile" seems like a great answer, but it is not. In a nutshell, smile can be best defined as the face you make when you are happy. Then it is perfectly circular (and noninformative) to say that we know someone is happy because they are smiling. (Technically, it does say that happiness can be communicated by a facial expression, but it does not say what that facial expression is.) So then they suggested upturned and downturned mouths. We tested that. Because I knew that crinkling they eyes is important, I asked them about my face when I upturned my mouth and had my eyes wide. That doesn't look happy, and eventually they got to something about closing eyes. They figured out showing teeth (which I think is correct, though showing gums is probably better). One student did not have an upturned mouth when he smiled, which was interesting.
One student was very good at producing a smile on demand, and he was happy to do so. I made sure he showed his smile to the row behind him, the point being that we were using his face to test our hypothesis about smiles. (But I never once used the word hypothesis.)
"Laughing" has exactly the same problem, and profits from the same checking and tinkering. The cultural expression of laughing is "ha ha ha", and the students said that. But in fact, people don't make an "h" sound when they laugh, or at least most people don't make a "ha" sound. So, what is the sound people make when they laugh? (I told them my sister's idea, that a very short "snort" -- expulsion of air through the nose -- could be sign of a laugh. That wasn't a good idea in terms of class control, though it raises interesting ideas about what a laugh is.)
We didn't get into body position. We did get into voice. I had one girl go out in the hall, to see if she sounded different when she smiled versus when she did not. Bad mistake -- it was hard to hear her, because she was out in the hall, and it would have been much much simpler to have the class close their eyes. (I think it is possible to tell from a person's voice whether or not they are smiling, but the class quickly realized that the key variable was pitch. We didn't have time to tinker with that.)
When you do this exercise, and when you test if an upturned mouth looks happier than a non-upturned mouth, the child making the upturned mouth will almost certainly also crinkle his/her eyes. That is not the essence of a good experiment. Probably no one in the class will notice this "confound" in the comparison. I didn't even bother to try to point it out -- we were into successes at the time. Later, I tried to make the point in a backwards fashion. I said that raising my finger made me look happy. I had them compare when I raised my finger (and smiled) to when I didn't raise my finger (and didn't smile). I think that is the right way to approach this issue -- they make the rules (no confounds) and then I enforce them. Actually, it didn't work well for me, I think because I used raising my eyebrow instead of raising my finger.
Exercise: Defining Tinkering
Exercise: Testing
Tinkering Intro
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