Every month, I put a quote on my students’ agenda.

There’s no assignment attached to it. No required reflection. It’s simply something I want them to see. Maybe think about. Maybe carry around for a while.

Usually it connects somehow to what we’re working on; a project, an idea, sometimes one of the intensities or scholarly habits we’re trying to understand about ourselves.

Last year, as we were getting ready to begin our service-learning projects, I chose a quote attributed to Socrates:

“The more I know, the more I realize I know nothing.”

Academic humility is something we’re always working on.

Gifted kids can be particularly good at knowing things. They can also be particularly good at deciding that because they know something about a topic, there probably isn’t much left to discover.

And we were about to tackle real problems through service learning.

I wanted them to understand that there is always more to learn about the thing you think you already know so much about.

I had an entire lesson planned around that idea.

Then, somewhere in the middle of class, a student asked:

“Who’s Socrates?”

Well.

That was not part of the lesson plan.

I was genuinely surprised. Surely my gifted fifth graders knew Socrates.

They did not.

Not one of them.

Which was a particularly efficient way for Socrates to teach me a lesson in academic humility before we’d even gotten started.

So I gave them a quick explanation, fully expecting to move on.  Nope. 

That question led to another question.

And another.

And another.

This happens fairly often in my classroom.

One question can derail an entire lesson, and I’m generally okay with that.

Sometimes we’re chasing a curiosity.

Sometimes we’re figuring out how a piece of tape got stuck to the ceiling and, more importantly, how we’re going to get it down.

Sometimes we’re moving a ridiculously heavy table because a pencil rolled behind it and apparently no other pencil in the room will do. Because sometimes a child cannot possibly be expected to continue learning until they have That. Specific. Pencil.

I don’t make the rules.

On this particular day, the questions kept coming back to Socrates.

Eventually I decided it would be easier to stop everything and find a TED-Ed video about his life.

Five minutes, I thought.

A quick detour into ancient Greece, satisfy everyone’s curiosity, and then we’d return to our regularly scheduled lesson.

That is not what happened.

If you’ve ever shown TED-Ed to a room full of gifted kids, you probably already know why.

The video led to more questions.

We started talking about Socrates and the way he used questions to examine ideas. That led us to Socratic seminars.

I explained what a Socratic seminar was with all the confidence of someone who had facilitated exactly zero Socratic seminars in her teaching career.

And eventually, class ended.

The next day, I still needed to teach the lesson we’d abandoned.

I read One Plastic Bag, the book I’d chosen to help us begin thinking about service: noticing a need, understanding a problem, and using our own talents to make a meaningful contribution.

All the ikigai stuff, you know.

But I didn’t teach the rest of the lesson I’d planned.

Instead, I put several reflection questions on the board.

We set ourselves up for our first Socratic seminar.

And I let them go.

I sat back, took notes, and mostly listened.

They were incredible.

They challenged one another’s ideas.

They questioned assumptions.

They built on something someone else had said, disagreed with it, reconsidered it, and pushed it further.

They even started thinking about how the conversation itself was working and came up with ways to make sure everyone had an opportunity to be heard.

And I wasn’t leading any of it.

I wasn’t asking the next question to move them toward the point I wanted them to reach.

I wasn’t pointing out the assumption they had missed.

I wasn’t pushing them to think more deeply.

They were doing it for one another.

The problem became more complex because their thinking became deeper.

Every new idea seemed to uncover something else to consider.

Another perspective.

Another assumption.

Another question.

Something they hadn’t noticed before.

And there it was.

The lesson I had intended to teach.

There is always more to understand.

I just wasn’t the one teaching it.

When we eventually moved into our service-learning projects, something was different.

The projects had more depth.

Students were more invested in the problems they chose and in the contributions they wanted to make.

Each class developed meaningful projects that genuinely belonged to them.

They were the best service projects we’d done.

And it all started because one student asked:

“Who’s Socrates?”

My students loved that first seminar. They begged to do another.

So we did.

And we kept doing them.

Now, when we encounter a big idea or a question that might guide our learning, Socratic seminars are simply part of what we do.

Which feels strangely appropriate.

Thousands of years ago, people gathered to wrestle with ideas through questions and conversation.

And now, every once in a while, a group of fifth graders pulls their chairs together and joins them.

I started that day thinking I was putting Socrates on an agenda.

Instead, somehow, he ended up in our classroom.

Maybe that’s why I’m willing to let a question interrupt a lesson.

I don’t always know where it’s going.

It may cost us five minutes.

It may cost us the entire lesson.

Every once in a while, it may require moving furniture in pursuit of one apparently irreplaceable pencil.

But I’ve learned not to be too quick to pull us back to what I had planned.

Because sometimes a student’s question isn’t taking us off course.

It’s showing us a better one.

And sometimes the lesson I don’t teach becomes the one we keep.