The Horse's Name is Friday

On Wednesday this week, my professor in one of my education classes started class by putting the following on the board…

“A man rode into town on Friday. He stayed for three nights and then left on Friday. How come?” *

Perhaps you’ve heard this before and you already know the answer, but for me, as far as I could remember, I had not.  

Image I took of my notes from class
the other day.

This is an example of a lateral thinking exercise and my professor was using it to prove a point. After a classmate decoded the answer to this particular exercise, my professor put up another, this time, it was more challenging.

After going through three or so, my professor explained to us the point of the exercise. The idea behind it was to show us how we, as future teachers, can start class by using some sort of lead in activity to help focus students.

Last semester, in my EDT 246 class, I had to work with a group and write a lesson plan. In our lesson plan, we used quotes as a lead in each day. The quotes we chose pertained to the topic of the day and on certain days, we decided to ask students to write down their thoughts about the quote.

My professor also mentioned that we could save lateral thinking exercises for days when there’s five minutes left in class, which isn’t enough time to move on to something else, but we also don’t want the room to turn into total chaos.

As a teacher, these are all nice tools to have handy. Upon thinking about activities that could be used as a lead in to a lesson, I remembered that in seventh grade, my language arts teacher would start class by having us write journal entries. She’d write a question on the board and every so often, she’d collect our notebooks and look at what we’d written.

The more I think about my future classroom, the more I like the idea of using lead in activities to focus the class and bring attention to the task at hand.

*The answer to the lateral thinking exercise mentioned in the beginning, is that the man rode into town on a horse named Friday.