Making students ask more questions

Making students ask more questions

I heard this story the other day and I thought it could be turned into a fun (higher order thinking skills) activity: an international company that was selling washing liquid in the Middle East had the following images on the box: dirty shirt + washing liquid poured on the shirt + clean shirt. The washing liquid was a disaster in all countries of the region except Turkey. What could have been the reason? Give it a couple of days if you know the answer, just so that we don't spoil it for the others :-)

In similar activities, students have to ask Yes / No questions from the teacher. It's like 20 questions, but the aim is to figure out the explanation for a puzzling situation.

Comments

  1. Claudie GNovember 21, 2017 at 4:11 AM

    Did people actually WASH the shirt in water after pouring liquid on it?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Elizabeth BekesNovember 21, 2017 at 12:29 PM

    Nice try, Claudie, but that is not the answer :-)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Elizabeth BekesNovember 24, 2017 at 4:55 PM

    It was actually Penny mentioning that her students do bar charts from right to left (on account of how the script is written in Hebrew) that reminded me of this story. The washing powder failed in all those countries where Arabic is L1 (that script also runs from right to left). So, to the unsuspecting housewife (whose gaze went from right to left), it looked like the clean shirt actually got dirty after using the washing powder. Turkish goes from left to right, though.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Claudie GNovember 24, 2017 at 11:33 PM

    Elizabeth Bekes haha..Back to the future....but also thinking of my husband's underwear that turned pink after washing . Because????

    ReplyDelete
  5. Elizabeth BekesNovember 25, 2017 at 2:46 AM

    Claudie G Well, the obvious answer would be that he washed it with a red piece of clothing whose dye bled. But I'm sure you're looking for something less ordinary...

    ReplyDelete

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