Blocked by Adequacy

These exercises illustrate being blocked by adequacy: accepting an explanation because it seems satisfactory, without testing what else might fit.

1. Stories, anecdotes, jokes. The students are invited to think of examples of the process of being blocked by adequacy. The examples may be from their own experience or else incidents they have heard about. The teacher can note down these incidents and add them to his own stockpile of material for future occasions. In any case the teacher may already have collected examples of this sort and can use them to illustrate what is wanted. e.g. I had a guest staying in my house. After the guest had left I found that the reading lamp would not work. I checked the bulb and I checked the fuse but still the lamp would not work. I was just about to dismantle the plug when it occurred to me that the guest might have switched off the lamp by the switch on the lamp base and not the wall switch which is what I usually did. This in fact was what had happened.

2. The students are shown parts of a picture or else a picture with parts obscured by a cardboard sheet. They are asked to decide what the picture is all about. They are encouraged to jump to conclusions before the rest of the picture is revealed.

3. The use of blanks. The students are asked to write a short passage on some theme and then to go over the passage striking out any word which would make the theme obvious. The passage is then rewritten with ‘blank’ substituted for such words. Alternatively the students can just write the passage and then the teacher strikes out the revealing words and puts ‘blank’ instead. A third way to do it is to take a passage from a newspaper or magazine and treat it in the same way. It is best to give the students an example of what is wanted before asking them to provide such passages. The blanked out passage is then read out to the rest of the students who are asked firstly to decide what the passage is about and then to try to fill in the individual blanks. This is done as an individual effort by each student and at the end the results are compared.

An example of this sort of passage might be: ‘He stood by the side of blank and every time a blank approached he would raise his arm and blank. It was some time before he eventually got blank and even so that did not take blank.’

In this passage the blank refers to anything that has been left out. It is important to point out that this need not apply to a single word but could be used for a group of words. Thus the phrase, ‘get anywhere’ would be replaced by blank just as would be the word ‘car’.