Cliffhangers

Last night I was traveling back from North Carolina after helping my nieces move out of their apartment after finishing their semester at Wofford College. I called my friend because I was a little bored in the truck alone. She stated that she really couldn’t talk because she was on her way to a GOT finale.  A GOT finale? What the heck is that. Game of Thrones. I clearly am one of the 1% of the world that doesn’t watch Game of Thrones. I quickly got off the phone with her so she could enjoy GOT.

It got me thinking about Finales. Our brains do not like unresolved issues. TV figured that out a long time ago and that is why cliffhangers are so popular. My Dad told me that when he was a young man, the movies had “cliffhangers”, he would go to the movies week after week to see which cowboy survived or which cowboy saved the damsel in distress. This spilled over into TV shows. I mean who remembers season ending episodes such as “Who shot JR or the Simpson’s Mr. Burns? Then there is the show “24”-pick any single episode. In fact, cliffhangers in TV have sort of become the norm to get the viewers to return and to watch the reruns all summer. And we demand that the cliffhangers be resolved. We get upset when a series we like ends either with an abrupt cancellation, like one my favorite shows Brothers and Sisters, or with an ambiguously written finale, like Six Feet Under or the Sopranos. Even the cast of Seinfeld sitting in a jail cell was not nearly as emotionally satisfying as when the helicopter flew off and Hawkeye Pierce saw that Honeycutt has spelled out “Goodbye” in the rocks on MASH- for all you younger teachers see if MASH is on Netflix or prime…it is a great show.  And how many of us were upset when Bobby was in the shower and his entire year of death had all been a dream?  But don’t get me started on the ending of Sopranos. Boom? Is that all there was? Boom! My brain reeled. I’m still upset years later.

Unresolved endings...We like things to end correctly. Our brains need closure. Our brains hate the cliffhanger, be it missing friends, losing loves, soldiers who remain MIA, sailors adrift at sea, or TV shows that end without resolution. And one of the interesting things about unresolved issues is that we seem to remember them longer than we do the resolved ones, as we try to fill in the blanks in our brains. We are wired for closure and feel all out of whack when things don’t end in neat little piles.

I wonder if that is why students have such a hard time when we don’t provide them with the answer that they want. “I don’t know, find out on your own,” was probably the most hated phrase I used in my classroom but also probably the most useful. I found that they could do much more than they thought they could AND I found that they could do much more than I had anticipated when I required more from them. What I also found was they could work on unresolved problems for ever, even groaning when I told them it was time to go to lunch or an activity.

Don’t believe me? Remember the Rubik’s Cube? How long did that go unresolved? How long did it engaged you? Have you ever been invited to a scavenger hunt or tried an escape room? I make it my mission to get to the end of a scavenger hunt or get out of the escape room. Has someone ever told you a knock knock joke but not finish it? It bothers you, you spend time trying to figure it out.

Our students need a cliffhanger. And this is a great time of year to experiment on those types of teaching. They don’t need to be mindless gatherers of information. They need their brains reeling for answers just like mine at the end of Sopranos. This is what creates lifelong learners and critical thinking students. And I hope against all hope that that is the type of student you want to star in the Production of your Classroom story.

And P.S. I hear that all of you GOT fans are disappointed today as well.