When you hear problem solving, I bet your mind goes straight to pages and pages of word problems, the bane of every math student’s existence. But do you think about the Scientific Method? What about the problem-resolution structure of historical events and literature?

You don’t? Amazingly, neither do students. We’ve treated the problem solving needs of each content area like they’re different skills when they’re really all the same. You figure out what the presented problem needs to be resolved. You look at what you have or already know. You figure out how the two fit together and make a plan for how you’re going to fill in gaps. And then you fill in the gap and resolve the problem.

Problem solving is not a content-specific skill. In fact, in life problem solving shows up in places where subject areas are heavily intersected. So, why are we teaching four different types of problem solving, each related to its own discipline? Why not show students that problem solving relies on the same basic skills set, regardless of the situation?

You’ve heard the old saying, “Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it”, right? There’s a reason for that. History is a pattern, a very long pattern.

When I say pattern recognition, your first thought is probably a spatial awareness test (where you have to identify which shape comes next) or a number sequence (where you have to figure out the relationship between numbers and identify the next two or three in the sequence). Or maybe your first thought was about your favorite jacket, which has a plaid pattern. If you’re at all crafty, you might have even thought about that pattern you’ve been working with to create your prom dress or the pattern you’re using to cut out the pieces for the dog house you’re building.

Or maybe you’re like me and think of the William Gibson book by that name.

The world around us is made up of patterns. Spatial awareness tests and number sequences are pretty standard fare in math classes and certain special programs. Sequence and cause and effect patterns run loose all over English and history classes. Even science has patterns as we experiment and look for recurring events, or patterns. Design fields also enjoy their own set of patterns, sometimes called templates, that they use to form the basic structure of something before they build it into what they are looking for. Design fields also have a pattern right governed by tessellations from math class in the materials they use. Patterned cloth and paper adorn all sorts of creations.

We tend to focus on pattern recognition only in math class, or briefly in English class, but really it’s another one of those transdisciplinary skills. We look for patterns everywhere, and in the classroom we use patterns as a teaching tool. We study good patterns that continue, and bad patterns (like some of those in history) that should be broken.

Again, I don’t know what I’m going to do with this, but it just adds to the food for thought.

There are certain skills that transcend academic subject boundaries. That is, you may learn the skill in one discipline, and then find yourself using it in others.

The other day, I realized sequence is one of those skills. Sequence is the skill of putting things into some sort of order. We teach it in language arts to help students develop an understanding of plot or story structure. We use it in writing to help students better organize their thoughts. We even use it in history classes to get students to understand how events relate to each other and build on each other.

But in order for sequence to make any sense, students have to understand both the concept of numbers and the concepts of ordinals. “What happened first?” doesn’t make any sense if you don’t know that the ordinal first corresponds to the number one. And I realized yesterday after talking with another teacher that a young child struggling with ordinals is also going to struggle with sequence because they haven’t made the necessary connections yet. They haven’t formed the context in which to understand how both work.

Even stranger, in the curriculum we use, ordinals are taught a full two years before sequence, but we expect kids caught in the middle to understand the concept. There’s a disconnect being formed instead of a connection that could be reinforced by showing the student that the skill is relevant to more than just math or reading. Is this a problem in other curriculua? I don’t know, but I’m starting to think that it shouldn’t be an issue at all.

I don’t even know how to begin to fix our own problem, but it does give me something to think about as I’m working on my own projects.