Update for Friday, May 15th
Many interesting thoughts & opinions about what folks think about whether being able to read minds would be a good power to have and what people might do with that power have been shared in conversation elsewhere. I’m updating this post rather than starting a new one so we can finish gathering more of your ideas here. Please leave a reply to add your thoughts to the comments (or add to your previous comment). Students may want to return to this to add a comment after listening to part 2 of the story and doing some reflection (the links and other updates will be in the updated list of this week’s assigned activities).
Enjoy Victoria Day.
We’ve started the short story, ‘Sevety-Six Dollars and Forty-Nine Cents’ by Kwame Alexander, and Monk seems thinks he can hear what people are thinking.
If it’s true
(and maybe it is)
Monk’s a mind-reader!
Would YOU want the power to read others’ thoughts? What would you do with it? Leave your responses as a comment, but make sure you’ve listened to the introduction and part 1 of the story (see our this week’s assigned activities for the links). Then spend some more time today making more progress on those projects. I’ll be glad to see everyone for our class circle Thursday afternoon.
If I could read someones mind, I would use it when people are telling the truth or lying.
I would also use that power, when I want to know what people are thinking in their head.
OK, I can imagine you might be able to do some good spotting a lie. If you were the only peron with this ability, do you think there could be any difficulty convincing others that YOU knew the TRUTH? If someone else had the ability to read your thouhgts, do you think there is any way you could tell a convincing lie?
If I was the only person with this ability and I am trying to convince that someone is telling a lie, if they don’t believe me then I would just leave it if it is not important, but if it is important then I would try convince more and try to make them believe me. If someone else had the ability to read my thoughts but I was telling a lie, then I would either tell the truth if I feel like it, or just tell them that it I am not lying.
It would be tricky to convince a third party that someone else was lying, wouldn’t it? If the proof you had came from your mind-reading ability, what could you say? “Trust me; I know what they are thinking!”‽ Maybe just sticking to the truth really is the best plan (at least, almost all the time).
i would see if they are going to do something bad like going to rob a bank or something like that
Glad you are thinking of using powers for good.
i would use it as a business and instead of people spending money on lie detector and instead paying me>:)
Interesting to see your entrepreneurial mind at work!
No I wouldn’t want the power to read minds because I might find something I wasn’t supposed to know like if I saw that someone was gonna rob me or something or do harmful things to someone
That would be unsettling. It is tempting or at least understandable, however, that some might want that ability in the hope of preventing harm. I suspect that we wouldn’t discover many, if any, plots to commit thievery. I wonder whether we might end up suffering much more from hurt feelings.
No I don’t want that power because if I came to know something which I am not suppose to know and leaked that thing by mistake then nobody would talk to me or be friends with and if I had those powers I would use to know why somebody is mad at me so I can try to improve those mistakes.
You bring up something very interesting in your second point, something we do A LOT of work on in school: how important it is to tell others about how we feel and and what we want from them when we have conflicts. Getting along and working with others IS much easier when we understand where they are coming from (what they are feeling and why). We CANNOT read others’ minds, so we HAVE to talk to each other to be able to work on inproving our relationships and finding solutions.
If I could read minds, I would first check what my family and friends really think of me and that way I would know if they are saying the true or not. If this include animals, will be exited to know what my dog think.
Finding out what people really think may lead to tricky situations (I’m not so sure I always want to know). But finding out what animals think, THAT would ber VERY interesting indeed!
If i could read minds i would see if my friends or family are lying to me, and maybe how they think of me. If my friends or family had a secret i would know right away if the secret would be about me or someone else.
It is interesting that among everyone’s responses to events in the short story “Seventy-Six Dollars and Forty-Nine Cents” by Kwame Alexander, the feeling that lie-detection was something potentially useful about the ability to read minds was mentioned almost unanimously.