I had a rule. It was an incredibly successful rule I used while teaching junior and senior English at a continuation high school. As mentioned in a previous chapter, a continuation high school is for kids who mess up in the regular system.
It was called the “I don’t know” rule, and it was simple. If I heard the words “I don’t know” three times during one period, the entire class had to write a 5-paragraph essay on whatever I told them to write about. They would laugh and complain about how unfair it was, but they knew I never threatened anything I could not or would not do.
The first time someone said it, everyone laughed. The second time, there was a frisson of semi-fake, but real fear. The third time someone said it, well, you can imagine. I wouldn’t want to be that guy.
Why that rule? Those three words signify a cop-out. They excuse you from thinking, and thinking was exactly what they didn’t want to do. Too much effort. Still, as Hamlet says, “There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
A few students, in the middle of the loathed essay, actually wrote a whole page on why it was unfair for them to write an essay. Really!
Mediators quite often find themselves in the middle of people who have lost the ability to reason or think, and are working on animal instinct. Our questions are meant to throw them a bone of perspective that they had previously not thought of, and provide choices that they had not thought about before. Or else, they thought from their own narrow perspective, not taking into account what the other side might be thinking. When you ask them what they think the other side might do or say, the common response is “I don’t know”. At that point, I really want to assign them an essay.