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Dear KidsOutAndAbout readers:
Back in Mr. Goldstein's chemistry class in tenth grade, two of my friends, let's call them Jim and Bob, were lab partners. Jim was the kind of guy who used to arrive at school super early every day, so early that the going joke was that Jim would be hammering on the doors when the janitors arrived, insisting that they let him in to get his education. Bob's strength, on the other hand, was figuring out how to minimize the work he needed to do while still doing fine in the class. So, as lab partners, Bob watched as Jim set magnesium on fire, figured out the components of dye using paper chromatography, and made golden rain.
Both Jim and Bob got A's in chemistry.
What's the lesson here? You have to look a little farther down the road from 10th grade to see it. Unlike Bob, Jim got a lot more than an A from that chemistry class: He also got the experience of being the guy who did stuff. I don't remember what Bob ended up doing for a career, but Jim has his PhD in materials engineering. He makes stuff happen.
Every baby who teaches herself about gravity is a scientist, an investigator, a tester, a doer. She drops that spoon on the floor over and over to see what happens, and whether it happens the same way each time. Her experiments let her learn what the spoon will do, and also what you will do. All babies do this. (Tip: Don't get frustrated; keep picking it up and handing it back to her with a smile. Science should be a happy game.) Somewhere along the way, Bob turned from being a spoon-dropping baby to a lab-watching teenager, and I don't know why.
Back in the '80s, even those of us who were TV addicts didn't have the kinds of "screen time" issues that kids do today. When I think about my own kids, I don't so much worry over the amount of time they spend staring at a computer as whether they are adopting Bob's attitude instead of Jim's. Are they fundamentally watchers, or fundamentally doers? I want them to be doers. I think they'll be happier as doers. After all, life is really one big laboratory, and for the doers, the experiments never end. The best part is: The results are usually even cooler than a liquid nitrogen soap explosion.
—Debra Ross, Publisher
© 2019. This column originally appeared in KidsOutAndAbout's newsletter on January 17, 2019.
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