In Search of Exploration

9:16 a.m. on a chilly October morning in Denver. A class of elementary school children is nervously awaiting the arrival of the city bus. The bright sunshine has them squinting on the southbound side of the street. A few attempt, without success, to get a passing truck driver to sound his horn. They hold bus tickets in their hands and on their young backs, backpacks filled with all the supplies they are going to need this day.

Today’s the day they’ve been waiting for, the grand adventure. They have been planning this for weeks. They know what is expected of them. They know their responsibilities. For they are Explorers and they are setting off into the unknown.

Back in the classroom, they have studied some of the great explorers of the past – Leif Erikson, Christopher Columbus, Henry Hudson, Ferdinand Magellan. They learned the facts but greater questions arose. What was it like for these stouthearted men and their crews? Did they know where they were going? What would happen if their supplies ran out? Why was there mutiny? Could they find their way home again? Outstanding questions from a group of eight to eleven year olds. Today they are going to find out some of the answers for themselves.

Their teacher has not told them where they are headed or how long they’re going to be. He has told them that they will be traveling to a new place, a place where they will find a different environment. They will be seeking the unfamiliar. They might stumble upon a new species of plant or animal or, if they are lucky, native peoples. They will be searching for clues, evidence that life has been there before them, and might still be there now.

The children are arranged in groups of four. They have picked names for their group – The Almighty Explorers, The Dodo Birds, The Exploring Rocks, and more. They have decided which task they are going to pursue out in the field – looking for plant, animal, or human life, or making maps. They have determined what materials they might need for their pursuit, and they have packed accordingly – home-made bug catchers, affectionately known as pooters, magnifying glasses, nets, cameras, clipboards, and all manner of recording equipment and writing tools. And lunch.

Lunch has been a big deal, a point of negotiation for some time. The teacher gave each group $9.48 and set them loose in the neighborhood grocery store. This wasn’t the time to go for the pre-packaged Lunchable. No one could afford it. This was a time for debate and dispute, for concession and compromise. Lively discussions ensued about the number of slices in a loaf, the number of ways you can split an orange, and whether the bakery department would hand out free cookies to cute kids from the school next door. (They did.)

The bus pulls up in a fit of hydraulics, a look of disbelief on the face of the driver and despair on the faces of the listless passengers. The children take up every available seat. This is a first ride for many of them. Most arrive at school each day by car.

They’re off. Some are amazed to see familiar places fly past the window from this higher vantage point. One or two easygoing commuters engage the kids in friendly banter. “Where are you all going?” They don’t understand why the children don’t know. “We’re going exploring!” and the passengers sense the excitement around them.

The bus threads its way out of the neighborhood and into new territory. Some kids are taking bets on where it will stop. Natural questions arise. “Will we have enough to eat? What will we find? Are we there yet?” Some kids nervously watch the landscape rush by. Others engage in carefree conversation about last night’s Dancing With The Stars. One or two pull out books and read.

After twenty-five minutes or so, the teacher asks one young boy to tug on the rope. This is their stop. This is a new part of town. The kids don’t recognize the place. The bus pulls up and the class piles out with shining eyes and wagging tongues. They wait for the bus to pull away with a mighty snort. They cross the street, and head down the hill for three hundred yards to their destination.

A vast array of early spring green awaits them. Trees snake along a stream awakened with fresh water from nearby melting snow. Open grass areas give way to manicured baseball fields. A jogging path winds around a children’s playground, following the stream, crossing it at a couple of points, forking into two and re-uniting far off into the distance. This is one of the larger parks in the city park system well removed from the usual stomping grounds of these children and their families. The perfect place to Explore.

The separate groups meet to strategize. Where are the best places to find animals and plants? Where is the optimal spot to begin making maps? Is our teacher really going to make us interview complete strangers?

Yes, yes he is.

A couple of groups head down to the stream. They immediately launch their nets into the shallow water. Great shouts of joy reach those on the banks. Creepy crawlies are being sucked up into pooters and scooped up into jars. Critters who live in, on, and under the water abound. “Look! Look what I caught! Wow! That’s amazing. Look at this one! Ugh! Gross!” Tennis shoes sink in the mud. Someone accidentally nudges a friend into the water above her ankles.

Another group tramps through long grass in search of bigger animals. Will they find a rodent or a nesting bird? They’re looking for new and interesting plants, species they haven’t ever found in their own backyard or playground. The small stream winding its way through this park should provide plenty of opportunity. Armed with clipboards and colored pencils, they settle in to draw what they see, to document, to create a record they can bring back to school without taking what they find.

One intrepid band sets off to talk to the natives, local people using the park for recreation. They find dog walkers, joggers, tennis players, mothers of young children at the playground. They approach and are pleasantly surprised at the natives’ friendly and open manner. They learn about the neighborhood and how frequently the park is used. They whip out measuring tools and graph paper and begin to map the area to scale. They plot exactly where the encounters occur.

After an hour or so, the teacher calls the class together. Children emerge in small clusters from the long grass, from behind the playground, from the clump of trees in the far distance. Classmates greet each other and share their adventures with passion, no one group waiting long enough to hear another without jumping in and interrupting. There is the story of the lady who has walked her twin Scottish terriers in the park every day for a decade. There is a tale of the curious black and white ducks who fled into deeper water at the approach of The Dodo Birds. There is the disbelief and debate whether the distance across the park from east to west is greater than the perimeter of the baseball field. And there is lunch.

Backpacks are opened. Provisions are divided out. Portions are controlled. “If we each have two slices of turkey in our sandwiches, there’ll be one slice left that we can split up. Let’s feed our crusts to the ducks. Hey, do you want to trade half my apple for a cookie? You didn’t even pay for that cookie, it was free!” There is even a suggestion from one of the kids to pick up trash after lunch, to leave the place even better than they found it. Motion carried.

The teacher eventually glances at his watch and calls his adventurers to gather together . He is proud of his gallant party of Explorers. Mission accomplished.

There was no mutiny. No one went hungry or abandoned ship. Throughout the day he heard the questions of scientists in search of knowledge, “Why, what if, how, what do you think, let’s try?” He heard the language of cooperation, “Come on, let’s go, do you want to try, let’s do it together!” He witnessed writing and reading and math and social studies and science and thinking and collaboration and trial and error and pushing out of the comfort zone and laughter and teamwork and success.

The band of explorers winds its way back up the hill to the bus stop. The children climb slowly aboard and flop into their seats. And they wonder, “What does tomorrow have in store?”

Choice Time

Sheena Iyengar is a professor at the Business School of Columbia University and the author of The Art of Choosing. I heard her speak last week and came away highly impressed by both her delivery and her topic. She spoke at length about her research on choice and about her book in which she aims to help us become better choosers. I was one of almost 4,000 people in the audience who listened to her fluid and eloquent presentation, given with no notes and in complete synchronicity to a slide show that played behind her. There is nothing remarkable about that for a gifted professional speaker who has clearly done her homework and knows her stuff. Except for the fact that Sheena Iyengar is blind.

Diagnosed as a toddler with a rare form of retinal degeneration, this superbly intelligent woman was completely blind at the age of 14. I wonder if she has a strong sense of what an audience of 4,000 might look like. That might be a plus as a public speaker. It might calm the nerves. I found it remarkable how she was able to regale us with stories, quote exact figures from her research, and show both amusing and informative examples to illustrate her point, all in perfect order with the powerpoint she had created. As a budding public speaker who still relies on cue cards highlighted by keywords, I found her talk to be an exquisite paragon of the art.

Iyengar’s talk was about the relationship between leadership and choice. Some leaders are literally born into the role. Others are simply born with bucket loads of charisma and naturally rise to the top, while most of us in leadership positions have arrived there because we have developed the ability to choose well and to enhance the power of good choices for transformative good.

Her book begins with the story of Steven Callahan who, in 1982, was shipwrecked and became one of the first people ever to survive on the high seas for more than a month. He drifted in a small raft, finding his own food and drinking water, for 76 days, ending up on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean from where he started. He says he overcame almost certain death by choosing “to pilot myself to a new life or to give up and watch myself die.” It was the power of his own choice that saved him.

I am proud that the school where I work, and where my daughters attend, teaches children how to make good choices. This is such an important part of our educational philosophy that we actually have a period of the day called “choice time”. And it is exactly what it says it is – a time of the school day when students get to choose what activities they would like to partake in. Teachers put out different types of materials, quite often art supplies, items to build with or glue together, thingamajigs where scientific discoveries can be made. And if a child does not choose to spend time doing one of the choices set out by the teacher, he or she may choose to do something else. Quite often the choices presented are connected to the current area of curriculum study, but sometimes not.

Children who have recently arrived at our school and who have not been exposed to having this much choice in the classroom sometimes struggle to pick an activity and to focus. But soon they learn how to make good choices, how to collaborate and negotiate with their classmates, and how to trust their own judgment. Some of our students come to us from traditional classrooms where they have been told where to sit, when to talk, whom to talk to, when to get up, where to go, and what to do. They are not used to making choices of their own. At our school, we have discovered that, at choice time, children actively engage in the process of defining themselves. They are given the opportunity to make decisions and think for themselves, and they shine.

Isn’t this what we want from our college graduates, from our work force for the 21st century? Don’t we seek collaborators and team players who know themselves, think for themselves, and have great ideas? That’s what I want for my own children.

Iyengar spoke of the vast differences in how certain cultures perceive choice. For example, Anglo-Americans crave individuality and feel empowered from having more choice, while Asian-Americans tend to value choice less and have deeper trust of group norms. She also warned that too much choice, as all parents can attest to, can be detrimental. Have you ever taken a small child to a good-sized grocery store and asked them to pick out a snack?

However, she highlighted one study that she had done, in which two groups of children were given anagrams to solve. One group was given the choice of several topics that the mixed-up words were about. They were also allowed to choose which pen, out of five different colored markers, they wanted to write the answers with. A second group was given no choices – they were assigned the topic and the pen. Not surprisingly, Anglo-American kids who were given the choices performed two and a half times better on the test than their peers with no choice. Interestingly, Asian-American children performed significantly better when told that their topic and pen color had been chosen by their mother. All great evidence of the power of choice.

It is clear that effective leaders today have to be dedicated practitioners of the art of choice. They have to understand the people they lead and work with them to give them the right amount of choice to empower them. Sheena Iyengar herself was dealt a rough hand in the game of life, a disease that robbed her of her eyesight. She chose to rise above it, to become an expert in her chosen field, and she chose to shine.


The Art of Choosing by Sheena Iyengar, published by Twelve, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, 2010. A link to her website appears in the left column of this blog.

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

I’m wedged in behind a tall man. He does not have his seat back in the upright position. It is in my face forcing the compact TV screen up against my nose, rendering it impossible for me to bend my 6’1” frame and get any of the essentials out of my bag which is now crammed firmly under my knees. Yet it’s not the lack of space that bothers me most about the seat being shoved into my immediate field of vision.

It’s the close-up view of the back of the tall man’s scalp, his generous center parting, that unmistakable sign of depilation, his chrome dome. For this is a bald man. Correction. A mostly bald man. A mostly bald man in need of a haircut. The two inch wide strip of grey fuzz encircling the rear end of his cranial globe, sticking outwards, unwieldy and out of control, as if he’d just stuck his car keys in an electrical socket. White hairs protruding at all angles, some pulled down by gravity, some pointing sideways, others reaching for the ‘call the flight attendant’ button, making it look like he’s got the tail of a bichon frise wrapped around the back of his head.

Yet the hairs I can stand. After all, there have been many times that I’ve been seen sporting an uncombed do, misguided tresses reaching out at all kind of angles. It’s not the hair. What bothers me most is the unavoidable close-up view of the man’s follicles, the sheath-like cavities which once held his lustrous locks. All those thousands of tiny little holes that have now so clearly failed him. Orifices galore, intimate and personal. I might be looking at an enlarged image of his tongue, or perhaps a close-up of a moon crater, complete with crevices, crags, dark and light patches, even a possible site for a manned landing. This is a baldscape I have not asked for and do not want.

And why my adverse reaction, you ask. Simple. Fear. Dread. Absolute terror. That one day this will be me.

I come from a long line of bald men. Good men. Smart men. Tall men. But not men gifted in keeping what God gave them up on top. No coif of the year awards going to the fellas in my family. I am aware that male pattern baldness is supposed to be handed down on my mother’s side of the family gene pool. Try telling that to my brother, completely bald at twenty-four, oldest son of my father, not a cowlick left at twenty-four, only begotten son of my grandfather, shining like a billiard ball at, yep, twenty-four.

And now here come I, rapidly approaching my mid-forties, hanging on for dear life. Ever since I was nineteen, I’ve noticed the ebbing of the hairline on either side of my forehead. Year by year, millimeter by millimeter, the hirsute forces of my brow have been beating a steady retreat. I have been waiting for them to follow my forebears’ example and to begin stampeding at a high clip until I too shine like the dome of the state capitol building. But I have been fortunate that the inevitable retreat has been more tortoise than hare. Slow and steady, forever plodding onward, but taking its sweet time to get to the finish line.

Will I stay lucky? Will my present rate of receding continue – two inches or so every quarter of a century? At that speed, my hairline will reach the crown of my head when I’m close to seventy. Will I grow silver and distinguished in the manner of Richard Gere or Michael Douglas or will the current pace of hair loss accelerate at an ever-increasing velocity leaving me looking more like Ben Kingsley or Patrick Stewart? Am I destined to join the ranks of the men in my family, just a late bloomer clinging on to every strand? Will I end up like my father and brother, my glabrous noggin shining for the world to see?

Who cares? Well, quite obviously, me.

I’m worried that I’ve somehow developed an air of superiority over my less woolly friends and relations, that somehow I’m better than them because I didn’t draw the short straw when it came to hair loss. Am I really that vain, that shallow? Is this the same attitude aired pompously in TV movies of the week by the blond quarterback of the football team and the captain of the cheerleading squad? Because they were blessed with good looks, they deserve to be more popular.

My friend Fred, himself an early entry into the ranks of the smoothly sphered, tells me that being bald in college resulted in him looking older than his classmates, and therefore the one elected to buy the beer. A nice fringe benefit for having a composer’s haircut, and surely a ticket to popularity.

Yet daily I ponder and fret. What happens when the inevitable happens? Is there a way to prevent, or at least delay, a shining dome?

I read in a newspaper once of a Welsh farmer who had his cow lick the top of his head every day for years and that seemed to do the trick. Is that where the word cowlick came from? Unfortunately, I haven’t got a cow, and if I did, I’m not sure I’d want it doing that to my hair. It may be a possible cure for baldness, but fancy heading into work each day with bovine saliva running down your neck. Ugh! Would my cat do instead?

The Body Shop has a mint-based shampoo called Ice Blue which I buy religiously. I might really believe that that delightful, sensuous, minty tingle during my morning shower actually prevents an excess of hair falling out and blocking the drain. I continue to massage the diminishing areas while showering, hoping that a little additional blood circulation will put the brakes on my hair’s demise. And who knows? Perhaps it is working and that’s why I’ve been able to buck the trend established by the men in my family. Perhaps I’m saved.

Saved from resorting to products such as minoxidil or finasteride, marketed under the more commonly known names of Rogaine and Propecia, stuff that men less self-assured than I avail themselves of in the battle against their receding hairlines. Saved from looking into potential solutions offered by groups such as the Hair Club For Men whose website presents me with the delectable yet true possibility of delving into something called Non-Surgical Bio-Matrix Strand-by-Strand Process or, even more tantalizing, Microscopic Follicular Unit Hair Transplantation. What is most alarming is that if those two menu items don’t whet your follicles, they have a further link to Extreme Hair Therapy Products, as if the first two don’t sound extreme enough. I daren’t even click to find out, worried that I might come across an invitation to participate in Non Compos Mentis Lacquered Trichological Therapeutic Incisions, or perhaps just the names and phone numbers of some alluring and potentially nubile Welsh cows. I think I’ll pass.

I’ve taken to wearing my hair a little longer these days, letting it flop around a bit in the front. I used to think that it gave me a foppish air like those dapper and dashing blokes of the English gentry in Jane Austen novels and Merchant Ivory films. A bit like Hugh Grant in Four Weddings and a Funeral. But perhaps I’m just covering up the slowly expanding triangles of flesh appearing above my brow. If you can’t beat it, hide it. A prelude to the dreaded comb-over. John McCain on the presidential stump. Donald Trump on a windy day in Atlantic City. My image conscious teenage daughter thinks I should cut my hair shorter, so I would “look like a normal dad”. Whatever that is. Perhaps I should acknowledge that I’m involved in a huge cover-up operation, a Watergate of the cranium, and I should let down the façade for all to see. I should face up to the inevitable outwards signs testosterone coursing through my body like a man.

There’s always the option to shave. Michael Jordan made that cool in the eighties and the trend continues today. Don’t let them see you aging prematurely. Cut the receding hairline off at the pass. Go completely bald and they’ll never see where your real line of defense is. Bald is beautiful. How can Telly Savalas, Vin Diesel, Andre Agassi, Howie Mandel and countless others be wrong?

No. I’d rather keep my golden locks while I have them. They may be turning a gentle shade of grey at the temples. They may be continuing on their merry path northward. They won’t last forever. I believe I’m doomed to follow in my family’s footsteps, to be examined scrupulously one day by some guy behind me on a plane, the poor fool praying, not for a safe landing, but for a full head of hair. Please God let me not end up like that bald dude in the next row.

Have They No Legs?

One of the benefits to teaching in a reasonably affluent community is the generosity of the families whose children I teach. I make no secret of my fondness for grande lattes, so largesse will often come in the form of a Starbucks gift card. This has the dual advantage of giving me enough energy to teach the little cherubs and underwriting my passion for writing where my feet don’t get in the way of the vacuum cleaner.

I can be found every other weekend or so, propped up at a corner table at one of various cafés around town, typing up random thoughts into some semblance of cohesiveness. I magically swipe my plastic card and a perky co-ed or underemployed actor hands over a steaming paper cup of high-octane go-juice. It’s a wonderful system.

Every so often, I don’t have time to stop and smell the beans. I have to grab a joe to go and make my way to my next fun-filled function. I’m in a hurry. Starbucks has clearly recognized this pattern among their caffeine-addicted clientele and gone the way of the ubiquitous fast-food chains – the dreaded drive-thru. Call me old-fangled, but back when I was in school, ‘through’ was a seven letter word. No longer. It has gone the way of lite beer and e-z money - away from the Queen’s English and into misspelled main street purgatory.

Just this morning, I headed out to procure the daily jolt to my nervous system. I found myself at a new Starbucks store, one armed with the dreaded drive-thru. I also found something else, something truly incredible. There were nine, count them, nine cars in line to order at the faceless little box by the side of the coffeeshop. I could not believe what I was witnessing. And none of them had switched off their engines. All were spewing poisonous gases into the atmosphere. I could choose to get in behind a blue Ford Expedition or maneuver to one of several empty parking places. Hmm, tough choice. I selected the latter.

Did these people have no sense? I’ll give one, maybe two, of these drivers the benefit of the doubt and assume that they were somehow incapacitated and unable to perform the strenuous task of getting out of their car and walking the seven yards to the door. Perhaps they had no legs, though I saw no handicapped stickers. I’ll also assume that one or two had a kid strapped in one of those complicated carseats which take an advanced degree and a good few hours to release and re-capture. They may be forgiven. But the rest of them?

I decided to conduct an unscientific experiment. I had a little time this morning. I went inside, bought my latte and a newspaper, took a seat by the window, checked on the time, and waited. It had taken me exactly one minute and forty-two seconds to get from my car to the table, coffee in hand. In that time, the first car in line had moved on. There were still however nine in line, as now a silver Volkswagen had snuck in behind the Ford. This would have been my place in line.

The paper had some interesting stories. The coffee tasted wonderful. The VW soon went out of view as it slowly snaked its way around the building, only to emerge thirteen minutes later on the other side. It was now only three cars away from the all-powerful window. I was onto the business section, with only an inch of milk and espresso left in my cup. Wow, the stock market fell again. My retirement plan was suffering. I hoped the driver in the silver car was too.

Another six minutes went by before the barista finally passed him his beverage. That’s nineteen minutes with the car idling to get a twelve ounce cup of coffee. Apart from the sheer waste of time that each of these drivers had just experienced (nine drivers times nineteen minutes equals almost three hours of wasted time) I couldn’t even imagine the environmental impact.

So, later that day, when I had a few minutes of my own to waste, I conducted a little research online. Took me no time at all to discover (thanks to www.greenyour.com) that every “two minutes of car idling consumes the same amount of gas required to drive approximately one mile. If a driver idles for one hour, one gallon of gasoline is wasted.” Not only that, I hear you ask, as you question the wisdom of not turning the engine off to save gas, the website went on: “contrary to automotive myth, restarting a car doesn't damage the engine and, in fact, ten seconds spent idling consumes more fuel than restarting the engine.”

So my friend in the German import had used approximately one third of a gallon, or roughly forty-two fluid ounces, in pursuit of his twelve ounce java. Not only that, I discovered that for every gallon of gasoline burned, whether driving and idling, a car releases twenty pounds of carbon dioxide into our air. Nineteen minutes of waiting at Starbucks translated into about six and a half pounds of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and a third of a gallon of fossil fuels wasted. That’s some footprint.

And what about the driver’s other footprints, the literal kind? What would the cost be to get off his butt, out of the car, and walk? Next time I’m at the gas station, I’m going to reuse my grande latte cup. I’m going to fill it up with eighty-five-octane gasoline, the cheap stuff, walk back to the Starbucks and offer it to the ninth person in line. It’ll save the driver a whole lot of trouble.

Science Fair

My sixth grader is beginning her first science fair project. It’s a vast undertaking, a mammoth enterprise incorporating multiple pieces and parts. There are forms to fill out and permissions to procure. Her teacher has given her a substantial heap of instructions. Rubrics abound. She feels excited and ready for the job. Not me. It brings up all my insecurities.

Science teachers scare me. At our school, we have wonderful science teachers. All women. Delightful people. They are talented and engaging teachers; they behave in public; you could even invite them out to dinner and they wouldn’t embarrass you. But there is something that sets me on edge.

It may be that they are just way smarter than I. They know the periodic table by heart, they can discuss the intricate details of oxidation and photosynthesis, they are immune to disgusting smells, they know the difference between Newton’s law of universal gravitation and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and they are comfortable handling creepy animals.

One of the science teachers at my school keeps two tree pythons in a large glass tank in her classroom. She actually lets her students touch these insidious creatures. The kids encourage the snakes to crawl around their waists and necks and they even bring them outside at recess. There is nothing worse than minding my own business, supervising kids at play, nursing my steaming cup of coffee, and thinking about how much more fun it would be to be lying on a beach in Mexico, when some irksome middle schooler ambushes me with a deadly reptile, forked tongue inquisitively probing my outer ear. I think the science teacher puts them up to it.

I was never very successful at science at school. I think it was an early sign of my unwillingness to follow rules. I was taught that science required me to stay within the lines. It bade me adhere to strict principles, abide by specific guidelines. It forced me to acknowledge that certain laws were not negotiable. The liberal artist in me couldn’t deal. I wanted to create, to experiment without a hypothesis, to throw a whole bunch of hydrochloric acid into the beaker and see what would happen. My English and history teachers loved me. I always failed science tests.

My science teacher’s name in elementary boarding school was Mr. Parsons. He had one of those bushy mustaches which were so fetching back in the seventies. Mr. Parsons was a former policeman, a fact which clearly made him uniquely qualified to teach fourth grade chemistry. He used to hurl blackboard erasers at my head if I talked in class. The wooden kind. He was a sadistic son of a gun. Maybe this is why I didn’t learn very much science. I think Mr. Parsons was hired because the headmaster had a thing for his wife’s alabaster skin and winsome smile.

In high school, my chemistry teacher was Mr. Packard, he of the throbbingly large nose and the insipidly monotonous voice. Chemistry under his guidance only existed in formulas, never in action. I copied down pages upon pages of molecular formulas, but don’t recall touching any equipment with my hands.

Mr. Hinge taught physics. After one year, he gave it all up to become a priest. I never got the chance to ask him where he stood on evolution.

My biology teacher was Dr. Upshaw. While not a medical professional, he took it upon himself to perform exploratory examinations on all incoming freshmen. Why I am not quite sure, but one was trained not to ask such questions in English boarding schools. Dr. Upshaw was a prober and pronounced the letter “s” as “sh”. “Looshen your troushersh” is a phrase I will not readily forget.

But that is all in the past. Thirty years later, I am learning to become open-minded about science. My daughter and her lab partner are encouraged to think outside the box, to design their own experiments based on what they find interesting. They are conducting a study of whether exercise affects short-term memory. This is cool stuff. I’m hoping it will shed light on the fact that the longer I go between visits to the gym, the harder it is to find my car keys. I have been assuming that it was just age, but there may be method behind my madness.

The budding scientists are developing an excellent understanding of the scientific process which will set them in good stead as they discover the wider world. They are holding themselves accountable and having to keep excellent records, traits from which I could learn as tax day rolls around each year. They have to discuss their results and be open to the possibility that they might be wrong. Dr. Upshaw needed a strong dose of that. They also get to design a really eye-catching poster – with colorful accents, intriguing vocabulary, appealing pictures, and attractive graphs.

My daughter’s science teachers are doing amazing work. Science is teaching her to think for herself, to use her resources wisely, and to be inquisitive about her world. Where was that when I was in school?