History, philosophy, art, and science lessons show up all the time in our home. But it’s rarely anything to do with school. And it never looks how you’d think. It happens spontaneously so we have to be quick on our feet. The other day Sean and I had this exchange which is just one example of how lessons go down around here:
SEAN: The other day, Julian said to me, “I’ve been spending time trying to think of a new color that nobody’s ever seen before.”
JEN: Julian said this?
SEAN: Yeah. So then I spent a long time explaining the electromagnetic spectrum. Ultra violet to visible light to infrared. And then I told him how you can have words that sound like they relate to a thing but they don’t actually. You can construct things that sound like real ideas but they’re pretend ideas. I then asked him to imagine thinking of a color that’s so incredibly black, it looks white. Julian said, “Whoa! … wait. That doesn’t make any sense.” I said, “that’s right.”
JEN: This is how we teach science. Or something? Philosophy?
SEAN: You’ve got to take the moment when it presents itself, right?
JEN: And you’d never think that would be the moment.
Incidentally, Julian is in the middle of advancing in the science fair. He tested flight times of rockets using different fin configurations and we launched at the Salt Flats. When he moved on from the first level which somehow did not include any tri-fold posters, perplexed, Sean and I asked him if he would be needing them eventually and Julian said he thought not. This was Sean’s response:
“Whattaya mean no poster? That’s how you present science! I thought that’s how they presented at the Nobel prize!”
You’ll be glad to know he has, since then, created a tri-fold poster as part of his presentation, so we know his experiment is scientifically sound. And it’s blue, so, you know. That can’t hurt.