The Habit of Dropping Spoons - January 6, 2022 | Kids Out and About Westchester <

The Habit of Dropping Spoons

January 6, 2022

Debra Ross

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 would arrive at school 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 the minimum amount of work needed for an A. So Bob watched as Jim set magnesium on fire, made golden rain, and figured out the components of dye using paper chromatography. Both Jim and Bob got A's in chemistry, but Jim had more fun.

What's the ultimate lesson here? You have to look a little farther down the road from Grade 10 to see it. Jim took away a lot more than just an A from that class: He also got the experience of being the guy who did stuff. A decade later, Jim got his PhD in materials engineering. He says what he does for a living is "pull stuff apart and put it back together again, sometimes in useful ways." He reports that it's still fun.

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. All babies do this. (Tip: Don't get frustrated; keep picking it up and handing it back to her with a smile. For kids, 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.

When the pandemic hit, science stopped being a happy game and became a worldwide emergency. The doers who specialize in medical care jumped into their clinics and hospitals and basically never left. The doers who specialize in chemistry and microbiology jumped into their real-life laboratories and got to work on treatments and vaccines. So these days I don't worry so much about the amount of time my kids stare at a computer as whether they are adopting Bob's attitude or Jim's: Are they fundamentally watchers, or fundamentally doers? At no time in history has it been more apparent how much we need the people who make things happen, now and in the future.

For a while, the pandemic made it almost impossible for parents to engineer opportunities for the hands-on activities that keep kids in the habit of dropping spoons. So that's our focus for 2022 here at KidsOutAndAbout.com: We'll work as hard as we can to compile local options for hands-on, minds-on fun, even as our uncertain times continue, in this laboratory we call life.

Deb