Every Kid is a Scientist

For my first few school-age years, my mom tried homeschooling us kids. Mostly because we moved so much. It was less disruptive, I suppose. I think it was also that we were hippies.

I remember the day this whole reading thing clicked. Everything about it. We had a big, beat-up hardbound copy of “Let’s Read” and after many days and weeks of letters and sounding it out and staring at squiggles, my brain jumped on the squiggles being the shapes of words.

Science was another thing entirely. We usually lived in the country, so we learned by being turned out into the woods and hills and ravines, and being told to come home before full sun down. Our parents, and the parents of friends, and neighbors took us all on nature walks (hippies), and talked about the things we saw. Scrub pines and mushrooms and deer tracks and gopher tortoise holes. The life cycle of maggots, why there were more baby bunnies in the spring, and how there could be seashells in the rocks we found. Most importantly, how everything worked together. The very observable essence of biodiversity, before that was ever a word I knew.

Observational science, the things you can see from looking at the natural world, has inspired fledgling scientists from day one. But the bigger stuff takes some creative explaining. Like why the sun crosses the sky the same way every day, or why the moon goes from a big fat marble to a silver eyelash.

For this my mom did what parents and teachers have been doing for decades… live demonstrations on scaled-down objects on hand. On this day she found an orange and a flashlight, and we closed ourselves into the silent darkness of our linen cupboard. She showed me how the ‘earth’ spun, and how the light only illuminated one part of our orange world at a time. She popped the plastic cuff off the end of the flashlight and showed how our bumpy orange earth spun in a circle every year around the sun, which definitely wasn’t the naked bulb of one of Dad’s work flashlights that he would be mad if we broke.

I asked about the moon and she ran out of hands. I ended up holding the sun while the moon, a balding tennis ball, began to turn around the earth, which awkwardly turned around the sun. An eclipse happened. And then the moon fell out of the solar system and the sun burned my forehead as we shuffled around to retrieve our heavenly sphere.

I ended up with a red thumbprint sized burn on my face, and the flashlight never quite popped back together again. The earth went back to being citrus, and the moon went back into the toy box. But just for a little while my mom and I were astronauts, watching the earth and the moon dance in limitless nothingness of outer space.