1. seed
  2. Burning and Learning

Burning and Learning

By ksharpe on March 6, 2007.

"When I was in high school, I remember friends who were jealous that my parents knew math and science," writes Janet Stemwedel of ScienceBlogs' Adventures in Ethics and Science, over at the current issue of the Science Creative Quarterly,

since obviously that meant I could ask them for help with my homework. What my friends didn't know was that my parents treated the most straightforward question as an invitation to a freewheeling Socratic dialogue of no less than 30 minutes. While I would have been happy just to finish my assignment with time to watch some TV, my parents wanted me to understand how things worked.

Isn't it funny how we do to our kids the very things our parents did to us?

And how. But it's kind of sweet, too, as Dr. and Mr. Free-Ride's rational (and experimental!) inquiry into the nature of car exhaust makes plain. Catch "Kids and Combustion" at the SCQ, in case you missed it the first time around.

Tags
Culture
humor

More like this

Friday Sprog Blogging: the rightful place of science.
By now, you're probably aware of the Rightful Place Project, which is collecting text, images, audio, and video from scientists, engineers, and others involved in conversations about science in response to the question, What is science's rightful place? I'm still thinking about my own response to…
Friday Sprog Blogging: screen-time or scream-time.
Earlier this week, the younger Free-Ride offspring "made a bad decision" about time utilization at the after school program, electing to play outside and do a project before doing homework, meaning the homework was still unfinished when I arrived to fetch the sprogs. The standard consequence for…
Friday Sprog Blogging: academic integrity for first graders.
A bonus sprog blog! Somehow, this has become cheating week, and this conversation feels like it fits in with our discussions of how do-gooders do bad and of how freshman engineering students think about cheating. * * * * * Dr. Free-Ride: (arriving to pick up the sprogs from the afterschool program…
Friday Sprog Blogging: Here Comes Science!
The Free-Ride family got its copy of the new CD/DVD set Here Comes Science by They Might Be Giants this week. The sprogs, who have been listening and watching, offer something kind of like a review. The first thing to note is that, on the DVD, you have a choice of going through the whole set of…