I’ve been pondering the old saying You learn something new every day, thanks to M and his seemingly insatiable curiosity. A routine tire change turned into a basic discussion of how a car works after he saw what was behind a tire and a computer cleaning turned into a (very, very) basic discussion of how a computer works.

M: Computers have brains?
Me: Yes. Well, they do things that we tell them to do. Or something.

While we have education constantly on our minds, we don’t try to find the educational angle in everything we do. The one thing we don’t want to do is to force learning upon him all the time – his innate desire has to guide him to a large extent. This desire tends to get dulled by years of schooling and I’d say it’s taken me about 10 years to get back some of that curiosity and desire. I hope that he and his sister don’t lose it.  The old saying shouldn’t be limited to a once-in-a-blue-moon statement made after discovering a neat little trick or shortcut.