Teachable Moments

I’ve almost lost some teachable moments, because the topic my son got interested in was one I’d assumed he’d not need until college or High school at the earliest.  Since he’s magically become an avid, fluent reader (four novels at the 6th grade reading level while I was  in China, maybe I need to travel more ;-) I just got him library books on the topic.  But he was more interested in harnessing my curiosity than surfing his own.  We did compromise: I read the books out loud.

B had been watching some classic popular science fiction with me these past few months, old Dr Who episodes and some of the original BBC “Hitch hiker’s guide to the Galaxy.” This brought up lots of questions about time travel, relativity and anti-matter. Of course in the science fiction stories, they are just plot devices, magical deus ex machina, but he persisted long enough for me to try to find resources to introduce the ideas without him needing calculus, or algebra for that matter.

The library came up to snuff with some PBS documentaries about modern Physics, I forgot to record which one before it was due back. We also read some biographies of physicists with simple explanations of their experiments. I wish I’d thought of researching like this when I took physics in college, the history holds the ideas together for me much better than the mathematical development did. Our readings sparked discussions of social themes like nuclear ethics, anti-Semitism, sexism, C.P. Snow’s “two cultures,” Soviet dissidents and industrial safety. History is weirder than fiction.

But, last night B wanted to know what mathematics had to do with Physics(!) This must be the downside of explaining modern physics with biographies and videos. We pulled out our old college text books and showed him random pages where every other paragraph is punctuated by an equation. B did recognize that the equations were math even though there were no numbers. He wanted to know how people went about characterizing equations, and perked up to know that we’d be starting graphing soon in math studies.

So, maybe all is not lost.