April 23, 2001

DOWN HOME:
How can kids attend school and not learn?
___We've had this conversation a zillion times at the dinner table.
___"How was your day? Did you do anything interesting? Did anything fascinating happen?" I'll ask our daughters, Molly and Lindsay.
___"Fine," Molly will answer. "And no, we didn't do anything interesting or see anything

MARV KNOX Editor

fascinating at all." Anybody who's raised an eighth grader wouldn't be surprised with her reply. An eighth grader could fly to the moon on a field trip and come home with nothing to report.
___"We never do anything really interesting," Lindsay will add. "Just go to school and come home." That's the standard world view for a high school junior. A junior could have an opportunity to fly to the moon and choose to go to the mall instead.
___"OK," I'll say, slightly changing the subject. "How was school? Did you learn anything? Were my tax dollars at work today?"
___"No," Molly will respond.
___"Nothing," Lindsay will add.
___Now, I can understand how one day seems pretty much like another when you're a kid and you go to school for 180 days a year.
___But for the life of me--maybe I'm the slow-learning, hard-headed dad-- I've never been able to comprehend how someone could come home from school and claim not to have learned anything that day.
___This idea came to mind last week, when Molly shouted out the answer to a TV trivia-game question I never knew. A couple of seconds later, Lindsay did the same thing.
___So, the next day, I asked if they learned anything at school. "No," Molly reported. "Nothing," Lindsay said.
___"Well, then," I asked, "how did you two get so smart if in any given day you never ever learned anything at school? You're not dumb. You make good grades. Where'd this knowledge come from?"
___"I think the Brain Fairy comes and puts knowledge in our heads while we sleep," Molly theorized. According to this theory, they get especially smarter on Saturday mornings.
___"Well, it's not like you have an epiphany," Lindsay commented. "You learn things incrementally, and one day never seems like a big deal."
___"Ha!" I retorted. "You said 'epiphany' and 'incrementally.' Why didn't you ever tell me, 'Hey, I learned the meaning of 'epiphany' today? That was something, and on the day you learned it, you claimed you learned nothing."
___Lindsay just rolled her eyes, ending the discussion.
___And while I've always wanted more information out of my kids at any given dinner time, I get her point.
___It's like the days God gives us. One blends into the other, incrementally, so we don't notice their significance.
___But you never know when you'll have an epiphany, so don't take any day for granted.
___

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