Introductions

I suppose I should tell you a little about myself, especially if you’re bothering to read this.

As far back as I can remember, I wanted to be a paleontologist. As in, I was one of those annoying five-year-olds who only wanted to talk about dinosaurs. My parents decided to help me develop this irritating habit by buying every book about dinosaurs they could find. When I tore through every Golden Book™ and picture book on the subject, they had no choice but to move on to more advanced books. I was ten years old when Jurassic Park was published, so they gave me that to read too. Yes, of course I wrote a book report on it.

Reading was a huge part of my childhood. My parents’ house was practically decorated with the written word. Every room had reading materials: bookshelves covering the walls of the living and dining rooms, cookbooks tucked into kitchen cabinets, Time and Popular Science magazines conveniently placed in the bathroom. My father worked all day, but read to me and my brothers each night before bed. And believe me, you end up learning to love story time if you grow up having an Englishman reading aloud the words of J.R.R. Tolkien or C.S. Lewis to you.

By the time I was in high school, the “what do you want to be” questions became more frequent and more pressing. When you get to that point, everyone all of a sudden wants to ensure that you have a direction and a goal to your life. And unlike my peers who grew out of their dinosaur phase, I was still as set on the whole paleontologist thing as I’d been in kindergarten. I took every science course my high school offered. When they ran out, they let me take time in the middle of the school day to drive to a nearby university and take an introductory geology course three days a week. It meant I missed three out of every five French classes, but my teacher didn’t mind as long as I kept up with the work on my own time.

In fact, at every stage of my childhood, I was given the opportunity to learn whatever I wanted to know, and the freedom to learn it at my own pace. I had remarkable teachers and supportive parents who encouraged me to pursue anything I wanted to try, however long I wanted to pursue it. So it’s probably no surprise that by the time I graduated high school I’d learned to play the piano, violin, and tuba, earned varsity letters in cross country and track, sung in the all-county choir, worked in an electron microscopy lab, starred in three plays, and been a National History Day state finalist.

I’m not listing all of these things to brag. I mean, it’d be a pretty weird flex if I was still tooting my own horn about things I did as a teenager, and frankly I’m much more proud of everything I’ve accomplished since then, so they all seem like rather piddly accomplishments in comparison. Rather, the reason I mention that I was able to do these things is because I was able to do them despite all along having the ultimate career goal of becoming a paleontologist, an objective that wasn’t furthered by any of them, except perhaps vaguely by my work in the lab of a completely unrelated science field. These days, I can no longer play the tuba or violin, though I still play the piano on occasion. I can still run a 5k, but only about half as fast as I did in high school. The only songs I sing are to my children or in the shower. And I haven’t worked in a science lab or acted on stage in more than a decade.

But the value of participating in each of those activities is not that I’d eventually make a career out of them or put them on a resumé or even a college application. Childhood is virtually the only chance we get to explore the world around us without feeling like we have to polish our brand, increase our exposure, advance our career, or build leadership experience while we do it. As children, we don’t have a career to work at or families to support. Our one job is to expand the horizons of our knowledge as much as we can before the rest of our life demands our attention. And also to listen to our parents, of course.

In the end, I didn’t become a paleontologist. I became a stable isotopic geochemist, which is something five-year-old me didn’t even know I could become. Hell, even sixteen-year-old me didn’t know that was something I could become. And then I went immediately from getting that graduate degree into the highly lucrative, universally respected field of teaching high school science.

The point is, we don’t know who we’re going to be. Dreams are allowed to change. Your degree (or lack of one) does not define you. And once you’re older than 20, no one cares what you did in high school. Children deserve the space to grow and explore on their own terms, not in pursuit of a specific goal or end result. Above all, childhood is when we get to have fun. And there’s no reason the way we learn can’t be fun as well.

For all of you who’ve read this far, I hope your own learning journey continues to be fun and that you allow yourself the freedom to keep on learning every day. And if there’s a learner in your life who could use a little more fun in their own learning journey, I hope that I can help.