If you don't have that way of thinking long before you get into college, you aren't likely to thrive in that environment during or after college. It isn't solely pure intelligence.
Great post—and I’m a woman, raising 3 boys, and I know exactly what you mean. . .science may be interesting to girls (and it was and is to me) but it is rarely FASCINATING to girls like it is to boys, maybe not to all but to many. . .
LOL...so true.
I remember taking my dad’s temporarily non-functional Rolex as a 7 year old, and disassembling it to fix it. This is no small feat, and required a vice, a hammer and a screwdriver. Needless to say, there was “sproinging” involved and missing/non-fitting components, and I surreptitiously threw his er...Rolex into a field so he wouldn’t find it.
For the rest of his life, he would stroke his chin and sometimes muse about “What happened to that Rolex I used to have?”
I was never able to tell him. Even as an adult, I just never had the courage. Of course...now that he is in heaven, he knows the whole story...:)
My wife and I had a discussion about this very thing (well, making explosives in general, I think it was thermite, in particular) not long ago.
"Why would you want to do that?", she asked.
"It's fun. Why wouldn't you?", I answered.
"Well, I don't know anyone who did that as a kid."
"Well, I don't know anyone who didn't."
Different sexes, different mindsets. I don't know too many guys who had tea parties with their other guy friends, either.
One of my favorite movies is “October Sky”, because it seemed to capture that...thing, whatever it is, that makes boys mix things together to see what happens.
I live in Massachusetts, and my wife told me the other day that there was a house in Sudbury that the cops were called to because some teenage kid was mixing chemicals to do something.
MY first reaction was: “So? Heck, when I was a young teenager, I was mixing all kinds of stuff together...”
My wife said no...it was different. The kid had mail order chemicals, the police called in Hazmat teams, closed off and evacuated the street, they had helicopters overhead and such.
Apparently, the kid’s mom had called the police. This appeared to be more than your standard 12 year old “what happens if I light this on fire?” curiosity.
Yeah, THAT is different. But, it is true. Some of the stuff I tell my wife I did as a kid she is amazed at, and I said I thought all kids did stuff like that, and she said “I sure didn’t...”