I’m sitting here drinking my Iron Man Juice—you remember in the second movie how he’s always guzzling chlorophyll water to counteract the growing toxicity in his body due to the palladium in his chest?  Well, I, too, drink a bizarre, green, chlorophyll drink for breakfast, which has, of course, now been dubbed “Iron Man Juice” as if there are ground up Iron Men in it.  “How does it make his blood less toxic?” said Luc.  Which led to a whole google trip on blood purification and diet and diabetes (because of dialysis as an example of cleaning blood) and why blood is red and little movies of blood cells moving through veins—the internet is just amazing.  And when Luc had had enough, he ran off and built with legos.

(My blood is fine, in case you’re wondering.  I just like the drink.)

But anyway, I’m sitting here sipping my green sludge while Sophie uses the iPad to film funny videos of Luc who is giggling hysterically.  They are on the other side of the yurt, so I can’t see what they’re doing but I can hear them.  She directs like a pro. Giggle giggle.  “Don’t smile, just let your face be natural.  Okay, now look a little to the left and stick your tongue out.”  Mumble mumble.  “No, Luc, I’m not filming your butt.” Giggle mumble.” “Okay, maybe in the kaleidoscope setting, but that’s it.”

Just a normal day….

Oh, and Henry just ran off the chase a deer and the goats are waiting to be milked.  After that, yoga and then some sort of kid adventure.  We were thinking maybe the Planetarium because we’ve been learning the constellations—actually we already know a lot of them because of these awesome picture books we had when they were younger, memorized from multiple readings.  So now the kids are reactivating that old knowledge (yes, you can have “old” knowledge when you are five, who knew?) and adding new layers to it.  And how about that awesome ipad app where you can hold it up to the sky and it shows you what constellation you are looking at????  We are soooo living in the future.

Yes, I am going somewhere with all of this.

So, yesterday, because Hulk calls Hawkeye “Cupid” in an Avenger’s episode, Luc asked me what Cupid’s deal was, and this led to a long discussion about Cupid/Eros’s history, parentage, and why so many of the Greek stories are so mean, not to mention how exactly those arrows work.  “What if the first thing you see is an animal?” “What if the first thing you see if yourself?” “What if you take the arrow out, do you fall out of love?” “What if he shoots himself with an arrow?”  Of course, each of these questions has a myth that answers it (and some had constellations, so that was a cool hook-up with other interests), so I told lots of myths over breakfast, ending with Eros and Psyche, one of my favorites.  “She shouldn’t have opened the box with the beauty sleep in it.  She shouldn’t have looked,” said Luc, worried.  He’s so sensitive.  For example, in the aforementioned Iron Man 2 the character he was REALLY WORRIED about was, can you guess it?  Whiplash’s bird.  “Are they going to let that bird out of the bag?” he said, big eyes.  This from the kid who’s favorite toy is a battle-axe.  But back to Psyche.  “On the surface, maybe,” I said, “but every time she was told not to look, she did anyway, and in the end, she became a goddess.  Maybe the moral is always look no matter what you’re told.”  To which Sophie answered, “only if you want to be a goddess.”

Right.  That is one perceptive kid.

So, why am I rambling on about all of this?  I was just listening to them giggle and thinking about how easy the days flow by and how curiosity can start anywhere and take you anywhere else if you don’t stop that flow.  From Hulk to deep questions of whether one should want to know divinity.  From picture books to astronomy.  From Iron Man to chemical nature of blood.  From funny videos to…?  Google lets us pursue any question to the exact degree that it is interesting in the moment and then we all run off, dispersing to our various projects until the next question comes up.  And that little node of knowledge gets hooked up to the web of knowledge in our individual brains in individual ways, through various links that have nothing to do with orderly lesson plans or structured “Units.”  A day or a year later that node will be there to hook more knowledge onto when the next spurt of interest arrives.  I just love watching them learn like this.

Because look: that intense vacuum-learning you see in a two year old, when they, say, pick up an entire language, or multiple languages, at light speed with zero apparent effort?  It’s my experience that that keeps going.  And by vacuum, I mean my powerful Hoover, or maybe those scenes in SF movies where the hull is breached and space starts sucking everything out the hole including the air and people are clinging to whatever is bolted down and even then they probably won’t make it.  Vacuum learning as in, my kids suck in knowledge like my dog Hoovers up scraps that get dropped on the floor.  Because at seven and five Sophie and Luc are as voracious for the world as they ever were, no diminishment, if anything, MORE.  I’m telling you, if people/society/school/parents don’t get in the way and mess it up by trying to make kids learn and think in a certain way, or on certain topics, or within a certain time table, that vacuum learning does not stop.  It just isn’t organized and quantifiable and testable.  It’s much much bigger than that.  All this nonsense about “getting kids interested in learning” really means “getting kids interested in learning what we think they ought to learn when we think they ought to learn it,” and I think it’s wrong and the worst kind of thought control.

Sounds extreme I know, but you’d think the same thing if you saw how easy it is for them to gorge themselves on experience and knowledge if one doesn’t try to control that in-flow to suit one’s own tastes and beliefs.  Because, from what I can see, kids—humans—are unstoppable learning vortexes.   And it’s hard for someone who was schooled, whose brain was molded in that way (like mine! Twenty years of school!) to even begin to grok how a mind can learn when it has always been free.  It’s like MAGIC.   Some days it’s a challenge to keep up with their hunger for more learning.  The idea of “getting kids interested in learning” tells me just how broken that model is.

Okay, okay, the goats are hollering at me and so I’ll get off my soapbox now.  But I’m serious about all of this.  Thought for the day: Learning is easy and automatic and voracious when we’re free enough to let ourselves follow our mind’s own path, no matter how non-linear and crazy fun that path might be.