Quiz Kid - Reminds me of you!

Below is a funny article that I have read and it reminds me of all of you in class! You have so many questions and I just want to reiterate (repeat) one point: nobody knows everything :)
However, we can always learn together!
Please read, its quite funny


Quiz Kid
Her son has all the questions. What happens when this mom doesn’t have all the answers? By Jody Mace

If knowledge is power, 4-year-old Charlie was aiming for world domination. He collected facts like other kids collected Pokemon cards. Naturally I was thrilled that my son loved to learn. So it came as a surprise to me how maddening this fact-gathering phase could be. Especially the part where he quizzed me. “Did you know that bugs help flowers grow?” “Did you know clouds are made from water?”

When he encountered something he didn’t know he expected an immediate explanation. Sometimes I could provide a complete, concise answer. When he asked how nails cause flat tires, I expounded, “A nail makes a hole in the tire. The air goes out of the hole, and then the tire is flat.” It felt good to be the fountain of knowledge.

But usually it wasn’t that simple. When he asked, “How many bones are in the spine?” I was stumped. I said, “We can look it up.” Charlie eyed me dubiously.

“Don’t you know?”

“No, I don’t know how many bones are in the spine.”

He didn’t believe me. “Yes, you do.”

“No, I don’t. Nobody knows everything.”

“You do know everything,” he argued.

But the sooner he learned otherwise, the better. “Nobody knows everything. Nobody.”

He scowled. “I’ll know everything when I’m in first grade.”

I was tired of arguing. “Well, that’s great. That’ll come in handy for your spelling tests.”
His barrage of questions made me realize how little I knew. What’s the difference between fog and clouds? Not sure. Do horses’ legs bend a different way from ours? Uh, never noticed. How do toilets work?; why is glass fragile?; how do they make Velcro? … all topics on which I was similarly uninformed. I started to wonder if I was cut out for this job at all.

Don’t parents just know things? My parents seemed to be able to answer a lot of my questions when I was a kid. Either they knew stuff or they were very convincing liars. I used to wonder if there should be a “parenting license” with questions like, “Should you let your toddler play with matches?” But now I was starting to think I had it all wrong. Maybe the licensing questions should be, “Draw a chart that illustrates the water cycle,” or “What is the difference between a reptile and an amphibian? Give three examples of each.” If there had been such a test, perhaps I would have been better prepared for this gig.

CONTINUED: Just the Facts, Mom
My son’s questions were often unanswerable, no matter how many arcane facts I committed to memory. Once, on a drive, he asked, “Where’s that truck going?”

“I don’t know. East?”

“No, I mean, where is it going?”

Maybe he didn’t really need to know the facts; maybe he just wanted conversation. So I said, “The man in the truck’s going to get a dog.”

“What color dog?” he said, encouraged that I finally knew something.

“Yellow,” I answered, and I could almost see that yellow dog in my head.

“But where’s he taking the yellow dog?” Charlie asked. He was hanging onto every word now.

“The beach.”

“What will they do at the beach?”

“The man will throw the dog a Frisbee. The dog will roll around in the sand, run through the tide, and shake the water off. Then he’ll chase the seagulls around and bark.” I was believing it now too. I liked that yellow dog.

“Then what?” Charlie asked.

“Then he’ll take the dog home. The dog will be tired and he’ll go to sleep on a cushion next to the man’s bed.”

Charlie smiled contentedly. Finally, silence. I congratulated myself on meeting Charlie’s need for conversation, and enjoyed the quiet, the break from the endless questions.

“Mommy?”

“Yes, Charlie?” I was smiling, too. I had this figured out at last.

“What color is the cushion?”

It had nothing to do with pleasant conversation. He didn’t care about my yellow dog. It always came back to facts.


I like the writer's style. She used many interesting phrases which you can pick up too! Do go and check out the meanings of the coloured words. You can try www.dictionary.com an online dictionary.