Every teachable moment

Posted on January 25th, 2010 by Sacha Chua

What is it like being a geek? It means being surrounded by opportunities to teach, even at the dinner table.

One of the LEGO magazine issues had included a pair of 3-D glasses. The issue had been tossed out due to a large number of jam stains, but the 3-D glasses were still on the kitchen table.

I put the 3-D glasses on. Things around me shifted from red to blue-green, depending on which eye dominated that part of my mental picture. I could influence which color I saw at a point by mentally favouring one eye or the other, but I couldn’t get the scene to be one colour unless I closed one of my eyes. Interesting.

I explained my observations to W- and J-. Curious, J- borrowed the 3-D glasses and put them on.

“Cool,” she said, looking around, as I told her about eye dominance.

Then I took a red pen from the pen holder and rolled it towards her.

“Wow! That looks white!” She switched eyes. “Now it looks black!”

Then I showed her a blue pen. She tried looking at the pens with both eyes, then with one eye, then the other.

W- and I explained a bit of colour theory along the way.

What is it like being a geek? It means recognizing that every little thing has a mystery that can be unfolded and explored.

More posts about: geek, life, science, teaching // 2 Comments »

Short URL: http://sachachua.com/blog/p/7004

http://www.daysstories.blogspot.com mom

Wow! By that definition, I’m a geek! :)
http://sachachua.com Sacha Chua

Oh, absolutely. What with all the parenting and education books you had around…

On This Day...

2013: Planning my code/development learning — One of the best things about programming is that as you learn more, the possibilities increase dramatically. Each new thing [...]
2012: Setting things in motion — The more people I talk to about my plans for leaving IBM and experimenting with business, the more real the [...]
2011: Tweaking fun and nudging myself out of procrastination — Using rational economics to analyze what I do for fun seems to have paid off. By changing the costs and [...]
2006: A waste of mangoes — <sigh> I miss the Philippines and mangoes that ripen beautifully. I tried one of the mangoes today, and it wasn’t sweet. [...]
2006: Who Moved My Oatmeal? — My oatmeal has gone missing. I really, really, really should’ve scribbled my name on it. I wrote a note on my receipt [...]
2006: Scopus – scholarly search on steroids — I am totally in love with Scopus. Try using it to search for scholarly papers. It pwns Google Scholar for [...]
2006: Metadata class — The metadata class was okay. The professor doesn’t just read off the slides. She tells stories sometimes, too. I’m glad that [...]
2006: Taming the TODO — I gave a presentation on Taming the TODO for the New to Linux Users Group. It was a very small session, [...]
2005: Carelessness — I have misplaced both my very pretty black bonnet with stars and my black muffler, and am somewhat put out by [...]
2005: A weekend in Kansai — I had a relaxing weekend in Kansai, hopping from Kobe to Kyoto and then to Osaka. Tita Cora is also fond [...]
2004: Benefits of color-coding — Psychological benefit of color-coding #A tasks – I feel much better when I get rid of all the red marks! =)
2004: Weblogs as Filing Cabinets — http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/categories/businessInnovation/2003/03/03.html Weblogs could be a mechanism to coherently codify and ‘publish’ in a completely voluntary and personal manner the individual worker’s entire [...]
2004: The First Letter — Fiction, resemblance to real-life characters somewhat intentional but don’t read anything into this, as I’m making much of it up. Helpful comments: It’s [...]
2004: Story — Deleted, lost secret key

sacha chua living an awesome life