Frank Keil on Wonder, Childhood and Lifelong Learning

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All right, let’s jump in. Frank, what’s the origin of the word wonder? Well, in English, it went way back to old English, and it’s changed in meaning back and forth over the years. For some people, early on it meant simply awe, like dumbstuck awe, like, oh my gosh,

this is far out, as he used to say. This is amazing. But there’s another sense of it, which meant a desire to know and to understand, to understand the inner workings of. And it’s a very positive emotion.

Some thought of it negatively. Augustine thought it was a terrible thing to be like that because it was kind of, you were too proud, you should be to stay ignorant. Adam Neve, after all, were criticized for wanting to know, and that got them into trouble. But I don’t think I get you into trouble.

I think it’s a terrific word when you use it right. And so the way I define it in this book, which is a shared meaning with people like sort of an overlap of Rachel Carlson, the environmentalist and the astronaut, Mike Jameson, and Richard Feynman of physicists, they all kind of converge on a similar meaning, which is, we desire to know how the world works.

We desire to unpack the structure of the world. What is it that makes things tick, whether it be natural world or machines or anything else? And I think it’s actually a passion, a hunger, that we all have early on. And we can see it in the event of infants.

You’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast. I’m Tom Van Der Rijk. And today I’m joined by Dr. Frank Kyle. He’s a Yale professor of psychology and linguistics. And he’s the author of a great new book, Wonder, Childhood, and the Lifelong Love of Science.

Frank is a leading scholar in the subject of thinking, particularly wondering. And Frank, we loved your book and so appreciate you joining us today on the podcast. Well, thank you for having me. I love talking about it. You mentioned Rachel Carlson.

You quoted her in the first chapter as describing wonder as a joyous marveling. I really love that joyous marveling at how the insight has revealed an enormous new expanse of possible patterns to exploit. But the joyous marveling was a wonderful phrase. Yeah, I try to use a bunch of analogies to get the idea across.

One is like having your lenses sharpened, seeing things that you never saw before because you understand what’s going on beneath. I try to deliberately wonder about some event happening around me to get it better. So I’ve been working a lot on spring. I’ve been understanding more about how the early flowers spring up through the frosty

ground. I’ve been learning how birdsong emerges from brain swelling and male birds. I’ve been looking at why the early flowers didn’t have bulbs. And all this stuff converges in this incredible thing. So when I go outside and walk around my yard, it’s much richer.

It’s like having better lenses. I had my cataracts removed last year and the world suddenly popped. Well, it pops on steroids when you have wonder and causal understanding. Like we’re joined today by our producer, poet, laureate, and creative director, Mason Pasha. I wanted Mason to be part of our dialogue because of all the humans in my life.

Mason has made a practice of wonder, part of his daily existence. And he does that for each of us. Mason, is that fair to say that you make wonder a part of your daily practice? I sure try. Yeah, I think that I’ve definitely carved out spaces in my life to wonder more.

And on the days where I don’t find myself wondering, I notice it, I think. And that helps me keep it going. You’re better than most of us, I think. One of us lose that. I don’t know about that.

But I’m lucky to have the space to do it, for sure. Wondering is a very social thing, which I think people don’t realize. It’s not all by yourself, all alone. When you wonder together, you amplify the power of it. You get insights, you share your knowledge and ways that can leverage understanding.

It’s important, again, to think of wondering as really diving deeper and saying, why does this happen? What does the causal glue that makes this hang together? It’s not simply asking facts like, see how many windows are in that building or how many birds live on my property.

It’s why does this happen this way? Or how does this work? And people think that’s too hard, but it’s not hard at all. We know it. It’s not hard because they see kids long before they enter school doing it like crazy.

And the why kind of questions and how questions don’t get really… They start about age three, but by age four, they really take off and show it before kids enter kindergarten. Some kids are asking more than one or 200 word, 200 why questions a day. I mean, and they’re asking real why questions.

They’re not asking why, why, why to annoy the parents. They’re asking why things work. And if you give them a non-answer, they’ll ask again. So if a kid says to you, how come I see the lightning before I hear the thunder? And you say, that’s right.

The light happens and then the sound happens. The kid looks at you and says, no, I just asked that. Tell me why. So they’re not happy if you try to evade the question. They really want no other answer.

Frank, I spent the week with my grandkids at two and six. And so I’ve had a lot of wonder in my life this week. It’s true. They can inspire you. They can ask questions that you never thought of driving nuts. And the big thing that I talk about in the book is don’t say be embarrassed or try to pretend

you know it. Say, I don’t know that. Let’s figure it out and do it together. Frank, why a book on wonder? What’s the backstory?

Yeah, a bunch of reasons. But one, you just triggered. I’ve had three sons who were fabulous wonders. But I was a parent then, as my wife was the Uber parent. And we together were so involved in bringing up these kids

that we kind of forgot about just you didn’t have a third perspective. And so when now I have grandkids and I’ve been watching them and I go, wow, this reminds you of just how amazing that period was. And so that happened. And then I had sort of knowledge of the last 20 years of research,

which has been documenting extraordinary causal abilities and understanding in kids, but well before they hit school. And it’s shifting our whole view of what kids come to school with. This old fashioned deficit view of kids coming in and how do we wipe out their deficits or race or misconceptions is in a theoretical area, largely been disproven.

They come with tremendous tool kits. And what I try to talk about wonder is one of the most powerful kind of devices for developing their abilities to understand the world. So all that came together. And then I also started to realize how often it crashes in kids entering school.

And I thought, well, gee, maybe we should try to keep it alive. Because it does happen for some. I give some examples and sometimes happens in whole countries or whole periods. Frank, that’s made very evident in the first section of the book, the cognitive gifts of childhood, where you kind of go into some of that in detail.

Just give us a little highlight reel of why you think kids are so good at wandering specifically. Well, it’s there’s so much to it. First of all, there’s been discoveries that something as simple as learning the statistic of your environment, the correlations that are out there. They do this without even awareness.

They’re constantly tabulating how often things co-occur and occur. That’s not wonder. That’s just basic stats of relations and correlations. But then on top of that, they know very quickly what’s causal versus is correlational. We teach undergraduates distinguish cause and correlation, not confusing.

And they can’t do it explicitly, but implicitly, they know what really matters. It’s the stuff where X causes Y. Then they start getting even more fancy. They start getting interested in mechanism, how causes get put together in these complexes that look like clockworks.

But they give you a sense of this, push this, this makes this happen. And they will do that again before they hit school. I say there are a thousand studies showing up from different vantage points. And then another thing they do is to learn how to leverage other minds. They learn that there are different pockets of expertise around them.

Before they hit school, they know there are people who are kind of mechanic experts, biology experts, and they seek them out differentially. And they know how to diet when they’re with your bullshit. Sorry, if that turns to. But they can tell when people are B.S.

human because they can say this person is contradicting themselves or they’re not confident or I saw them make a mistake earlier and they track all this. So they’re really well equipped. For sure. And I think I’m personally curious, Frank, as Tom alluded to, I really

love the arts and a lot of things that are wonder inducing, so to speak. And I think that the term that is most grabbed onto in that space is curiosity. They use that a lot as like the curiosity muscle or like how this person is just such a curious individual. And in the book, you make a pretty clear distinction between wonder and curiosity.

Would you mind doing that for us? It’s an important point. I think curiosity is fantastic. But it can be less, less focused than wonder. Gossip can be simply wanting, gee, I wonder how heavy that car is or I wonder

how tall that building is, which can be fun. And my trigger things wonder dives deeper. It says, I wonder what makes that the way it is or what are some alternatives? It often poses kind of facts. Those while what happened is that birds wings were half as long or if away twice

as much, what happened if ice didn’t float on the water but sunk? It’s actually a wonderful thought experiment because we would not have life if that were true. But something that simple could chance on the whole planet instantly. So the kids start thinking that way and it’s much more playful.

It’s more active and attentive. It includes making hypotheses and guesses about different versions of reality, possible worlds. They do all this. Tom, that reminds me of you and your frequent use of how might we as a way to

start conversations or get us to go deeper? Yeah, I mean, the one thing which we all know, but in the rush of life as either children or teachers, you forget sometimes this, don’t ask closed-in questions, ask open-in questions, get kids to expand. But I have enormous sympathy for teachers.

One of my sons taught in inner city high school for several years for Teach for America and the challenges of trying to get deep engaged discussions in a large class of kids on a tight schedule is really hard. So that’s one of the reasons why kids, why questions plummet from a hundred a day to one or two a day shortly after the inner school.

These, some people are bound to a curriculum, which asks them to test and retest these kids for facts. It’s very hard to find a test before high school and sometimes not even in high school that asked them to really understand some mechanism or who would explain it.

And it’s ironic because the next generation science centers, standards, very much embrace the ideal of deeper understanding and a whole idea of learning progressions getting deeper and deeper over the years. But when you look at the actual tests that are mandated by the states, they’re not translated in that way.

They don’t look that way. And I’ve looked at this pretty closely and been very discouraged by that because, and I understand what happens. It’s hard to grade kids in a sensitive way when you have 30 of them and you’re on a clock and you have a mandated test you have to deliver.

Frank, what is, what’s the link between wonder and agency, learner agency? It’s huge the way I think of wonder. Again, it’s not the stupefied dumbstruck. It is being an explorer coming up with different conjectures about reality and then seeing if you’re right.

And so you have to be very attentive. And wonder is this really interesting part of us because it’s both a really active humility. You’re admitting you don’t know something, but it’s also an act of audacious daring because you’re proposing often something that no one has proposed before.

So I think wonder is socially disruptive. It’s a form of giving you real autonomy and even challenging the status quo. And I give some examples later in the book where wonder stifled or, or taken off track by some ulterior motivation. The worst case I know was Lysenko, who devastated traditional genetic

theory and caused by some people’s estimate the starvation of 30 to 40 million people in the old Soviet Union because he rejected genetics. And that he went wild. And the people who did wonder, he had them exterminated or prisoned. So wonder is a delicate thing, but a vigorous thing or a disruptive thing.

If you let it really flower. For sure. I, and that you started to get here a little bit there, Frank, but, um, why in this book did you specifically focus on science? That’s a great question.

Um, I try to bring in humanities everywhere I can. And I had some very evident humanists read the book and give me comments. But the main reason was because there’s more consensus on what the underlying causal patterns are for science. Science tends to talk more about kinds and humanities and social sciences.

I’ll talk about individuals. Like what I did, why did Napoleon go back to Russia? What did this not happen? But in the science, you tend to talk about what was this kind of bird do? What involved this way?

So the mechanisms are clear and the more consensual in humanities. It’s not clear what we’re causing plays roles in many areas. What’s the causal kind of understanding of, of a piece of art or music? So I don’t think that they’re not relevant. I think they’re very relevant.

And I take some examples. What I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is all the different forms of literature that use different versions of disguise and, and like Shakespeare’s full of this, someone pretends to be someone else. And I thought, how neat it would be to have a conference where people who,

who know all about this would get together with virologists who are looking at the way that viruses mask and conceal themselves and the Trojan horse, the decoy. And, and, and so that would be the kind of humanities and science conference I’d like to see.

The ones I’ve been to are often much worse than that. They’re like, what is consciousness? Everybody goes, Oh, I don’t know. And so that’s not all in here. I want to show that there’s more kind of content full.

There’s a real idea. I mean, all the disciplines, humanity, social science, is often have very rich, well articulated ideas. And how can we walk across them? I focus on science because there’s more consensus, not a hundred percent, but

there’s something out there that everybody tends to agree is the core thing. And we can really unpack it if we do it carefully. You taught me something about the, the poet Keats in this book too, in the beginning, you were, how he was actually a scientist in his own right. Although.

Yeah. He’s been slammed as, or not slammed. He was slammed by Dawkins as, as criticizing Newton, saying Newton destroyed the beauty of rainbows by explaining them to prisms. But that’s kind of taken out of context.

He has another incredible poem about our science discovery. He was a medical student. He was euphoric about a science during this romantic enlightenment converges. There’s a book I strongly recommend by Richard Holmes called The Age of Wonder, which is about the very end of the enlightenment where people like Keats and

Shelley, the courage was the most amazing one. Cloridge, this is the rhyme, the ancient man or Kubelkahn, he got really into, into, into science. And so he started listening to, to lectures on chemistry. And he said, I’m going to attack chemistry like a shark.

He got so into it. And there was this real kind of interaction that was, it was amazing between him and the leading lights. I wouldn’t say the world’s side was open to everyone, but it was a pretty interesting convergence of people across the disciplines.

We’ve kind of lost that. We’ve gone to our tunnel vision and that’s too bad. I think there’s a reason why we have universities is to bring people together to get shared insights. But we get so into our little treadmill.

So we sometimes forget that. I don’t know if that helps to answer the humanities question, but I want people in humanities to read this book because I want to hear what they think and connect. Frank, you, you outlined four elements of wonder.

And I thought those components were fascinating. Could you outline those? Yeah. I mean, that’s sort of what I referred to earlier, that initially they’re really good at noticing correlations, but then they also go beyond

the most the causation, but then they construct these models. They’re almost, so this is not so much in the book, but I’m increasingly believing the kids develop almost spatial kind of models. The real model that appeals to them is a kind of clockwork. It’s almost almost like a watch.

And that gets them in trouble sometimes when thinking about electromagnetism. But that’s, I think, the core. That’s what we evolved to think about. You know, my granddaughter, when she first saw us playing on a piano, when nuts trying to figure out how did that press on the key give that sharp sound?

And she tried to call inside the piano and figure it out. And it’s a really interesting mechanism. And so that’s what wonder involves. It involves noticing a pattern, saying the muscles in the so they caused it.

That’s the second step. But how are those causes connected in a coherent story? And then it often involves conjecture and surprise. So they think, I think it works this way. They open up and say, oh, no, it’s this instead.

And I can get them very excited. That’s great, Frank. I’m curious, do you have a thought here on the primary difference between wonder and imagination that’s sort of similar to the curiosity piece earlier? It’s interesting.

I’ve not been asked that before. Again, I think it’s part of the process. You can imagine all sorts of things. I’m thinking wonder is the kind of imagining that’s focusing on, again, the innards, what makes it work, or even the outer.

Just what made this came into being? And why is it stable? Why does it keep recurring? How can I understand it? How can I find out where an expert’s telling the truth?

Because if one of the best ways to understand whether you’re hearing a good story is to ask them on packet to tell them the mechanism. I found we’ve done a little work on this. Someone’s trying to blow smoke in your eyes and they don’t know what they’re talking about, just ask them to explain and unpack the mechanism.

And if they start appealing to authorities or they’re positioned, you know, they’re not so serious. The best, best scientists, they don’t try to broadcast their achievements. They tell you how it works. On the subject of imagination, we did a podcast about a year ago now with an

author named Martin Reeves about the imagination machine, he calls it. And there’s a really compelling section in there that gets to a little bit of what you were saying earlier about sort of the power of collaborative wondering that talks about the collective imagination as a way to sort of like navigate the world and innovate better.

I would love just a little bit more from you on what, how do you best create the atmospheres and environments for collective wonder? And what does that actually look like in practice? It’s not an expert on this, but I’ve done a little work in the area and read some. One thing I think is very important is to make sure the interactions are

constructive rather than competitive or destructive. So I talk a little bit about arguing to win versus arguing to learn. And you want to argue is not a bad thing. It’s a glorious way to test each other’s ideas out and learn together. But you have to realize that it’s a win-win game.

It’s not a zero-sum game. I have far too many undergraduates here at Yale who think that you should avoid arguing because someone’s going to get hurt or lose. That’s not the way it’s supposed to be. And there are studies done by Makua Tomasawa with very young kids showing

you can induce them to be arguing to learn types or arguing to win types. So we can socialize them and teach them to engage and question each other. It’s a wonderful thing, a terrific thing. As long as you realize that the goal is not to win, lawyers have to do that. No court.

Okay, fair enough. But no one else does. The rest of us can do it as a tool to share. And of course, if you have a diverse group of people, people can bring you different things to the table and really amplify your possibilities.

They can think as though you never thought of it. That’s why I’m always amazed at how my three-year-old granddaughter makes me see things differently. I’ll give you an example. Um, I had not studied the planets much at all.

And the other day she said, well, Venus is the hottest planet. I said, no, no, no, no, no, it’s Mercury. That’s the closest to the sun. She said, no, grandpa, that’s not right. That’s not right.

And Venus is the evil twin of Earth. And I said, what are you talking about? And she went through this whole thing about how Venus had this really big atmosphere and it was the green, this is a three-year-old, but she really has gotten into it.

And of course she was right. The surface temperature of Venus is 860 degrees Fahrenheit because it’s this super, super big global warming issue. And Mercury doesn’t have any atmosphere. So it’s kind of, you know, it’s hot, but it’s not hot like Venus.

So I learned all this and that’s got me in a whole thing about planets that I learned lots more since then. So she can launch you into it. She asked me why cardinals don’t migrate. And I got, wait a minute, I didn’t know they didn’t migrate.

Why is that? And then I got, I got me to all sorts of questions about how they got to be read. They have to eat red berries. So any kid can launch you into stuff you never thought of. And she’s really good at it.

So that’s a collaborative thing. I guess I’m getting back to your question. It’s interactions or something you should seek out. And it’s joyous. It’s fun.

I’m always in awe of people. And you might be one of them who are always doing this, who are always kind of picking up that ball and carrying it forward. And everybody enjoys it. It’s fun.

The only time perhaps isn’t fun is when you’re at a really shallow cocktail party and someone comes up to you and says, and then they just want to say how expensive the houses are or where they’ve been on their latest travel trip. But you don’t want to do that. You want to talk about something and dig deeper.

And then they start going, Oh, I don’t want to be in a corner talking to you and understanding something. But except for those rare occasions, I think people delight in this. We’re kind of going through our greatest hits of our wonder podcast right now. But we also have a podcast with Annie Murphy Paul, who’s done a lot of thinking on.

I know Annie pretty well. She lives here in New Haven. Awesome. Yeah. And she has a recent book and talked to us a while about how much of thinking is rooted

in the body and your environment and your surroundings. And like there’s this sort of physical movement that compels that forward. And I’m curious, have any of your findings for wonder been similar? A little bit. I talk about, and Annie, I’ve talked about this, the division of cognitive labor,

how we’re embedded in social communities. And so our knowledge that we sometimes think is in our head is actually in other people’s heads. And we confuse that and we have studies showing that. So you have to sometimes realize, I don’t know this, but the guy next to me knows it. And sometimes that’s good enough, but you have to learn how to go after that and get it.

Knowledge can be in your environment. I do talk about this a bit in the book. We’ve done a bunch of studies and this we have something called the illusion of explanatory depth, which is where people think they understand the world in far greater detail than they do.

And the way you can find it out is you have someone explain to you how a stapler works and you hand them a stapler and they’ll do it perfectly. Now you take another person and have them explain how a stapler works, whether the stapler in front of them and they can’t do it at all. They don’t realize they can’t do it at all, but they need all those external props.

And that’s great. Why put it in your head if you can use it? That doesn’t mean that you should rely on Google. And so I don’t talk about much in the book, but I’ve done work on this. You can’t offload everything.

You have to have some core toolkits to know how to search on Google or have a conversation with someone. When I have a lab meeting, if everybody had to turn to Google before they formally had a question, it would go dead in a second. And the same thing happened to math education.

As I consider the history of math ed, when calculators first came out, I’m old enough that there weren’t any calculators when I was a kid, when they first came out, people said, we don’t have to teach from times tables or anything else because it’s all in the calculators. But as a number of people have shown, they lose the sense of the structure of number,

the sense of all the systematicity of number. They need to have some databases that you can be flexible and agile within your head. And I think that’s the thing that makes this tricky. Absolutely cognitive issues depend on the world, on other minds, but we need some stuff internal as well.

And Wonder helps build that up. Frank, we want to close out with some questions about child development and specifically schools, what schools can do to promote Wonder. But let’s start with a general question of how do you answer a kid’s question? And maybe you can think of a kid that’s five or six, and then would you respond differently

to a kid that’s 10 or 12? How do you respond to a kid in a Wonder appropriate way? It really depends on the details. I wouldn’t retreat a kid who’s five or six that much differently from a 12-year-old. I’d try to gauge what they knew and where the holes were and how it could fill it in.

What I didn’t know and what we might want to do is a shared expedition. You’re not a co-equals. You’re sort of the senior partner in this investigation, but you’re definitely a partner. I would talk about sources, how we could find out, why it’s important, why it might matter.

I might redirect the questions a bit. If they start acting more factoidy, I’d sort of say, well, let’s figure out why these facts are there because that’s what really matters. And then we might talk about who we could talk to or how we could find out more information and give them a sense that you can’t.

I mean, I do this all the time with undergraduates that come in my office and they say, I want to write a paper on this, but there’s nothing I’ve ever written on it. I said, that just can’t be true. And even after years of education, some kids don’t know how to do a good Google search. So you have to teach them how to kind of navigate the landscape.

And we should be doing more of that. We should learn how to do it better ourselves. I’m astonished how many people I know who are well-educated adults who Google stuff about health and get totally misled by not thinking carefully about what they’re doing and about the source.

So I think it’s all of that. They’re not magically different from us. Just do what you should do as an adult and just kind of gauge it so that the kid can track you. I’ll tell you another thing that has surprised us. Kids are not daunted by complexity.

They embrace complexity. People think, oh, we have to simplify it. But that’s not true. We did a study recently, it came out in a major journal, where we took adult VOTEC internal combustion engine videos.

These are made for people who are into diesel engines. And they’re really complicated. There’s a seven-minute video. There’s 1,000 events happening, all this language. The only thing we changed was the language.

We made it simpler and more kid-friendly. We showed it to kids. And all the parents who saw us about your show had said, that’ll kill them. They wouldn’t have watched at all. They couldn’t get out of it.

And then they learned all this stuff at a very abstract level. We could show they were different from controls. So I think the world is complicated. There’s a million things going on. We don’t have to always present it to them on a oversimplified caricatured plate.

Yeah, I love that. Frank, it feels like the complicated world for us as parents and teachers requires us more frequently to respond to a young person by saying, I don’t know how might we? There is a new level of humility. It’s not a depressing thing to say.

It’s exciting. But another thing, I had a teacher seminar on this. When you say, would you discover us that you don’t know something? You shouldn’t be embarrassed. You should be euphoric.

I have this incredible opportunity to expand my ones to sharpen the way I see the world. And that’s a real kind of way to shake yourself up. No, no, it’s not bad to find out you don’t know something. It’s a wonderful thing. It’s really wonderful in a real literal sense.

It’s just you’re going to have all sorts of opportunities to transform yourself. Oh, how do we create middle and high schools that aren’t wonder killers? Oh boy. Yeah, that is the toughest question. I don’t want to be kind of a cliche and say, go to Finland.

But I would say, go to Finland. I mean, I think some of what they’ve done, and it was not an easy job, was to kind of rethink about the extent to which kids could own their own education, how teachers could become much more partnered with the kids. Teachers actually have more time to discuss every child in the classroom at the end of the day.

It’s kind of the way a team of doctors might discuss a kid with disease. Where is this kid not making? All this stuff is very different than the way we do it today. It requires more resources. It requires a whole country that’s behind that kind of educational approach.

And I think it doesn’t mean kids don’t have an agenda, have a curriculum, but I think you have to try to figure out a way to get them playful and loving it and invested in it. And it happens. Great teachers do it. I had one teacher who I talk about length of Mr. Knight in the book,

who transformed my life because he got me so engaged. And he did also history, which I think is a great way to teach science, the beginning of the idea and its evolution over time. And somehow he packed it all in and did the same amount of curriculum as anybody else. So it’s all of that.

And your listeners, I’m sure, know that. You’ve seen it. You know it when you see it. But it requires more respect for our teachers and more opportunity for them to kind of develop these skills and not just be worrying about some narrow sense of the curriculum.

Frank, does that imply more student-centered or student-directed learning? Should there be more space for learners to follow up on the questions that are important to them and their community? Absolutely. But it doesn’t mean that you just let kids want to run across from like free range sheep.

You have to give them some direction. You have to give them some resources. You have to help guide them. Yeah, my son who taught in New York City had kids going around their neighborhood figuring out where the pollution was and how they could correct it.

He had the sort of major water monitoring stations. He did all sorts of stuff to teach them biology. And that’s the kind of thing you can do very easily while getting across some of the key messages of what life sciences are. So you don’t have to abandon the underlying agenda to get some deep concepts going. But you have to be creative in ways that make it seem real and relevant.

I have undergraduates just last week. I had a seminar where a senior told me, I hate science. Science is irrelevant. Oh, I like his poetry and art. And I said, that’s crazy.

That’s like, say, you hate breathing or you hate food. Do you want blurry glasses so you can’t see the world as clearly? How could you say that? And so that’s what I try to convince everyone. It’s not a bad thing.

It’s a wonderful, it’s a terrific thing. Frank, is there one person, one voice that you’ve learned from in this exploration of wonder that you can share with our audience? No, not 100s. Because of many different ways.

I’m sorry to be quite. I’ve learned a lot from my wife who was an astonishingly good parent compared to me, who always did things that encouraged wonder. I’ll give you an example. We lived on this huge cliff in Ithaca for many years on Lake.

And about halfway down the 100 steps to the lake was a spot where the shale had spilled out on the stair landing and our fossils there. And she would always pause and just let the kids muck around and say, what’s that? It’s going into a trilobite. So she would introduce kind of and guide them to situations that would trigger natural wonder episodes.

And so I learned enormous amount from watching her. She was always inside the kids head, always figuring out where’s an opportunity. And she wasn’t being didactic. I have a section called didactic predators. Parents are so honest, they just lecture their kids like, you know, like sermons.

And that doesn’t work. But you have to engage them and have them. And once you get them hooked, they can’t stop. It’s kind of it’s kind of like Keats. He was into it.

He was not being negative. I love that. Mason, closing thoughts on wonder, anything that you’ve learned from Frank’s book that you want to take us out on? I mean, I think it’s just it’s really great to give like some some kind of mechanical understandings for why this happens.

And Frank, I do want to just mention something on the on the tail of that stairs story. But I’ve said this, I think to our team before, it’s really special when you go for a walk and you actually touch things as you’re walking as a way to establish a sense of wonder. There is sort of like neglected senses in some ways as when you go out into nature and just like picking up a stick and holding it a little longer than feels normal.

And I’m sure you’ll get some weird glances. But it’s just such a good way. Someone told me, you know, you have to think about mindfulness and all this wonder is related to mindfulness. What was the last time you saw a real shooting star there every night? And I’ve started now at least one night a week when it’s a clear night to lie in the field outside our house for about half an hour and find one.

Because I forgot about those and they’re so cool. And then I think it starts triggering all sorts of things. So yeah, take those opportunities. You’re not wasting your time. You’re growing.

It’s also the one thing no one can take away from you. I mean, as I get older, I constantly think about this is the most fun thing I do. I’m really impatient to wonder. I’m devouring stuff. I only wish I’d done it earlier because there’s so much to learn and it’s always exciting.

Every time you do it, it generates an infinity of more questions and every day is a little bit richer and more exciting. And I really mean that. That’s not just a pletitude. It really, really makes that kind of difference. We’ve been talking to Dr. Frank Kyle, a Yale professor and author of a great new book called Wonder,

Childhood and the Lifelong Love of Science. Frank, thank you so much for this contribution. It’s a must read for teachers, head leaders, a book that I think parents would deeply appreciate. Thanks for being on those podcasts. Well, thank you very much.

It’s been great. You asked great questions and you clearly wonder yourself. So it’s nice to have been inspired by you guys. Thanks to our producer Mason and the rest of the Getting Smart team for making this possible. And until next week, keep leading and keep innovating for equity.

Thanks for tuning into the Getting Smart podcast today. We want this podcast to be actionable and insightful and a great way to learn about what’s next in learning. In order to stay on the cutting edge, we need people in the field to tell us what they’re hearing, what they’re wanting and what they’re needing to learn more about. Got a topic or a guest in mind?

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