Burning and Learning

"When I was in high school, I remember friends who were jealous that my parents knew math and science," writes Janet Stemwedel of ScienceBlogs' Adventures in Ethics and Science, over at the current issue of the Science Creative Quarterly,

since obviously that meant I could ask them for help with my homework. What my friends didn't know was that my parents treated the most straightforward question as an invitation to a freewheeling Socratic dialogue of no less than 30 minutes. While I would have been happy just to finish my assignment with time to watch some TV, my parents wanted me to understand how things worked.

Isn't it funny how we do to our kids the very things our parents did to us?

And how. But it's kind of sweet, too, as Dr. and Mr. Free-Ride's rational (and experimental!) inquiry into the nature of car exhaust makes plain. Catch "Kids and Combustion" at the SCQ, in case you missed it the first time around.