Newton's Law meets Murphy's Law

wisdompursuit — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 20:04:22 -0500

Don’t you hate that pit in your
stomach when you know you’ve made a big mistake but you’re not exactly
sure how bad the fallout will be? Then you lose a night’s sleep tossing
and turning, beating yourself up for doing something that seemed
reasonable at the time, but now you know it wasn’t. Do you remember
back to high school when even minor decisions carried the weight of the
world?

Enter my son, high school freshman, perfectionist, and science lover
working on his first science lab report of the year two days before it
was due. He had written formal science lab reports before, so it should
have been a fairly straightforward assignment. But he panicked - the
all-out, I-can’t-think-straight- and-I’m not-even-sure -of-my-name kind
of panic that renders one incapable of coherent thought.
He couldn’t get a graph of his data to look right when all of a sudden
it dawned on him; his lab group had done the experiment backwards and
all of his data was inverted. Because they were using some new
high-tech equipment to perform the experiment at school, there was no
chance of us replicating it at home. Gone are the days of science
experiments with simple household supplies.

We let him have a good cry, assured him that this wasn’t the end of
the world, and then together came up with some strategies to handle the
situation. He would contact the teacher first thing in the morning to
see about the possibility of re-doing the experiment on his own time.
If that wasn’t possible, we would encourage him to write the paper
explaining his skewed results in light of his errors. Either way, some
good life lessons were being learned. By morning, his head had cleared
and by that afternoon, I had my son back. He had been able to re-do the
experiment during lunch ( my son who is hungry as soon as I put away
the food had given up his lunch to do this!). He confidently came home
and with a renewed sense of purpose has been diligently working to
complete the paper.

The whole episode reminds me of those VISA commercials:

Cost of trying to write a lab report with incorrect data:1 night of tears, 2 stressed parents, and 1 missed lunch period to re-do the experiment with the teacher

Value of redeeming his self-confidence and knowing that he overcame one of life’s many hurdles on his own:

Priceless.

Parenting. It’s everywhere you want to be.

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Newton's Law meets Murphy's Law