| My dad was a huge fan of educational television. When I was growing up, I rarely watched sitcoms, I watched whatever was on PBS. Sometimes because it was interesting, and sometimes because my dad made me because he thought it was something that I should know about. One night I watched a program about plate tectonics, and I found this fascinating. I was in second grade and we got to choose a word of the week to look up and write a story about, and for some reason I insisted on Gondwanaland because it was such a cool word. My teacher thought I was making it up and got mad at me for disturbing class. It could have scarred me for life, but my mother (a teacher at the elementary school) came to my rescue and found it in an encyclopedia for me in the section about continental drift. I first began to have an inkling that maybe I was a little different from your average kid. |
