Where curiosity takes control
I get lost in web resources that intrigue me, and I love the feeling. If there were one thing I could wish upon every child, it would be the experience of losing all track of time and place, teleporting into an alternate era or experience where curiosity takes complete control. The time-travel hole that forms the central premise of Stephen King’s novel, November 22, 1963, is a perfect parallel to the timeless-learning experience I have when whirled into certain sites.
My current learning vortex is the JFK Library’s interactive, The President’s Desk. (How appropriate to time-travel just as Stephen King imagines, landing the oval office during JFK’s presidency.) As a big fan of West Wing and The American President and a child of the 1960s, I am powerless to resist. I click and experience sounds and artifacts of the era. JFK makes a phone call in my ear. His diary shows where he was and when, and I follow him along. I am gone for hours. Every click makes me curious about the next one. I regret not having someone alongside me, since my impulse is to share, “Look at this! Remember phones like this? Listen to him talk about the sea from this scrimshaw thing. He’s here.”
Is it the lure of the Camelot fantasy that holds me at this desk? I think not. It is the layering of experience: a school child stunned to hear that the president has been shot, the touch of artifacts made real by sound and voice, the connections between what I knew, what I know, and what I want to know. Just weeks from now, we will pause to observe and struggle to explain that day 50 years ago to many who have no connection or recollection. But this virtual desk tips up like a floorboard, dropping us into a time and place where we wonder and touch and learn. If there were one thing I could wish upon every child, it would be this feeling, this experience — as often as possible and on whatever topic draws him/her as Kennedy was drawn to the sea (click on the scrimshaw to hear it).
