The Day My Dad Did Not Have the Answer

Rogelio Valdés

Oct 1, 2020

El Hondable, Coahuila — Place of the discovery

I was one of those children who never stopped asking questions. How do you plant this? Why does that insect have horns? How do computers work? What are stars? What is the internet? That last question even sounds strange today.

I was lucky to grow up with parents who also answered everything. My dad, especially during my early years, seemed to know absolutely everything. He was, in my eyes, the smartest person in the world. Until one day he did not know the answer to a question I asked him.

My brother and I were at my grandparents’ ranch, exploring and looking for fish in the stream near the cabin. There we found something we had never seen before: a cylindrical structure made of small river stones, clearly built for some purpose. We were so amazed that we forgot all about the fish and started searching for more of these little “stone tubes” so we could investigate further.

We found another one nearby, then another, and by the fourth one we found something heavier that did not seem hollow inside. We tried to open it with sticks, which became the finest tools in our forest science lab. When we finally managed to open it, little legs came out moving. That was enough to scare us, so we took it straight to my dad. We were not very brave.

Who’s that Pokémon, Dad?

For better or worse, my dad is one of those people who rarely says “I don’t know.” Even when he doesn’t know, he usually offers a theory. And the way he says it makes it sound like absolute truth.

He told us that the little stone tubes must be the insect’s house. Maybe it was something like a butterfly forming a chrysalis during metamorphosis, or like a snail building a shell and living inside it for years.

What was it called? He admitted he had never seen them before, and he had visited that same ranch frequently as a child. Once we got home, we searched through encyclopedias and books without finding anything. My dad probably searched AltaVista or Yahoo too, but it was around the year 2000, so no luck there either.

We all felt like explorers who had discovered a new species. Then, about four months later, we found it in a very old encyclopedia my grandparents had. There was only a black-and-white photo, the scientific name, and a description that was no more than two sentences long. But the description matched perfectly. We had found Trichoptera, an insect similar to a dragonfly that builds a casing from small river stones and other materials.

I remember this experience very clearly because it was the first time I felt like I had discovered something by myself. That feeling of exploring the unknown awakened a deep curiosity in me, and I think every child should experience something like that. Even if we are not the first to reach the answer, and even if the question seems simple, what really matters is the process we follow to find it.

Years later, I realized there were many other questions my dad did not know how to answer either. But I think this and other experiences trained me to figure things out for myself. Asking the question is only the first step. Learning how to find the answer is what really makes the difference.

One of the best classes I ever took in college was with a professor who guided us through experiments so we could rediscover the laws of physics. In a way, we were walking the same path Newton did. But that is a story for another day.

Now, when I teach a child something, I do not rush to provide an immediate answer. Instead, I try to help them build knowledge for themselves. Fortunately, throughout our virtual course, I have watched children become more and more self-directed.