Neil deGrasse Tyson says wise things.

In an interview with Larry King -- who is, somehow, still alive -- Dr. Tyson said something that I think rings really true. I'll paraphrase heavily, of course; I've watched another 30 minutes of this interview (it's a good one, natch) and other things crept into my head in the meantime.

Space is a way to get kids interested in thinking about their world differently. Whether you ultimately end up doing something space-related as a career or not, it gets them interested in the STEM subject areas -- Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. What you end up doing is creating a set of kids that grow up thinking differently about things, and that's a good thing.

I've seen this myself, many times. Kids are absolutely drawn to space; they're fascinated by it, have questions about it, think about it, wonder about it. I had a class full of Grade 9 characters in semester 2 this year -- to my knowledge at least 3 of them spent a night in jail during the semester -- and yet every day during the space unit, it was 75 straight minutes of jamasmanyquestionsaboutspaceasyoucaninthere.

It was a little exhausting, for sure, and it made getting through that day's material a little trickier, especially when the questions got off-topic (as they usually did). But, consider...

1. I find space pretty interesting.
2. I enjoy talking about it with others.
3. I know a fair bit about it, and hope I can pass some of that knowledge on.
4. Especially for these kids, if they have science-based questions, you'd better believe I'm gonna satiate their curiosity as thoroughly as I can. I know there's this idea that the teacher shouldn't just be the answer-box, and I usually take that advice, but when a kid has a question about a black hole and blurts it out when I'm in mid-sentence because he just can't wait, am I going to tell him, "Gee, sonny, that's a great question, why don't you go home and find out the answer and share it with the rest of us?" Like that would fly in my class.

Anyway, Dr. Tyson said something else pretty profound as I was typing, and I managed to get this one down pretty much verbatim.

We spend the first year of a kid's life teaching them to walk and talk, and the rest of their life we tell them to sit down and shut up.

So long as nobody's cranking-up to punch anyone else, calling them a "dirty gypsy" (yup, that happened) or anything like that... it's probably a pretty good teaching philosophy.

. . .

JESUS CHRIST I'M ON HOLIDAYS AND I'M THINKING ABOUT TEACHING.

SOMEONE COME OVER AND SLAP ME, PLEASE.*

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* mmmhmm. Please.