When I was a kid, I did the same reports as my son. (I mean the same kinds of reports, of course — my body of work in elementary school included coruscating monographs on raccoons and airplanes and...

When I was a kid, I did the same reports as my son. (I mean the same kinds of reports, of course — my body of work in elementary school included coruscating monographs on raccoons and airplanes and George Washington Carver.) If I had done an anaconda report, and my teacher had asked aer the second-largest snake, I would not have simply turned, walked, typed and learned. I would have returned to the encyclopedia, and if the answer wasn’t there, I would have ended my investigation abruptly. Or maybe, if I was especially motivated, I would have gone to the library and checked out a book about snakes, but even that would not have been a guarantee. And so I would have most likely gone on with my life in third grade, and then fourth, faintly feeling the burr of the question in my brain, continually assessing how important it was to scratch that itch.