A Grandmother's Story

The kids who do best at school aren't the smartest. They're the most curious.

The other day my grandson asked me why the sky goes pink before it rains.

And I didn't know.

I'm sixty-three years old. I taught science for thirty-one years. And I stood in my own kitchen and couldn't answer a nine-year-old.

I mumbled something about the clouds. He gave me that look children give you when they can tell you're guessing. And he reached for his phone.

I've thought about that little moment more than I'd care to admit.

His name is Theo. And the thing you have to understand is that he has always, always been curious.

When he was small he took apart everything in my house. The toaster. The torch. My kitchen scale, which I never got working again, and I honestly didn't mind one bit.

He'd trail round the garden after me. Why do worms come up after rain. Why's the moon out in the daytime. Why, why, why, until my daughter would laugh and say, "Mum, you've made a monster."

I loved it. I want to be clear about that. I never once wished he'd stop.

The only thing that ever nagged at me was that I couldn't always keep up with him. He'd ask me something and I'd think, I haven't the foggiest, love. And I hated that feeling. Like I was letting him down a little, every single time.

Then he got the phone, the way they all do now.

And I won't pretend it ruined him overnight, because that isn't what happened.

It was quieter than that. He just started reaching for it first. Every spare minute, head down, thumb going. The questions didn't stop all at once. They just thinned out. Came a little less often. Then less again.

And the thing that worried me wasn't really the phone. It was what went quiet alongside it.

His teacher said he'd "switched off" in class. The tests started coming home with marks I won't repeat. Not because he isn't bright, he is. But you can't learn a thing you've stopped being curious about. It simply doesn't go in.

He was right there, funny as ever. I wasn't losing him. I was watching a curious boy slowly decide the world wasn't worth asking about anymore. And I didn't know how to stop it.

I tried the obvious things. You probably have too.

I took the phone off him once. We had words, he sulked, and the minute it came back we were right where we started.

I gave him the talk about working hard at school. His eyes glazed over before I'd finished.

I even bought him one of those lovely children's encyclopedias, the kind that win prizes. It's still on the shelf, spine uncracked. Of course it is. You can't hand a switched-off child a textbook and expect a spark.

It was a friend of mine, a woman who taught for thirty-odd years and was head of science at her school, who put it straight.

She said don't go at the grades, and don't waste your breath fighting the phone, because you'll lose. She'd watched a hundred parents lose.

She said the thing that actually matters is the curiosity. Get him wondering again, she said, and the rest sorts itself out.

"But Carol," she said, "whatever you give him has to grab him the way that phone grabs him. Or he won't give it ten seconds."

Then she handed me something. And I'll be honest, my heart sank a little, because it looked like the very last thing on earth that would work.

It was a comic book.

"He's got a hundred comics," I said. "That's half the trouble."

She told me to read him the first page myself, then leave it on the table and walk away.

And I'll be truthful with you. I didn't do it.

Not because I disagreed. Because I didn't know how to start. How do you sit a nine-year-old down and go, "right, let's read a comic together," without it feeling like a lesson, like another thing his grandmother's making him do? I couldn't find the words for it.

So I just left it there. On the kitchen table, next to the fruit bowl, where he'd see it. And I said nothing at all. I half expected to be throwing it in a drawer by the weekend.

It sat there for two days.

And then on the third evening, I came in from hanging the washing, and he had it open on his knees at the table.

He'd picked it up on his own.

I didn't say a word. I just put the kettle on and watched out of the corner of my eye, my heart going, because I'd already decided he wouldn't stick with it.

And then I heard it.

He turned the page. On his own.

He read the whole thing in one sitting. My Theo. Who hadn't willingly opened a book in the best part of a year.

He didn't come running with a hundred questions, mind. It wasn't like the films. He just looked up when he'd finished and said, almost to himself, "Huh. That's actually clever."

For him, just then, that was everything.

It didn't happen all at once after that. It crept back.

He asked for the next one a few days later. Read that one too. Then, about a week on, he asked me a question over tea, a proper one, the kind he used to ask. Then another the next day. Slowly, the wondering came back the same way it had gone. Quietly. A bit at a time.

And the strangest part was, I never did have to fight the phone. He just reached for it a little less, because now he had something else worth being curious about.

There's a whole little set of them, as it turns out. Chemistry, physics, all sorts, all in that same daft comic style.

There's even one for maths, which was always his worst subject, the one that made him want to give up. I never thought anything could make my Theo curious about maths. That one did. He started seeing the why underneath the numbers, and somewhere along the way they stopped frightening him.

I've honestly never seen anything like it.

Now, I'm not going to sit here and tell you he's top of the class. He isn't, and you'd be right not to trust me if I said so.

But over the next couple of terms, that curiosity quietly did its work.

He went from those marks I wouldn't repeat to a B+ in his science. A B+. From a boy who'd switched off completely.

His teacher actually stopped me at pickup to ask what we'd done. She assumed we'd hired a tutor.

We hadn't. We'd just got him wondering again.

But if I'm truthful, the grades aren't even the part that matters most to me.

It's that when he asks me a question now, I'm not stuck anymore.

Because every "why" in those books is right there in the pictures, put simply enough that even I understand it. And I'm no scientist, never have been.

So now when he asks me something, I don't go vague and guess. I sit down next to him and we find it out together. The two of us at the table going, "ohh, so that's why."

That feeling I told you about at the start, of letting him down every time I didn't know the answer? It's gone. I can keep up with him now. We get to wonder about it together.

That's the bit I'd have paid anything for.

I'll leave you with the one hard thing my friend told me, because I wish I'd heard it a year sooner.

A child's curiosity doesn't last forever on its own. The little ones ask hundreds of questions a day, and by about ten, for most of them, it's nearly stopped. And once it goes properly quiet, it's terribly hard to wake back up.

I lost the best part of a year fumbling about. Taking the phone away. Lecturing. Buying books he never opened. A year I won't get back, while that little window was quietly closing on him.

I was lucky. It hadn't shut yet.

I don't know how much time you've got with yours. And the honest truth is, neither do you.

So if you've got a grandchild who used to ask you everything and has gone a bit quiet behind a screen, I'd not wait about.

The curious little person you knew is still in there. I promise you that. Mine was.

He just needed the right thing to wake him back up.

— Carol