Let There Be Light!

The boy came home from school today and, as has been his wont, got started immediately on his homework.

I finished up some impromptu archery lessons with the neighbor and returned to make sure the lass was all set for her soccer practice. While tending to her, the boy started whining about not understanding his homework.

I was more focused on his sister than him at that moment, so I dismissively asked him if he had read the instructions. He said he had and proceeded to read them to me. It was a 1 sentence instruction telling him to fill in a multiplication table. For some reason that still escapes me, that operation just wouldn’t compute.

He began getting overly excited. I ignored him. Shortly thereafter, the lass was off to her soccer practice so I turned more of my attention to the boy. He was still frustrated. This is still a problem for him- he gets so frustrated with something that he essentially locks up. He refuses to calm down and think things through, refuses to try coming at things from a different angle, refuses anything other than someone fixing his problem for him. One of these days, I, or the Wife- whomever draws the short straw, will have to just let him flounder about until he unlocks himself or explodes.

Today was not that day.

I worked him through to the point where he understood he had to fill in the multiplication table. Initially, he was pleased with understanding. His face then fell. He was staring at 100 little squares that all required numbers in them, and he had to fill them in. I left him like that for a moment to go take care of a few other things. When I returned, he was balling on his homework.

There was a brief instant where I was ready to lay into him for making things more difficult on himself. What good was sitting there balling on his homework going to do?

Fortunately, I course corrected and calmly suggested he walk away from his homework and calm down a bit. Naturally, him being completely around-the-bend irrational, refused. He got up to go blow his nose, though, and I seized my opportunity. I walked over, picked up his homework papers and put them in a cabinet far out of his reach.

And just like that, he went from miserable to mad. If he had been a cartoon, he would have changed colors from a sky blue shade to a crimson red. Maybe he would have gotten the volcanic-eruption treatment out the top of his head. I would have been Woody Woodpecker, laughing. Then, I would have pecked him in the head and flitted off in the direction of…

Ahem…sorry.

I refused to give him his homework sheet back until he’d calmed down. He slowly came to grips with the fact that I was serious and started looking for other things to do. Eventually, he started playing with a piece of wire and battery. Then, he started asking me questions about what he could hook it up to. He got an idea and went and grabbed a light bulb. Guess you could say a light turned on!

I agreed to help him hook it up, even though I knew it wouldn’t work. It was a lamp battery that required AC current so there was no way a battery, probably mostly drained, would work.

When it didn’t work, I explained the problem to him. He then went rummaging around in the kitchen and found a flashlight bulb. Now he was in business. After a little bit of finagling, we managed to connect the battery and sure enough, the bulb glowed a bit. It also confirmed my suspicions about the battery’s status.

That led the boy into a quest to create a flashlight. He came up with somewhat workable contraption involving a D cell, some tape, a piece of wire and the bulb. He didn’t like that he had to manually hold the bulb against the battery. Happy, but not satisfied, he asked me if I had any ideas.

I did. I told him to go get me a hanger. It had to be a metal wire hanger, I specified. One that didn’t have any clothes on it.

When he came back with the hanger, I first verified that he hadn’t ripped his sister’s clothes off of it moments earlier. I then proceeded to cut a section of it off. I stripped the plastic coating off it on both ends, then wrapped one end around the bulb. Finally, I bent what remained into a rough handle shape that clipped on to the other end of the battery and voila:

We had a flashlight. My siblings will likely recognize this as a little project our Grandfather introduced to us many years ago. It had the same effect on the boy today as it did on us back then. He was delighted and hooked at the simplicity. Shortly thereafter, the hanger was chopped to ribbons as he worked on his own variations.

Here’s a low-power version he managed on his own:

He even came up with a 2-D cell design, with a little help from me.

Somewhere along the way, I took his homework out of the cabinet and placed it out for him to complete. When he finally remembered that he had homework to do, he was astonished to find that I’d put it out for him. He’d been so engrossed in his engineering, that he’d completely missed that I’d returned it to him.

He even managed to complete it without anymore tears.