One day in 3rd grade, our teacher divided the class into groups to discuss and formulate an answer to the following question: which weighs more, a pound of bricks or a pound of feathers?
Fortunately for my group, I’d heard this riddle before. “Don’t worry guys, I heard this at my old school,” I said, putting an end to the discussion before it began. “It’s a pound of bricks.” They asked if I was sure, and I said yes. We wrote our answer on a piece of paper and waited for the other groups to reach a consensus.
The death glare fired at me by my best friend when the correct answer was announced (an aside for all my third grade readers out there: both weigh the same) shocked me less than the revelation that one can be both 100% sure and 100% wrong.
My days as an arrogant eight-year-old were far from over, however. A few months later, the same teacher corrected my spelling of the word “violin”. With all the respect I could muster, I said, “Mrs. Harwood, I’ve been playing the violin since I was five years old. I think I ought to know how to spell it.” With all the patience she could muster, Mrs. Harwood again asserted that there is no “o” in violin, at least not where I’d put one.
I was furious. Not only was I absolutely sure, I had credentials. Why, I was even more of an expert than my teacher on this matter! On the pretense that I had a serious and urgent issue, I excused myself to run down the hall to the school’s secretary (my mom), knowing that she would back me up.
“That’s not how you spell ‘violin'”, my mother said quietly. “You need to apologize to your teacher.” (Memory redacted.)
By the time of the Moon Incident, several months later, I had lost almost all faith in my ideas about how the world works. I was riding in the backseat of the family station wagon with my dad and my older brother when I overheard one of them refer to the moon as a satellite.
“Wait,” I said, leaning forward between the seats, “the moon is a satellite?”
“Yeah,” my brother said, and turned back around.
This is my earliest memory of having a truly open mind. I sat back in my seat, craning my neck to look out into the night sky, and tried to align my brain with a world in which, apparently, NASA had designed, built, and released into space that great, shining, spherical object I’d always naïvely assumed had occurred naturally.
But, as I learned momentarily, you can even be wrong about what you were wrong about.