At age five, my daughter was told that when you find a stem topped with one of those white puff balls–what we adults recognize with widespread enmity as dandelion seed heads–and blow it into the air, whatever wish you make on that dispersing cloud will come true.  

Consequently, she began calling these seed heads “wishes”.  

A few years later, on the homeschooling stretch of my life’s vocational journey as a learning facilitator, my veteran Constructivist sensibilities engaged within my first steps like some kind of professional muscle memory. From the outset, I found myself eschewing most advice and curriculum in favor of intentionally nurturing an experience of learner-constructed knowledge-building based on broad ranging exploration interrupted here and there by deep rabbit holes.

The times they built knowledge spontaneously, however—venturing beyond the borders of my intent—are what I remember most. One such occasion will, I suspect, be among the last stars burning when the vast sky of my collected memories has all but gone dark.

From the outset, I had pressed upon the minds of these learners a foundational conception of science–and habit of mind: observe the natural world, notice patterns, construct testable theories. Soon, a distinct language phenomenon developed within our microculture. Anytime one of us noticed something interesting, we’d yell, “Science!” and then describe our discovery of an observed pattern and wonder aloud at its meaning. 

Meanwhile, I purposely paired our daily formal study of science texts with our daily reading in poetry books and called that learning block Science and Poetry as though these two disciplines are always paired like salt and pepper, my hidden curriculum being that the arts and sciences, that beauty and truth, are equally essential and often inextricable.  

Six months later, spring came and my daughter, now 7, collected a bouquet of its first flowers–dandelions, of course–put them in a jar on a window sill and promptly forgot them entirely.  About a week later, I witnessed her synthesize the understanding of science she’d been gradually building over months’ worth of “Science!” moments with her blossoming understanding of poetry’s concentrated use of figurative language, of seeing things as they are but also as something else entirely. 

She ran up to me with the jar.  “Mama, Mama,” she exclaimed, “I knew it, I knew it!  Those yellow flowers change into balls of seeds, into wishes!  See?  Science and poetry!”  Thus was I, like the parasol of a dandelion seed caught by a breeze, blown away.