When Charles Lindbergh was thinking about attempting the first transatlantic flight, he ran into an issue: he honestly didn’t even know how long the distance was.
There is an incredible exchange in his memoir about the flight, where in the early preparation Lindbergh is talking with a mechanic about his plan to go from New York to Paris by a certain route.
“How far is that?” one of them asks.
“It’s about 3,500 miles. We could get a pretty close check by scaling it off a globe. Do you know where one is?”
“There’s a globe at the public library. It only takes a few minutes to drive there. I’ve got to know what the distance is before I can make any accurate calculations. My car’s right outside.”
Lindbergh was a guy who knew how to solve his own problems by figuring stuff out. Lindbergh and his partner end up taking a piece of string, stretching it from New York to Paris across the curve of the globe, and then measuring it against the key. They got it pretty damn close too, close enough for him to survive the flight.
We don’t have to solve our children’s problems for them. We don’t have to teach them how to memorize things. What we have to do is teach them how to help themselves. We have to show them that everything is figureoutable.