Some kids like museums. T1 doesn’t. We went to the Natural History Museum in London last year. It’s such a fantastic place, and admission is free which appeals instantly to my frugal Chinese genes. According to T1, you get to see bones and more bones, and all sort of bones. And lots of dead animals. What’s there to be excited about? All he wanted to do was to play ping pong on the park outside the museum. On a windy autumn day. It’s one of those tussles we have, my idea of a holiday adventure is usually tied to some form of knowledge acquisition, especially when it involves free admissions. T1’s idea of fun and adventure is waiting for other kids to finish chasing ping pong balls in the wind so that he can do the same. We sat on the grass for an hour munching the sandwiches I prepared and the Chocolate Banoffee dessert which we got from Waitrose whilst waiting for his turn at the table.
I dragged the boys into the museum after two rounds of ping pong. We went up to the first floor, where I tried to get T1 interested in the evolution of man. A marble statue of Darwin sat imposingly by the staircase as if to oversee the origin of the species. There was the homo floresiensis, the “hobbits” that lived more than 17,000 years ago, the Neanderthals, the homo erectus and all sorts of homo whatchamightcallits with such close resemblance to the modern man that suggest the irrefutability of evolution. T1 was unimpressed.
“Just because a bunch of people in a museum tell us we evolve from apes, doesn’t mean they are right.” How he could dispute the carefully curated chain of evidence before us is beyond me.
“Besides if we evolved from apes, how come there are still apes around, and they didn’t evolve?”
I wasn’t sure if I knew enough of evolution to explain its complexities to him. Normally, I would have just consulted my trusted advisor, Mr Google, except that I wasn’t ready to pay Maxis’ phenomenal roaming charges so Mr G was unavailable for comment. T1 was just not convinced and goes on to seal his argument,
“Mima, you said God created Adam, the first man. If we are descendants of Adam how could we have evolved from apes?”
It is safe to say that if I ever homeschool T1 I’m quite sure I’d be the first mother to pull all her hair out by the end of the first week.
We hustled through the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods and more old bones in record time to get back to the ping pong table. I don’t remember much else of our tour of the museum, except that 1) you don’t want to argue with an eight year old about evolution and creationism when he has his heart set on ping pong, and 2) the Chocolate Banoffee dessert from Gü, with dulce de leche, banana puree and mascarpone cheesecake topped with chocolate ganache, was an absolute delight.
The rest, as they say, is just history.
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