"You see the blossoming interest in science and space. Seeing the future of your child, seeing the passion that's within them... something amazing happened!"
One rainy summer day, Geoff and his wife watched WGBH's Nova with their young sons. As fascination replaced pent-up energy, the parents got a glimpse of the lifelong learnerstheir boys might someday become.
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My name's Geoff Bloss. I think the most important is I'm a dad and husband.
We have a house out on Montauk, and we're on our summer vacation and we had one of those rainy days. My wife and I knew that we were going to be our kids' entertainment for the entire day.
We start to flip through the TV, and we stumble on "The Elegant Universe," the Brian Greene series. I look at my wife kind of askance and say, "Do we give it a try?" And something amazing happened. That anxious energy that we had from a four-year-old and seven-year-old slowly gets washed away and they get quiet. And there was fascination that you saw on their face, there was interest that you saw on their face. Never did we think that there would be two or three hours of the four of us just sitting down as a family and learning as a group of us.
And over the course of the next couple weeks, you see the blossoming interest in science and space. If you were to go into either of their rooms, they've got these altars to science and space in there. You know, it changes my wife and my perception as parents as to what we talk to our kids about and what we try and engage them with.
My older son is explaining the potential for this multitude of dimensions to exist in our universe, and he's using the same analogy that was used in the series. And he says, you know, "And I definitely want to be a physicist when I grow up."
Seeing the future of your child, seeing the passion that's within them manifest itself, and seeing those moments where you've got a tiny glimpse into understanding what they could become. The most powerful learning experiences that you can have are those that you share with people that you love.
The investment that WGBH and NOVA made for this kind of programming to be accessible to the public has changed our lives.
And it all hearkens back to just one rainy day on Montauk.
