Most of my professors remind me of my parents. This makes classes slightly awkward but also weirdly comforting. I’m totally fine with long lectures, since I’ve been lectured to my entire life. Imagine two very academic research scientists raising children. That’s my sister and I. They’re very quirky, quiet people. Mom, a physicist, loves listening to baseball on the radio, and Dad, the biochemist, has a hobby of maintaining fish tanks. Occasionally they say completely unexpected things for such quiet and reserved people, such as “When I was in Antarctica…” These statements always catch me completely off guard.
I’ve been aware of some of the effects of their parenting for years. I’ve never been in the habit of watching TV, and in middle school, that caused shock and even outrage in my class. My parents very logically decided they didn’t want television to be part of my life or theirs. Sometimes we watched old movie musicals, black-and-white silent comedies, or nature documentaries. My cinematic knowledge goes dark after the '20s right up till about 2010 when I got a computer and started tracking pop culture on my own.
I have a similar problem with music. I have no appreciation for music produced between 1950 and 2000, and that includes the '80s rock that most of my friends adore. People learn to love what their parents love, and my parents happen to love more “historical” music, like '40s jazz, and opera. I love opera. We’re all nerds.
Visiting museums with them is awesome. Sometimes Dad doesn’t even read the plaques, he just launches off on his own knowledge, especially in aquariums. I spent a lot of my young life in national parks and campgrounds, and they treated everything like a museum exhibit. Some of my earliest memories are stopping to look at bears in Yellowstone. Mom occasionally idly describes how certain cloud formations probably came to be. Because of Dad, I have been a fountain of information on dinosaurs since I was four.
The most important thing they’ve done for me is to always remain my friends as well as my guardians, always treating my sister and I like students, making sure we know the logic and reasoning behind their decisions, because, as scientists, they know that the process of coming to the conclusion of an argument is more important than the conclusion itself. My sister and I got our way if we constructed a valid argument, which was rare.
I’ve always found plenty of ways to complain about their science-y ways, because we all love complaining about things, and I could complain all day that I’ve never seen any of the movies people reference or learned to use any video game controllers. I whine about how I’ve been expected to be fantastic at math and science and forced into the most difficult classes. Growing up a bit differently has not always made associating with my peers the easiest thing in the world, but at the end of the day, I’m happy that we’ve always been kind of strange.
