Reflections on Childhood, Learning and Culture

Saw Oppenheimer the other night. I felt like I had entered a transformative time tunnel. Aside from an incredible screen play with stellar actors, the film took me back to my youth. In 6th grade, Mrs Noonan assigned a research project of our choice. It required references and be at least 10 pages. I had gone through the classroom air raid drills and canned food storage the previous 5 years so it was natural for me to research this person who “created the bomb”. My paper was “Oppenheimer, Father of the Atom Bomb”. I recall it was relatively easy research to access. The town of Los Alamos, the Manhattan Project, the Trinity site and that tower that the bomb hung from were very topical icons at the time. What wasn’t obvious was the reconciliation of Oppenheimer’s work with the actual dropping of the bomb on the Japan. The overarching theme that I recall I presented was how this force of mass destruction would reduce the casualties of an extended war. The movie certainly dug deeper into that dilemma and Oppenheimer’s struggles. 

I was an average student in 6th grade with a keen interest in things around me. It just shows how one can achieve in academics when there is high interest in the assignments. Unfortunately, the high interest at the time related to the deaths of over 500,000 humans.