Children are very bad listeners, but they are perfect duplicator. The complexity of our language is something that take quite a time for children to fully understand. Nevertheless, the misconception in the part of the children could be a memory for the same children to laugh over years later.

I am going to list the misconceptions I had when I was a child. I hope anyone who read this article could also remember one or two of their own misconceptions and tell me about it in the comment part.

Earth is a flat and infinite plane with contours

This is what I believe when I was four years old. Actually I didn’t believe that it is really flat. There are still mountains, hills, beaches, lakes and seas on top of it. However I believed that earth is infinite in the sense that there are always new uninhabited continents and islands for humanity to find and colonize. This believe end when a teacher show me a globe, which started to make me wonder there are other balls somewhere.

The universe started at year 0 AD

Even now, I am not really good with historical time-lines. I thought that since calendar was started at 0, it must mean that God started the universe at that time. Based on said model, I also concluded that human was created at January 6th 0 AD. Since Maria and Josephs are the parents of Jesus who is God, they should be born before God. Therefore they don’t belong to this universe. Sunday school teachers, you will have to be careful with what your students interpret your teachings.

Computers can be told to make games

At that moment I still don’t have any idea about programming syntax. I think that computers are intelligent beings that we can program by using human languages if we know the right DOS syntax. I thought computer games were made by making a file with complete description written in human language in it and use a syntax to ask the computer to make the game. Today, I know that you can only do that if you are the manager of a programming team. Otherwise, you have to have a chat with the computer using programming languages.

If I mix 34 different liquids, I can create a new life

One of my private tutor when I was in elementary school told me that a living cell consists of 34 different parts. I don’t know where the logic come from, but I translated it into “If I mix 34 different liquids, I can create a new creature”. I look around the house for 34 different liquids to mix, but nothing happen.

Babies could be created from pencils and water

This is what I believed when I was 8 or 9 years old. The logic is like this, babies are living things so they are made from organic compound. Organic compounds consists mainly of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen. The pencils are where I plan to get the carbon from. I can get the oxygen and hydrogen from water since the chemical formula of water is H20. A female teacher stopped me immediately and gave me no time to explain anything as I asked her, “I want to make a baby, do you have time to help me?”

My reflection on my childhood misconception

Regardless of how funny those childhood misconception seems to me today, I think that I can learn something from those misconceptions. The universe where we live is so complex that it is impossible for any of us to get it right in our first try. We have to make hypothesis, test it, adjust the variable and test if over and over again before we can be sure that we had done it right. There is no shame in being wrong as long as we are willing to correct ourselves. Observation and experiment results are going to guide us, but we still need somewhere to start the journey from.

My other articles :

• Personification of Inanimate Objects and Abstract Concepts
• Rule of Linguistic in Learning a New Expertise
• What Could Robots Do at This Moment?
• Earning Money by Answering Mathematics Questions
• Challenge in Learning New Languages