Teaching Subversion

This morning I was over at our grade school recruiting altar servers. When I went into the 6th grade, they were studying light. So I had to ask the kids: "Spiritual light or physical light?"

"Physical light," responded their teacher. So I went on to ask them,

"Is light a wave or a particle?" A lot of umms and half-raised hands followed. So I continued,

"Maybe light is a partic-ular kind of wave. How about that?"

Then there were a lot of "whoas" and cries of "that's neat!"

But then I had to say, "Children, many times in life people will try to tell you things, and a lot of things they say will sound neat and clever. But like what I just said to you, these things often don't have any meaning. The truth is that I'm good at playing with words but I don't know the first thing about the wave-particle duality. So, be suspicious. Now, who wants to be an altar server?"