“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”

- Mark Twain

This week I have definitely been enlightened as to what the state of today's youth is. In a word: different.

Tell me, what do the following have in common? Space, Girl Scout, Boy Scout, fantasy, basketball, football, Bible, band and art?

Give up?

Well, before I give out the answer, let me tell you how I came to group these words together in the first place.

It all started when I was packing the car with my tent and sleeping bag and my next door neighbor's son, Jake, came walking over to ask me what I was doing. I told him I was going to spend the next couple of days on Cayuga Lake camping. I must have struck a cord with him because his eyes lit up and he told me that he, too, was going to a camp.

I told him he was going to have a lot of fun and then went into this little talk about how much I always enjoyed going to Camp Rotary when I was younger. Sleeping in tents, canoeing, pulling pranks and building fires. It was a memory I hadn't visited in a while and I was looking even more forward to my trip into the woods.

I explained that, to me, getting away and having nothing but the stereo of nature to listen to is sort of cathartic.

I looked down and realized I must have lost him somewhere between merit badges and mess kits because he had this expression that every 11-year-old gives to an adult when he has no clue what the heck they are talking about.

Jake then flipped the script on me when he explained that his biggest thrill about camp was getting a new calculator.

Huh. It was now my turn to have that adolescent blank stare when he revealed that he was going to (I can hardly write the words) Math Camp.

Oh sure, there's nothing that makes me think of warm summer days more than getting out in the sun and practicing some long division. Little Jake wouldn't be going to the black hills. No, he's headed toward the blackboard.

I had always assumed that summer meant eating pie, but to Jake it meant trying to figure out the square root of it. Even after he explained it I still didn't understand, but I didn't want to burst his excitement, so I just told him that I was jealous. Inside, though, I was clueless.

Things have definitely changed since I was a kid. Back then, vacations were all about having fun. We weren't looking for anything educational to take up our time as that would go against the whole principle of “vacation.”

I think that it's a good sign that kids are excited about learning during the off- season. The only thing I wonder is, if Jake has to figure out the angles before giving a fellow camper a wedgie?

Auburn native Bradley Molloy's column appears here, each Sunday, in The Citizen. He can be reached at lovonian@hotmail.com