In Three Weeks the Biography Report Comes Home. We've Started Picking Nobodies.

Swim season winds down in a couple of weeks and school starts, and somewhere in the first month the biography report will arrive. It always does. Pick a person, read about them, write a page, stand up in front of everyone and say who they were.

The first year, my son picked Einstein. So did four other children in his class.

The famous names are the hard ones

This took me a while to understand, because it seems backwards. Surely the well-known person is easier? There’s more written about them.

That’s exactly the problem. Everything about Einstein has been said, in the same words, on every website a twelve-year-old will find in the first three results. He read four pages and they were all the same four facts. His report came out fine and completely flat, and he wasn’t interested in it for a single minute.

The other thing nobody warns you about: three other children stand up and say the same sentences. By the fourth Einstein, the class has stopped listening. So has the teacher.

So now we go looking for someone nobody has heard of

The rule in our house is loose but it works: pick someone whose story you can tell in one sentence that makes a person say wait, what?

A few that have done well here.

Yuri Kondratyuk was a self-taught engineer who worked out, back in the 1920s, the route a spacecraft would need to take to reach the Moon and come home. He never had a laboratory. He wrote it up and it sat mostly unnoticed for decades, and the approach it described is essentially the one Apollo used to get there. He wasn’t even using his real name at the time, which is a whole second story.

Gregor Mendel spent years crossing pea plants in a monastery garden, counting them, writing down numbers. He published. Almost nobody paid attention, and he died with his work ignored. Thirty-five years later other scientists rediscovered it and realised he’d worked out how inheritance functions.

Waldemar Haffkine developed a vaccine against cholera in the 1890s and tested it on himself before he’d give it to anyone else.

Each of those is a sentence you can say out loud and watch a room turn around.

What actually changed

The reports got better, but honestly that isn’t the part I noticed.

What I noticed is that he started reading past the point where he had enough for the assignment. Because when nobody else has the story, the only way to find out what happens is to keep going, and at some point he stopped doing homework and started being curious. He told me about Kondratyuk at dinner for about three days.

That may not happen for your child, and I’d be lying if I said it was a method. It’s just what worked here, twice.

If you want somewhere to start looking, our books are collections of short lives written for exactly this age, and about half the people in them are ones most classrooms have never covered. All three are here, for ages 8 to 12.

And if your child comes home set on Einstein anyway, that’s fine too. He’s genuinely interesting. He’s just going to have to work harder for it than the kid who picked the monk with the peas.