Gallaudet National Essay Contest
Second Place		Grandpa and His Basement of Knowledge By Jeffrey Y. Mansfield The Learning Center for Deaf Children Framingham, Massachusetts

	Jeffrey Y. Mansfield

It was in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that I discovered my desire and motivation to learn. The person who taught me this was my grandfather. The place was his basement.

My grandfather gave me lessons on everything —arts, sciences, geography, politics, history. His teachings have immersed me in knowledge and stimulated me to be as discerning as he was. The moments I had with my grandfather have been the turning points of my life.

My grandfather’s office was in the basement of his home, where a 1995 IBM PC rested beside a Xerox machine, high-tech gadgets, lamps, file drawers, and a CD player. Everything was adorned with Post-it notes with all kinds of directions on them. On the mouse, one of the yellow squares proclaimed, “Move this to the program which you desire, then click twice.” My grandfather wrote the directions in handwriting that was only a degree better than the scribbles of a preschool student. His tendency to write directions on just about everything can be attributed partly to his colossal knowledge and partly to his arrogance. He considered himself twenty times smarter than the next most intelligent person he knew, and didn’t believe others knew how to use a computer.

My first foray onto the Internet with his computer was a virtual tour of the Louvre, a museum in Paris. The first thing he showed me was the famous glass pyramid entrance to the museum. He gave me a 15-minute lecture on the pyramid alone—how it was constructed, why it was constructed, and why it is important. He explained that it was an engineering marvel when it was constructed and led to a revolution of art. The designer was Ieoh Ming Pei, a Chinese man, about whom my grandfather delivered a 10-minute biography as part of his 25-minute lecture. I watched befuddled.

I was eight years old.

Afterward, my grandfather took me to the first floor of the real Louvre. Around us were the works of Van Gogh, Monet, and Da Vinci. My grandfather, proud of his knowledge, got right to elucidating on Da Vinci’s remarkable technique in the celebrated painting, the Mona Lisa. As a result the eyes follow you, he said, and also make the passionate mouth smile and frown as you view the painting from different angles. My grandfather continued to give me his personal perspective on another ten paintings or so. I sat there as his words flew by me, nodding and smiling as he talked.

I was still eight years old.

The next summer, I went again to my grandparents’ house and my grandfather arranged a project for the two of us. We would make a model of an electric dynamo —a generator that would produce electricity. We spent the first day working endlessly. Much to our dismay, no matter how precisely we followed the directions, the dynamo still did not work. Long after I went off to bed, my grandfather continued to sit in the solitude of his office and look for the flaw in our model.

	Jeffrey Y. Mansfield and his treasured grandparents.

He found it, too, he announced joyously the next morning at breakfast. He took me to the basement and showed how we had connected the four wires incorrectly. He rearranged them correctly, but the dynamo still did not work. He became even more frustrated. Then he noticed that the wires were made of tin. I thought there was nothing wrong with using tin. “Tin is not as good a conductor of electricity as is copper,” he said. Then he went out to a local hardware store and returned quickly with copper wires. We spent another half-hour working. Finally the dynamo began to spur and spin slowly.

My grandfather was overcome with joy. Once again, his determination and persistence paid off. I was glad that this long and exhaustive project was over. At least I thought it was over. Just as I started to relax, my grandfather came back downstairs with a World Book Encyclopedia cradled like a baby in his right arm. Right then, I knew our project was not quite over. We looked up dynamo in his encyclopedia. We learned about Michael Faraday, the inventor of the 17th century who built the first dynamo, but grandfather was not nearly satisfied. He took me over to his computer, put an Encarta CD into the CD-ROM drive, and we looked up the dynamo there as well. We found out about the arduous process that inventor Faraday had to endure in creating the first dynamo. Finally my grandfather printed out the encyclopedia entry and gave it to me. It was “for future reference,” he said.

Three summers later, when I next visited my grandparents’ home, my grandfather didn’t have any experiments arranged. At first, this disappointed me, but in other ways, I was glad because some of his experiments can be exceedingly boring. It was the next to the last day of my stay when my grandfather took me by surprise. He handed me twenty pages of text about the steam engine and the man who invented it, Robert Fulton. He gave me a 30-minute lecture on Fulton and the foundations of the steam engine.

Then he brought up an old model of the steam engine, which had not been used for ten years, and said, “It would be fun to see if we could get this thing going again.”

And we went right to work.

As we spent time together, as he led me into discussions, quizzes, and especially scientific experiments, I realized that my grandfather ignited my own motivation to attain more knowledge of the vast world in which I reside. Now our discussions have broadened to include the origin and use of the English language, natural history, political history, American history, literature, and the various branches of science, especially engineering, geology, archeology, and geography.

Nothing can compare to what I have learned from him.

I am extremely fortunate to have such a wonderful, intelligent, loving, and caring man for my grandfather.