Family Life
In 1948, Karplus married Elizabeth Frazier, whom he had met at an international folk dance group he organized while at Harvard. They had seven children born between 1950 and 1962. When the oldest child, Beverly, was 7, Karplus accepted her invitation to present a science lesson on electricity to her third-grade class, using the Wimshurst machine he had inherited from his grandfather. Unfortunately, while the children enjoyed the demonstration, the lesson was a conceptual disaster. This stimulated Karplus to think about how to teach science better, and as the other children entered school, he continued to visit their classes on a "show and tell" basis with various science experiments or demonstrations. Conversing with his children and their classmates, he became increasingly interested in children's learning, reasoning, and science concept development.
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Famous quotes related to family life:
“The touchstone for family life is still the legendary ‘and so they were married and lived happily ever after.’ It is no wonder that any family falls short of this ideal.”
—Salvador Minuchin (20th century)
“Being so wrong about her makes me wonder now how often I am utterly wrong about myself. And how wrong she might have been about her mother, how wrong he might have been about his father, how much of family life is a vast web of misunderstandings, a tinted and touched-up family portrait, an accurate representation of fact that leaves out only the essential truth.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)