"We've got TATERS!!"
The celebratory shout came from the direction of the dining room. My 11-year-old son had just peered into a 5-gallon bucket beside our dining room window - a container he is using to grow spuds.
I had told him several days earlier that at the first sign of green shoots he was to yell out the news at the top of his lungs.
While giving him a congratulatory hug, I muttered famous words of Scarlet O'Hara in "Gone With the Wind."
"As God is my witness, Son, we will never go hungry again!"
"I wouldn't go that far," he said flatly, perhaps wondering how a couple of sprouts in a bucket were going to displace his daily diet of toaster pastries and frozen pizzas.
"Look," he said.
He took his index finger and gently moved aside some dirt to expose a tiny coil of green emerging from one of his seed potatoes. It was the first sign of life from the bucket, and he was so happy.
For days, he had been watering the dirt with a recycled Windex bottle filled with water. I took him to Walmart to buy a grow light because he was convinced his plants needed uninterrupted light 24/7.
He also wrapped a length of cardboard in aluminum foil to fashion a reflective collar around the bucket to channel more sunlight onto the dirt. It looked like something George Hamilton would use to tan his face.
If this all sounds obsessive, it's just our younger son's nature.
When our 11-year-old undertakes a project, he is all in. I noticed him watching YouTube videos about how to grow plants in a bucket. He has also exchanged emails with farm dwellers in our family to make sure he is doing things right.
One day, when I told him he hadn't watered his "taters" in 24-hours, panic flashed across his face and he literally ran to get his Windex bottle.
As a dad, I like what I see here. I think it bodes well for him.
If I could wish one thing for my kids to ensure their success, it would be to become competent project managers. Project management requires problem-solving skill, which, at its base, is just having the passion to learn something from scratch and the willpower to see it through. It's also what 99 percent of America's middle managers do for a living.
I want my sons to embrace the "trial and error" method. I also want them to be willing to phone a friend if things go off course. They already seem to have internalized that the internet is the biggest aid to human efficiency ever invented.
Our older son, 16, has spent much of the past six months sequestered in his upstairs bedroom trying to construct a fancy air rifle from spare parts. As strange as it sounds, this was his big self-selected personal project at school, and it worked for him because he was passionate about doing it.
Some weekends he would disappear for hours, ordering and assembling parts like a mad scientist. It reminded me of the way people used to hand-make desktop computers from component parts back in the 1980s.
The building process was part mechanical and part intellectual. He watched tons of DIY videos and even reached out to local air-gun experts for help. The build included a lot of self-teaching in electronics. Somehow he learned how to plug components of his gun into his laptop computer to measure their performance.
That he never got the gun to work 100 percent was immaterial. The project was all about learning and growing and not giving in.
When he presented photos of his project on PowerPoint at school during "showcase," it attracted the attention of a science teacher, who walked over to express interest and learn more.
Technology has made rote learning obsolete. The human mind is no longer just a vessel for information; it's actually more of a muscle to do the heavy lifting of modern project management.
Kids who learn how to learn, like our sons, own the keys to the kingdom in the 21st century.
Either that, or they will make excellent doomsday preppers.
Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfree press.com or 423-757-6645.