For a while, my husband and I were worried that our son wasn’t talking.

He was almost two years old, and his vocabulary was remarkably efficient.

He could say “snake.”

And he could say “What’s that?”

That was pretty much it.

Fortunately, “What’s that?” turns out to be an incredibly versatile phrase.

We’d go for a walk.

“What’s that?”

I’d be making dinner.

“What’s that?”

He’d sit on my lap and point to something on my shirt.

“What’s that?”

Sometimes he’d ask so quickly that we didn’t even have time to answer before his finger had moved on to something else.

“What’s that? What’s that? What’s that?”

All day long.

The strange part was that he seemed to understand quite a lot. We could talk to him. We could ask him to do things. He clearly understood what was happening around him.

He just wasn’t saying much back.

Even more confusing, he would sometimes point to something we were absolutely certain he already knew and ask:

“What’s that?”

So there we were with a two-year-old who seemed to know exactly two useful things:

Snakes exist, and the rest of the world requires further investigation.

As funny as it is to me now, at the time I was worried.

Was he learning all of these words? Did he know more than he could tell us? Why wasn’t he talking?

Then one Christmas, we were at my cousin’s house.

My son was sitting on my lap doing what he always did, pointing at the letters on my shirt and asking his favorite question.

“What’s that?”

My aunt was watching him.

She is a retired teacher, and she knew I was concerned about his language. After observing him for a while, she suggested something simple.

Turn it back on him.

Instead of answering his questions, she suggested I start asking some of my own.

So I did.

“Where’s the A?”

He pointed to it.

Okay.

“Where’s the M?”

There it was.

So I tried another.

And another.

And another.

Wouldn’t you know it?

He knew the letters.

All of them.

I was stunned.

My child who wasn’t talking had apparently been quietly collecting information the entire time.

Nothing about him had changed in those few minutes.

My perspective had.

I had been so focused on what he wasn’t showing me that I almost missed everything he was.

Sometimes changing what we see begins with changing how we look.

And sometimes, learning doesn’t announce itself.

I think about that Christmas often as a teacher.

We like visible evidence of learning.

I certainly do.

Tell me the answer.

Show me your work.

Explain your reasoning.

Create something.

Demonstrate what you know.

And those things matter. We need ways to understand what children know and what they still need.

But that little boy sitting on my lap reminds me that there can be an enormous amount happening inside a mind before we’re able to see it.

He had been noticing, sorting, connecting, and remembering.

And apparently learning letters while he was at it.

I had been waiting for the learning to come out in the form I expected.

Words.

Instead, my aunt gave me another way to look.

That’s stayed with me.

How often do we mistake not showing us for not knowing?

How often do we assume nothing is happening because we can’t see the evidence we’re looking for?

And how often might a child be telling us something about their thinking in a form we haven’t learned to recognize yet?

My son’s “What’s that?” fascinates me even more when I think about it now because I’m not convinced he was always asking for an answer.

Sometimes he already knew the answer.

Sometimes he didn’t even wait long enough to hear one.

Maybe he was collecting words.

Maybe he was confirming what he knew.

Maybe he was experimenting with language.

Maybe he had simply discovered a remarkably effective way to keep every adult around him engaged in a nonstop conversation.

I don’t know.

And I love that I don’t know.

What I do know is that he was paying attention.

There was an entire world around him, and he was taking it in as quickly as he could point.

Then, eventually, something remarkable happened.

He started talking.

Not gradually in the way I had expected.

It was more like someone flipped a switch.

Suddenly, there were sentences.

Full sentences.

All of those words we’d wondered whether he was collecting seemed to have been in there after all.

He had been learning long before he was ready to show us.

I’ve spent a lot of my career thinking about how to create curious learners.

The older I get, the more I wonder if that’s the wrong goal.

Children arrive curious.

They point.

They touch.

They take things apart.

They collect things adults would absolutely classify as garbage.

They ask questions we know the answers to.

They ask questions we don’t know the answers to.

They ask questions they apparently already know the answers to.

And sometimes they ask the next question before we’ve even finished answering the first one.

Maybe our job isn’t to create curiosity.

Maybe it’s to recognize it.

To make room for it.

To take it seriously.

And to resist assuming that because we can’t see learning yet, it isn’t happening.

Because “What’s that?” eventually becomes “Why?”

Then “What if?”

Then “How do we know?”

And perhaps one day:

“What would happen if…?”

That’s the life of the mind beginning to unfold.

It doesn’t begin with knowing.

It begins with paying attention.

My son is long past the “What’s that?” phase now, but I still think about that little boy sitting on my lap at Christmas.

And I think about my aunt, who looked at the same child I was looking at and saw something I couldn’t see yet.

She didn’t change him.

She changed the question.

And that changed what I was able to see.

I try to remember that when I look at my students, too.

Because sometimes changing what we see begins with changing how we look.

What might we discover about a child if we change the question we ask?