Not long ago, my fifth-grade son Kevin asked me about the meaning of a word in a novel. “Look it up,” I responded. “But my screen time is off,” he said. I looked pointedly at the bookshelf that held at least three dictionaries, and Kevin sighed (叹气) dramatically. “Can’t you just use your phone?” he asked. Suddenly it occurred to me that he did not even know how to use a dictionary.

I took down one of the dictionaries, and we read it together for a few minutes before I handed it to him. It took him a few tries to find the word in question. While going through the pages, he kept saying, wide-eyed: “How can there be this many words?” After a while, he looked at me and asked, “Do you know all these words, Mom?” I smiled. “I definitely do not know all these words,” I said. “But that’s why this is one of my favorite books.”

I had my first dictionary as a gift for my 13th birthday. I decided that I wanted to learn as many words as I could and started marking every entry I looked up with a pencil to measure my progress. I continued to make these pencil marks for years, and when I went off to college, I packed that dictionary in my suitcase.

Kevin wanted to see the dictionary. I felt a small pain in my chest. The dictionary was stolen at the end of my freshman year of college. “That’s so sad,” he said, “but you still know all those words, even without the book.” I realized that this was true. I still made it through the next three years of college, even without the book. And it wasn’t, ultimately, the dictionary that got me there — not really.

Now I understand that although my son may be learning differently, he is still learning. It’s not about the words themselves or how we learn them, but the wanting to know them, the curiosity and the appetite.