Deuteronomy 6: 1-9 (links validated 9/24/24a)

I remember a time when, after a seemingly endless, but successful educational career, I announced to my family that I no longer needed to go to school since I already knew the entire sum of human knowledge. After all, I had completed first grade. I knew how to read, how to count and how to do math, how to write and on and on. So I thought that it obviously was all downhill from there. For some unknown reason, my sisters — from their lofty perches of ninth and eleventh grades — seemed to think that perhaps I was a little less fully informed than I imagined. In fact, for some reason they appeared to find my announcement to be highly amusing, which just showed how little they knew. No wonder they had to keep going to school! Oh sure, they began to pepper me with words and ideas I’d never heard of before, but I knew that they were quite willing to make stuff like that up, so I wasn’t fooled. By them. At that time. Although surprisingly, it eventually turned out that they were actually right, and there really is little bit more to learn than what you can get in first grade. Who’d have guessed?...

("A few years ago, a radio station ran a contest. Disc jockeys invited their listeners to tune in their clock radios. 'Just for fun,' they said, 'when you wake up to the sound of FM-106, call and tell us the first words you spoke when you rolled out of bed. If you're the third caller, you'll win $106.'...")