Parenting & Family Quote by Robert T. Bakker

Name-dropping Yale is the point, but it’s also the misdirection. In one flat, almost throwaway sentence, Robert T. Bakker compresses an entire origin story: elite training, institutional legitimacy, and a deliberate choice to translate that legitimacy into public wonder. The syntax is casual ("Also", "while I was"), as if teaching kids at a museum is a side quest. That understatement is doing work. Scientists often talk in the language of grants and papers; Bakker signals a different self-concept: the kind of researcher who treats the public not as an audience but as part of the ecosystem that makes science matter.

The subtext is about access. Yale represents a gated corridor of expertise; the museum classroom is the open door. "Kids" is the quiet pivot word: not undergrads, not colleagues, not donors. Children are the hardest and most honest crowd. They force clarity, they reward narrative, and they turn abstract authority into something testable. Bakker, famous for making dinosaurs feel alive and urgent, is essentially describing practice in persuasion - learning how to make deep time feel personal, how to make bones become stories.

Context matters here because museums sit between academia and culture. They’re where scientific knowledge gets converted into public memory, where a field like paleontology becomes identity-forming (the kid who decides dinosaurs aren’t just cool, they’re a calling). Bakker’s line reads like biography, but it’s also a credo: if your science can’t survive a room full of curious children, maybe it isn’t finished yet.