Watercolor illustration: A signpost between two landscapes playfully evokes a geography pun.

A small geography mishap that gave us a good laugh at home.

I’m helping my daughter revise geography. She wants a quiz, so off we go. “The capital of India?” I ask. “New parts,” she answers without hesitation.

The joke works in Czech: Nové Dillí, the Czech name for New Delhi, sounds rather like nové díly, meaning “new parts”. I look at her. She looks at me. The silence stretches. Then I burst out laughing.

I’m not sure whether to blame the pandemic-era home study or a memory aid that had escaped supervision. We corrected the pronunciation and carried on.

No grand educational experiment. Just an ordinary moment at home, a mistake and a shared laugh. Learning can look like that too. Thankfully.

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