How fun?
Check out the following videos. We’re going to eBay to load up on track today.
YouTube: Lieshout Duplo train track (part 2), the helix
YouTube: Just another Sunday afternoon
YouTube: Daniel’s Duplo Trains
YouTube: The duplosmasher – for you metal fans out there.
YouTube: The Information Train – for you CompSci fans out there.
Emma and me played around with Scratch the other day. It really does live up to its billing as a Lego-like environment to write programs in (especially where simple animations are concerned).
You might think that introducing a 3 year old to programming is a bit overboard – but this is just another set of Lego bricks.
Which is perfect.
Related links:
Psychology Today: The Art of Now: Six Steps to Living in the Moment
ScientificAmerican: The Serious Need for Play
defmacro: Taming Perfectionism
NYTimes Book Review: Reality Intrudes on an Undercover Mental Patient
Cognitive Daily: Would we still obey? The first replication of Milgram’s work in over 30 years
The Frontal Cortex :Kandel on Psychotherapy
NewScientist: Our world may be a giant hologram
Wired: Clive Thompson on How More Info Leads to Less Knowledge
And a little Flash to boot 🙂
Flash sounds like a perfect tool to teach programming. Others I’ve been reading about:
Scratch (scratch is built on Squeak Smalltalk – there are other educational environments/tools built with it as well)
My roots: LOGO and Commodore BASIC.
Interesting related article at O’Reilly: Why Johnny Can’t Program.
These three articles explain a lot about folks who refuse to hear any feedback/advice/criticism given in good will.
It’s true it turns out – they are, most likely, dealing with a self esteem issue. But not the kind you think. In fact, they just may be looking down on you.
ScienceDaily: High Self-esteem Is Not Always What It’s Cracked Up To Be:
…Increasingly, psychologists are looking at such behavior and saying out loud what may go against the grain of how many people act: high self-esteem is not the same thing as healthy self-esteem. And new research by a psychology professor from the University of Georgia is adding another twist: those with “secure” high self-esteem are less likely to be verbally defensive than those who have “fragile” high self-esteem.
“There are many kinds of high self-esteem, and in this study we found that for those in which it is fragile and shallow it’s no better than having low self-esteem,” said Michael Kernis of University of Georgia. “People with fragile high self-esteem compensate for their self-doubts by engaging in exaggerated tendencies to defend, protect and enhance their feelings of self-worth.”
ScienceDaily: Studies Find Narcissists Most Aggressive When Criticized:
…researchers assert that people with high self-esteem are a heterogeneous group that may be more different than alike since high self-esteem can be an accurate appreciation of one’s good traits, or it may be a highly doubtful sense of personal superiority that is not reality-based. While some individuals with high self-esteem are largely unaffected by feedback, others may require frequent confirmation and validation of their favorable self-image by others. Thus the psychologists assert that differences in the validity of individuals’ self-esteem undermines its usefulness as a predictor of aggression.
The authors suggest that aggression by narcissists is an interpersonally meaningful and specific response to an ego threat. “Narcissists mainly want to punish or defeat someone who has threatened their highly favorable views of themselves,” the authors note. “People who are preoccupied with validating a grandiose self-image apparently find criticism highly upsetting and lash out against the source of it.”
New York Magazine: How Not to Talk to Your Kids:
Why does this child, who is measurably at the very top of the charts, lack confidence about his ability to tackle routine school challenges?
…For a few decades, it’s been noted that a large percentage of all gifted students (those who score in the top 10 percent on aptitude tests) severely underestimate their own abilities. Those afflicted with this lack of perceived competence adopt lower standards for success and expect less of themselves. They underrate the importance of effort, and they overrate how much help they need from a parent.
How we introduce our children to the culture that made us – us – is a complicated thing. It’s far harder then I thought it would be.
The Baby Boomers didn’t seem to fret that their culture, which glorified counter-culture, was the mainstream, while Gen-Xers were growing up. Reduced to a series of insidious marketing messages that taught us to spend our youthful energies consuming goods that made us look rebellious, and feel rebellious.
They hypocritically fretted over the lyrical content of Prince, W.A.S.P., and Metallica, when The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, and Led Zeppelin, laid it all down twenty years before. And it was broadcasted to Gen-X wherever we went.
It’s always do as I say, not as I do. Isn’t it?
We live in the age of niche media now. Broadcast doesn’t have that kind of access to our children it once had. Chances are my neighbors kids listen to different music then the neighbors next to them.
So we have decisions to make.
Right now it’s what is appropriate music for a baby?
Tonight I plan to learn the guitar to “This Little Light of Mine” and sing it for Emma. Inspired by last night’s re-broadcast of “When the Levees Broke”. Just an unbeliebable song on so many levels. I remember singing it in elementary school choir.
She loves The Ramones. “I Wanna Be Sedated” gets her feet moving and her face lights up as she laughs. And she likes Bon Jovi. Especially “It’s My Life”. You start singing the pre-chorus and you can see the look in her face waiting for the hook to kicks in. She loves the Annie soundtrack, especially “Dumb Dog”, and The Sound of Music soundtrack, especially “Do-Re-Mi”. The bigger the score, the louder the chorus, the better.
Who am I to argue with a smile and a laugh like hers?
🙂
Anyway, via dangerousmeta comes the following Washingtonpost.com story that kicked off this train of thought: “The Cradle Will Rock, to Metallica”:
Behold the dulcet tones of Metallica, my sweet little cherub-rockers!
Out are the roaring guitars, pummeling drums and howling lyrics such as “pounding out aggression / turns into obsession / cannot kill the battery / cannot kill the family.” In: glockenspiel, Mellotron, vibraphone and chimes.
If you listen closely enough, you might even hear the people behind the “Rockabye Baby” series laughing. They’re totally in on the joke, which they plan on repeating often: Albums of lullabyzed Radiohead and Coldplay songs are also out today — never mind that some of Coldplay’s originals are already soporific. And many more will follow — from Tool and Pink Floyd, both due next month, to Nirvana, the Pixies, Smashing Pumpkins and Queens of the Stone Age.
“I’m laughing the whole time; it’s all tongue-in-cheek,” says Michael Armstrong, who is producing and performing the albums — a process that involves extracting the lyrics and musical teeth from the songs.
It’s not a joke really. Is it? And no – I’m not buying this crap.
I wish I could offer my father some kind of tribute today. Let him know of the great job he did and how much I respect him. But I can’t. I didn’t have one. The guy took off as soon as my mom told him she was pregnant.
This is my first father’s day.
In days past I have offered well wishes to the father of my wife, Richelle, and to my little brother, who in many ways, is someone I look up to, a great dad of two bright, amazing boys.
I hope I follow the examples they’ve set for me.
And to shout out at those who have run from their responsibilities – your children need you.
Senators Evan Bayh and Barack Obama have a piece in the Inquirer on legislation they are proposing that will help those trying to do the right thing and punish those that don’t:
Today, too many men seem to think that fatherhood ends at conception. These men, so many of them still so young, leave mothers to bear the brunt of being both mom and dad, forcing them to face the challenges of raising a child and providing for the family on their own.
These women often perform this role heroically, but the statistics tell us what so many of them already know – that children are better off when their father is also involved.
Children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime. They are nine times more likely to drop out of school, five times more likely to commit suicide, and 20 times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioral problems, to run away from home, and to become teenage parents themselves.
So the question is: What do we do as a nation to solve this problem? How do we make sure that these boys start acting like men?
First, we will need a change in attitude. We will need to realize that government can’t legislate responsibility – that change can’t come just from Washington. As fathers, we need to teach our boys that having a child doesn’t make you a man – that what makes you a man is having the courage to raise a child.
But what government can do is to make it easier for those who make that courageous choice – and to make it harder for those who avoid it. The legislation we are introducing, called “The Responsible Fatherhood and Healthy Families Act,” will provide support for fathers who are trying to do the right thing in making child-support payments by providing them with job training and job opportunities and expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit. It also stops penalizing marriage in the tax code, and makes sure that children and mothers, not the government, receive every penny of child support.
At the same time, it cracks down on men who are ignoring their parental responsibilities by increasing child-support enforcement to $4.9 billion over 10 years, a measure that will collect nearly $20 billion in payments that can help raise, nurture and educate children.