My soonish-to-be-5yo asked to go to Target today. "No." "Mama, let's talk about how we can get to 'yes.'"
In a couple of weeks, I'm starting a "coding bootcamp," which will run for three months, so I'll be somewhere between scarce and entirely absent.
FINE, fine.
"Mama, let's talk about how we can get to 'yes.'"
Awesome.
I mean, what the hell goes on in your home?
I swear I don't read airport businessdude books!
I like that he also likes Target. I think they see it as a toy store where the grownups buy toilet paper.
It's so hard to find good free labor these days.
I initially read this post as indicating that you were going to spend three months teaching your five year old to code.
Three months getting R. Lee Ermey to teach his five-year-old to code.
4: Indeed.
5: I didn't even know they made board books of "The Five Habits" series.
8: Me too.
Three months should get a solid grounding in R. Who's this Ermey person?
I'll teach him to code, then I'll teach him to read.
I didn't give much thought to the fact that "learning to read" is incremental. He can read "cat in the hat" stuff, but nothing that will hold his interest. I feel like we oversold how much fun reading would be.
What language is the bootcamp for?
I both want to talk about the bootcamp, and feel like this might be the prudent response.
I'm currently very happy because five minutes ago I realized that the JSON parser I was working on was extra credit. String manipulation is jahanam.
||Hey, start the New Year off right by voting for my stupid neighborhood over another stupider neighborhood in this online poll.If someone wants to create a bot or other cheating mechanism, that would also be great. The voting is neck and neck, and the prize may be a modest boost to the value of my house, which might also possibly benefit you in some yet-to-be-defined-or-explained-way. My neighbors are desperate, insecure people to whom this meaningless trophy would mean a lot, so help out. Voting closes soon!|>
Also, if we lose to Pacoima I will personally hunt down and murder every single person here. Or not! But take a Pascal's wager on my murdering you and vote. Happy New Year.
12.2: Kai basically never gave a crap about reading until a month or two ago when he was able to read Warriors books. He had a brief fling with Jack & Annie, but that didn't have a successor (honestly, it didn't occur to us that he'd stop reading once he started, but he did).
I guess that's not quite true: he would pore over "true fact" books--dinosaurs, reptiles, what have you--but that's not reading as such. Among other things, I don't think it really advanced his literacy skills, just his skill at sounding knowledgable while bullshitting about some creature.
AB and I (and my sister) squared this circle by teaching ourselves to read at very young ages, but for whatever reason, neither of our kids were remotely early readers. I suspect it's a fatal flaw in their personalities.
Voted on all devices for not Pacoima.
17: I just voted for not Pacoima. Be sure to put me down on the Do Not Murder list. That's AcademicLurker with a capital "L".
"Mama, let's talk about how we can get to 'yes.'"
"What do I have to do to get you into a brand-new Target store today?"
I'm disappointed that Skid Row didn't make it to the finals.
My older kids at a weird stage where he's intensely interested in letters and can recognize some common short words and I think he could probably get to "reading" with some focused effort but (a) he's nearly two years from kindergarten and I don't want him to be deathly bored at school from Day 1 and (b) what's the point exactly? (Also, (c) "some focused effort," ha ha ha, he's three.) So I'm running an uncontrolled experiment in whether literacy will just spontaneously manifest itself if a kid's looking over your shoulder at books a few hours every day.
(b) how much is the kid sitting quietly in the next few years worth to you, in chances of refusing to do anything but read for the rest of his life?
I am definitely not going to teach the kid to code until he comes to me on his knees begging, lest it acquires a spinach-y stench. Maybe I'll expose him to Scratch at some point and see if it takes.
27: Oh my gosh that would be great, compared to stealing toys from his brother and devising intricate languages consisting solely of high-pitched squeals.
why push reading early when doing so inevitably will result in boredom at school??? there's plenty of boredom without creating opportunities for it! leave it to the professionals.
I remember the day the kid got sucked into a chapter book full on for the first time and spent hours on the couch, surfacing in a dazed state. all three of the kids (kid plus 2 step kids) are voracious readers, particularly surprising for the one born profoundly deaf, but I understand once he figured out he could read faster than his parents could read *to* him he basically ripped the books out of their hands. I think it would be substantially more of a pain in the butt to parent an unenthusiastic reader, all those hours of additional active supervision ... when their sucked into a book you can basically assume they'll stay parked.
I voted WA, although why i'll like never know. sounds like a very pleasant neighborhood!
We're in the lead for the first time! Taste the blade, Pacoima!
30: it depends on the school involved, I think, but there will be plenty where a lot of the kids will show up either able to read or mostly-able/pretty-close-to-reading, and while plenty of teachers are patient gentle people there are also a bunch who aren't. (I mean, they're mostly not monsters or anything, but it's still not necessarily fun for kids to be behind on something/find it harder than their peers/etc. when it's something that's also clearly something adults think is very important.)
32: Are you seriously contending that showing up to kindergarten illiterate will piss off the teacher and put the kid at a disadvantage?
30.1 is weird. A kid smart enough to learn to read (mostly) on his own before kindergarten will have a rich panoply of opportunities to be bored in (almost any) school, while a kid who is actually reading on his own at a young age will have the opportunity to, you know, read. Which is the most anti-boring of all indoor activities available before puberty.
Meanwhile, knowing how to read when I got to kindergarten meant that I was put in a reading group in Miss Pizzutti's 1st grade class, which has resulted in a rewarding lifelong crush on my (subsequent) first grade teacher. You can't put a price on that, my friends.
My (extremely untechy) sister in law mentioned wanting to introduce my nieces (6 and 7 1/2) to coding soon this Christmas. I showed her Scratch, but I doubt either of them have the attention span yet. Even the elder gets frustrated pretty quickly if she can't work something out.
Approximately my mental image of Miss Pizzutti since ca. 1979.
My older kid was a sort of competent reader from about age 5, but only got comfortable enough to really sit down and enjoy books on her own and read them obsessively at almost age 8. That felt late to me a an Unfogged-type but it did happen. The school has a required 20 mins per night book reading thing, which I think really helped build it as a habit. It is sure nice to be able to have her just go sit somewhere quietly with a book.
Also, fuck you Pacoima! Iron fist in your face!
A kid smart enough to learn to read (mostly) on his own before kindergarten will have a rich panoply of opportunities to be bored in (almost any) school
Actually! Interestingly, once you're above a relatively low threshold of not being cognitively disabled, learning to read relatively early or late, within a pretty broad range of variation, doesn't seem to correlate with much of anything else, so my colleagues who work on this sort of thing tell me. It's kind of its own thing.
I must say, what may have been the final puzzle piece for Kai's reading seems to be Lucky Listener, a sheet that comes home every other day with a reading on it, and Kai has to read it aloud eight times to however many people will listen. In the first weeks, there were definitely times he'd struggle a bit, with either a tough word or just some unusual language, but now he whips through almost anything.
Plus, it honestly great to teach them that general skill at an age so young they don't even recognize it as a challenge. That is, they find lots of stuff that's simple for adults to be a challenge; they have no idea that this is, roughly, something many adults would feel uncomfortable with.
38: Interesting. I'm certainly open to that idea, now that my obviously genius-level kids have been late to learn.
I still think that it's a silly worry. Either they'll find school challenging/engaging or they won't; fostering false challenges won't help in the least IMO.
Or, to be fair, some kids might benefit, but others won't, same with failing to teach them to count or teaching them to play catch with a lopsided ball that confounds anticipation. If they grow bored with ordinary schooling, figure out a way to add challenge; don't retard their learning to ensure that ordinary schooling is ample challenge.
32: Are you seriously contending that showing up to kindergarten illiterate will piss off the teacher and put the kid at a disadvantage?
Will? No obviously not. Can or could piss off the teacher? Absolutely.* Can or could make them feel left out if they're surrounded by peers that are mostly reading? That sounds like a pretty obvious part of human psychology.
*For weird scheduling/moving reasons I ended up missing a massive chunk of first grade and I can assure you that that describes how learning to read went for me.
all of my comments on this topic should be read from the perspective that i react very poorly to the whole arms race style of child rearing, think it iniquitous etc., so if we disagree on that then completely ignore me! or ignore me anyways, who cares!
but at any rate -- if your kid spontaneously teaches herself to read then perhaps she will be that rare little critter who then goes 0-100 in 2 seconds and will flop herself down on a couch for a long marinate in a chapter book within a few months of cracking the code. the vast overwhelming majority of kids, even if painstakingly handfed super early reading skills, are still going to take another couple of years of cognitive development before they zoom off into independent-reader-for-hours-at-a-time land. as ogged noted. when it arrives it is fabulous, but can't in my opinion be rushed.
it could be that when your kid arrives reading in kgarten there is an idyllic early reading group for her, with love and all - sounds fantastic!, but ... a lot of classrooms are going to have routines and schedules that will require all of the kids to be engaged with the whole group even if some of them already know the material. hard on 5 year olds to handle that gracefully, day in, day out. it was like 4th or 5th grade for me before i had a teacher kind and wise enough to give me permission to go read quietly when i wanted to, so that was several years of uncomfortable boredom to negotiate (and remember so much of what they are learning is social, any distinguishing characteristics can be tough to navigate), and my parents specifically forbid my older siblings from teaching me how to read.
also why would you spend your time with your kid in hard core pedagogy? like i said, there are professionals who do just that as their day job! enjoy the little bastards!
also also i think there is a material risk that pushing early reading (or math or music or etc etc etc) turns the kid off major big time. not worth it!
yours truly,
a probably completely negligent parent
I think it would be substantially more of a pain in the butt to parent an unenthusiastic reader, all those hours of additional active supervision ... when their sucked into a book you can basically assume they'll stay parked.
Thank God for video games!
My wife and I were both bored at school at various times (in her case, starting in kindergarten as a precocious reader), so we're sensitive to the issue.
I'm not seriously talking about hobbling the kid just so he'll fit in at school. I'm mostly talking about not aggressively pursuing reading instruction which he may (or may not!) be ready for. So basically I'm signing on to DQ's philosophy.
43 was me.
I'll add that shortly before I went to kindergarten, my older sister thought it was important that I know the alphabet, and she taught me. At every age, my kids have been hilariously ahead of where I was (my son started reading street signs at something like 3 years of age) and I turned out basically okay, education-wise.
and where the kid pulls, follow. kid pulled very strongly to dance and music from age 3 so we followed. I'm not advocating grim sensory deprivation people!
particularly surprising for the one born profoundly deaf, but I understand once he figured out he could read faster than his parents could read *to* him he basically ripped the books out of their hands.
Just curious - what does this mean?
I'm about to go out for the night, but:
also why would you spend your time with your kid in hard core pedagogy? like i said, there are professionals who do just that as their day job! enjoy the little bastards!
I'm not sure what you define as "hard core pedagogy", but I don't actually enjoy spending time with my kids if I'm not intellectually engaged. Ape-like mud play? Boring! Let me read a book! Digging up plants and asking rational questions? Yes please! My learning, let me show you it! I cannot conceive of refusing to answer kid questions for fear that they might be bored when their class gets to xylem up and phloem down, or how chromosomes work, or what have you.
I also think it's a mug's game to avoid turning the kids off learning. Our kids have heard more about buildings and urban planning than most adults. Maybe it'll stick, maybe they'll refuse to go on a house tour the rest of they lives. Who cares? I'm not parenting defensively.
To be overly earnest, when I give my kids grown up discussions of any topic, I don't care whether it's sticking or whether they're developing a repulsion from intellectualism or whatever. What I care about is that I'm engaging them as people who are capable of talking about the world as an interesting, comprehensible place with people who have passions. I don't care if they share those passions, I don't even care if they come to my weltanschauung. I just want them to have this experience of a world beyond their school's pedagogy, which in some ways is beyond what we give them. More ways of looking at the world is always better. The idea that I'd avoid a subject to avoid some future boredom or turning off is unimaginable. "Sorry, sweetie, you can learn about Athene when your teacher gets around to it. I'd hate to spoil it for you."
34.1.3: surely still behind setting things on fire in the bathtub. Which is another argument for reading, from the grownup point of view, I suppose.
48:
have fun out on the town! I suspect we are in violent disagreement on around 80-90% of day to day parenting decisions and yes of course my kid knows an absurd amount about frcp 50. poor thing but an inoculation against law school cannot begin too early!
all i'm saying is there's a biiiig difference between the sorts of casually imparted knowledge you describe and teaching *most* kids to read at like age 3. excepting everyone's geniuses here of course so proceed proceed as you were.
47: it is tougher to learn to read if you can't hear. but if you rely on lip reading, someone reading a picture book to you can be a frustrating experience - all that looking back and forth etc. luckily with sson he got hooked by stories yay go fiction! so as I am told literally physically removed books from parental mitts and got to it. he's a smart bugger.
it is tougher to learn to read if you can't hear.
So he knew English and could lip read as a small child? That's what I was curious about.
yes, wore extremely powerful hearing aids from around 8 months, never learned sign language.
I suspect we are in violent disagreement on around 80-90% of day to day parenting decisions
I've only been skimming this conversation, so I'm not sure if this was sarcasm, but how would it even be possible to disagree on 90% of day-to-day parenting decisions. I would assume that most of them would be fairly noncontroversial.
"Here! Try putting this piece of dirt in your mouth!"
"No no! You have to turn the bandsaw on before you use it, like this."
although feel very strongly should only eat dirt you find particularly delicious and then only if your manners are comme il faut.
My son is learning French, but I'm not encouraging him.
"Fahrenheit 451" was named because that's the temperature where paper burns, right? And I used parchment paper in a 425 degree oven. Was I 26 degrees from a house fire?
Nah, it just kind of scorches. You can have a whole lot of flames inside an oven before it spreads,
anyway.
As long as you've got the smoke alarms under control. I hate those things.
Well, drying fireworks is a touchy thing already.
Private windows allows a person to vote often for WA. Cookies eaten!
I once set my parents microwave on fire by trying to use it to dry out a couple kilos of dirt for a science project. If you are wondering how long it takes for a couple of kilos of dirt to catch fire in a microwave, the answer is "about 10 minutes."
We're about 300 votes in front of Pacoima. Good. Still, every vote counts and it runs through tomorrow. I'm downshifting the I-Murder-Everyone-On-The-Blog Threat Level from Threat Level Indigo to Threat Level Yellow. Still, murder threat level could shift up to Threat Level Violet (or beyond) overnight so make sure to vote. Happy New Year.
67: Not even the new year yet and I already succeeded in my resolution to do something to make the world a safer place.
I voted. As for parenting, growth mindset!
I'm pretty sure kids keep growing regardless of their parents' mindset.
I'm currently very happy because five minutes ago I realized that the JSON parser I was working on was extra credit.
Unless other bootcamps are using the same pre-course assignments, I've gone through this program and can email you if you have any questions.
Also, what parts of this implementation I understand are pretty sexy:
https://github.com/douglascrockford/JSON-js/blob/master/json_parse_state.js
60: As long as you've got the smoke alarms under control. I hate those things.
Right, proper deployment is to have it hanging open with the batteries sitting on the hall table.
Hey, NI, please do email me at ogged at unfogged.
The linked parser is cute: any parser that has several disgusting regexes* in it gets sexy points, in my opinion. I've never written a JSON parser in javascript, but I wrote one in Java and did without regexes, thereby missing out on acres of fun.
*jwz paraphrased: "You have a problem. You decide you can solve it with regexes. Now you have two problems."
I just use "eval(JSON)" like a real man.
How Stories Deceive ...Maria Konnikova, New Yorker, 12/29/15
hooked by stories yay go fiction
Hooked? Precisely.
Zak didn't just ask people to watch "Ben's Story," as he calls it. He had them watch it together, while his team monitored their neural activity, specifically the levels of certain hormones released from the brain into the blood. For the most part, the people who watched the video released oxytocin, a hormone that has been associated with empathy, bonding, and sensitivity to social cues. Those who released the hormone also reliably donated to charity, even though there was no pressure to do so... Zak and his colleagues sprayed oxytocin into the noses of some subjects. Their donations increased substantially: they gave to fifty-seven per cent more causes, and, when they gave, their donations were more than fifty per cent greater.
where the kid pulls, follow
Following this strategy with a dog wouldn't work, because you'd just end up trying to stop the dog from eating really gross shit. Like for instance other dogs' shit.
Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900 on some story of ETA Hoffman.
Anselmus must also feel that he is bound to love Serpentina twice as much for her trouble and instruction. Her speech is not just a story of the past, it is also an appeal that warns of the dangers posed to the race of salamanders by evil spirits and wise women: consequently it ends with the plea " Stay true! Stay true to me!" Anselmus can only answer by pledging his eternal love.This eternal love is known as hermeneutics. Anselmus is among the marvelous beings who can interpret the uninterpretable and read what has never been written. They came into the world at the beginning of the
nineteenth century.
Kittler talks a lot about the introduction around 1800 of "home readers," books designed for mothers to teach their children to read, taught in a very specific way, alphabetically, and politically consigning women to the role of mothers. Around 1800 is the gendered division of society into "Mothers" and "bureaucracy," very much encoded in language and the system in which language is taught.
Hermeneutics is of course what fiction is all about.
"He walked into the foyer and handed the butler his hat."
It was maybe a 36 inch red white and blue stovepipe hat?
Fiction asks you to create write the hat, based on a personal and socialized interpretation of the surrounding contexts. Hermeneutics.
Love = hermeneutics = fiction. That sounds about right.
Nice work all. We won. You started the year with a glorious victory for the forces of the Popular Democratic Front, and helped drive bastard offspring of that cesspool of villany, Pacoima, to well-deserved tears. To top it off your odds of being murdered by me are now very, very, very low. Indeed, my new year's resolution is to not murder anyone here. As NSYNC sings -- no murdering, this I promise you.
86: Excellent news! I voted for your neighborhood even more enthusiastically since those other poseurs claim to have murals. Bah! Philadelphia sees your paltry murals and we raise them by three thousand.
88: Un-possible!
One of my favorites is the Love Letter series, visible as you take the elevated subway line through West Philadelphia.
The Guardian's Top 10 list.
NPR's Philadelphia Murals 101 story.
Time's photo gallery of murals.
I refuse to believe that you had a reputable job interview in Philadelphia and no one mentioned murals. Those people are infidels, clearly.
Friday I get an offer with numbers. The next Friday, I'm meeting with somebody who wants me to go to a different city. This order is not optimal.
I'm pretty sure the guy I met with is technically an anti-infidel.
Hopefully the numbers will be good! Come over to the right side, Moby.
I just saw Star Wars so that confused me for a minute.
I'm filling out an on-line job application after four beers and using the unfogged comment box as a drafting window because spellcheck works in it and doesn't work in their form.
So 96 is a line from the application? Interesting.
Is a cover letter still to "Dear Ma'ams and Sirs" or just "To Whom It May Concern"?
I went with "Dear Zirs". All the anxiety about getting the dates of previous jobs or figuring out if the phone number you haven't used since 2002 sort of disappear when you do this with a light buzz.
I wasn't drunk enough to put the person who wants to hire me with a pay cut as a reference.
Wrong place. It's the shining jewel of the Gadsden Purchase, as nobody has described it to me.
That's a really hard name to pronounce. 'dsd' isn't a common set of letters.
Tombstone, then? Montreal is better.
Be sure to include the bit about stabbing Harrison Ford on your resume.
The trick is to calm the antelope enough that it will stay in the bucket while you crank it up.
See, if you move there you can become an expert at antelope-calming.
It's also an obsidian source, in case you're running low on darts for your atlatl.
I've actually been looking into consulting/programming from home. But then we'd still need to move because our house isn't big enough for me to have an office upstairs. The woman who lived here before had an office in the basement, but she was raised in Soviet Russia. I don't have that kind of deprivation in my background. I want daylight.
Well la di da, Little Lord Fauntleroy needs light. What's next? Vitamin C?
I guess I could take over the dining room. That has skylights and windows.
Then you could make your family eat in the basement! It's win-win!
It's also an obsidian source, in case you're running low on darts for your atlatl.
There should be an atlatl weapon class in nethack. They've already got a sling, they can just expand it into non-bow projectile launchers generally.
Then they can have spear throwers and whatnot. This is a great idea.
Hitting anything with a sling is goddamned impossible. Three times out of ten my ass, artisanal sling craftsman. And I don't even know where my sling is now anyway.
I was imagining Moby roaming the southern banks of the Gila River, like a bard, but for puns.
Apparently, applying while buzzed works. Or at least doesn't demonstrably not work.
And I don't even know where my sling is now anyway.
I think I see the problem. You're supposed to use the sling to launch rocks or shot or the like. You don't throw the sling itself.
Sounds as if it could lead to cramping if it went on too long, but if the pay's good I suppose it's worth it.
So you've got three balls in the air, if I'm counting right? Complicated.
Three in the air, two in the pouch.
