10 ms·

My daughter has this as an school assignment, with some implication that it is some sort of a contest, and we managed to grow quite a few of similar quality to

My daughter has this as an school assignment, with some implication that it is some sort of a contest, and we managed to grow quite a few of similar quality to the seed crystals on the site in 4 days, which was the original (poorly thought IMO) deadline. The trouble is that no one else was able or cared to do it so fast, so the deadline has been slipping for a couple weeks now, with our best crystals going to school and back a few times, getting scratches and broken bits instead of nicely growing undisturbed. A bit discouraging. I'm now remembering how frustrating was for me to take school related things too seriously and discover you cared more than your teachers when I was her age.

samstave 5y ago
>>A bit discouraging. I'm now remembering how frustrating was I am picturing you over a mortar and pestle crushing the salt of your enemies whilst a single tear falls into the mix - and en-vigorating (filling with life) - the salt of your defeated enemies..
dekhn 5y ago
We managed? When I was a kid I never got help from my parents on these projects, and hated the kids who "won" because their parent helped. On the other hand, being the competitive person who excels in science projects is often a very good predictor for being able to handle the tedium of a scientific lab job.
- fcatalan 5y ago
  When I was a kid I never got help from my parents either and I now think that I would have benefited from a bit of closer attention. I developed a huge spectrum of bad practices and behaviours that I'm inclined to think I could have avoided at least in part. I want to think there's some space between doing their homework for them and not caring about the minutiae of their education, and I want to be there.
  - koolba 5y ago
    > I want to think there's some space between doing their homework for them and not caring about the minutiae of their education, and I want to be there. Even showing a lack of interest in their pointless projects is a life lesson in priorities and individualism.
    - fcatalan 5y ago
      But the project isn't pointless! For example, most of my help was to make sure she took 10 different containers and placed them in different locations around the house to increase the probability of getting a few decent crystals. I discussed redundance with her in the context of explaining why some of her friends were not getting results from their single try. I think that these practical thought patterns are extremely valuable, better than creating a miniature jaded adult...
      - cornell532 5y ago
        You sound like a great parent doing right by your daughter. She's lucky to have you. The point of school is to learn to think + learn to face adversity & failure....
      - wilkommen 5y ago
        You're doing good. Just cause someone else's childhood sucked and they feel like they learned something from it doesn't mean it's a good thing. You learn a lot more about how to live well from being loved than you learn from being ignored and neglected.
        boringg 5y ago
        Well said.
      - watwut 5y ago
        I mean, I sometimes help my kids in very similar way. But, I find it very wrong to judge kids who were truly independent or make such projects into competition between the kids. Because the real competition is here in fact in between adults. Parent knowing that "different locations around the house to increase the probability of getting a few decent crystals" is what makes the difference. Parent who makes sure the kid takes 10 containers is what makes difference. As you said, it is not within average kid going by school education to figure it out. > The trouble is that no one else was able or cared to do it so fast, so the deadline has been slipping for a couple weeks now, with our best crystals going to school and back a few times, getting scratches and broken bits instead of nicely growing undisturbed. A bit discouraging. The thing is, the "no one cared" is very unlikely. Those other kids did cared. But they were doing the project as kids do - loosing attention or doing it ineffectively. Forgetting and trying re-over. Having it at bad place and thus having it grow slowly etc. And all that is part of actual doing-projects learning. It is not bad pedagogy to have kids deal with these issues and have them slowly to figure it out. It is bad to then expect the similar result as your daughters had, when the most important decision making was done by you. Or judge those kids as "dont cared". And this is an actual issue - a kid doing the project the way that is age appropriate and in fact independent ends up labeled as not caring kid. And I think there is value in kids figuring stuff out truly independently.
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  I was enamored with "Things of Science" when I was a kid. So much so I began collecting them off eBay, scanning the little science booklet and sharing them for posterity. As such I love DIY science like this. Regarding crystals, I have scanned in and cleaned up two projects relating to crystals: http://underlandia.com/index.php/2017/09/24/things-of-science-338-crystal-growth/ http://underlandia.com/index.php/2017/09/24/things-of-scienc... http://underlandia.com/index.php/2020/08/21/things-of-science-1973-crystal-growth/ http://underlandia.com/index.php/2020/08/21/things-of-scienc...
  - zt9 5y ago
    @JKCalhoun just got this account to say thank you for this - I am home schooling with my kids this year and this is a gem of a find.
    - JKCalhoun 5y ago
      You should be able to find many of the "things" in many of these kits. They were very well written, researched. Each "experiment" is a simple step along the way to understanding a concept (such as crystals).
  - germinalphrase 5y ago
    Thank you for sharing Things of Science!
  - klik99 5y ago
    Wow, another thank you for scanning and uploading these, looking forward to trying some out with my kids! I bet there would be a strong demand for a modern "Things of Science" - youtube is great and all but having a kit put together is a boon for parents
  - pvitz 5y ago
    Also from me thanks a lot for all your scans! They are wonderfully written and the experiments are a lot of fun!
- detritus 5y ago
  My daughter's only 2 and a bit right now, but I can totally envision an environment wherein I'm acting as an idiot sub-lab assistant role, helping with the basics of her demands. Of course, I'd not want to do her work for her, but more than equally, I'd be quite happy to have a '5% We-encouraging' in her vocabulary when it comes to her explaining herself. What parent wouldn't, if they can?
- dctoedt 5y ago
  The sitcom Modern Family had an episode in which kids had to do an egg-drop project and were helped by their respective parents. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Egg_Drop https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Egg_Drop
- csa 5y ago
  > When I was a kid I never got help from my parents on these projects, and hated the kids who "won" because their parent helped. These can be two different things: 1. Constructive help from parents has (at least) two components. First, it shows your child you care. This may seems small, but it’s not. Second, and I think this is what a lot of HNers would appreciate, is to help your child to develop good processes. There is a lot that goes into this, and it can be parent-centered or child-centered, but having your child reflect on process and (ideally) implement some good processes can really set them up for later in life. Imho, parents should have to write a short narrative about what involvement they had in their child’s project, if any. This is required at some of the local schools where I live. 2. Having the parents do the project for the child is just silly. Most decent teachers can see through this (assuming they care). Congrats to the adult parent for winning elementary school or middle school as an adult. :-/
  - kazinator 5y ago
    > This is required at some of the local schools where I live. Like heck I'm gonna sit there writing short narratives for some school. Homework stops at the kids.
    - rablackburn 5y ago
      I’m guessing if they don’t receive a narrative from you they infer that you probably didn’t write the actual assignment.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    > Most decent teachers can see through this (assuming they care). I entered the science fair as a kindergartner with a poster project explaining how (the output color-mixing of a) color TV worked. Principal accused my parents of doing it; they had no idea what he was talking about and protested that I’d done it. So he interviewed me about it and left convinced I’d done it. ;)
    - csa 5y ago
      Yep. When in doubt, a simple question like “why did you choose this topic?” or “what was the hardest part of this project?” will usually make clear the driving force behind the project. Some younger kids will just blatantly admit that their parents did the project (sometimes/often to the child’s dismay).
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  “When I was a kid I never got help from my parents on these projects, and hated the kids who "won" because their parent helped.” I wish my parents had shown interest in stuff like this and supported me to some degree. It’s not about doing the whole project for the kids but showing interest is super helpful. I often gave up on stuff because my dad would basically say “what’s this nonsense for?” I noticed this when read books about Steve Wozniak and Richard Feynman. Their dads showed interest and encouraged them to explore the world and also challenged them from time to time.
  - dekhn 5y ago
    As the person who said that I should point out that my parents did teach me and work with me on things, just not technical maker projects (pinewood derby, build a bridge and see how much it can carry, etc). Other kids had dads with garages full of woodworking equipment and had trained them. On the other hand, my parents provided me with a computer and the freedom to learn from it (the thing I liked about computers is that you didn't have to depend on other people as much to learn how they worked). As an example of what I missed out on, while I was on a team of makers I was using a cordless drill and stripped a screw. A coworker poitned out there's a knob that controls the tension of a ratchet, so you can make t he drill stop spinning before stripping the screw. I had no idea, at 45, that was even possible. They had all known about it from early childhood.
    - klik99 5y ago
      I had the exact same experience at 35 - I was a self taught at home handyman and thought that it was inevitable that screws just get stripped! Funnily enough my dad was pretty handy at building, but the extent of my help was holding and gophering so I never actually learned much, except that it's possible to DIY.
  - perl4ever 5y ago
    I recall something about Feynman's sister not being encouraged. I don't recall if it was his father or his mother.
- mikesabbagh 5y ago
  > When I was a kid I never got help from my parents on these projects, and hated the kids who "won" because their parent helped. It took me many years later to understand that those kids were actually getting help from their parents and I was not that bad actually
- alisonkisk 5y ago
  It's not the kids' fault, nor their parents', nor your parents', nor yours. It's 100% the teacher's fault for turning what should be a collaborative learning experince into an unfair contest.
5faulker 5y ago
Could be a good self-sufficiency project too.
Waterluvian 5y ago
I know exactly how you feel. Very frustrating and sometimes disenchanting to discover they don’t really care. But perhaps also a good life lesson because that happens all the time. It’s good to try and develop a healthy self-driven passion. Oh, you don’t care? That’s fine because I do and I learned a lot.
aaron695 5y ago
> and we managed to grow quite a few It feels like you've helped and now expect it run like an assignment for adults. Except I would think if she was treated past her particular child level, like being disqualified for bad paperwork, she'd become a kid again. Some of these kids in her class will be dumb-asses, possibly being beaten more at home because of lockdowns, who'll never do more than clean toilets. Your points valid, and this is why we have private & gifted schools, you kick out the low classes and the dumb. But it's a hard problem, not interacting with dumb kids or kids in bad families is not a good outcome either.
EpicEng 5y ago
>I'm now remembering how frustrating was for me to take school related things too seriously and discover you cared more than your teachers when I was her age. Perhaps it's you taking this children's assignment too seriously. Was the goal really to find who could grow the best sodium crystal, or was it to teach them how to manage a small project and learn a bit of chemistry? Did your daughter learn anything about those things? That teacher has a bunch of other kids to educate. Maybe they don't care, or maybe you just have your priorities screwed up a bit.
- d883kd8 5y ago
  Fuck them kids they should have studied
tapland 5y ago
This is a perfect experiment to do in class, letting them sit in the classroom to be revisited at the beginning or end of classes (maybe weekly?). It doesn't sound as suitable for a take home project
maceurt 5y ago
I can't believe parents send their kids to public schools instead of home schooling. The only benefit is childcare and socialization. And those aren't necessarily always benefits either. I mean the amount of time wasted in school is outrageous. And I don't mean wasted as in the hyper ambitious tiger mom way, I mean situations in which you are sitting in a room doing nothing or on your phone or you are taking a test to prove that you know some information. We just accept this as normal. Nothing is less normal than a bunch of children growing up in a building sitting in chairs all day. In an environment that is strictly controlling with harsh limitations on freedom of speech, no tolerance policies for all sorts of relatively innocuous things, and a forced secularism as to ingrain in students the unimportance of spirituality, physical health, personal liberty, and nature. And lets rid ourselves of this notion this is about education, because it isn't. Every step of school is focused on obedience and preparing them for the next step so they will be able to get a job. It is the perfect way to mold a child into an obedient wage slave.

samstave 5y ago

>>A bit discouraging. I'm now remembering how frustrating was I am picturing you over a mortar and pestle crushing the salt of your enemies whilst a single tear falls into the mix - and en-vigorating (filling with life) - the salt of your defeated enemies..

dekhn 5y ago

We managed? When I was a kid I never got help from my parents on these projects, and hated the kids who "won" because their parent helped. On the other hand, being the competitive person who excels in science projects is often a very good predictor for being able to handle the tedium of a scientific lab job.

fcatalan 5y ago
When I was a kid I never got help from my parents either and I now think that I would have benefited from a bit of closer attention. I developed a huge spectrum of bad practices and behaviours that I'm inclined to think I could have avoided at least in part. I want to think there's some space between doing their homework for them and not caring about the minutiae of their education, and I want to be there.
- koolba 5y ago
  > I want to think there's some space between doing their homework for them and not caring about the minutiae of their education, and I want to be there. Even showing a lack of interest in their pointless projects is a life lesson in priorities and individualism.
  - fcatalan 5y ago
    But the project isn't pointless! For example, most of my help was to make sure she took 10 different containers and placed them in different locations around the house to increase the probability of getting a few decent crystals. I discussed redundance with her in the context of explaining why some of her friends were not getting results from their single try. I think that these practical thought patterns are extremely valuable, better than creating a miniature jaded adult...
    - cornell532 5y ago
      You sound like a great parent doing right by your daughter. She's lucky to have you. The point of school is to learn to think + learn to face adversity & failure....
    - wilkommen 5y ago
      You're doing good. Just cause someone else's childhood sucked and they feel like they learned something from it doesn't mean it's a good thing. You learn a lot more about how to live well from being loved than you learn from being ignored and neglected.
      - boringg 5y ago
        Well said.
    - watwut 5y ago
      I mean, I sometimes help my kids in very similar way. But, I find it very wrong to judge kids who were truly independent or make such projects into competition between the kids. Because the real competition is here in fact in between adults. Parent knowing that "different locations around the house to increase the probability of getting a few decent crystals" is what makes the difference. Parent who makes sure the kid takes 10 containers is what makes difference. As you said, it is not within average kid going by school education to figure it out. > The trouble is that no one else was able or cared to do it so fast, so the deadline has been slipping for a couple weeks now, with our best crystals going to school and back a few times, getting scratches and broken bits instead of nicely growing undisturbed. A bit discouraging. The thing is, the "no one cared" is very unlikely. Those other kids did cared. But they were doing the project as kids do - loosing attention or doing it ineffectively. Forgetting and trying re-over. Having it at bad place and thus having it grow slowly etc. And all that is part of actual doing-projects learning. It is not bad pedagogy to have kids deal with these issues and have them slowly to figure it out. It is bad to then expect the similar result as your daughters had, when the most important decision making was done by you. Or judge those kids as "dont cared". And this is an actual issue - a kid doing the project the way that is age appropriate and in fact independent ends up labeled as not caring kid. And I think there is value in kids figuring stuff out truly independently.
JKCalhoun 5y ago
I was enamored with "Things of Science" when I was a kid. So much so I began collecting them off eBay, scanning the little science booklet and sharing them for posterity. As such I love DIY science like this. Regarding crystals, I have scanned in and cleaned up two projects relating to crystals: http://underlandia.com/index.php/2017/09/24/things-of-science-338-crystal-growth/ http://underlandia.com/index.php/2017/09/24/things-of-scienc... http://underlandia.com/index.php/2020/08/21/things-of-science-1973-crystal-growth/ http://underlandia.com/index.php/2020/08/21/things-of-scienc...
- zt9 5y ago
  @JKCalhoun just got this account to say thank you for this - I am home schooling with my kids this year and this is a gem of a find.
  - JKCalhoun 5y ago
    You should be able to find many of the "things" in many of these kits. They were very well written, researched. Each "experiment" is a simple step along the way to understanding a concept (such as crystals).
- germinalphrase 5y ago
  Thank you for sharing Things of Science!
- klik99 5y ago
  Wow, another thank you for scanning and uploading these, looking forward to trying some out with my kids! I bet there would be a strong demand for a modern "Things of Science" - youtube is great and all but having a kit put together is a boon for parents
- pvitz 5y ago
  Also from me thanks a lot for all your scans! They are wonderfully written and the experiments are a lot of fun!
detritus 5y ago
My daughter's only 2 and a bit right now, but I can totally envision an environment wherein I'm acting as an idiot sub-lab assistant role, helping with the basics of her demands. Of course, I'd not want to do her work for her, but more than equally, I'd be quite happy to have a '5% We-encouraging' in her vocabulary when it comes to her explaining herself. What parent wouldn't, if they can?
dctoedt 5y ago
The sitcom Modern Family had an episode in which kids had to do an egg-drop project and were helped by their respective parents. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Egg_Drop https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Egg_Drop
csa 5y ago
> When I was a kid I never got help from my parents on these projects, and hated the kids who "won" because their parent helped. These can be two different things: 1. Constructive help from parents has (at least) two components. First, it shows your child you care. This may seems small, but it’s not. Second, and I think this is what a lot of HNers would appreciate, is to help your child to develop good processes. There is a lot that goes into this, and it can be parent-centered or child-centered, but having your child reflect on process and (ideally) implement some good processes can really set them up for later in life. Imho, parents should have to write a short narrative about what involvement they had in their child’s project, if any. This is required at some of the local schools where I live. 2. Having the parents do the project for the child is just silly. Most decent teachers can see through this (assuming they care). Congrats to the adult parent for winning elementary school or middle school as an adult. :-/
- kazinator 5y ago
  > This is required at some of the local schools where I live. Like heck I'm gonna sit there writing short narratives for some school. Homework stops at the kids.
  - rablackburn 5y ago
    I’m guessing if they don’t receive a narrative from you they infer that you probably didn’t write the actual assignment.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  > Most decent teachers can see through this (assuming they care). I entered the science fair as a kindergartner with a poster project explaining how (the output color-mixing of a) color TV worked. Principal accused my parents of doing it; they had no idea what he was talking about and protested that I’d done it. So he interviewed me about it and left convinced I’d done it. ;)
  - csa 5y ago
    Yep. When in doubt, a simple question like “why did you choose this topic?” or “what was the hardest part of this project?” will usually make clear the driving force behind the project. Some younger kids will just blatantly admit that their parents did the project (sometimes/often to the child’s dismay).
spaetzleesser 5y ago
“When I was a kid I never got help from my parents on these projects, and hated the kids who "won" because their parent helped.” I wish my parents had shown interest in stuff like this and supported me to some degree. It’s not about doing the whole project for the kids but showing interest is super helpful. I often gave up on stuff because my dad would basically say “what’s this nonsense for?” I noticed this when read books about Steve Wozniak and Richard Feynman. Their dads showed interest and encouraged them to explore the world and also challenged them from time to time.
- dekhn 5y ago
  As the person who said that I should point out that my parents did teach me and work with me on things, just not technical maker projects (pinewood derby, build a bridge and see how much it can carry, etc). Other kids had dads with garages full of woodworking equipment and had trained them. On the other hand, my parents provided me with a computer and the freedom to learn from it (the thing I liked about computers is that you didn't have to depend on other people as much to learn how they worked). As an example of what I missed out on, while I was on a team of makers I was using a cordless drill and stripped a screw. A coworker poitned out there's a knob that controls the tension of a ratchet, so you can make t he drill stop spinning before stripping the screw. I had no idea, at 45, that was even possible. They had all known about it from early childhood.
  - klik99 5y ago
    I had the exact same experience at 35 - I was a self taught at home handyman and thought that it was inevitable that screws just get stripped! Funnily enough my dad was pretty handy at building, but the extent of my help was holding and gophering so I never actually learned much, except that it's possible to DIY.
- perl4ever 5y ago
  I recall something about Feynman's sister not being encouraged. I don't recall if it was his father or his mother.
mikesabbagh 5y ago
> When I was a kid I never got help from my parents on these projects, and hated the kids who "won" because their parent helped. It took me many years later to understand that those kids were actually getting help from their parents and I was not that bad actually
alisonkisk 5y ago
It's not the kids' fault, nor their parents', nor your parents', nor yours. It's 100% the teacher's fault for turning what should be a collaborative learning experince into an unfair contest.

5faulker 5y ago

Could be a good self-sufficiency project too.

Waterluvian 5y ago

I know exactly how you feel. Very frustrating and sometimes disenchanting to discover they don’t really care. But perhaps also a good life lesson because that happens all the time. It’s good to try and develop a healthy self-driven passion. Oh, you don’t care? That’s fine because I do and I learned a lot.

aaron695 5y ago

> and we managed to grow quite a few It feels like you've helped and now expect it run like an assignment for adults. Except I would think if she was treated past her particular child level, like being disqualified for bad paperwork, she'd become a kid again. Some of these kids in her class will be dumb-asses, possibly being beaten more at home because of lockdowns, who'll never do more than clean toilets. Your points valid, and this is why we have private & gifted schools, you kick out the low classes and the dumb. But it's a hard problem, not interacting with dumb kids or kids in bad families is not a good outcome either.

EpicEng 5y ago

>I'm now remembering how frustrating was for me to take school related things too seriously and discover you cared more than your teachers when I was her age. Perhaps it's you taking this children's assignment too seriously. Was the goal really to find who could grow the best sodium crystal, or was it to teach them how to manage a small project and learn a bit of chemistry? Did your daughter learn anything about those things? That teacher has a bunch of other kids to educate. Maybe they don't care, or maybe you just have your priorities screwed up a bit.

d883kd8 5y ago
Fuck them kids they should have studied

tapland 5y ago

This is a perfect experiment to do in class, letting them sit in the classroom to be revisited at the beginning or end of classes (maybe weekly?). It doesn't sound as suitable for a take home project

maceurt 5y ago

I can't believe parents send their kids to public schools instead of home schooling. The only benefit is childcare and socialization. And those aren't necessarily always benefits either. I mean the amount of time wasted in school is outrageous. And I don't mean wasted as in the hyper ambitious tiger mom way, I mean situations in which you are sitting in a room doing nothing or on your phone or you are taking a test to prove that you know some information. We just accept this as normal. Nothing is less normal than a bunch of children growing up in a building sitting in chairs all day. In an environment that is strictly controlling with harsh limitations on freedom of speech, no tolerance policies for all sorts of relatively innocuous things, and a forced secularism as to ingrain in students the unimportance of spirituality, physical health, personal liberty, and nature. And lets rid ourselves of this notion this is about education, because it isn't. Every step of school is focused on obedience and preparing them for the next step so they will be able to get a job. It is the perfect way to mold a child into an obedient wage slave.