2 ms·

I love all these "back in my day.." and "how do I replicate my [very limited, and - no doubt - wildly incorrect memory of] childhood for my kids" type posts Be

I love all these "back in my day.." and "how do I replicate my [very limited, and - no doubt - wildly incorrect memory of] childhood for my kids" type posts Because they all-too-often display a vicarious hubris that some how some way my [limited] memory of childhood is the Only True Way™ to experience childhood, and must be replicated for every successive generation Nostalgia is great - but I do not want to force my kids to go through the stages I had to to get to where I am now I want them "standing on the shoulders of giants" to be able to do the next Great Thing™ Or for them to decide to do something totally different - because I don't want them following in my career and hobby footsteps because I do it, but because they actually want to do it Socrates bemoaned this self-same behavior in children ~2400 years ago: "The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers." Don't mistake your biased nostalgia as some kind of Thou Shalt Do Thus™ for the next generation Surely there are positives of how you learned something, but that doesn't mean it is the One True Way™ to learn

hluska 5y ago
Do you have children??
- warrenm 5y ago
  I have several Thanks for asking
  - hluska 5y ago
    Wicked! What’s your goto when things are ambiguous? I find myself defaulting to stuff I learned from my parents when I was young. Not because I believe I was raised perfectly or in the One True Way, but because I don’t know what to do and that’s the pattern I default to. Any ideas?? I’d dig getting get of patterns and parenting in the moment, but it’s very hard (for me).
    - warrenm 5y ago
      When things get ambiguous (which I'll take to mean, "they don't get it the way you're explaining it" - please correct/direct my understanding if you meant something different), I look for how others have explained something - or I'll take my kids to someone else and ask in front of them how they'd explain it: it's as important to me that my kids know I don't know everything and am willing and want to learn as it is to be able to answer/explain things to them in the way I learned/understood it :) Sometimes, intentionally or not, we all, of course, revert to "how we learned it" - and sometimes it's because you can't find someone else to explain it, or some other way to accomplish something, or of all the ways you've seen it learned/explained, you really are using the "best" :)
lariati 5y ago
Love the Socrates quote. I would take the opposite approach if I had kids. Build a really baddass PC with KDE Plasma, great monitor, just a perfect workstation then tell the kid they can't use it. This is what grownups use to build Youtube and all the apps you love, you aren't old enough to use this. Build the most simple youtube search app with vanilla js/html/css and then act like the code is almost pornographic and they can't even look at it. Finally at some point give in to them begging to see what is going on. Emulating basic on an Apple IIe is like forcing the kid to learn trombone and play Count Basie tunes because that was what was cool back in the day. They will despise trombone by the time they are teenagers.
- warrenm 5y ago
  >Emulating basic on an Apple IIe is like forcing the kid to learn trombone and play Count Basie tunes because that was what was cool back in the day. They will despise trombone by the time they are teenagers. Exactly! Forcing kids to learn what you did the way you did is not smart - unless they actually want to learn what you did (the way you did) I worked at a non-profit in my early 20s, and had the chance to teach kids from middle school to early college how to build web pages (among many other things). When I would teach the workshop, they were building actual, live XHTML 1.0, CSS3 (I think it was 3?) compliant pages and sites in about an hour or so When others would teach the workshop, they'd be in there for two hours just seeing all the ways we used to do it that we don't anymore (except, you know, when you really need to (using tables to format, etc (all those 'fun' geocities hacks folks making "complex" sites in the 90s had to do before CSS was a thing and widely supported))), and only then get to the 45-60 minutes of how to do it now. There are some things that can more-or-less "only" be taught one way (like, say, using a table saw). But everything else? Teach it in a way that engages your student(s). Want to write games? Get some books on the topic, and write games. A handful of fundamentals need to be known first, but without goals that connect with the learners, they'll never really learn it. And if it turns out they hate programming? That's OK, too - there's a whole world of alternatives, an being so myopic as to think the only way to "have fun" or "learn" is the way you did it as a kid is kinda dumb :)

hluska 5y ago

Do you have children??

warrenm 5y ago
I have several Thanks for asking
- hluska 5y ago
  Wicked! What’s your goto when things are ambiguous? I find myself defaulting to stuff I learned from my parents when I was young. Not because I believe I was raised perfectly or in the One True Way, but because I don’t know what to do and that’s the pattern I default to. Any ideas?? I’d dig getting get of patterns and parenting in the moment, but it’s very hard (for me).
  - warrenm 5y ago
    When things get ambiguous (which I'll take to mean, "they don't get it the way you're explaining it" - please correct/direct my understanding if you meant something different), I look for how others have explained something - or I'll take my kids to someone else and ask in front of them how they'd explain it: it's as important to me that my kids know I don't know everything and am willing and want to learn as it is to be able to answer/explain things to them in the way I learned/understood it :) Sometimes, intentionally or not, we all, of course, revert to "how we learned it" - and sometimes it's because you can't find someone else to explain it, or some other way to accomplish something, or of all the ways you've seen it learned/explained, you really are using the "best" :)

lariati 5y ago

Love the Socrates quote. I would take the opposite approach if I had kids. Build a really baddass PC with KDE Plasma, great monitor, just a perfect workstation then tell the kid they can't use it. This is what grownups use to build Youtube and all the apps you love, you aren't old enough to use this. Build the most simple youtube search app with vanilla js/html/css and then act like the code is almost pornographic and they can't even look at it. Finally at some point give in to them begging to see what is going on. Emulating basic on an Apple IIe is like forcing the kid to learn trombone and play Count Basie tunes because that was what was cool back in the day. They will despise trombone by the time they are teenagers.

warrenm 5y ago
>Emulating basic on an Apple IIe is like forcing the kid to learn trombone and play Count Basie tunes because that was what was cool back in the day. They will despise trombone by the time they are teenagers. Exactly! Forcing kids to learn what you did the way you did is not smart - unless they actually want to learn what you did (the way you did) I worked at a non-profit in my early 20s, and had the chance to teach kids from middle school to early college how to build web pages (among many other things). When I would teach the workshop, they were building actual, live XHTML 1.0, CSS3 (I think it was 3?) compliant pages and sites in about an hour or so When others would teach the workshop, they'd be in there for two hours just seeing all the ways we used to do it that we don't anymore (except, you know, when you really need to (using tables to format, etc (all those 'fun' geocities hacks folks making "complex" sites in the 90s had to do before CSS was a thing and widely supported))), and only then get to the 45-60 minutes of how to do it now. There are some things that can more-or-less "only" be taught one way (like, say, using a table saw). But everything else? Teach it in a way that engages your student(s). Want to write games? Get some books on the topic, and write games. A handful of fundamentals need to be known first, but without goals that connect with the learners, they'll never really learn it. And if it turns out they hate programming? That's OK, too - there's a whole world of alternatives, an being so myopic as to think the only way to "have fun" or "learn" is the way you did it as a kid is kinda dumb :)