5 ms·

Show him this: http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html

jacquesm 18y ago
I think that piece makes some assumptions about the attention span of 13 year olds that are not present in the samples available to me :)
- xenophanes 18y ago
  I knew a 13 year old, diagnosed with ADHD for not sitting quietly in class, who could concentrate on a chess game for 4+ hours straight. And then play another one after a short break. I could do the same. I also read SICP when I was 13.
  - jacquesm 18y ago
    I have a son like that. He's great at the stuff that he is interested in, anything else and he's bored instantly. ADHD to me is just a convenient label for kids that are different than that norm, so we trot out the medicine cabinet to make them conform instead of helping them to cope with the world around them we make it easier for the 'rest' to cope with them.
    - unalone 18y ago
      When I was in high school, a friend told me he had been diagnosed with ADD. His parents had him tested because his grades were suffering. My friend and I have similar personalities, and my grades were similarly hit-and-miss. I went home and asked my mother if I had ADD. Her response: "Probably." I'm grateful that I had parents who accepted my quirks as a part of my personality and not as problems to be fixed.
      - jacquesm 18y ago
        I guess I got lucky, or I would have been on ritalin or some other fashionable (or profitable) drug for sure. I'm 43 now, 44 in March, when I was a kid ADD did not yet 'exist', and from my experience with my sons teachers the teachers in the schools that I went to were of a better grade than the teachers he has to content with (and that have to contend with him) today. I think the latter is the biggest factor in the diagnosis of all these 'children that we can't handle', it is striking that the %age of these kids seems to go up with every generation. Hopefully soon there will be generation of teachers that is as fast and as smart as the kids they are trying to teach. To some extent I think it is the influence of our media rich world, and next to that probably the enormous amount of technology and information available to kids from a very young age onwards that causes kids to be so tremendously fast at the stuff that these teachers can barely cope with. Boredom is their lot, unless you can get them interested, and once you manage that better hold on to your hat. One thing I have found to be universal in dealing with 'gifted' or 'fast' children (I prefer those terms), it is that once you have gained their respect it gets a lot easier to communicate with them and to get them interested in the stuff that they should know. It's just that if you're a teacher and you get these knowledge seeking missiles that can run rings around you your visceral response is probably to want them to slow down to your level. I think that is the best way to lose their respect. Congratulations to your parents, they seem to have done just fine :)
        unalone 18y ago
        Hopefully soon there will be generation of teachers that is as fast and as smart as the kids they are trying to teach. As much as I would love to believe this, I'm at a college that's renowned for its teaching program, and teaching majors came to me for quite a lot of tech problems. (Two didn't understand basic algebra - worrysome.) The problem is that people who decide they want to become teachers very rarely work well as teachers. My favorite teachers were all passionate about their subject first and foremost: many of them, even in high school, committed to their work outside of just teaching. The people who say "I want to teach and I don't care what" are very often the most problematic teachers. I agree with you entirely about how enormous the world of media has become. That's part of the problem. There are so many things to pay attention to that the slow pace of the average classroom doesn't have enough to appeal to students. With the exception of perhaps three teachers' classes, I learned more online than I ever did in a class. (The solution is to develop teachers who are more singularly fascinating than the Internet, which is a difficult challenge.)
carlosrr 18y ago
I thought of the same article. Also, I greatly enjoyed reading iWoz and it is be very accessible for a teenager. Woz' passion is very contagious and it may help him discover how fun constructive hacking is.

I think that piece makes some assumptions about the attention span of 13 year olds that are not present in the samples available to me :)

xenophanes 18y ago
I knew a 13 year old, diagnosed with ADHD for not sitting quietly in class, who could concentrate on a chess game for 4+ hours straight. And then play another one after a short break. I could do the same. I also read SICP when I was 13.
- jacquesm 18y ago
  I have a son like that. He's great at the stuff that he is interested in, anything else and he's bored instantly. ADHD to me is just a convenient label for kids that are different than that norm, so we trot out the medicine cabinet to make them conform instead of helping them to cope with the world around them we make it easier for the 'rest' to cope with them.
  - unalone 18y ago
    When I was in high school, a friend told me he had been diagnosed with ADD. His parents had him tested because his grades were suffering. My friend and I have similar personalities, and my grades were similarly hit-and-miss. I went home and asked my mother if I had ADD. Her response: "Probably." I'm grateful that I had parents who accepted my quirks as a part of my personality and not as problems to be fixed.
    - jacquesm 18y ago
      I guess I got lucky, or I would have been on ritalin or some other fashionable (or profitable) drug for sure. I'm 43 now, 44 in March, when I was a kid ADD did not yet 'exist', and from my experience with my sons teachers the teachers in the schools that I went to were of a better grade than the teachers he has to content with (and that have to contend with him) today. I think the latter is the biggest factor in the diagnosis of all these 'children that we can't handle', it is striking that the %age of these kids seems to go up with every generation. Hopefully soon there will be generation of teachers that is as fast and as smart as the kids they are trying to teach. To some extent I think it is the influence of our media rich world, and next to that probably the enormous amount of technology and information available to kids from a very young age onwards that causes kids to be so tremendously fast at the stuff that these teachers can barely cope with. Boredom is their lot, unless you can get them interested, and once you manage that better hold on to your hat. One thing I have found to be universal in dealing with 'gifted' or 'fast' children (I prefer those terms), it is that once you have gained their respect it gets a lot easier to communicate with them and to get them interested in the stuff that they should know. It's just that if you're a teacher and you get these knowledge seeking missiles that can run rings around you your visceral response is probably to want them to slow down to your level. I think that is the best way to lose their respect. Congratulations to your parents, they seem to have done just fine :)
      - unalone 18y ago
        Hopefully soon there will be generation of teachers that is as fast and as smart as the kids they are trying to teach. As much as I would love to believe this, I'm at a college that's renowned for its teaching program, and teaching majors came to me for quite a lot of tech problems. (Two didn't understand basic algebra - worrysome.) The problem is that people who decide they want to become teachers very rarely work well as teachers. My favorite teachers were all passionate about their subject first and foremost: many of them, even in high school, committed to their work outside of just teaching. The people who say "I want to teach and I don't care what" are very often the most problematic teachers. I agree with you entirely about how enormous the world of media has become. That's part of the problem. There are so many things to pay attention to that the slow pace of the average classroom doesn't have enough to appeal to students. With the exception of perhaps three teachers' classes, I learned more online than I ever did in a class. (The solution is to develop teachers who are more singularly fascinating than the Internet, which is a difficult challenge.)

carlosrr 18y ago

I thought of the same article. Also, I greatly enjoyed reading iWoz and it is be very accessible for a teenager. Woz' passion is very contagious and it may help him discover how fun constructive hacking is.