Category: Parenting

On Formula

Throughout history, there have been wild swings in public perception of scientific progress. Ages of “enlightenment” and “dark ages”. We’re in yet another swing — this time from “Ooh, science! How amazing! Nothing science does could possibly be bad” to “eww, chemicals. You scientists are gonna give us all cancer and destroy the planet”.

My personal opinion — humans do not understand all of the little, interconnected, nuanced things that have evolved naturally over millions of years. We may discover some symbiotic relationship between soil bacteria and plants that mean food grown on regenerative farms is actually healthier than food grown with artificial fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. Maybe the plants produce different components because cabbage worms are starting to eat the leaves, thus eliminating the bugs reduced the nutritional value of the food.

But I certainly don’t think we should all stop eating anything that isn’t grown in our own back yard today because mass agriculture isn’t 100% producing the same food. We’ve got to eat something. A lot of somethings. Every day. And I view formula the same way … it’s certainly good enough to sustain growth and development. Is it missing something we don’t even understand yet? Maybe! I expect the first formula formulation and what is in the store today differ as new discoveries were made. But villainizing formula is just as silly as refusing to eat anything you didn’t grow.

Kanban for Kids

I find it interesting that Anya’s school had very good “lessons” for taking notes — the teacher had a class where she would talk and the kids took notes. The kids then submitted the notes, and she basically graded the notes. “This was just a funny story, no need to include in notes” or “when I mention something three times, it needs to be in your notes. Add ‘whatever got mentioned repeatedly in class’ here”. I won’t say that Anya loved note taking class, but she did it. And, since kids got to use their notes for their tests … she saw the benefit of having decent notes.

Time management, though, the school seems to take the “throw in water, if you don’t drown … well, you can swim!” approach. They assign a bunch of stuff, generally due around the same time for extra fun. And then they don’t say anything to the kid if they’re a month behind. So I found myself explaining Kanban boards to Anya.

We do digital things at work, but she needs something everyone can see just walking by. So paper cards, magnets, and white board it is! You make a column for “stuff I am going to need to do” — we call this a backlog. New assignments go here first. We thought color coding the classes would be cool — so take a square of paper, write the name of the assignment, the date it is due, how long you guess it will take to complete (1 hour, 1 day, 1 week).

You then have other columns for “in progress”, “done”, and “stuck” — we have additional columns at work because they make sense for what we do — “UAT testing”, “Awaiting Feedback”. You may find there are other columns that make sense for your classes too — I used to have a “Researching”, “Draft”, “Editing”, and “Final Draft” columns because everything was a research paper.

At work, we plan a week or two of work — you pick enough cards to fill up the week, and that’s what you are working on. This means our cards could represent a week of work — I’m only going to finish one card this week, but that’s a full week of work. For school work, picking the cards daily kind of makes sense because new assignments pop in all the time. It would be difficult to shoehorn new assignments into an already planned out week.

If the “in progress” items will be picked daily, then a card shouldn’t represent more than a day of work. So “Write the paper” is too generic. That would need to be broken out into “select topic”, “start research”, “continue research”, “finish research”, “start draft”, “continue draft”, “finish draft”, “review draft”, “edit draft”, and “finalize report” might all be reasonable items to accomplish in a day.

Using this method, you can see when things are due, realize when you have two or three big things due at the same time (so some are going to need to be finished early), and can keep track of anything where you are stuck (had to ask the teacher for clarification, waiting for a book to be available from the library, etc).

If nothing else, she seems happy about the “moving it to the completed column” bit!

Easter Hunt

Anya wanted to do an Easter egg hunt this year — so I designed a bracelet for her & made little bags with the components. The components were put into some of the eggs (candy was put into other eggs)

And we hid the eggs all around the property —

But I stood near each of the hiding places and marked a point on OSMAnd+ … then she took my cell phone & used the map to search for her eggs.

Important lessons learned — {1} bits to assemble a bracelet are a cool gift, but three green spheres in an egg? Not so awesome (and Anya’s gotten old enough to say “ugh, beads?” when she’s not thrilled with the contents of the egg) and {2} she should delete the marker once she gets the egg. She had ten eggs when she was done searching, but we don’t actually know which ten of the twelve that are hidden she’s found. So we’ve got to do the whole search again to mark off the “done” spots!

Squid Custom Error

We’ve been having a challenge with Anya getting her school work completed. Part of the problem is the school’s own fault — they provide a site where kids are encouraged to read, but don’t provide any way to ensure this reading is done after classwork has been completed. But, even if that site didn’t exist … the Internet has all sorts of fun ways you can find to waste some time.

So her computer now routes through my proxy server. I’d set up a squid server so *I* could use the Internet unfettered whilst VPN’d in to work. It’s really annoying to get told you’re a naughty hacker every time you want to see some code example on StackOverflow!

While I didn’t really care about the default messages for my use (nor did I actually block anything for it to matter), I want Anya to be able to differentiate between “technical problem” the site didn’t load and “you are not allowed to be using this site now” the site didn’t load. So I customized the Squid error message for access denied. This can quickly be done by editing /usr/share/squid/errors/en-us/ERR_ACCESS_DENIED (you’ll need to make a backup of your version & may need to replace the file when upgrading squid in the future).

 

On Questioning Science

While science is based on questioning, “questioning” means “questioning, then developing a plan to test your new hypothesis, carrying out your test, documenting and publishing your results, then discussing those results with the scientific community”.
Questioning cannot just stop with a gut feeling, some one-off event you witnessed, or something you’re neighbor’s dog-walker’s friend overheard whilst riding the bus. You cannot just believe that the acceleration of gravity on Earth is -1.5 m/s^2. You believe it, design an experiment to measure the acceleration of gravity, measure it, and … well, find out that you’re wrong.
I have a quip that I use with Anya — she knows you’re not supposed to break laws. And she knows there are “laws of physics”. So she put it together and announced proudly that we may not break the laws of physics. (And, I expect, that meant that there were some physics police wandering around ready to fine you). I tell her she’s welcome to break the laws of physics, but then she needs to publish her proposed ‘new laws of physics’ that explain what she was able to do in a peer-reviewed journal. Because they’re not laws like a group of random politicians decided something is illegal. They’re laws like the scientific community believes it is impossible. And most of us are thrilled to learn we’re wrong and gain a better understanding of the world around us.

Zombie Monster Invasion

Anya went almost eight years without developing any imaginary monster fears — right after she entered preschool, she thought there were generic monsters that might be lurking. But I invited them over for tea and cake, we’d chat with them, and she was OK with our new monster friends. She read The Last Kids on Earth series six or more months ago. Tonight, about twenty minutes after he went upstairs to bed, asked to come down and say goodnight again. She was worried that monsters were going to fly zombies into the house. She sat with me, and I explained that the best thing about imaginary fears is that you can come up with imaginary solutions. And eagles are great protection from zombies. And there are a lot of eagles in our area — big golden guys, even bigger bald eagles. Lots of eagles. And they all eat zombies (and probably monsters). She’d forgotten to take the compost out, so she took out the bowl. And realized she forgot to bring the chickens into their coop (which was really odd since she went outside with food and water specifically to bring the chickens in … and she did fill up their food and water. But left the chickens in the tractor). She apologized to the chickens, snuggled them all to warm them up, and came back into the house. I sang her a goodnight song and we chatted about the eagles perched on the top of her bed — a golden girl she named Goldie, a bald eagle she named Balder, a golden guy that didn’t get named yet, and Balder’s mate was over at the lake getting a fish for them (we told them to eat over the fish tank so they didn’t get fish guts all over Anya or her bed). Goldie had an egg that she gave to Anya to keep warm. There were a few zombies, and Goldie ate them. All of the eagles have kevlar jackets that prevent zombie bites, so there won’t be any zombie eagles. Then the egg hatched. Anya put fifty kevlar jackets on the baby eagle (and herself) to protect them  from zombies. And Goldie got some small fish from the lake to feed the hatchling. So Anya’s feeding her baby eagle while three grown eagles watch over them. Hopefully that’s sorted the zombies.

On Patriotic History

History is written by the victor. They can tell us how nice they were (or at least how necessary their not-niceness was). But the fact those who win get to write history in their favor doesn’t negate the value of ensuring people have a more robust view of what actually transpired. The good and the bad. Which makes Trump’s idea of a more patriotic history quite frightening.
 
In software development, we have “retrospectives” — a meeting where everyone chats about how the last project went. What worked well. What didn’t work well. It’s not meant to be subversive, negative, or blamey — it’s meant to get people thinking about how we could improve the things that didn’t work well. And to feel proud about the things that did go well. I’d love to see this approach taken to teaching history.
 
By focusing only on the good aspects, you lose important information. A tangentially related example: my daughter’s social studies book attempts to cover the concept of savings and loans. They talked about saving money to buy something bigger later and about the bank giving you money to buy something bigger *now* and you you give the money back later. And omitted the entire concept of interest. Elementary schools are telling kids that the bank will give you a couple hundred k to buy a house, you pay them back over time, and it’s all beautiful. I pulled up my credit card statement and showed her how the grand we spent last month could be paid back immediately — the bank gave me a grand, I paid them a grand back, and they gave me 30$ in bonus cash back for using their service — but that’s not a sustainable business model. How does the bank pay for the building downtown? The people who work there? The advertising? The computer systems? I showed her the “if you pay the minimum” and “if you pay more than the minimum, look how much you ‘save'” box where that grand could cost me three grand. Or I could ‘save’ 1500 by paying more than the minimum due.

Chalk Tightrope Race

Anya’s online school includes physical education — they provide ideas for games we can play, and we we tweak the idea. Last week, they wanted us to stand on one foot and play catch with a ball. That turned into a cross between volleyball and tennis. The activity this week was to draw a few chalk figures (circle, triangle, line, zig-zag) and pretend those are a tightrope. Anya turned it into a race — you start by running along the long line, leaping to the triangle, following it and then leaping to the circle, running along the circle, jumping to the next circle and running along it, then leaping over to a short line that gets you to the zig-zag. There was a lot of running into each other (especially when she added the “go either direction around the shape” rule), and it was really hard to win if you didn’t want to run over the tiny person. Which makes it one of Anya’s favorite games.

On art … 2

Art is a way of seeing something worthwhile in everything. A way of understanding and experiencing the world. I remember seeing a painting of an old barn next to an overgrown field. It’s something I’d have dismissed if I’d seen it in person — just a collapsing old building. But the way the artist painted it? The dilapidation and decay were stunning. That’s how I’ve viewed the world ever since — from urban slums to Queen Mary’s gardens, there’s something wonderful to be found if you try.
It’s also a gateway to learning. It’s historical (how did someone think to slice up the stalk of a papyrus plant, overlay them, wet them, and allow them to dry to make a writing surface!?! How different would the world be if we were lugging around cuneiform tablets), scientific (how your eyes perceive frequencies as colors are combined, how rocks break as you carve them, visualizing the head of a drum as a song is played) … I’ve taught my daughter a lot of more traditionally “educational” things by making or experiencing art.
And it’s enjoyable — something doesn’t have to have a practical utility to be worthwhile.