Not Back To School Picnic

August and summer are drawing to an end. Next week MVHL hosts the annual Not Back To School picnic at Great Brook Farm State Park in Carlisle. Here's a map of the area (This is my first time embedding Google Maps in my blog. It's so cool!):


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"Is College Worth the Cost?"

Anya Kamenetz has this column on Yahoo! Finance today, and I agree with most of her analysis - particularly the section titled "What do I want to do?".

I have to say I have serious misgivings about this: "...people with bachelor's degrees [wi]ll still earn an average of about $1.2 million more than high school graduates over a 40-year career". I do not know if she is ignoring the opportunity cost of that money. For example, if I put $25,000 in the stock market (instead of spending it on college), my child will retire a millionaire just on that! My gut reaction is that college costs have risen beyond the tipping point where they are a sure deal for the majority of high-school graduates (as they used to be).

Voltaire

I got this in an email today:

Voltaire was one of history's great skeptics. He was skeptical of the revealed truth of the Church, skeptical of the divine right of kings, skeptical of the wealth and position of the aristocracy, and skeptical of the "wisdom" of the common man.

I'd add to the list my skepticism about the wisdom of experts.

And I love this quote from the email:

"Doubt is an uncomfortable position," said Voltaire, "but certainty is an absurd one."

Doubt and uncertainty is directly related to unschooling. I don't know the meaning of life. I don't know what the future is going to bring. I don't know what kind of technology and society the kids are going to encounter in another 5 or 10 or 15 years.

All I have are hints and incomplete answers. One of these answers is that, generally speaking, there are conditions which make a human being happier: when their survival needs are met, when they are in a Flow activity and when they are engaged in something that is imbued with meaning for them. I think that our kids' happiness matters. All that we can really do is facilitate their pursuit of happiness, which comes from helping them develop their own sense of who they are and discover their own Flow and Meaning activities.

When to Take Classes

Recently I was at a one-day workshop on "Arranging from a sheet of music". I showed Manisha what I did at the class, and she made a very interesting comment:

"My views about taking classes have changed a lot. I used to think of taking classes whenever I thought of learning something new. Now I believe in dabbling. Start dabbling, build up a basic level of familiarity in the field and then take a formal class to gain proficiency."

That's what she did when she took Computer Science classes at UML as a working software engineer. She learned a lot in those classes. This was in stark contrast to what happened when she did courses for her Bachelor's degree. The courses did not have any context and were done to fulfill graduation requirements. Not much lasting learning happened as a result. I have been arranging a cappella music (although not in barbershop style) for several years, and all that preparation helped me enormously in the class.

We bought Supriya her drumset a year and a half ago. She has been playing it off and on, and now she has a basic familiarity with it. Now that some friends of hers are thinking of a garage-band, I am encouraging her to take drum lessons. She is ready for formal training.

Daredevil Aseem

Aseem learned to ride his bike recently and has been riding it whenever he can. But his real ambition is to ride the bike on the ramps at the playground! Finally he got his wish. We went to the mall on Saturday and got his own kneepads, elbowpads and wristguards. Last night he put them all on, pushed the bike up the ramp and then rode it down. And then did it all over and over again.

Then Supriya put on her helmet and came down the ramp a couple of times on her skateboard. That inspired Aseem and then he skateboarded down the ramp many times. He has a great sense of balance and he wants to be a daredevil. You can see it in his eyes! Now that he has his protective gear on and knows the rudiments of the skateboard & the bike, he is on his way...

"Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies"

"Supriya just coined another beautiful word. "I can blow up Key [the green alien] again, but then Aseem is just going to dis-blow him!" she exclaimed. She is just a master of coining new words. She makes them up to express what she wants to say, and she does not care if there is no such official word. That's the difference between a native speaker and an outsider,"

I wrote in my new project to write 8 lines per day for 100 days. I talked my friend Donna into it and then got inspired to do it myself! So Donna wrote back recommending "Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies: A Guide to Language for Fun and Spite". Sounds like fun...

Supriya's First Programming Lesson

Supriya starts her first Robotics class in two weeks. It's only 6 or 8 sessions, but she is excited about it (as am I). I want her to be prepared for the class, so I taught her the basics of programming today. I drew a figure on the paper standing at a point on a grid. I told her that a computer is very fast and very dumb, so she has to be very precise in her instructions. It was a simple exercise to get the robot from point A to point B, which she did without any hesitation:

1. Turn 180 degrees clockwise.
2. Take 2 steps.
3. Turn 90 degrees counterclockwise.
4. Take 3 steps.

It took all of 5 minutes for the "lesson". The rest of programming, as they say, is just details...

"Four Hour Workweek"

I have been enjoying this book by Tim Ferriss (http://fourhourworkweek.com/blog/). The buzzword is "lifestyle design". Even if I do not do any of the things he recommends (from having a business that run itself to outsourcing routine stuff), my main takeaway is that it's a new economic reality out there. The old industrial model is mostly gone. We live in an incredibly abundant and almost magically a la carte world. It is possible to design your lifestyle towards what you want to do. And it is possible to do it now - you do not have to wait until you retire at 67. I particuarly enjoyed the chapter on "Mini-retirements". This is the worldview I want to inculcate in my kids.

Supriya-isms

"Daddy, please higher the volume." Supriya asked me. "That's perfectly correct," Manisha said. "If 'lower the volume' is acceptable, so is 'higher the volume.'" I agree.

Supriya has several others like this - words that should be acceptable but aren't (yet) because they lack sanction from the gate-keepers. Supriya often uses "tooken", as in "I should have tooken it with me." She has also used "putten" several times. As they say, language happens...