Lego Star Wars

Supriya bought the Lego Star Wars game (with her own money) on Sunday and the kids have been glued to it for the last three days. It's a rather complex game and they are busy cracking it.

Manisha is glued to Harry Potter, in parallel. She is on the last book and is enjoying it immensely.

Transhumanism and Unschooling

I call myself a Transhumanist. It all starts with Humanism, which Wikipedia defines as:

a broad category of ethical philosophies that affirm the dignity and worth of all people, based on the ability to determine right and wrong by appeal to universal human qualities—particularly rationality.

The article goes on:

Humanism entails a commitment to the search for truth and morality through human means in support of human interests. In focusing on the capacity for self-determination, Humanism rejects the validity of transcendental justifications, such as a dependence on belief without reason, the supernatural, or allegedly divinely revealed texts. Humanists endorse universal morality based on the commonality of the human condition, suggesting that solutions to human social and cultural problems cannot be parochial.

Transhumanismtakes this one step further. It is an international intellectual and cultural movement supporting the use of new sciences and technologies to enhance human mental and physical abilities and aptitudes, and ameliorate what it regards as undesirable and unnecessary aspects of the human condition, such as stupidity, suffering, disease, aging and involuntary death. Transhumanist thinkers study the possibilities and consequences of developing and using human enhancement techniques and other emerging technologies for these purposes.

The World Transhumanist Association describes itself as

an international nonprofit membership organization which advocates the ethical use of technology to expand human capacities. We support the development of and access to new technologies that enable everyone to enjoy better minds, better bodies and better lives. In other words, we want people to be better than well.

In my mind (& Manisha's) my ideas of Unschooling and Transhumanism are joined at the hip. They share a whole list of common themes and preconditions.

• The belief that life is good.
• The optimism that life is getting better.
• The belief that this is an abundant, friendly and trustworthy universe.
• Our inalienable right to control our own minds and bodies.
• Friendliness towards technology.
• Happiness as the ultimate goal.

Aseem Pogoes

After much diligent - and often frustrating - practice Aseem has mastered the Pogo-stick. He can consistently do more than 10 now. I just searched my blog for Supriya's Pogo-stick mastery and found the post on November 5, 2005 about Supriya learning to do it (when Supriya was about 6 1/2). Evidently Aseem is 6 months ahead of her.

House-painting at Friends'

Yesterday we went and helped Dee and Jon with paint their house from the outside. Supriya and Aseem enjoyed working with the paint-brushes. Supriya discovered painting with rollers and did quite a bit of work with a couple of different sizes. We all had a good time and did some net positive work (I think).

Supriya's Music Composing

Supriya has been playing with the piano today. She came up with a lovely theme and really memorized it and has been playing it the whole day. I have explained to her what a theme is and right now she is trying to come up with variations on her original theme. First it was all white keys. Now she is adding the black keys. I showed her how you build a tune by starting with a theme, going away from your original theme or "home base", doing something similar and then coming back to repeat home base. She is getting the idea. (As Supriya is experimenting at the piano, I hear Aseem humming her theme while playing at the Lego table!)

I will have her record the tune tomorrow and then find a way to post it somewhere on the web. I will also try to get some classical music to demonstrate the concept.

"Is College Worth the Cost? Part 2"

This is the follow-up article to the first one by Anya Kamenetz. It starts with: "Isn't a master's degree the new bachelor's?" A lot of statistics about salaries for various post-graduate degrees follows. This one caught my eye:

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the payoff from social science and liberal arts master's degrees is actually negative -- the average liberal arts MA earns less than the average of all BAs.

"We Send Too Many Students to College"

is the title of this great article by Marty Nemko, a career coach. The statistics just goes to reinforce my beliefs (and biases).

Secrets of Greatness

This continues the thread about achieving greatness in any field. My brother sent me a link to an article about deliberate practice. That turned out to be a 44-page PDF file. So I Googled and got this valuable & fairly short article. A couple of excerpts:

"The best people in any field are those who devote the most hours to what the researchers call "deliberate practice." It's activity that's explicitly intended to improve performance, that reaches for objectives just beyond one's level of competence, provides feedback on results and involves high levels of repetition."

"Armed with that mindset [of deliberate practice], people go at a job in a new way. Research shows they process information more deeply and retain it longer. They want more information on what they're doing and seek other perspectives. They adopt a longer-term point of view. In the activity itself, the mindset persists. You aren't just doing the job, you're explicitly trying to get better at it in the larger sense.
Again, research shows that this difference in mental approach is vital. For example, when amateur singers take a singing lesson, they experience it as fun, a release of tension. But for professional singers, it's the opposite: They increase their concentration and focus on improving their performance during the lesson. Same activity, different mindset."

Very interesting. The two questions Manisha and I want answered:

• How do you know the person in question is not "talented"?
• How do you keep/stay motivated for long stretches of time without frequent rewards? I suppose the answer is intrinsic motivation; i.e., you do the activity for its own sake and the rewards you get from your improvement are enough to keep you going. But that raises the question of why that particular activity interests you so much.

Taekwondo Testing

We had our testing yesterday. We did the whole routine - sparring, poomsae and breaking. Aseem did his Basic poomsae confidently. Supriya and I did the 3 1/2 that we know (Basic, 1, 2 and 1/2 of 3). Then we broke boards, first with our hand and then with front kicks. I broke 2 boards with a middle punch, and my hand is still sore! All in all it went very well. We will get our new belts (green for Aseem, light blue for Supriya and orange for me) next week.

More Garage Band

Today we have a new episode of the garage band (BTW I think this whole garage band thing will make a great show for reality TV!) It was Supriya, Wiley and Joe in attendance and yet another day of great internal struggle for me. For one I want them to play on their own and create music as they want it. That's the whole point of the garage band. On the other hand I can see that they are floundering for lack of focus and leadership. All of them are great musicians and in a few years they are going to be in serious bands. For now, though, I am afraid that this weekly floundering is going to create boredom which will lead them to lose interest. My solution to the dilemma is to let them "jam" on their own for most of the time and work on a known piece of music for the rest of the time.

I had handed their moms copies of Yankee Doodle Dandy yesterday. Apparently Wiley did not get his music. Joe had worked on sounding it out on his guitar. He did get the notes but he could not go as fast as the song needed to go. No matter; for about one glorious minute, we sang the song well. By we I mean Wiley on accordion, Joe on drums, Supriya singing melody and I singing harmony on the chorus. This is not the configuration we had planned in advance, but it worked. And that's all that matters.

The kids also created a short piece with Joe playing a weird bass-line on the keyboard, Supriya on a mini-accordion and Wiley on a concertina. It sounded strangely musical, perhaps a foreshadow of the music they will make in the future...

"Planet Earth"

We watched the first DVD in the series last night. Like all the other BBC productions, the photography is spectacular, and David Attenborough's narration is of course classic. There are many memorable scenes of chases: a snow leopard trying to catch a mountain goat, a shark catching a dolphin, a pack of wild dogs catching an impala. One thing that kept bugging Manisha and me was the frequent cuts in scenes. It felt like they were cutting every 15 seconds or so and jumping continents without any warning.

Hanging with the Money Crowd

is the title of the story on Yahoo! Finance today written by Jean Chatzky. It starts:

One of the summer's biggest stories carried the headline "Weight Gain Is Contagious!" Sensational? Sure, but based on some pretty good science.

Humans are social animals and we do follow social norms (at times behaving like automatons!). The article makes some very good points about money habits about your peer group - and also about money habits of your family, your closest social group.

Voyagers

Three weeks ago we joined the Voyagers, Inc. coop. We went there the first time to check it out and immediately felt right at home. We knew many of the families, and Supriya and Aseem looked comfortable with the environment and the people.

Supriya has joined the Musical Theater class, run by the talented Lauren Sprague. They are working on producing a short musical comedy based on "Stone Soup", written by Lauren with input from the class. She handed in the script to the cast members yesterday and Supriya read it to me in the van on the way back. She is really excited to be in the play. She has also joined the Dungeons and Dragons club. I have no clue what goes on in the club! All I know is that she has a whole bunch of friends in there and she is enjoying it. By the time she is done with these two, she seems to have no mental energy left for any more focused tasks and plays with her friends the rest of the time.

Aseem is doing 2 classes: Rhythm Sticks and dinosaurs. He is really into dinosaurs these days and enjoys the dinosaurs class a lot. So far they have made a dinosaur habitat, dinosaur fossils and a papier mache dinosaur bone. He spends the rest of the time playing in small groups or by himself.

I have been enjoying hanging out with my friends. I also help out Christina in the Rhythm Sticks class. After lunch I run a juggling club, and after that I take part in the weaving class (which turns out to be more fun than I thought!). So overall we are really enjoying Voyagers.