SteamBox

So I bought a steambox for the living room. This is like a PS4 - but instead of PS4 games, you download Steam games. Not all games on Steam work, but some of them are exceptional (and in particular, they tend to be from Indy shops).

One of those, is OctoDad. You can get it for your phone too! Uninstall Minion Rush today, and get this instead!

How to do a science project without tears

The Final Thing - 8 hours and out.

So I want to create a formula for "Doing a science project with your kid" that is PAINLESS. 

Now, most of you with male children have discovered that if there's one thing they don't want to do, it's professional-grade science project board layout. So here is a formula that teaches your kid science, without the sucky parts.

1. Obtain some animal or plant. (I ordered mosquito larvae online)

2. See how some substance (soap in my case) effects it when added. Do this maybe 10 times. Take pictures using your phone of the process as your kid does it.

3. Write whatever it is down on paper, but then enter it into Google App's spreadsheet with your kid. Click the five buttons you need to make a bar chart out of it. Print that shit out.

4. Have your kid use Prezi to create a small presentation about it, then download that presentation as a PDF which you can print out.

5. Paste the presentation, the pictures, and the simple graph on a poster board.

6. DONE.

"Gravity works on everything except the things on Space"

The pain of not understanding gravity. IS IT FRICTION?

Ok.

Long Division

I spent all last night teaching my nine year old long division. There were many tears. Only some were mine.

When your kid asks you how to do long division.

Seriously, he comes home with math homework and then writes random numbers down in the hope I won't check that he can't do it. Then when I walk him through it, he CLEARLY HAS NO IDEA HOW TO DO IT.

I have no idea what they actually do in school, but every time a school voucher program comes on the ballot I vote yes, because I'd rather spend my evenings doing anything else. Everyone gets so excited about how great the elementary school is that Max goes to, but frankly I don't see it. Any school is great if you spend four hours AFTER THE SCHOOL DAY ENDS teaching your kids math.

This weekend I spent two days socializing with a fifteen year old girl who was visiting from Canada. She was super nice! And Super Jewish! She is studying "Talmud" in her school - apparently half her curriculum is Jewish studies, so I asked her about what the Talmud says about slaves. It says a lot, unsurprisingly, none of which she knew, also unsurprisingly! Her dream career is to "mix chemicals to make new make-up." But let me put it to you this way: You go to a madrasa, you are not going to become a chemical engineer.

Racist Comments from a 9yo

I got a call from the guidance councilor at Max's school today (he's 9). Apparently Friday when all the kids were in a line he said "Looks like the white girls are all in front and the black girls are all in the back, like in the olden days." Everyone got offended and today he apologized to the class, although the school was great in that they clearly realized Max is not a racist, just, you know, nine. Also, I love that the counselor doesn't know I'm pretty brown. Max looks like an Aryan poster boy, so having a brown dad is something that will surprise them.

Realistically the only reason he would even know about "the olden days" is we've been watching John Green videos on YouTube, where he has a whole great history session called CrashCourse. WELL WORTH A VIEW. Of course, your kids may end up knowing things about the civil rights movement without any context and make impolitic remarks. So I'm going to have to also have him watch Thank You For Smoking.

Strategy and Tactics

If you've built software, you know the feeling when a project is too large and too old to survive. This is not because your coding or initial design was wrong. It's because your requirements have changed and your understanding of the problem has also changed now that you have experience building your old and busted version 1.0.

Imagine you were still using a computer program built in the 70's. Those computers took us to the moon and back! They can do amazing things. But you do not want to try to compete in today's market with them.

The same is true with current schooling in America. It cannot be fixed by more money, in the same way that throwing more money at a broken engineering project (or a war in Afghanistan) cannot fix it. Watch this video, but start at 8 minutes in:

(https://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_reinvent_education)

If you've not watched this video, you're missing out on a great summary of the latest research in education.

Even the BEST SCHOOLS are now outdated, strategically broken in several ways only obvious in retrospect. Sal goes into it a lot better than I can here, but I'll point out things I've personally seen in my kids' (B-graded) school, with even with very good teachers.

1. The teachers have to teach to the lowest common denominator.
2. Even doing that, students don't completely learn one concept when they have to move onto the next. (This is the bike analogy from the video).

People think that that Khan Academy is about the website, which it is not. It is more about proposing a revolutionary way to do education as a whole, with the website as one implementation of the idea, the way Word is just one kind of Word Processor but there are others available, with similar concepts behind them.

There are simple things you can see that they take advantage of from the science. For example, you cannot move forward to take a "mastery challenge" on KA without waiting for a day after you do the practice questions. And you have to get 10 right in a row on the mastery challenge to pass it. You can do one thousand questions, and get the last ten right, or just the first ten. Either way is fine.

Those two simple features are the result of a small advancement in educational science. This is why when teachers prefer i-Ready, I watch my kids do it, and I can tell that i-Ready is inferior. It may have nicer graphics, but it doesn't take as much advantage of the things we know are proven to work.

The apple tree in Eden.

Sal Khan also talks a bit about the "Gifted" program. The key strategic issue he addresses in the video is that your "best" students one month can be the most "behind" the next month, although because learning is a tree structure (see above) even that is a bad abstraction.

In conclusion: Having great teachers is not a solution for a broken system. Working the kids harder and harder with more and more homework is not a solution. A complete revolution in education is what you need, and what you get from your school, no doubt, is excuses. I enjoy watching everyone, teachers and parents, complain about Common Core. But without realistic universal metrics, you can't even see the problem. Stop whining about it, teach the kids better, and you don't have to worry about a once a year automated test.

This is rated "mostly true", but is inspirational either way.

Video example of Headsprout -> Blending.

I've mentioned HeadSprout before, because I think it works (for boys and girls), but I wanted to demonstrate a three year old learning how to blend. WITHOUT PAIN. The goal of this blog is the painless-for-the-parents part of the technique. Boys are hard enough to raise without having to be turned against your own kids by your teachers and society in general.

Anyways. Watch this video, then tell me that's not easier than sitting with them being frustrated because they're looking into space thinking about Minecraft.

People like to think that the major benefit of computer aided learning is that "Kids like being on computers more than they like teachers" but it's not. There's been some real science that's gone into teaching kids, and the phonics we learned is not the modern phonics teachings.

Above, you see he is learning "fl" and "ee" as phenomes. He does not know "e" as a single character yet. Just one example.

Teaching Boys to Read with less Tears

Boys have, in general because I like to make broad generalizations as a hobby, no desire to please or impress you. My friends with girls have the ability to act disappointed, and their daughters will be all sad and actually try to do better next time. This is so foreign to me I don't even know how it would work in practice.

There's two things I think work very well with boys: Headsprout and Comic books.

Headsprout is basically Rosetta Stone but for learning how to read. You just say "You get to play 10 minutes of a video game after you finish your Headsprout" and then you watch them to make sure they are following along and they'll pick up some basic skills. The real magic is after they've learned how to "blend" (combine letter sounds into a word, as opposed to "sight reading" a word). Then Headsprout pumps them all the way up through reading comprehension and gets them into about fifth grade reading level effortlessly.

Click here to sign up: https://www.headsprout.com/

Let me sell you on the 100 bucks with this comment: Headsprout has infinite patience and you don't. As long as you make the child do it every day, it works well.

The second trick that works well is comic books. Not the newer comic books, which are extremely adult in both topics and art. But the older ones that date from even before our generation. The originals. Because they share characters with the modern movies your kids are already aware of them and interested, and because they date from before it was OK to show kissing on TV they are all safe to buy your five year old.

"I'm old. My webs smell like prunes and irony."

Suggestions:
Complete Calvin And Hobbes (Super effective but WILL turn your kid a bit into a monster)
Older X-Men Books Are Always Good
Older Spider Man is Still Great (Don't forget Spider Man is created because his dad dies, like Batman, so you may want to avoid the very first ones)

They even make comics about all the Greek Gods, which are quite good:
Zeus

Once they can read you get them Joss Whedon's X-Men books, which are amazing for both adults and kids and probably the best comic books ever created (he also created Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, directed Avengers, etc.):
Book 1 + Book 2

An Addict's Guide to Video Games

There's going to be a LOT on this blog about video games. Why? Because they're super important.

Most parents view the time their kids spend playing video games as a failure on their part. And honestly, if you don't follow my simple rule, you are right, but it's probably not worth beating yourself up about.

Here is my simple rule: I don't let my kids play games that I don't play myself.

There's a huge difference between the kinds of games that stimulate your kids and the kinds that are basically poison. South Park summed it up perfectly in that most mobile games (especially the free ones) have as their main goal to be just barely fun, so that you're forced into buying "coins" or "gems". Good examples of this horrible genre are all the running games.

I've played through basically this entire game and  can't tell you why since every moment of it is the same. It reminds me of high school. 

This is possibly the least entertaining game of all time. I always root for the monster, which makes for short games.

Even Minecraft has two modes: super boring mode ("Creative") and a mode that is basically too hard for children ("Survival"). If you've never PLAYED Minecraft yourself (which is weird) let me describe it for you briefly. 

You start out with nothing but your hands, and have to punch down some trees to get wood, which you can make a crafting table with, and then a wooden pickaxe. Using your wooden pickaxe you can harvest rocks from the ground, which you can then use to make stone pickaxes and swords and such. 

After deforesting the local area like an Aztec you can make torches and go deeper into the ground (all the while being hunted by skeletons and zombies and spiders) to collect iron, which is pretty rare so you'll spend hours digging to find it, while killing pigs and cows for food like the anti-vegan god you are, which you then have to cook using wood you cut from even more trees, if there are any left. 

This is a SUPER hard game. It is FAR too frustrating for kids even in easy mode because the conceptual tree of actions is so open ended. Take an hour and try to play it yourself and see what I mean. Then uninstall it forever and move your kids to better games.

Here are some games that are pretty good for all ages and do not have, at their root, the core goal of getting your kids mindlessly addicted to them.

First of all: If you are reading this blog, you've probably not heard of "Steam". Steam is an online marketplace for video games that will install on your Windows, Mac, or a special box you can attach to your TV like a console. You are going to want to install it. Think of it as the "Whole Foods" of video games. Are you going to go shop at Publix for your kids' brain-food?

There are very few games worth playing on mobile devices. It is a sad fact of life. There are a few, but they are not going to be free, so you'll have to invest in the good ones.

The Cave

Hilarious puzzle game with great voice acting. For kids 7 and up. 

Store Links: Apple Android Amazon Steam

Reading skills not required for this game.

Stay Alight

A worthy puzzle game. No reading required. 

Store: Android Apple 

Don't Starve

This is the game that Minecraft is under the covers. But it is EASIER for kids to understand without the block mechanics. Also it is FUNNY. Basically this game is better than Minecraft in every way.

Stores: Apple Steam

Reading skills may be required for this game. 

Team Fortress 2

Stores: Steam

This game has cartoonish violence, fast paced play, and is for kids 5 and up. It will play even on older, underpowered machines, and is free. 

The secret behind this game is that unlike some of the console shooters that it LOOKS like (CounterStrike,  etc.) it is really a strategy and math game. This is the game I am addicted to, as the following for this game is vast.

There's a online mode (which my kids play as I don't care if they hear bad words or ruin my online reputation by actually being good), or you can have them play against bots. You don't need to read to play this game, but it helps.

Keep in mind after a while your kid will be connected to all his friends at school via Steam. With one click he can play with them online, which is a huge motivator to get his homework done on time.

Star Control 2

Store: Free Download for Mac and PC

This game is great fun for about age 6 and up. You have to be able to read to really enjoy this funny and involved RPC+Space Shooter from my childhood.

Old games are super great for kids. I personally learned how to spell from playing Zork, which is online here. Some of these games are hilarious, but some of them are also a bit hard for kids. You might have to help. But you don't have to beat the games to get value out of playing them (aka, free reading and typing exercise for your kids).

I always attempt to eat everything in Infocom games. I am an Infocom glutton.

 GWOP

This game is famous for being...nearly impossible. But still super fun.

Store: Browsers with Flash

Nico Suggested DragonBox, which theoretically teaches your kids to do Algebra:

http://www.dragonboxapp.com/

This similar game is by SeanBaby, one of the funniest people on the Internet:

http://www.calculords.com/

Ok, so now your kids are addicted to better games. Now what? 

... Khan Academy.

MAGIC GUEST POST BY BRI: A Lil' Nanny Perspective

Hi, I'm Bri. This is my guest post.

When I'm not walking in the door to the sound of roaring and stomps that sound like an elephant rampage (by that you probably think I'm talking about the 3 young boys but in fact I'm actually talking about Dave, chasing the kids around the house with loud roaring sounds and his hands up in the air like a gorilla.) - I actually get to have front row tickets the Aitel show. Which I have to admit, is my favorite show.

There's a handful of moments when I have come out of my bedroom on the verge of laughter tears because of things I overhear Dave saying, and then laughing at himself about. For example, a 9 year old who is strongly upset over not being able to play a video game finds it completely necessary to tell his father how it feels about it at the top of his lungs from the shower. Dave has a very simple solution: "get a job and move out." - that's what made me giggle a bit until Max then responded: "I want my own computer so I can play video games anytime I want!" - I then spit out my drink when I heard Dave say "I'm going to make you go outside and build a computer out of sand." Dave: 1 Max: 0

If it's not forcing the children to watch (in my opinion, very awesome) nature shows, he's dropping facts about the human body, insects, teaching Chinese swear words, wrestling them to the floor and telling them to get over the pain, he is explaining that it's too late/you didn't earn video game time but then at the last minute saying "hehe ok guys I'm gonna play the game now! Bye!"

DAVE WINS EVERY TIME
#blessed to have won the tickets to the Aitel household

MIC DROP
xoxo B

The fucking basics: Sitting down to do homework.

One thing I've heard a lot of single mothers say over and over is "Why won't my son sit down and do his homework like I used to."

Only one has his hands in his pants. A RARE MOMENT.

That is the first step of failure right there. First of all, no boy has ever sat down willingly in his whole life. I can't even get mine to sit on the couch to watch TV. Even to this day, when dating, women want to sit for hours and talk in a bar or restaurant, but frankly, I'm going to suggest a change of venue after an hour just so I can get up and walk somewhere else.

Guys (and your boys) hate sitting. They're not going to sit for dinner. They're not going to sit to do homework. They're just not going to sit ever. Get a table high enough for them to stand at when they do their homework and don't fight a battle that you can't win before you've even gotten them to put pencil to paper.

When boys get frustrated, they are going to jump up and down in the air, twist around, and otherwise be all over the place. You can't stop it and you lose ground every time you try to. Your goal is just to get them BACK to the table, not try to keep them there the whole time.

Look.

"This is so fun! YOU CAN SENSE OUR EXCITEMENT FOR LEARNING!"

Ok, this the first post, and so to give you some idea what this blog is about, let me put it this way. Most teachers have had parents come in CRYING about trying to get their sons to do homework. And because of how the world works and it's unfair, I know I know!, if you get divorced and you have a son you are probably the one taking care of taking them to school and educating them at home.

As a single father, I feel your pain. But I have an advantage! I have the male brain. As you've noticed, from watching your friends with their daughters calmly learning in class and doing their homework without being told, the male student is a gremlin of pain when it comes to education.

But let's fix this. I will tell you all the male secrets that I use when teaching things to my three boys. The goal is not to make them geniuses or valedictorians. The goal is to keep you sane. This is going to be harder than it sounds.

I call this classroom study "Daddy trapped a cockroach and put it outside so you can torture it to death."