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Wow, those photos are AMAZING! And I loved this post. It made me smile so much – the thought of your kids on the phone to tech support, you giving them your credit card – but mostly, that you seem to be enjoying it all :)
(Oh and Terraria is great!)
Our loss of a belief in magic is an impoverishment of the soul. All too commonplace, sadly.
There’s lots of things I enjoyed about this post, but most of all it is beautiful to remember with you what it is like to stumble upon the everyday magic of life – and be able to see it for what it is!
When it comes to the discussion of computers and the myriad of operating systems and programming languages available to perform operations on them, a depiction of the Tower of Babel is appropriate.
Sugata Mitra put computers in a wall in a poor area of India and the same thing happened. It is a super inspiring TED Talk for anyone wondering if kids can learn on their own.
http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves.html
What a great link. Thanks. It’s so difficult to explain to other parents, in a convincing way, why I believe kids learn fine without curriculum. But when I see experts talk about empirical evidence, I feel encouraged to keep trying to have those conversations.
Penelope
Beautiful.
Thank you, I needed this.
Trust. Yes.
On a very side note, if they like Terraria, they should probably be watching the development of a game by the same people, Starbound. http://playstarbound.com/
I’m curious as to them playing Terraria, when people complain that it’s just a knockoff of Minecraft and that’s what they were playing before I recall? (I played Terraria first, funnily enough.)
I read your blogs and agree with most of what you write, but I really struggle with your notion of unlimited computer time. How would you apply this to teenage boys? Mine use the computer to watch utube videos of movie trailers, porn (soft, due to filters), and Facebook. That’s pretty much it, and you would be amazed by how many hours in a day they will commit to these pursuits. I wish they would use their brains to DO something on the computer rather than passively consume, but they aren’t really interested in games or projects of any sort. (At the onset of their puberty their father and I tried our best to monitor and direct their computer usage in the hopes of developing good habits, but it was an exhausting, losing battle. At 15 and 17 they now seem too old for us to manage their computer time.)
I now have a couple toddlers and I’m thinking I’m going to do things differently this time around. Any suggestions?
That’s the hard part: the urge to help them. To step in and save them. To me the hard part of teaching someone to do something is knowing when to step back and when to step in. It’s uncomfortable, even upsetting, because no one likes to see a child struggle. Honestly, I think we’re all a little afraid that if we don’t make the journey smooth for them they might give up.
The article says they dropped off Xoom tablets. Not ipads.
Love this story cause my parents did the same thing with our computer when I was a child. I spent about an hour on the phone with tech support to get the CD-ROM drive to work, and then when I hang up I come to find out that my step-dad could have fixed it but wanted me to have the experience of dealing with tech support!
It was a bittersweet lesson.