Last week, New York City’s Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT) took place—a single exam with the power to determine entry into the city’s most prestigious high schools. For years, this test has sparked fierce debate: is it an equalizer, giving all students a shot at academic excellence, or a gate that keeps out minority students and prevents equity? With Black and Latino students making up 68% of NYC’s public school population but only about 10% of those admitted to specialized high schools, many see the SHSAT as a symbol of the system’s failures.
You walk into the field and see a group of children huddled around a fire pit. They’re having fun, performing strange rituals, singing odd songs, and building a community. What do you call this? Summer camp. If the songs are in Hebrew and the rituals are thousands of years old, then you’d call it Camp Ramah.
Summary: Kids do incredible things. Instead of trying to teach them as little adults, give them some tools and flexibility and see what they create. They may not do what you expect, but it’s fascinating (and funny) to see how they think.
When we switch to and from Daylight Savings Time, I start to question reality. I realize that things that we take for granted, like what it means to be “5 o’clock” can be changed by fiat. It reminds me that things that I see as solid and unchangeable are just human constructions.
I’d always thought of dice as being fair. Like flipping a coin, I’d assumed that a throw of the dice was random. Then I learned about nontransitive dice and it blew my mind.
Nontransistive dice are a set of dice that don’t behave in the normal way. Even though each die has an expected value of 3, some dice are better than others in 1:1 matchups. Just to make things even stranger, there’s no set of best dice, just like in the way that the game of “Rock, Paper, Scissors” has no best move.
A few months ago, I wrote about how Alexa and Google Home are used in our house. In my experience, these devices are a better way for kids to use the internet than a mobile phone. A phone becomes an extension of a person, isolating her from the group. Interacting with Alexa is more of a family activity with Alexa acting like another person in the room.
Some people think it’s odd to treat Alexa humanely. As a machine, she doesn’t have any feelings. But think about the way we refer to Alexa. It feels more natural to refer to Alexa as a “her” than an “it” because that’s the way we interface with her. And if we interface with her as a person, we should be polite and say please and thank you.
I keep trying to find great movies to watch with my 8 and 5-year-old sons that are fun for all of us. The Princess Bride is one of the best. It’s a great movie for adults and it even has Peter Falk as the narrator grandfather to keep the kids engaged.
Today my son Blake started telling me that “Today is Opposite Day!” and then said things like “I love doing my homework. Just kidding. It’s opposite day!”
I told him that he couldn’t possibly be telling me that today is opposite day. If it were opposite day and he was telling me it was opposite day, then it wouldn’t be opposite day. And if it’s not opposite day and he told me that it was opposite day, it would be opposite day. It’s a cycle that never ends. Formally the sentence, “This is opposite day” is neither true nor false and therefore is undefined.
The Infinite Circle of Opposite Day
This, of course, prompted his friend Gabe to try to explain it all to me. “It’s complicated,” he said, “you see, if we say it’s opposite day then we would say that it’s not opposite day to mean that it really is opposite day.” But I didn’t find this line of argument compelling.
Blake tried a different tack, “We can say that Wednesday is opposite day.”
“Yes,” I said, “but you can’t say that on Wednesday.”
This is an ancient logical paradox called the Liar’s Paradox which often takes the form of “I am a liar” or “This sentence is false.” Because the sentence is self-referential and negative.
I figure it’s never to early to teach the kids about logic and paradox. It also makes Blake be more specific about opposite day. The inherent problem with opposite day is that kids randomly choose which items are opposite and which are not (e.g., the sentence “It’s opposite day” is not negated). Now he needs to say “If it were opposite day, I’d say that I love doing my homework.”
In our home, we have a rule that there are no phones at the dinner table. We do this so everyone is paying attention to each other — not their phones. When a person has a phone at the table, it lets them be alone, even if they are sitting in a group. It gives that person a superpower to transport their mind to a completely different place. People are alone together (per Sherry Turkle):
Teenagers Alone Together
When you have an Amazon Echo or Google Home, that is another entity in the room. Some people are worried about how kids are being rude to Alexa and how they will bring this rudeness to their interactions with people. I think this is a red herring. It’s much easier for kids to deal with a free standing AI like Alexa than trying to teach children how to deal with a human being combined with a smartphone.
When the iPad came out, many of the reviews highlighted how useful it was for children. It’s the same way with voice assistants. The kids will do a lot of exploring. You’ll want to lock the machines down these down to prevent purchasing everything on Amazon. We’ve learned a lot from our kids’ explorations, most interestedly that there are songs called I Pooped and Diaper Baby.
For reference, our setup is two Google Home Mini’s that are each next to a Chromecast. We also have an Amazon Echo in the dining room table.
Some other things that we use the voice assistant for:
To check the weather
To play music
For the kids to watch their TV show on Netflix
To turn on and off the TV (Chromecast + Google Home)
As an intercom (between the Google Homes)
Update (2/10/2018): There’s a great video about politeness and Alexa called Southern Alexa.
Every King Holiday has been a national “teach-in” on the values of nonviolence, including unconditional love, tolerance, forgiveness and reconciliation, which are so desperately-needed to unify America…. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is not only for celebration and remembrance, education and tribute, but above all a day of service.
So on this Martin Luther King day, my family and I participated in the Time of Good Day of Service. We visited an elderly homebound woman as part of the Dorot program. Dorot is a great organization that partners professionals and volunteers to enhance the lives of the elderly. They do a number of programs but the ones that are most relevant to us are the visits to the elderly around holidays. This is a great way for the kids to learn about charity — and there are relatively few charitable events that kids can participate in.
In this year where people are becoming more divided, it’s great to go and meet a stranger, learn from them and take part in our shared humanity.
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