Snack Shack Billy
September 19, 2012
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Meanwhile, in Maine…
The original, obviously inferior version, if you’re interested:
More Beatles Bolognese
June 14, 2012
6 Comments
My sons are up to around twenty-five songs that they can play together now. After dinner each night, my wife and I go for a walk around the neighborhood while they practice together in an unused bedroom. The plaster is falling off the walls rather nicely in there.
The nine-year-old is entirely immune to praise. If you tell him,”You played that really great,” he might say,”Yes, we did,” in his best Chance the Gardener monotone, but he’s more likely to start rambling about something he’s building on Minecraft, which is apparently what he’s thinking of the entire time he’s playing the drums. My older son teaches him the songs. They have become self-contained now. I used to give the little one a lesson at lunch every day, but it became superfluous.
They use Spotify and YouTube to find out what they need to know. Our children do not attend the public schools. I was amused –if that’s the right word — to read that the local schools hand out laptops to all the children, but are reconsidering allowing the children to fully use them for school. They’re thinking of blocking certain sites because the kids waste too much time there. Only a few websites, one being YouTube, were mentioned as needing to be blocked.
After all, what could an intelligent and curious youngster find on YouTube that’s worth knowing?
Yeah, We Home-School Our Kids. Why? No Reason. Next Question
June 13, 2012
5 Comments
[Editor’s note: The original video was removed by the author. I’ve substituted another. The original was from a High School in Hartford, Connecticut, and the students were even less informed than these kids are]
At 2:10, the young lady actually texts her answer aloud: IDK.
I give you, one more time, a six-year-old:
Keep doing you-know-what to that Public School chicken, everybody. It’s working out swell.
They Call Me Captain Kirk
May 21, 2012
38 Comments
I had a fascinating and edifying conversation with my teenage son recently. He’s homeschooled. None of his friends are.
He had been tentatively hired to play and sing at a public function. I would ask him, from time to time, about the particulars of the job. He’d shrug and say he was waiting for information. When there was less than a day left before the scheduled date, I got a little peeved when I got the same answer — waiting to be told what to do; who to see; when to go. I received a little education while sorting it out with him.
The person in charge was ostensibly an adult but is more like a teenager running in place on the calendar. I asked him how he was communicating with her.
-I left a lot of messages on her Facebook wall.
-Facebook! Facebook? Why don’t you email her?
-No one has an email address, dad.
-Really?
-Well, they might, but they wouldn’t look in their inbox and answer you. There’s a part of Facebook that takes the place of email, though.
-Well, why don’t you leave one there for her?
-I left a half-dozen there. There’s no way to tell if anyone is looking at that.
-Why don’t you call her on the phone?
-She’s like my friends. She doesn’t know how to answer a phone.
-What do you mean? They all have $500 phones.
-They don’t know how to answer them.
-How can that be?
-They all are iPhone type slabs and they have to lock them so they don’t butt-dial 911 and their mother twenty-five times a day. They can’t unlock them fast enough to answer them.
-Well, why don’t you leave them a voicemail and tell them to call you back?
-Dad, they have no idea how to use voicemail. All their mailboxes are full and have never been listened to.
-You’re making that up.
-I’m not.
-Let’s find the phone number for the girl…er, woman that you need to talk to and call it.
…the voice mailbox you’re trying to reach is full. Disconnecting.
-No one answers the phone?
-Dad, they text everything.
-But you’ve left “text” messages everywhere for your contact person.
-Texting isn’t for information, really.
-What does that mean?
-Dad, no one says much of anything when they text. It’s like a really elaborate handshake that goes on for a while.
-How so?
-A friend texts “hi.” You’re supposed to say “hi” back, but it’s bad manners to say more than hi, so that they can ask you how you are in little words without vowels in the next text, and keep the thing going for as long as possible. That’s why they don’t answer the phone, too, you can’t break the string of texting. Nothing really ever gets said.
-Well if all they do is text, why do they need iPhones? What can they do with them?
-Well, you could Google something, I guess, or watch a video, but they don’t.
-Why not?
-Watching even half a 240p video will put them over their data limit, so they won’t do it.
-Well they must do something with the screen.
-The girls all use it to look at Facebook, where they leave little text messages and ducklips phone photos for each other to look at while they text each other directly.
-Someone must be using the phone to talk on the phone.
-No, if you want to talk on the phone you use Skype.
-Now we’re getting somewhere.
-My friends all get laptops given to them at school, and use them to Skype one another.
-They Skype in school?
-No, the boys play flash video games during class in school, and the girls…
-No, don’t tell me — they look at Facebook all day.
-Now you’re getting it dad.
-They must use them for something to do with school.
-Well, they’re Apples, dad. They’re pretty much useless.
-Well, don’t they use them to read books or Wikipedia or something?
-No one in school reads the books, dad.
-Come on.
-Well, a couple of kids read all the books that get assigned. The kid that was homeschooled until last year does, I think.
-You’d flunk if you didn’t read any books.
-There’s a website they use their laptops for that tells you what a book says without reading it. I don’t know the name of it.
-Cliff Notes?
-I think that’s it.
-The teachers would catch them.
-I think the teachers know but don’t care because it’s no skin off their nose.
-So the kids just plagiarize Wikipedia for their work?
-I think the teachers have a thing about Wikipedia so they’ve found some other place to copy and paste from.
-Doesn’t the school block that sort of thing?
-Are you serious, dad?
-Yes, I guess.
– I guess they try that sort of thing here and there but it’s a joke. They tried blocking something at YouTube once, and the kids just erased the backslash on the URL and it went right through. The technical ability of the school is strictly Wayne Newton-fan level.
-What do your friends think about you?
-They call me Captain Kirk because my phone folds in the middle and I talk into it.
Behold The Birth Of Unorganized Hancock
May 12, 2012
14 Comments
I get all sorts of credit for these sorts of things but I don’t deserve it. Laissez faire. To let to do. Forget economics, it’s education that needs it. If you let them, they will do it. But one does guide. Show. Help. Encourage.
My neighbor is a very good teacher. He wrote a book about education
. I’ve read it several times now, because he gave me a big box of draft copies, hundreds and hundreds of foolscap pages. He didn’t give them to me to read; I crumble them up and start fires with them — but I read the pages as I go. An old habit. He would tell the kids to write whatever they would and could, and he’d edit their work, suggestions, really, kindly offered, and give them back and they’d have at it again. Not much of the kids’ work was very good, but it was all a lot better at the end than at the beginning. That’s teaching.
The Heir painstakingly taught himself to sing and play, and assembled some local friends and got them a gig in the park last year. One kid didn’t show up, so the Heir had to sing all the songs, but they made plenty of noise for just three guys. The audience made them play everything twice. They were in all the local papers. Then the other kids got together without the Heir and decided they didn’t want to play the songs my son wanted to play. They wanted to play parts of Aerosmith songs in their mother’s basement instead. That was the end of that.
So the heir assembled some other friends, and painstakingly taught them how to play the songs. They didn’t know how to play — or even own — their own instruments. Eventually they had a gig at the recreation center in a neighboring town. They did great, drew a little crowd, made a little money, and were noticed, and so were offered a chance to play in the the high school gym for a charity event. The Heir sang all the songs, and supplied all the equipment, such as it it. They were in all the local papers again. They were offered a job at the big fireworks show downtown on July 4th.
Then the bass player showed up and said he was going to play the guitar instead. He didn’t know how to play the guitar, but the Heir could show him, surely. By July. He’d got to talking to his friends and the drummer that played parts of Aerosmith songs was going to re-join.
But we have a drummer, the Heir says because he is loyal.
Well, the drummer doesn’t want to play the drums anymore; I asked him, and he doesn’t own any, anyway, and he’s going to play the keyboard instead. And my other friend is going to play the keyboard and sing, too. Between the two of them, they can probably play enough keyboard to sound like something. He doesn’t really sing, but how hard can it be, really? I’ve also invited the guy that didn’t show up for the first gig in the park to be a singer, too, and all of them together can sing parts of an Aerosmith song well enough. I guess. They never tried. And the bass player from the first band that never played again even once wants to be in this one now. Anyway, we don’t want to play those songs you like. You know, the ones the audience wants to hear.
But we have a job in a few months people are relying on us, the Heir says. We need to practice with the three of us, as hard as we can, or we’ll never be able to play for two hours in July.
But this is a democracy says the bass player.(er… former bass player, current guitar owner) Just because you sing all the songs and we practice at your house, and you teach us all the parts on all the instruments, and we use your equipment and your father brings it all to the job in his truck and your mother feeds us doesn’t mean you’re in charge. We voted. If you don’t like it, you’re out.
The Spare Heir is barely nine, and has been playing the drums for a few months now. I know Time magazine says he should still be breastfeeding, but we decided to let him play the drums instead. He said: I will play the drums with you, my brother.
Children get an education whether they know it’s an education or not. All these kids are learning lessons about all sorts of things, most only tangentially related to the music they think they’re learning. I used to work, for hard money, sometimes with and for very hard people, in the music business, but I could never have dreamed up this very useful curriculum in what the music business is like. Laissez faire.
The Heir is still friends with his friends, of course. There was no malice in any of it. The others never got together, even once, but the bass player with the borrowed bass said the drummer bought a third bass drum. Which is nice.
Tag: homeschooling
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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