221–230 of 319 posts
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Dad of 8 here. It makes life so sweet when we acknowledge the child's capacities. Notice it didn't take that much patience...it's almost just a matter of creatively overcoming a language barrier.
Out of curiosity, did you mean you have eight kids, or your kid is eight years old? Because if it's the former, I'm impressed you have even one second to be on HN!
I hope my kids want to learn and are curious about how things work like the OP's kid! I dont want to be one of those parents that pushes their kid to the point that they dont enjoy learning or suffer socially. Asking for a future me: how do you give your kid the best chance / environment to develop socially, but still enjoy learning & embracing the nerdier things?
I sent mine to a Steiner / Waldorf school on the hope that this is more of a social / confidence building environment. Then I surrepticiously feed her inner geek at every opportunity I can find. My personal current favourite is Wild Kratts [0] which teaches a amazing number of things. Also we send my daughter to a violin school where they teach the suzuki method which has a fairly nerdy type of group of parents that…
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Dad of 8 here. It makes life so sweet when we acknowledge the child's capacities. Notice it didn't take that much patience...it's almost just a matter of creatively overcoming a language barrier.
If you do have 8 kids, that's amazing. I have 5 myself and most of the time I feel more like a zookeeper/riot policeman than a dad.
What is truly astounding about this is the patience to even attempt to explain free theorems to a 6 year old. Most parents would likely answer "math" and that would be the end of it. I don't (yet) have kids, but when I do I hope I have the wherewithal to recognize and take advantage of moments like these.
It's an immense amount of effort to do it consistently. And it gets harder with each kid, at least for me. One of the things you figure out is that some kids aren't interested. And if your kid isn't interested in thinking about prime numbers, you're going to be hard pressed to change that. Conversely they will have interests that you don't share, and it's going to be harder for you to participate meaningfully in that…
I grew up in a family with 7 kids and my youngest sibling is just 12 years old. I remember when my younger set of siblings were born, I was thinking "I'm going to teach them EVERYTHING I've learned at a young age, and they will be way ahead of their peers." I failed to grasp just how much of their personality is ingrained in them from their DNA and that they might not have all the same interests as me. It was a great learning experience though -- when I do have kids, I'm not going to try and shove my interests down their throat. I'm going to pay attention to what they are drawn to and give them as many resources as I can so they can pursue that interest as much as they desire.
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My teenage son is a musician and is taking AP Music Theory right now. I ask him to tell me about what he is learning, and he patiently tries to explain it to me, but I just nod along because I have no idea what he's talking about.
The gist of music theory: It sounds interesting when sounds with simple frequency ratios are played at the same time. E.g., playing a 440 Hz tone at the same time and 660 Hz tone has a 2:3 ratio. Some combinations of frequencies, when played before or after other combos can establish an expectation and then either fulfill it or negate it. E.g., if you take the ratio above and then play 440 + 587, it'll sound like it'…
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This sounds great! I remember teaching myself to read before I was supposed to (very standard Belgian education), and probably as a result I was from that point on always ahead of my classmates simply because I'm very curious. I tended to read ahead for subjects that interested me, and not really bother for those that didn't. Teachers were sometimes annoyed because they really didn't understand why I could do insanel…
Would you say that not getting the degree was justified, since getting a degree is 50% the display of having the intellect to the subject and 50% the display of having the diligence, persistence and discipline to finish something, which is one of the most important traits in the professional world. Not trying to be snarky, but genuinely interested. Did the "inability" to focus on things you're not interested in imped…
Taxes and administration: not that complex in Belgium so I can't say much about that, but I value correctness a lot and that makes my administration easy to do (I never ever postpone doing my taxes, paying bills, ...). I usually find a way to make things interesting too, by keeping my administration as digital as I can. I'm always an early adopter.
Exercise: I struggle with this. Once I get going it usually goes quite well (but always have to combine it with something that does interest me, for example running with "Zombies, Run!", a sort of interactive audiobook/running trainer combination), but tend to stop completely if I hit roadblocks.
Social life: maybe. I have a great core group of friends that I've known since high school but that's about it, and I am not great at forming deep bonds. I have some work friends, but not at the level that I'd invite them over for dinner on a random week night. It's not at all at a problematic level though. I don't really know. I tend to be extremely honest and open about basically everything, and that scares / freaks out a lot of people, so it's not easy to make new good friends.
If you want to chat more, feel free to message me on whatever messaging platform you like. My username is always Ambroos or AmbroosV.
I hope my kids want to learn and are curious about how things work like the OP's kid! I dont want to be one of those parents that pushes their kid to the point that they dont enjoy learning or suffer socially. Asking for a future me: how do you give your kid the best chance / environment to develop socially, but still enjoy learning & embracing the nerdier things?
[0] That's not to say that there's no correlation in the real world between parents trying to steer their kid to be more curious and the kid growing up to be more curious, just that there's no causation because both effects are caused by their shared genes.
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As someone who takes pride in having solved the first 100 problems of project Euler, I am slightly ashamed to admit that I probably spent as much time as your daughter to solve that. I got stuck thinking in integers, and quite quickly left the exercise as an oversight in writing the post (since X + y = even, X - y = odd is impossible for integers) 3 seconds into the first coffee of the day the realisation of my stupi…
For the posterity: {a+b=10;a-b=1} translates to {a+b=10;a=b +1}, thus the first equation is ((b+1)+b=10) giving (b=4.5), and from there we get (a=5.5).
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My teenage son is a musician and is taking AP Music Theory right now. I ask him to tell me about what he is learning, and he patiently tries to explain it to me, but I just nod along because I have no idea what he's talking about.
The gist of music theory: It sounds interesting when sounds with simple frequency ratios are played at the same time. E.g., playing a 440 Hz tone at the same time and 660 Hz tone has a 2:3 ratio. Some combinations of frequencies, when played before or after other combos can establish an expectation and then either fulfill it or negate it. E.g., if you take the ratio above and then play 440 + 587, it'll sound like it'…
Since then I’ve been thinking of a wikihow- or w3schools- like site that explains a CS50 level class online and can expand to reach Python, or Go or another language in depth. A second parameter to teaching is the pace - the speed of lecture and the steepness of the learning curve. Maybe we could structure a slow or fast paced versions of each module and the viewer can pick or customize a track for themselves. Is anyone interested in joining or contributing to such an effort?