351–360 of 434 posts
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Mmm...tricky. Is it okay for the school to contact you when your child does not show up at school?
School attendance is a legal mandate and you are financially responsible for serious fines if he doesn't. So yes. This is very different from telling you what he talked about at lunch or what he read in the library.
I'd say that the bar for home schooling is set pretty low.
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I could be wrong, but I think PTSD can be induced with images. The Hiroshima/Nazi photos were powerful because they were such a rare display of extreme violence. (At least, that's how I remember feeling when I first saw them.) Plus, their impact was lessened because they were grainy, old, and black and white. Would you be OK with kids today seeing a modern mass grave -- bodies hacked up, heads cut off, etc.? Me, I'd…
If there was a decent chance of standard internet gore causing PTSD, then it would be an epidemic . Most kids have unfiltered unsupervised access to the internet (particularly now in the era of portable internet connected devices), but they seem to be turning out fine. I think it is good for kids to see photographs of modern atrocities and war crimes. I wouldn't want them to make the mistake of assuming that is somet…
I'm not going to defend the PTSD hypothesis in particular, or that it's important to be aware of past horrors. But there are real forms of trauma that only require seeing things, and it doesn't much matter whether it's in real life or a picture, only whether it's truly believed.
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> Since it is impossible to autonomously do payments on the internet before age 18, my parents' willingness to let me use their credit card I'm a high school teacher, and I teach some intro programming classes once in a while. I teach primarily low-income/ at-risk students, and this is one piece of the puzzle that keeps my students from gaining more real-world experience. It's a hard issue, too, because you can rack…
>That said, there is plenty of learning you can do by building your own server. I've thought about that, but it really seems to be more expensive and less useful. DigitalOcean is $60/year and already has a server-grade internet connection. I could build a $500 server and host it illegally on my Road Runner connection (256kbps upstream) but that'd be inferior service for a lot more money. >It's a hard issue, too, beca…
>Parents are warned to keep kids off the computer This point cannot be overstated. I'd never have been a hacker without vast quantities of unsupervised, unfiltered internet time around age 9-12. The largest enabling step for me was when I got my own laptop which I was free to break (software-wise) and free to take into my room so I could focus away from the distracting noises of the kitchen/living room. Much of even…
I don't agree. Having unlimited access to technological resources is great, I don't think anybody is denying that. But with unlimited net access also comes extremely violent videos, social networks with all kinds of shady types hanging around etc... I really don't think it's responsible to let a 9-12 yo alone on the net in their room. Enabling them to access the net easily while still supervising what they do, giving…
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Excluding the more privileged sometimes seems worse than the bias which excludes the less privileged? That doesn't seem to make much sense to me.
While I don't agree with your assessment of privileges, let's look at it in another way: should boys be artificially constrained so that they don't outperform girls (and I am not implying boys would outperform girls, just that that is what society seems to think)? If you offer a robotics course only for girls, but not for boys, this is what you are effectively doing. You may end up with a better gender ratio, by prev…
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Which feminist told you to dress or look a certain way? No doubt, there are feminists in the margins who think that way, but the vast majority of feminists I’ve ever met or talked to would be absolutely abhorred and disgusted by someone telling you how to dress or look. That’s certainly what I think. Gender policing is disgusting. I’ve real trouble integrating what you are saying with what I’ve heard feminists say ab…
>Which feminist told you to dress or look a certain way? In my experience, feminists are more obsessed with making sure other women are dressed "correctly" than just about any other demographic outside of conservative christian republicans. Have you never read an article by a feminist about X or Y movie character is demeaning to women because she dressed too sexy, or wore something that the feminist herself would nev…
Dress and body policing of women is a reflection of misogyny, of which women and men both participate. However, it is definitely wrong to do so whether one considers themselves feminist or not.
> Have you never read an article by a feminist about X or Y movie character is demeaning to women because she dressed too sexy, or wore something that the feminist herself would never wear?
Media representation criticism != body policing of actual people.
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You don't. It's Java. It's like a kid asking you to build a car engine from scratch day one. We kindly point them to our Scratch class as a way to learn how to program.
So what? My kid went to summer camp for Java graphics/game programming; he had a middle school semester of Python before that and nothing else. He wasn't the youngest in the course, either. Java is not that hard. In fact, because it's so explicit (and wordy and boilerplatey), it might even be easier than some of the alternatives.
When those kinds of kids want to make Minecraft mods, we start them at the beginning, with Scratch.
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Well, I'm glad I didn't come to the wrong conclusion. It's too bad, though, because Minecraft modding got this kid really excited, and there are many (maybe millions) like him. It seems like it could be a really fruitful area for work. Actually, when I was looking through stuff for him, I found a project that implemented Minecraft bindings for JavaScript with the aim of creating a friendly environment for kids. The a…
It is a shame that Minecraft modding is so horrific because, as you say, it would be a very powerful motivator to get young people involved in programming. Even the RPi Minecraft appears to lack information about modding: http://pi.minecraft.net/