What, your kid doesn’t have 5 pairs of the same pants?
2 Likes
This is a sound idea. An incentive other than not being scolded might be good on my part.
1 Like
Yes it’s tough to remember to do more carrot than stick, especially when it’s like stop hitting your brother on the head with something, but it is definitely more effective. Just tough sometimes to have that extra emotional energy.
It’s amazing how effective it is with my 5 year old son though, who is a bundle of energy to the point where I’ll occasionally have him run laps around the house in the summer. You ask him to get dressed and he’ll be distracted by everything but you get him excited to win and he’ll be standing with his shoes and jacket on by the door faster than anyone.
2 Likes
She’s pretty much wise to me now, but when she was younger a challenge would often work with Mini Me. Especially when there was another adult to riff off of.
“Grandma doesn’t think you can be dressed and ready to go in the next three minutes but I told her you can. Don’t make me look bad!”
Or
“Daddy doesn’t think you’re strong enough to carry this, but I told him you were.”
Then of course when she inevitably succeeds the other adult can be like “WOW! That was fantastic!”
1 Like
The only way I can motivate my son to get dressed in fewer than 10 minutes (not being hyperbolic there, it’s literally ten minutes, the -I of his ADHD-I is on FULL display every single morning) is to race him. I have a lot more items of clothing to put on than he does and he never beats me (though sometimes I take extra long tying my shoes to let him win), but it’s the only motivator for him to get moving.
3 Likes
kid shared her first slate of grades from college. 4 A’s and one A/B in a class called “College Success”. I have concerns she might not succeed!
4 Likes
Does she have a major?
math. climate studies. looking at a minor in data stuff.
4 Likes
At school, my kid is allowed to be on Youtube and play Flash games, after she finished her work. This seems like a perfectly awful idea for a whole society that sees screen time as the devil. She has a new favorite, which is a chill ASMR style painting series. Very Bob Ross. Which seems harmless, but is also hypnotizing in a way that it feel not that harmless.
At least they don’t allow phones.
2 Likes
While I’m on my old man rant, I’m going to add, I’m freaked the fuck out about generative AI.
Either it’s going to grow until it overshadows our children’s accomplishments, or it won’t but it will still be a devil to educate our kids.
Why learn to art when you can just ask a bot to generate a picture that’s better than you’ll ever be able to draw?
And why learn to write or think or code when you can ask for an essay, outline, script, etc. on any topic or subtopic?
It’s just all so good. Too good. Too easy to cheat. Too easy to feel like you should be cheating… In part because everyone else is. In part cheating with AI can feel like doing the work. And in part because deep down, we can feel that the skills are becoming redundant.
1 Like
Maybe this is a controversial question, but does she need to learn to “do art”? And what is “art”? The arts are great, and all kids should be exposed to them, but not all will take to any artistic expression. And with the digital age comes digital art. I suppose with the invention of photoshop, it was believed that such a tool would devalue or destroy other medium, but it hasn’t. AI will never make artists out of non-artists, nor will it prevent artists from emerging, in my opinion.
Another controversial opinion of mine: Art is not about the ability to draw or paint or sculpt or write or… well, or the ability to make something pleasing to the eye/mind. A person who can sketch a photo into something that looks almost as realistic as the photo itself is not truly making art, although certainly they are quite talented.
In my opinion, art is the ability to create something that others can consume and feel it came from within their own selves, it pulls a reaction from us or identifies with us in some way. That’s why many of us will read a great book, hear a moving song, read a profound poem, etc., and think, “I could do that.” Because it feels like it originated from us in some way, and so we think we have the talent to do the same thing, created from nothing. But most of us cannot.
And separate from all of that, will your daughter still have access to art class, creative writing, music in school? Surely she will be exposed to all the different medium types there. Perhaps she won’t be inspired to explore those more, perhaps they will bore her. But if she has an artistic instinct within her, I don’t think you can snuff that, and she will explore it. But if you believe she will be working against her own interests, I’m sure there are schools and programs out there that will only permit exploration of those mediums and not utilizing AI.
2 Likes
Actuaries at one point had to develop everything from first principles, on paper, without a computer. Now we have actuarial software that doesn’t even require us to understand the principles to be able to use. Why do we have to know how to code something from scratch in order to be great actuaries?
The most important skill of an actuary (or engineer, or programmer, or data scientist, I suspect) is not knowing what to do, it is knowing how to ask the right questions. I’m not an actuary who can code, never needed it in my previous area of practice and moved into this one after I was in a leadership role. That doesn’t hold me back, and in many ways it gives me a unique perspective. I can’t tell you why something isn’t working, but I can tell you that it isn’t, and that comes from being developed to ask the right questions, not from learning the right code. And if I ever needed to code something, I would be glad to have AI to do it for me. It’s not diminishing my contribution, it’s elevating my role and allowing me to spend more time on the decision making and less time on the crunching.
2 Likes
My daughter is taking French at university, and taking it seriously. However, an essay of hers was flagged for containing vocabulary which she had learned in her own but which they had not learned in class. She’s also not allowed to use tenses they haven’t learned in class. Apparently many kids are simply asking AI to translate for them. So using AI to cheat has the further effect of restricting the students who are progressing on their own. I have no idea what the solution to this is.
4 Likes
Yep, I grew up with 4-12 hours of TV and video games a day, and still do. It’s uh… definitely great and not at all a drain on my very humanity.
It’s a nice line of thought. I can’t relate personally, because I find “insurance” really boring. I don’t ever want to think about it or talk about it. As you might imagine, this limits my career potential. 
I don’t code much either, but I live a lot of my life in Excel without ever thinking about high level stuff.
Anyway, let’s say there is some kind of “high level” thinking, and some kind of “low level” thinking. And maybe AI is coming for the lower level thinking. Here are my issues:
-
It might destroy the job market, because only so many people get to be the manager. Arguably “define the problem” is the most important, but it also uses the least manpower.
-
It might still wreck the first 12? 16? years of education for most people. Because most people aren’t doing high level thinking for school. They are writing essays and solving science problems.
-
While I think in some ways people very much overestimate what AI can do right now, I think we also underestimate what it will do. Specifically we assume it’s going to be bad at a lot of “human” things, like asking the right questions. In practice it is only sometimes bad at them.
There is little you can do about coursework. I would allow them to use AI and ding the ones that overuse it.
They will however get found out come exam time. The smart ones will do fine here.
The youtube and flash games thing is really not a good idea by the school.
Phones are completely banned at our school except for the IB students over 16 (they kind of treat it as a responsibility. If you abuse it they confiscate and you lose the priviledge).
The school does however assign work to be done at home via a tablet (they use a few educational apps).
The little ones love having colorful tablet covers. Here is the one our kid chose:
1 Like
I have cloned myself. My son wrote on the bottom of his weekly homework a note to teacher letting her know that he did the WHOLE thing the first day he got it.
5 Likes