Author: TechyDad

Christmas Traditions Old And New

Holidays

Today is Christmas day.  I hope everyone that celebrates Christmas has a wonderful holiday.  I happen to be Jewish, so I don’t celebrate Christmas.  Even though I don’t celebrate the holiday, we still have some Christmas traditions that we tend to follow.

First, we watch the Christmas day parade.  Often, I’ll work on Christmas day.  (I can take that time off another day and tend to get a lot of work done without a lot of incoming e-mails or phone calls.)  Finally, though it might be a bit stereotypical, we go out to a Chinese restaurant for dinner (or at least bring Chinese food in).

This year, we’re adding a new Christmas tradition.  I got into Doctor Who late last year.  Soon afterwards, B got into Doctor Who.  Finally, after some tempting using a book titled When’s The Doctor, the boys became addicted to Doctor Who.  Every year, Doctor Who has a Christmas special.  Not only is this our first year watching it together (live or DVRed as opposed to "catching up"), but it’s going to be an extra-special episode.  Matt Smith is stepping down as The Doctor and Peter Capaldi is taking his place.  So my boys, B and I will see our first live (or DVRed but viewed soon after the live showing) regeneration.

What Christmas traditions do you have?

To Do List Prioritization

Family, Fatherhood, Parenting

To-Do_List_smallOn Sunday, I had so many things that I needed to do that I couldn’t keep track of them all.  Out came my trusty To Do list app of choice (Out Of Milk) and before long I had a list of 10 things I needed to get done.  By the end of the day, all but 2 were done.  Those remaining two were put off for another day since they involved shopping and we feared the pre-Christmas crowds.

After dinner, I sat on the couch with my boys and watched some television.  I only managed to get in a half hour before duty called again.  This wasn’t on my To Do list, but it should have been.

There are so many things that I "have" to do that it all-too-often seems like I have no time for the things I want to do: Like spend time with my boys or go on date nights with my wife.  Real life has a habit of butting in and pushing the things I want to do off the list.

I realized that I always want to have "spend time with my family" on my to do list.  Even if it’s just watching TV for a half hour.  The "need to get done" items can wait until this "want to do item" is checked off my list!

Conflicting Messages To Santa

Holidays, JSL

Santa Claus didn’t factor heavily into my life growing up.  He’s appear on countless holiday specials, and would be sitting in malls waiting for children to sit on his lap to ask for certain Christmas presents.  Being Jewish, I didn’t care for the Christmas specials and has no interest in siting on a strange man’s lap.

In fact, my feelings towards Santa didn’t end at indifference.  On Christmas eve, I would ask my father to light a fire in the fireplace.  I wasn’t intending this to be a signal or a warning to Santa Claus, but a trap.  I was actually hoping that Santa would somehow forget that we didn’t celebrate Christmas, would come down our chimney, and would get roasted.

Five years ago, my nephew came up with this idea on his own.  Yesterday, JSL brought home a letter that he wrote to Santa as part of a school project.  (I’ll leave aside for now that he was told to write a letter to Santa in his class when he doesn’t celebrate Christmas.  That’s a completely different subject.)

santa-letter

Here’s what he wrote:

Dear Santa,

I don’t want you to get stuck in the chimney so here is my advice: Don’t eat so much not healthy food on Christmas or on any other day.

Love,

JSL

JSL seems to want to help Santa out, not have him burned alive.  A much different sentiment expressed than the one I had for Santa when I was young.

Don’t Take The Plagiarism Short Cut

Internet, Life, Parenting

writeIt was bound to happen eventually.  We sat NHL down by the computer so he could type out sentences to his spelling sentences.  As I was preparing dinner, I looked over and saw one of his sentences.  Only there was a problem.  It was way too advanced a sentence for him to have written.  I asked him and he admitted to having looked up words on Dictionary.com to be sure of their meaning.  While he was there, he noticed that they had the words in sentences.  Just what he needed.  Copying them would save a lot of time, right?

I knew then and there that it was time to introduce NHL to another word: Plagiarism.  I told him that he couldn’t just copy someone else’s work and try to pass it off as his own.  First of all, the assignment was for him to write out sentences.  Copying someone else’s work is not fulfilling the assignment.  Secondly, the purpose of the assignment is to learn how to use the words that he is being introduced to.  Grabbing sentences from the web isn’t teaching him anything.  Third, stealing someone else’s work and passing it off as your own isn’t fair to the original author.  I asked NHL how he’d feel if someone stole something he wrote and told people they had written them.

Sadly, too many people don’t learn this lesson this young.  Some go through life thinking that passing someone else’s work off as their own is perfectly acceptable.  Others learn their lesson later in life when the consequences are more dire.  These consequences can range from public shaming to losing your job or being kicked out of school.

In a way, I’m glad that NHL tried to plagiarize so young as this lesson is an important one to learn as early as possible.  Just like with Google Image Searches, text on the Internet is not free for the taking.  It can definitely be tempting, but you can’t just take text from Wikipedia or another source, use it in your own work.

NOTE: The "pen paper" image above is by aungkarns and is available from OpenClipArt.org.

Math ala Common Core

School

This past weekend, NHL and I got our eyes checked.  As we needed new glasses, we picked out new frames and they rang us up.  After adding in frames, taking off what insurance covered, and accounting for co-pays and add ons, our total was around Twenty Two Tens dollars.

If you are scratching your head wondering just what type of figure this is, let me back up a bit.

I was helping NHL with his math when we came to the last two problems here:

common-core-math

It took me a couple of minutes to realize what they meant.  When they say 98 tens, they really mean 980.  When they say 893 hundreds, they mean 89,300.

The problem is that nobody in the real world speaks like that.  When I said that our glasses cost 22 tens, you probably thought it was some kind of weird typo.  If you were looking at a car, the dealer won’t quote you a price of $150 hundreds dollars.  They’ll call it fifteen thousand dollars.

So why are they framing the numbers in such an odd way?  To be honest, I don’t know.  Perhaps they want to stress the "tens place" or "hundreds place" with the numbers, but what they are ending up doing is confusing the kids.  NHL actually argued with me when I called 9,830 "nine thousand eight hundred thirty" instead of "nine hundred three tens" like he’s been taught in school.

As he encounters numbers in the real world, though, he’ll wind up being confused and will need to spend more time and effort learning the real-world method of talking about numbers.  Common Core purports to prepare students for college, but by teaching numbers in this manner, they are only preparing students (and parents) for nothing but more and more confusion.

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