If the sticker shock keeps up, you will need to award it posthumously…
Blaming technology is turning the blame from the people truly responsible. The parents. Your kid spends too much time watching TV? Whose fault is that? Who bought and paid for the TV and cable? I have lots of tech in my home. My two sons each have a computer, and have had their own for most of their lives. We also have game consoles and DVDs. But we also have guitars and pianos, kazoos, tambourines, bongos, maracas, harmonicas, fifes, and recorders. We have paper and crayons and ink. We have saws and hammers and wood. Gardens to plant and lawns to play on. And my wife and I made sure that the kids saw US doing those activities. If you lead, they will follow.
I play computer and video games myself. I can see how someone could spend far too much time playing them. That’s why I limit my kid’s activities on those items (its why I limit my OWN time), and have them do other activities. It’s why I have introduced them to music (one plays piano and the other guitar). I hear other parents complaining that they can’t get their kids to practice their piano scales, and my kids practice at least an hour a day. The difference usually is that the other parents don’t play, and I do. They invited a friend over on Saturday and they jammed for four hours straight. Not once did they play a computer or video game. They didn’t even spend any time texting on their cells, as they were all having far too much fun. They also didn’t take time to empty my fridge, for which I am truly grateful. Three teenage boys in a kitchen is a frightening sight!
The calculators required by middle and high school students are scientific calculators. Long division in the head is one thing (and is a skill my children have learned), but trigonometry and calculus is a bit more difficult without a tool of some kind. When I was a kid in those dark days just before Texas Instruments, we used slide rules. I still have mine right here (Sterling Slide Rule by Precision Scientific Instruments) on my desk as a reminder of the days before computers. But I stopped using it exactly when I got my first TI calculator!
I find it very amusing to read a computer forum where people are complaining about technology. I can’t be the only person who sees the irony of that, am I? At what point should we say enough? Before we cure cancer, or after? Should we have stopped at the Feudal State stage, or should we aim higher? Perhaps that golden nostalgic time in the 50s, where the cars had lots of chrome and June Cleaver looked so nice in her string of pearls, and the kids had crew cuts, father knew best, and the colored people used those fountains over there? Should the height of our technology be the backyard bomb shelter?
A recent study claims that there has been a rise in narcissistic personality disorder among the young. The 'I love me" generation has used self-affirmation and baseless pride to obscure and hide the epidemic lack of achievement and critical thinking that characterizes much of the younger generations.
Now before anyone goes thinking I’m criticizing THEIR prodigious progeny, there ARE some remarkable young people out there who are infinitely bright and offer great hope for the future. My fiancee is one of them, so I know that they exist.
But look at Facebook–the ultimate narcissist’s dream. You too, can let someone know that you have a new hole in our sock, or have just successfully found the perfect setting for the toaster so that it doesn’t burn our bagel. I’m practically on the edge of my seat with excitement…[whstl]
…or have just successfully found the perfect setting for the toaster so that it doesn’t burn our bagel. I’m practically on the edge of my seat with excitement…
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I can’t get my toaster to even TOAST the damnable bagel, let alone risk burning it. Perhaps if I were on Facebook?
I can’t get my toaster to even TOAST the damnable bagel, let alone risk burning it. Perhaps if I were on Facebook?
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Go to the “how not to burn your bagel” group page. lol to share your trials and tribulations. You too, will find fortitude and solidarity with others who share the same misfortunes and unfairness of life. [;)]
I agree with you on blaming technology, but I just think we may have come too far too fast. We strictly limit time on the PC to our Daughter and to some extent, ourselves. Marissa has been learning Trumpet for a few years now and is in her school band. She also helps with my kits sometimes and occaisonally does her own. But her BIG passion is art. And she is REALLY good. She wants to become an animator for Pixar or Dreamworks when she is older. I would love to send her to a good art college but I think she will have to do the local college thing unless she can get a scholarship. She has quite a few activities she enjoys and that’s a good thing. The problem is that there are too many parents who themselves were brought up with too much tech. A lot of the people in my generation didn’t realize the effect it would have on their kids so didn’t move to limit the time of use. They thought it was as cool as their kids did. So the behavior pattern carried over. I was lucky that my family was usually pretty tight on money. My Dad could give scrooge a lesson in economics. We never had a color TV up into the 80s. I had to save 2 years of my own money to buy my Atari 2600 (Sears Telegames System). Heck, I was 10 before I got my first bike. But you know what? I think it actually helped me become more balanced when I did get into technology. When I was in HS, I entered a local science fair. My project was a Helium Neon laser. I didn’t win the 1st place prize of $5000, but I DID win 2nd. Which was an Altair 8080 computer kit. Which I actually liked better. But even then, I was careful not to let the build and operation of it take too much of my time. And this is how I have brought up my Daughter (although we do have a color TV set by now).
I remember sliderules. I probably still have one kicking around here somewhere. I was in my Jr. year in HS when they allowed us to use calculators in a very limited way (only to check our work). I got a TI30 which is pretty much what everyone else in class had. But we could not use them to do the problems. Just to verify oru work. Marissa’s school is just getting into Algebra now and they tell them to use the calculators. I don’t think this is a good way to teach them math. So I spend quite a bit of time teaching her how to actually do it in her head.
Amazingly, we got her a cell phone for emergency use only, and she never uses it. I don’t think it a question of saying “enough”, but its a question of teaching ourselves as a society that we need to develop ourselves outside of our tech. We need to relearn lost skills and preserve them. And we need to limit the temptation to spend 48 hours straight staring at a monitor zapping our friend’s virtual dudes.
BTW, I hated crew cuts.
Rich
I totally agree. To put it simply. We are raising a population that is 90% spoiled rotten. I see my Daughter’s friends and I think “Thank the powers that be that Marissa is not like that.”
In the late 90s I worked for the US Forest Service and lived in a house at the station. One day a pig hunter drives into the compound and sets up a short distance from my house (I could have hit hiom with arock from my back door). I told him it was a government work site and he can’t hunt here, and he tells me “its not posted so F off”. Rather than get into an argument, I just pulled the fire engine out and “tested” the siren for the 10 minutes or so it took him to pack up and leave.
When should we say enough? When everyone owns a house with a picket fence, a car and there is a model kit in every pot…that’s when…
I often feel myself thinking that way, but then I realize it is too simplistic. It is not that the younger generation today has been ‘spoiled rotten’, though there are those that have. It is simply that, as our society has changed, what is important to them has also changed.
I think the most salient point that was brought up was not to criticize technology, but instead to be concerned about the pace of technological change. The rate at which things change in modern society has a disorienting effect…
lol. hunting next to the fire station… sheesh…
also… has anyone tried to help their kids with their math lately ??? wow… i have to read the chapter to figure out what their doing… I can get my own answer, just not the way the teacher wants them to do it…
the times they are a changing…
That’s the spirit! [:D]
Yup, my daughter (grade 8) came home with a sheet full of circles, cut into quarters, with a number in each quarter… with instructions to solve the equations… HUH? [*-)] Sure, when you give me an equation to solve, what’s with the screwed up pie charts?
mmmmm - pie, now there’s a hobby. No really, how many people can cook for themselves now?
You mean wealth, power and celebrity is something new?
I grew up with a classical Italian Grandmother. 
She was great. Learning to cook was not optional in my family. She started teaching us when we were old enough to hold a spoon. Man… Now I am having cravings for Lasagne
No, but the need to know who has contracted what from Paris Hilton on any given day… that’s new. And what the [cnsod] is a Beiber anyway?
I think it varies geographically, but home cooking is exploding with the whole foodie culture thing. My wife hits the famers’ market every weekend, she’s part of a local farm co-op that gives us a box of fresh vegetables every other week (for like a third what they cost in stores). We’ve considered going in on a meat co-op, but 50 lbs of assorted cow parts is a lot to store. We both cook frequently (I’m in charge of the grill and dishes), everything from basic tacos and burgers to last night’s green chile pulled pork over cilantro lime rice. In the last few years I’ve learned what the heck quinoa is, and that it’s pronounced keen-wa, not quin-noah.
My boss is a total foodie, runs a foodie blog, and goes to all the various restaurant tastings, hits every new food trailer that opens…
I think, like modeling, it’s a passion thing. The “passion curve” is flattening, with less people in that casual middle. Hence the explosion of foodie cooking alongside the general decline of the type of home cooking I grew up with.
Eh, celebrity gossip’s nothing new. Go back far enough and there were those persistent rumors of Caesar giving it up for the king of Bithynia. Or Burt and Loni. It’s just, like so much else, become a self-sustaining industry. That and Caesar and Burt Reynolds actually did stuff to justify celebrity status. I’m convinced Paris Hilton is a product of E!..
As for Justin Beiber…latest in a long line of teen hearthrobs who inevitably flame out and go nowhere, except for the 1 in 20 that reinvents themselves.
The more things change…
I think one of the barriers to new entrants to the hobby is the initial cost. Once one gets introduced and begins to look more into it a bit there is an overwhelmingly large assortment of tools and materials that one could feel like they must accumulate in order to build models. I myself was intimidated by the thought of getting an airbrush and compressor years ago.
But the majority of we older modelers started as kids where mom or dad would buy us a $2 kit and a .50 tube of orange testors and let us have at it. Paint and brushes didn’t come until years later. Then finally, as we became more serious about producing better looking models (and trying to reproduce what we saw in the new model rags) we moved into more exotic tools and supplies. The hobby came in easy to digest phazes that allowed our tool assortment to grow with our budgets and interest.
The hobby has changed a lot since then and so have people. I had HO trains and AFX cars back then. Today my boy has video games and computers. It don’t seem that people, no matter what the age, look at model building as an inexpensive kids past time today but an expensive adults hobby. And that’s simply not true. While the sky is the limit on what we spend it’s certainly not the rule.
Now lets change tracks.
For a number of years now it’s been known that some kids have abused the very materials we use to build our kits. Glue and paint have become a dirty name in some circles and I can imagine an overly cautious or worrysome parent may well forbid their kids to have access to chemicals they might abuse for a cheap high. In places like that it’s safe to say any interest in the hobby may get stamped out if for no other reason than just for the parent to play it safe.
There is a large and growing list of reasons kids and adults may avoid model building as a hobby and there could well be pages of text spent discussing them. In my own eyes there is a certain romantic quality in reproducing my fantasies in miniature plastic models. I spent hours and hours as a kid shooting down the bad guys in my very own imaginary Corsair and having a toy I made myself really helped seal the eventual hobby into my head. Had I had access to video games? I may well have never picked up that very first snap tite kit of a funny car back when I was six. Todays kids still have that lively and wonderous imagination that I did as a kid, they just imagine different things than I did when I didn’t have video games and ipods to distract me.
Heck, I never even saw the first Star Wars movie until I was in my twenties.
Very true—I mean there were those rumors about me at the “U-Boat Rehabilitation Centers” that persisted well into 1944…then there was that lingering rumor about me eating cats during the Stalingrad seige—wait, that was true…