I confess that I have lost track of the various blogs called variants of "TCS". That's TCS as in "Taking Children Seriously" rather than Tech Central Station, to cut the complications down just a little.
But whichever TCS blog this one is, I recommend, for whatever that may be worth, this article about how to treat and raise toddlers by Alice Bachini. It's obvious that Alice has personal experience of all this stuff. She doesn't like using her individual children as characters in the dramas she writes about, Lileks style, but I don't think I'm giving away any big secrets if I say that I have from time to time watched her do the kind of thing she write about in this piece, and that I was impressed.
I'll leave it at that, because my day is stacking up, and I have about twelve blogs to attend to. Well, not nearly that many, but on days like today it can seem so. Don't be surprised if nothing else materialises here, but if not, I'll probably try to put up more over the weekend, which I don't routinely promise to do.
Although, there is time to mention that in another bit of the other TCS empire, I also found this. It's about starting a school. Alice would not approve.
Have a good weekend.
Category: Free market reforms • Parents and children
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Lileks is back, and I think the pause may have caused him to contrive a bleat in his head over a period of days which has a more than usually penetrating sound to it.
I don't get all the American local stuff. I don't know who Adriana Lima is, what is so special about a '57 BelAir Convertible, the exact point of driving to Rio, or where Rio is. But I agree with the following. He's talking about the Gay Bishop they've just chosen over there, amidst great fanfare. Apparently before moving in with Another Man, the Bishop had already got himself a wife and kids.
This story has irritated me from the start, and it has nothing to do with Rev. Robinson’s sexual orientation. The guy left his wife and kids to go do the hokey-pokey with someone else: that’s what it’s all about, at least for me. Marriages founder for a variety of reasons, and ofttimes they’re valid reasons, sad and inescapable. But “I want to have sex with other people” is not a valid reason for depriving two little girls of a daddy who lives with them, gets up at night when they're sick, kisses them in the morning when they wake. There's a word for people who leave their children because they don't want to have sex with Mommy anymore: selfish. I'm not a praying man, but I cannot possibly imagine asking God if that would be okay. Send them another Dad, okay? Until you do I'll keep my cellphone on 24/7, I promise.Who are you to judge? is the standard response, and I quote Captain James T. Kirk when asked the same question by Kodos the Executioner: who do I have to be? I’ll tell you this: my nightmare is losing my daughter. The idea of leaving her on purpose is inconceivable, and I don’t care if Adriana Lima drove up the driveway in a '57 BelAir convertible, tossed me the keys and asked me to drive her to Rio, it ain’t gonna happen. I made a promise when I married my wife, and I made another when we had our daughter. It's made me rather cranky on the subject of men who don't stick around. They're letting down the side. They're reverting to type. They're talking from their trousers.
I know, I know, his daughters love him & support him now. So what. Hitler’s dog went to his funeral. (No, that doesn’t make sense, but it’s my favorite wrench to throw in conversations this week.) If he’d cast off his family to cavort with a woman from the choir, I’m not sure he’d be elevated to the level of moral avatar – but by some peculiar twist the fact that he left mom for a man insulates him from criticism. It’s as if he had to do it. To stay in the marriage would have been (crack of thunder, horses neighing) living a lie, and nowadays we’re told that’s the worst thing anyone can do. Better to bedevil other lives with the truth than inconvenience your own with a lie. Right? If others are harmed in the short run, eventually they will be happy because you’re happier. Right?
I don’t think it works that way with little children. I don’t think they understand why Dads leave – and so they make up their own reasons and spend years looking for evidence in other people.
As I'm fond of saying in all kinds of contexts, hypocrisy is an under-rated vice. (See my comment, which says that a sportsman who used to be naughty but is now saying: be nice!, is better than a sportsman who was naughty and still says: be naughty!)
It is commonly said that children are impossible to deceive, and that therefore if you are unhappy they will realise it and want you to rearrange things and be happy. They will want you to abandon them. Rubbish, rubbish, rubbish. Children are extremely easy to deceive, and the deception typically lasts, as Lileks explains, even if the attempt to sustain it is abandoned (along with the children), and long after it has been abandoned. Children absolutely do not want to be abandoned.
Maybe the fact that I agree so strongly that one should not abandon children for man/trouser reasons is why I don't yet have any children and I suppose may never. What if your child isn't a Gnat child, but instead some terrible sticky, whiny, unlovable, unloving, resentful, IQ damaged, medically mucked-up and hence financially ruinous, un-Gnatal mess? I'm too frightened of the permanence of the change, of the limitlessness of the responsibility, the way I suppose some men who do get children only realise when it actually happens. Or don't even then.
A friend of mine recently told me that he was coming out (again) as straight, as both, that is to say. Fair enough, in fact fine. He's young, with no children. He's getting all that stuff sorted first. Quite right.
Make bed. Maybe the bed is right immediately. If not, remake bed until it is right. Then have children. If that means three gay guys adopting or contracting out the pregnancy, fine, whatever. But then: lie in bed. Do not have children and then remake bed.
The other day my super-intelligent friend Alice, whose judge of a good blog is infallible, I've always thought, recommended a particularly fine culture blog , and while rootling around at it I found this, on the educational power of the internet:
For now I just want to give the Internet a pat on the back. The Internet, I think, is very good, which I did not think of first, but which I am now thinking with particular thoughtfulness.I was once a failing architecture student, and as regulars here now know, I remain a (st)architecture fan. But until recently, I despaired at the cost of keeping up with it all. Keeping up means you had to have pictures, and pictures on paper are just too expensive, and too bulky to share a flat with if you get at all serious.
Until today, I had no idea who Santiago Calatrava was, or about that beautiful footbridge in Bilbao. I am, in short, thanks to the Internet, catching up.
I dined with Michael Jennings last night, and he was likewise raving about how much sheer stuff the average bright fifteen-year-old now has at his finger tips, compared to the time when he was a bright fifteen-year-old, searching through inadequate libraries for dumbed down books about whatever it was, that as likely as not weren't there at all.
And who, pray, is Santiago Calatrava? That's no the point, apparently.
… the real point of this posting here is not Hurrah For Calatrava. It is hurrah that I was able to learn about the guy, and so amazingly quickly.About fifteen minutes ago, I knew nothing of him. Then, the daily New York Times email, and I'm straight to the op-ed piece linked to above. Google search: "Santiago Calatrava". Bingo. Now I've done about half an essay on him. Education or what? I am myself back to being a bright fifteen-year-old.
I couldn't have put it better myself.
Yes, alright, alright. Settle down. All the Infrastructure Problems here at Brian High have now been sorted out, so everybody sit down, pay attention, and stop mucking about. You over there, stop that at once.
My thanks to the two members of staff who worked so hard to solve our recent problems, Mr de Havilland and Mr Singleton.
Sometimes I wonder if you people appreciate just how much work is involved in educating you all.
It is not likely, but it is possible that there will be some kind of service interruption here, nowabouts. I am switching from one host to another, whatever that means exactly. But I am being helped by these clever friends of mine, so all should be well.
But if there is trouble, I may be prevented by it from telling you about it, that it's not you it's me, and that you are a wonderful person and that you'll find another education blog ... So I'm telling you this now just in case.
PS: Whether or not I do vanish, have a read of this. When I next get a string of free moments I'm going to.
I've just caught these people advertising themselves on the television. Are they any good?
That's "Computeach", IT teachers since 1964. I'm never convinced when people claim to have been doing something "since" whenever. All it tells me is that they want you to think they're experienced, but not that they necessarily are. After all, was it the exact same people? And if it were, would that be good?
Here are two ways of seeing this.
One: the British economy is on the up and up, and more and more people want to get with the new economy.
Two: the British economy is on the down and down, and more and more people are now unable to get real jobs doing this stuff and so are desperate to teach it instead, and will take very poor money to do it, so it's all got a lot cheaper to learn, so come and get it. Please. Oh all right then.
Still, TV adverts cost, and this advert at least suggests that someone thinks this will make money rather than just chuck it away. You don't very often see education adverts on British telly. And if the economy is on the down and down, teaching and learning this stuff is no bad way to react.
