Dadventure

According to the CBC, the Calgary Board of Education is beefing up their wireless networks in order to allow students access to the Internet in school. After reading the comments, it seems I am one of the few who believe that this is a good thing.

I’ll go beyond that statement, actually, to say it makes me feel profoundly sad to read the comments and see so many people think of the Internet as something that is unimportant and a waste of time. That the immediate thought of most is that students will do nothing but abuse the access they are given. Yes, some will. Yes, this move will not be easy and yes, it will require that some things within the school and teaching change. It will be disruptive, but in my opinion, we have no choice and the longer we delay giving students this kind of access in schools, the bigger we fail them.

In 1953, Child psychologist Jean Piaget wrote, “The principal goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done.”  We have moved far beyond a world where teaching “the basics” is enough. To not bring this type of access to students in our schools does a grave disservice to our children and their ability to work and live in THEIR world, not our world.

How do we teach students to become critical thinkers in an information age when we shield them from information?

I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that web is the greatest educational tool ever created, and to not figure out how to appropriately use it within education is amazingly short sighted. We need to help students figure out how to appropriately use this tool or else we risk abdicating it to the likes of Perez Hilton and mass infotainment. If educators do not stake a claim on the web, it will become exactly the devoid educational environment that those posting negative comments at the CBC site fear.

I am not naive to believe that this will be easy.  Teachers will have to develop new skills. New problems will arise that we need to find solutions for. New methods of teaching developed that exploit the affordances of technology. But as a parent, I will firmly support and actively advocate for the appropriate use of technology in the classroom for my children. And I will also actively support any initiative that helps teachers learn the skills to teach my kids how to appropriately use the web.

To the teachers who are pushing for access to technology in the classroom and running into barriers (and I work on the periphery of the K-12 education system and know many of you do run into resistance), keep up the fight. I am with you. And if you are a teacher who cannot understand or see the potentials of the web – who believes that the Internet is a useless time waster full of nothing but LOL and OMG, please consider retiring and opening up a space for teachers who want to teach my kids to live in THEIR world, not yours.

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I am not sure if The Girl is outgrowing her princess phase, but it certainly hasn’t been the focus of her attention in the past little while like it was at one time. That said, they are hard to ignore and Princesses still pop up from time to time. Like Patricia Coppard, we also try to expose The Girl to Princesses who don’t fit into the standard Princess stereotype. But it isn’t easy.

I once went to the public library with my daughter looking for anti-Princess Princess books – the kind with strong female characters who don’t end up living the Prince’s life at the end. I asked the librarian if she could recommend something that was about Princesses, but not the Disney kind. She could not recommend a single book. Even after I prompted her with a “something along the lines of The Paper Bag Princess, perhaps?” she still could not think of a book to recommend. So, after searching around the library ourselves, we finally found The Gypsy Princess about a young gypsy girl named Cinnamon who longs to live a Princess life until she actually gets to and finds it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Man, I wish I had Patricia’s list of recommended books that day because it looks like there are some good ones. So, if you are looking for a few anti-princess princess books, here are a few that she recommends, with a few of mine tossed in.

1. The Paper Bag Princess by Robert Munch
2. The Gypsy Princess by Poebe Gilman
3. Princess Smartypants by Babette Cole
4. Sleeping Bobby by Will and Mary Pope Osborne
5. The Princess and the Packet of Frozen Peas by Tony Wilson (Patricia’s personal favourite)
6. Princesses Are Not Quitters by Kate Lum
7. Princess Pigsty by Cornelia Funke.

Care to add to the list? What is your favorite non-princess princess book?

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When you are 6 and 3, there are a few truths. White milk tastes better in a pink cup. Peas can never touch the potatoes. And on Christmas Eve, a fat guy in a red suit will somehow squeeze down the chimney and leave presents under the tree.

If there is one thing my kids believe in with absolute conviction is that something magical will happen on Christmas Eve. There is not even an inkling of doubt that what happens 6 days from now will not be real. The fact that Santa couldn’t be real is inconceivable – a possibility that has never entered their consciousness.

For weeks now, the talk around our house has been of Christmas. Of the family and friends we have coming, of the meals we will prepare, of the parties we will be going to. All of this is adding to their excitement level. They are vibrating with anticipation.

When The Girl was born my wife and I struggled with the mythology of the season. Is it okay to lie to your kids? Because, window dress it all you like, it is a lie.

It’s a struggle Chad at Vancouver Parent has been blogging about in an  excellent series of articles which has provoked tons of response, including some supposedly from kids who stumbled across his article in Google and had their world shattered. Chad, I don’t think you need to lose sleep over this one. It’s an inevitable fact that they would have found out anyway.

In the end, our decision was that childhood is a place where fairies and magic, bunnies that leave chocolate eggs, and fat guys who bring toys exist. In the culture we have grown up in, this mythology is part of of what makes childhood special and unique. The absolute conviction that this stuff is real is a big part of “the magic”.

In my twenties I spent many years working in commercial radio. During that time I grew to despise Christmas. Christmas just meant I had to work twice as hard selling people stuff. I spent countless hours locked in a voiceover studio pumping out commercial after commercial. My on location work tripled, and  Christmas Eve was often spent on location at various businesses around town trying to do a last minute pitch jobs on sweaters and stereo equipment, only to pick up the pitch on Boxing Day. By the time I hit 30, I was done with Christmas, and with commercial radio.

Since then Christmas has slowly became a more meaningful time of year. But it hasn’t been until this year that I have truly felt that mythical “magic” of the season. It feels like when I was a kid, and I attribute this to the fact that my kids are entering their peak Christmas years. They get it, and their excitement is infectious. I find that I am anxiously looking forward to a 6am wake up call to witness the magic unfold.

I am mindful that this will only last for a few years. The Girl is smart. She asks questions. And this years unwavering belief could become shadowed next as she spends more time with peers and in school with bigger kids. This may be the only year where they both live with the absolute reality that magic still exists. And I am going to soak it up.

As tough as the lifegrind sometimes seems to be, I know that when I am a drooling old fart these are the days that I will look back on as the best days of my life. And part of that is tied to the fact that I am feeding off the excitement of my kids. They are making this a magical time of the year for me, too. I am having so much fun with them as we all get swept up.

You see, in the end, it is really all about me. Selfish old me. I tell them the lie because I want them to believe in the magic because their belief is MY magic. It ’s a magic that weaves an intoxicating spell over me and sweeps me up in tides of gushing sentimentalism.

The lie is not a lie we parents tell our kids, it’s a lie parents tell to ourselves because we want to believe. We want these moments to be pure and sparkling and live long in our memories. The lie becomes a device – an excuse we use to generate the energy and the excitement that heightens all senses, which helps to indelibly burn these shared family moments into our memories for years.

This year, for the first time since I believed the lie myself, I do believe in the magic of Christmas because I am living it with my kids. And that is why I am happy I told the lie.

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Jim over at Sweet Juniper has created one of those wonderful posts that somehow manages to encapsulate exactly what being a Dad is.  A funny, sweet, sad, frustrating, and intimately poignant snapshot of a day in the life of one Dad.

I can especially relate to the moment he shares with his daughter who, after throwing up on his laptop battling a norovirus, reacts like I could imagine mine doing. Just when you think you know what you are being called on to do as a parent (in this case, make your kid comfortable while they battle a bug), parenthood throws you a small curveball and you realize that you are being called upon to do something else entirely.

I go into my daughter’s room to kiss her goodnight and find her sweating under blankets. Her best friend has lately found other kids he’d rather play with at school, and in her sleepy state that’s the first thing on her mind. Through her dream haze she says to me, “It’s good that he wouldn’t play with me today; I might have made him sick.” Here I’ve been worried I upset her with my reaction to what happened, but heavier things weigh on her tiny heart.

“I just want you to know that I love you, and that my computer isn’t broken after all.”

“Okay, Pops.”

“And don’t you worry about him. He doesn’t know how much fun he’s missing.”

A few lines later, musing about his angry reaction to losing his laptop, he says;

But how could you be mad at her? You might as well be mad at the wind.

Later on, an event happens that puts losing your laptop to a kid vomiting on it into perspective, and presents another reality of what parents are called upon to deal with, in this case it is Jim’s Mother-in-Law. Here’s hoping the follow-up post has some good news with regards to that situation.

This is wonderful writing, and a post that every soon to be Dad should read.

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Update December 12, 2009. looks like the video has been pulled.

Like most people there are certain movies that I watch every year during the holiday season. A Christmas Story, Scrooged, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, and It’s a Wonderful Life.

It’s a Wonderful Life, in particular, seems to have a real cultural relevance today. Not only are the themes of the movie timeless (the importance of community and the power of one), but the setting for the movie seems so contemporary considering the events of the past year. While we in Canada have been somewhat shielded by the financial turmoil south of the border, the past years financial uncertainties have certainly rippled across the border. Considering the movie is well over 60 years old, the story of corporate greed, failed banks and financial institutions, and foreclosed homes is the stuff that we are, sadly, read about everyday.

The entire movie is available online or watch it below.

via Open Culture’s list of movies you can watch for free online.

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