Below you will find pages that utilize the taxonomy term “parenting”
- kudos:
Kiddo is coming with me to class this afternoon, which is fun—but complicated by the fact that my lecture today is the most controversial and ‘adult’ of the semester for this class. Still, maybe a kid will have important insight on controversies surrounding content moderation?
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Kiddo after waiting and watching patiently while I filled out ballot at early voting: ‘I have to admit, that was pretty fun!’
why I put email back on my phone
- kudos:Since the beginning of COVID-19, I’ve been dismantling a lot of my productivity and organization systems, trying to put less pressure on myself to get things done and be more mindful in how I spend my time. Several months ago—I cannot remember exactly when—this culminated in taking email off my phone and pivoting away from the excellent Things 3 task management app to a more paper notebook-driven approach to keeping track of what I need to get done.
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Using the Stardew Valley soundtrack as a chores anthem seems to get kiddo more excited (or at least less resentful) about helping out around the house.
beating Super Mario Galaxy 2 with kiddo
- kudos:About a month ago, I blogged about the approach we take to playing video games around here, which is to check out old games from a local library and play them on the Nintendo Wii we liberated from my parents’ basement a couple of years ago. Earlier this week, that approach bore some fruit: After repeated cycles of keeping the game out as long as we could, returning it for a couple of weeks, and then checking it back out, kiddo and I beat Super Mario Galaxy 2—a game several years older than she is for a console that’s been around for nearly as long as her parents have known each other.
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Especially proud of kiddo’s growing sense of humor when it involves successful wordplay. Tonight, she went from ‘my legs are wobbly’ to ‘my legs are wallabies,’ and it was great.
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Kiddo’s response to our complaining that we’re also tired: 🎶’When you’re a kid you get to sleep, but now you don’t, now you don’t!’ 🎶
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Lego to discontinue Mindstorms robot line after a 24-year run | Ars Technica'
- kudos:Noooo! I was just blogging about wanting to get into this once my kid’s a bit older! link to ‘Lego to discontinue Mindstorms robot line after a 24-year run | Ars Technica’
thank you, Seymour Papert
- kudos:This morning, kiddo was pretending to be a robot, so when I needed her to switch her attention from, say, getting dressed to brushing her teeth, I’d have to pretend to “reprogram” her before she’d cooperate. This got me wondering if she was maybe old enough to try some basic programming activities—something like LEGO Mindstorms. I think that she’s probably still a bit young for that sort of thing, but it made me excited about doing this sort of thing in the future.
ClassDojo and educational 'accomplishment'
- kudos:As kiddo’s school year has gotten into full swing and mine has gotten busier, I’ve spent less time griping about her school’s use of ClassDojo. However, I’ve also become increasingly annoyed at the fact that the weekly update email I get from the company always has the subject line “What did your child accomplish this week?” The body of the email is divided into two sections: The number of “points” that my child was assigned, and the number of “stories” that my child appeared in.
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Just wrote in an email that the worst part of academia is when my breaks from school don’t line up with my kid’s. I wrote it flippantly, but I don’t think I’m too far off.
old video games, libraries, and xkcd
- kudos:There’s a great xkcd strip (see below) about someone who always plays video games on a five-year lag because you get to enjoy all the good games with less of a hassle: I love this strip for a few different reasons. First of all, I’ve never been a hardcore videogamer, so if I do ever play a big title, it usually is about five years after the fact. Second, I think there’s something about it that gets funnier (or else makes me feel older) over time: It’s funny to think of someone only discovering Portal in early 2013, but now that “five years late” is almost “ten years ago,” there’s something kind of absurd about the strip.
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It’s September, and we’re on our second cold of the school year. 😩
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Kiddo’s classmate thinks our ridealong setup (which attaches a third wheel and second seat for kiddo to my normal bike) should be called a tricycle. I love it, but it enrages kiddo for reasons I don’t get.
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This afternoon, kiddo tried to walk out of the library to the car without stopping her book, which makes me optimistic about her development as a reader.
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‘If there was a dimension where they didn’t brush teeth, I would want to live there.’
putting my work where my whining is
- kudos:Early in the school year, I signed up to be a parent representative on one of the Site-Based Decision Making (SBDM) committees for kiddo’s school. I had already started being a rabble-rouser about ClassDojo and some of my other edtech concerns, and I wanted to show that I could put in work where my whining was: That is, that I wasn’t just going to complain about things, but that I was going to show support for the school by helping out where I could.
data privacy and kiddo's school
- kudos:In addition to all the irritating ClassDojo stuff going on at kiddo’s school, I’ve also spent some time banging my head against the wall made up of two forms: One to opt out of FERPA directory information sharing, and the other to opt out of kiddo’s information being shared with media outlets. I’m too tired tonight to get into all the details of what’s been going on, but the short version is that there’s no (clear, easy) way for spouse and I to request that kiddo’s name and image not be shared on school social media without also insisting that kiddo’s name and image not appear in innocuous things like… a school yearbook.
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When I was in school, I’d frequently get stressed about whether I was sick enough to warrant staying home. The idea of making a “wrong” choice in either direction was frightening. Anyway, it turns out that anxiety extends to making that same decision for my kid.
some thoughts on platforms and 'community'
- kudos:I’ve thought a lot about “community” in online spaces over the course of my (still-short) academic career. Early drafts of my dissertation had a lengthy discussion about the benefits and disadvantages of Étienne Wenger’s community of practice framework (which emerged from Wenger’s work with Jean Lave) as compared to James Paul Gee’s affinity space framework. From a research perspective, I tend to prefer Gee’s space-focused perspective and agree with many of his arguments for why it makes more sense to use that language in an online setting.
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The parent of one of my (college) students this semester was previously the (early childhood) teacher for my kid. Funny how these things happen!
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Besides explaining Star Wars stuff, one of the greatest perks of parenting is pulling out board games I haven’t played in years because kiddo wants to try them.
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‘What’s going on in the movie when this [the Imperial March] is playing? Are the Stormtroopers trooping?’
parent agency and edtech
- kudos:I’ve been blogging about ClassDojo enough over the past few weeks that I think it’s time for a quick recap before sharing some of the latest developments. I heard about ClassDojo being used schoolwide back in late July and started wondering what approach I should take as both a student’s parent and an edtech researcher. On Monday of this week, I talked to kiddo’s teacher about it and wrote up some thoughts the next day about teachers’ diminished agency in the realm of edtech.
- kudos:
I hate myself for creating a ClassDojo account, but kiddo’s school is going all-in, so not sure I have the choice. First observation is how confident the app is that it can make me pay extra for free software I don’t want to use in the first place.
emailing principal about edtech concerns
- kudos:I really will get back to blogging on other subjects sometime soon, but here’s an email I just sent to kiddo’s principal raising some concerns I have going into the school year. I’m not sure what will come of this—and I’m not at all sure this was the right email to write—but in the off-chance it’s helpful for someone, I thought I’d post about it here. Dear Principal [so-and-so],
schools' Acceptable Use Policies and R. Sikoryak's 'Terms and Conditions'
- kudos:Kiddo starts at a new school on Wednesday, and I’ve been putting off signing the Acceptable Use Policy and Chromebook Policy because I want to read them carefully. I don’t know how much I can do about anything that I’m really concerned with, but I’m a tech researcher when I’m not being kiddo’s dad, so I feel an obligation to be informed and raise a fuss when something is fussworthy.
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Kiddo is encountering face cards for the first time and is incensed that Kings rank higher than Queens. “Why can’t they be equal?!” Proud that she recognizes sexism at her age.
being a student's parent as an edtech researcher
- kudos:Kiddo starts at a new school this year, so we got the chance to all go as a family today and get introduced to everything. Kiddo got to meet teachers and other kids while we filed into a meeting to fill out a ton of paperwork and learn about how this school does things. For years, I’ve been wondering when my research in educational technology (and, increasingly, critical research on social technologies more broadly) were going to become relevant as a parent with a kid in school, and it looks like it’s going to be this year.
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Trouble is a dumb game, and I will never own a copy, but if it kills some time with kiddo at Grandma and Grandpa’s when I’m too tired to play anything more imaginative, I guess that’s fine.
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I will never grow tired of hearing kiddo say “sand hanitizer.”
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I have been making efforts to introduce kiddo to both Mario Kart and ABBA, so I am very proud that she now makes the Koopa Troopa / Super Trouper joke on her own.
(re)introducing kiddo to Wallace and Gromit
- kudos:When I was growing up, our family had a three-VHS set of the original Wallace and Gromit shorts, and while “Wallace and Gromit fan” was never at the forefront of my identity, I have always loved The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave. Naturally, things that I loved as a kid are near the top of my list of things to introduce to kiddo. I showed them to her a couple of years ago—probably near the beginning of the pandemic—but she had no memory of them, so this weekend, I had the pleasure of reintroducing her to the series.
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Saturday morning dad biathlon: Solo walk and run for latest couch to 5k session then 7 mile roundtrip on bike (kiddo on ridealong) to play at local playground.
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One of the most prominent joys in recent parenting has been discovering that the same Jon Agee who was writing palindrome and wordplay books when I was a kid is still at it—and watching kiddo enjoy them even more.
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Je suis deçu de ne jamais avoir réussi à enseigner le français à ma fille, mais je suis quand-même content que cette langue reste un moyen de communication secrète entre mon épouse et moi.