Your five-year reminder that Selkie’s cell phone canonically still exists.
↓ Transcript
SELKIE: Grandpa, cans you show us how to do curvy stuff?
THEO: Been thinking over your chair design, huh?
SELKIE: Yeps!
SELKIE: I needs to learn mores about makings things, so I looked up chairs. I like the curvy ones.
SELKIE: You use a lathe fors that, right?
THEO: Very good! How did you learn that?
SELKIE: Internet!
SELKIE: Dad says I haves to do one educational thing on this befores I play games. I usually reads the news app.
AMANDA: I read the news once, the same day I failed a math quiz. Never again.
THEO: Been thinking over your chair design, huh?
SELKIE: Yeps!
SELKIE: I needs to learn mores about makings things, so I looked up chairs. I like the curvy ones.
SELKIE: You use a lathe fors that, right?
THEO: Very good! How did you learn that?
SELKIE: Internet!
SELKIE: Dad says I haves to do one educational thing on this befores I play games. I usually reads the news app.
AMANDA: I read the news once, the same day I failed a math quiz. Never again.
Real chairs have curves (that's a bad pun even by my standards)
Smart move, Amanda. Reading the news doesn’t lead to good things.
You could maybe find a good news site that is more accurate and less depressing, like astronomy or cooking. Reading the news about what they have learned about Jupiter and other planets has been really interesting the past decade or so.
Teaching kids how to properly understand sources, including what is a good source, and how to critically review something that is read is a completely different animal. Since the internet being for everyone was still sort of new when I was a kid (90s and 00s), I feel like they weren’t very well prepared for teaching kids what was a good source back then. A lot of “don’t use wiki” but not much else. Wiki can be useful to find terms to look up for further research, or if you are lucky, sources that they cited for further info. Not the best source, but normally still better than some random opinion article or blog about hearsay (my neighbor’s cousin’s aunt had this happen type of thing). I still swear by mendeley for doing citations in a research paper.
Good Parent Todd.
He would have an even better big brain move if he only allowed games that had some educational impact (I’m including things like pyramid solitaire in that since you can learn what all adds up to 13, so it isn’t as high bar as it might seem). Speaking of which, being able to read sheet music deals a lot with numbers. I think I deal more with fractions there than anywhere else in my life.