Tag: the boy

The boy’s greatest enemy is himself. He isn’t self-aware enough to realize it yet.

He was working on his laptop going through the chapters to write a new program from his book. He had already worked through a bunch of minor problems with his code, basically stuff that he didn’t copy correctly from the book onto his computer. So by his standards, he was ahead of the game. Not having gotten so frustrated that he started getting mad at his computer.

It was shortly after that when the computer started giving him a little trouble. He was trying to save his file and the computer wasn’t responding as quickly as he expected. His frustration started building and I told him to just give it a minute. Unfortunately, he couldn’t contain himself.

The Wife told him to walk away at that point and that was when he snapped at her. I snapped back at him in turn. The Wife remained calm and tried to say something else. She never got to finish her comment because the boy rudely cut her off, assuming he knew what she was going to say.

That was when his compute privileges were revoked.

Things continued to get worse for him. He was mad because he felt we were being unfair to him. He didn’t understand what he’d done, he claimed because all he did was “say something.” He accused me of not listening to him. Finally, he attempted to stomp off up to his room.

He eventually calmed down, but he didn’t get his computer privileges reinstated.

For the now, his temper continues to be his greatest weakness. He makes all kinds of poor decisions under its influence including yelling at us, smart mouthing us and generally displaying an inability to contain himself. To some extent it has to do with his age, but it’s also a part of him as well. The Wife and I have to keep that in mind while he sorts out how to deal with it.

A few weeks back, the boy had a shift on the ice with his house league hockey team. One particular shift was telling, as it was clear from the moment he got on the ice for that shift that he didn’t want to be in that position.

He prefers defense. He’s thinks he’s pretty good at it. Personally, I’d rate him at probably a bit lower than he himself does, but that’s OK. More importantly, because of his own impressions, he tries hard when he’s out there and he tries to get better at playing defense.

So when the coach sent him out to play right wing for a shift, he responded predictably: he didn’t try very hard.

After that game, I asked him about that shift and he said the coach wanted him to try it out. He quickly added “I don’t like offense though, I’m not very good at it so I didn’t try very hard while I was out there.”

“Well, that much was obvious,” I recall replying at the time.

I wasn’t referring to him not being good. I was referring to him not trying. Rather than hammering yet again on how he should be doing his best whenever he can, I opted for the team approach. Namely, that he’s on a team and they are counting on him to try his hardest when he’s out there. If he doesn’t, he may miss an opportunity to help the team out or worse, his lackadaisical approach might result in a score for the other team because he wasn’t in position or skating hard for the puck.

He didn’t appear overly impressed with my impromptu lesson. I can’t say I’m surprised. In general, there seems to be a selfishness to the average 9 year old that is tough to crack. It can be set aside for short durations and the boy is as good as any at being surprisingly generous. But it quickly resurfaces, especially when siblings are involved.

One more life lesson for him to learn.

The boy’s favorite Christmas present is his laptop. It’s not a toy laptop loaded with educational games. It’s the real deal laptop, with a 64-bit Intel processor and 150GB of disk space. Size wise, it’s a netbook so it’s just right for him to set on his lap and peck away at. Best of all, it has Ubuntu installed on it.

The only thing I don’t like about it is the Unity UI. Bleck. But then, I’m not a big fan of UI’s like that. Extended Linux exposure will do that to a user.

The reason he got that kind of rig is because of his desire to learn to program. It’s hard to justify anything else for a kid other than a Linux box since tools, debuggers, editors, IDE’s and any language the prospective programmer could possibly want to work worth are readily available at no charge. If this machine had not been available I’d have converted some other machine, probably a chromebook, as I saw fit.

So he’s enthusiastically resumed his programming activities. In addition to the laptop, he received a “programming for kids” book on python. I was somewhat amused to see that the book’s approach was similar to my own. Namely, introduce him to the language and so forth and build up his ability to write programs.

I’ve come to realize this is a completely inappropriate way to teach a kid like the boy. He needs to see a program actually do something. He doesn’t care about variables and tuples and functions or object-oriented and classes and constructors or closures. He wants to see a ball bounce on a screen.

The book has a couple of simple games it helps the prospective programmer write. It takes the approach of building up the knowledge bit-by-bit until there’s a functionally complete program. Naturally, the boy skipped all that and went right to the part where the whole program is laid out. It’s a “bounce” program, a simple version of the game “Pong.”

I’ll admit to not initially being thrilled with his approach. But, there are plenty of programmers out there that have cut there teeth by reading code and learning how it worked that way. There’s no reason the boy can’t be one of those if he chooses. Most importantly, he was willing to work through it. He did try to see if I’d be willing copy it for him, since I “could do it faster.” I scoffed at the notion though, “I can’t learn how to program for you.”

I did have an “I told you so.” After he’d started writing the code, I told him he would have to debug the program. First, there were bound to be typos in his code and those would cause syntax errors he’d have to work through. Then, there would likely be some lines he missed, or mistyped so the program would fail at strange points. Thankfully, there was only 80 lines of code or so, so debugging it wouldn’t be to difficult a task.

Forty-five minutes later, he’d finished typing it and tried to run it. It puked.

So I helped him fix that mistake. “Do you think it will run this time?” he asked hopefully.

“No.”

And it didn’t. It didn’t run on the third try either. Or the fourth. Or the fifth.

To his credit, the boy maintained his patience. It was obvious he was in that excited state a programmer attains when their program is about to ready to take flight. It maintained his focus.

After we fixed the syntax errors, we finally got a screen to pop up. But it still wasn’t running. Once more, we slowly brought his little program to life. First a paddle appeared on the bottom of the screen. Then a ball appeared above it. Shortly after that, the ball started bouncing around and the game was working.

Through all of it, I tried to explain what was wrong so he’d learn something for the next time. For many of the errors, he’d have needed a better understanding of programming to solve. Regardless of whatever I tried to offer him though, his main motivation was to see it run.

When finally it worked, the boy was beside himself with joy. Literally, a smile from ear to ear. Here was a game that he had “created” and written on his computer that he could actually sit and play.

Since then, he’s gone back and started trying to do other things. Last I saw, he was trying to draw circles on the screen. Hopefully this little success breeds more. Perhaps the thing to look for is a book with various programs for him to copy and play with.

The main thing is he’s off an running.

The boy was working on a last minute gift for the Wife. He’d already picked out a couple of presents, but he wanted to make her something as well. So, he set to work on one of those rubber band bracelets that seems to have taken the world by storm. Perhaps its just our world, but for all intents and purposes, it’s the world.

He came home one day a couple months ago and was weaving these these rubber bands together with his fingers. He said a friend had shown him how to do it at school. Soon after that, the Wife had purchased a supply of rubber bands for making the bracelets and he and the lass would sit and string them together. Shortly after that, he got a “loom” for making even fancier patterns. Then we were seeing all the kids making the dang things. Since then, both kids have mastered several patterns and designs and will sit and work on them when the mood strikes them.

So the boy had worked out a hybrid design involving a “hex-a-fish” and a “star-burst” design together and was working on joining the two halves together. That’s when “disaster” struck. Remember, when you’re a kid, everything that doesn’t go exactly, perfectly, as expected is a disaster.

The boy, naturally, responded appropriately.

He grabbed the bracelet he’d been working on and threw it across the room. Then yelled about how the world isn’t fair and everything always goes wrong right at the end when everything is almost done.

The Wife and I both tried to calm him a bit, but it was little use. He was cranked up and needed to be distracted from it. He stomped upstairs to go beat up his bed, or something.

I then had an idea.

I went up after him and asked him to join me for a moment. We walked over to a book shelf I’d made for the Wife and I pointed to some inlay work I’d done on it. It was a straight line of alternating darker wood set into a piece of maple. The accent gave the book shelf a little bit of character that it otherwise would have lacked.

It also never would have been there if I hadn’t messed up while building the bookshelf. I’d cut a groove on the wrong side of that piece of wood. I was upset when I’d done it, but rather than hurl the piece across the yard and destroy the garage to vent my rage, I walked away from it. I showed it to the Wife a bit later and she came up with the idea for the inlay.

So I explained all this to the boy. I set it up by asking him if what he thought of that little bit of inlay and then went on to explain how it ended up there. I even concluded the entire thing with a nice pithy “And the only reason it’s there is because of a mistake,” which, given the circumstances, I thought was a nice way to try and give him a different perspective on his own situation.

I was feeling pretty good about myself at that point. It was just like the movies where the young child is imparted with some useful life wisdom by his parent and everyone walks away happy and better. Roll credits.

Yeah, right.

The boy, seeing I was done, got up and walked back to his room to continue doing whatever it was he’d been doing. I sat there for a moment, admittedly disappointed. I already knew life kids don’t accept these sorts of lessons quite so neatly and cleanly as we parents would like. But I’d hoped this would at least get some kind of reaction. Alas, it was not meant to be.

Some days it seems just about anything is enough to make the boy mad. It could be a project that he’d been quietly working on. He’ll come to a point where something will go wrong and he can’t solve it. His frustration quickly boils over to anger and it’s all he can do not to completely destroy the project.

It can be his homework. Lo be the problem that he doesn’t quite get and causes him to begin erupting in fits of furious erasing and a willingness to throw his homework into the fire.

It can be a request to help. If he feels like it’s unfair (usually because he thinks he’s being asked more than his sister, or some variation thereof) he quickly turns into an angry little hornet. The request could even be something that is regularly asked of him, but for some reason he’s deemed it an unsuitable moment to be asked this particular time.

His temper is one of the white-hot varieties. He makes no bones about the fact that he’s mad. It’s not uncommon for him to be willing to destroy something that he’ll likely regret doing so. Sometimes his anger is directed at himself and he becomes his own worst critic, thinking he should have dealt with something better or solved something quicker.

More and more, I try to respond to his anger with rationale and logic, or just a calmness to offset his own boiling emotions. That balance can be tricky though, since he’s not the only one in the house with a temper. I’ve, regretfully, let it slip on a number of occasions where we’ve ended up going head-to-head. I say regretfully because I don’t think it’s a good example to set for him and, unfortunately, I think those are the moments that leave a bigger footprint.

I suspect this is one of those traits he’ll have to spend time working on to curb as he gets older. For now though, he doesn’t have the resources to reign himself in and the Wife and I have to figure out ways to defuse him. Time will tell how big a problem it becomes for him.

The kids had a half-day today because of parent-teacher conferences at the school. I took the opportunity to cut cord wood. Let me just say that cutting, splitting and stacking cord wood in 20 degree weather is much harder than doing it in warmer weather. In fact, I’ve concluded I erred pretty badly in waiting for the cooler weather to come before starting in on the cord wood. For one, when fingers get cold, there is no way to warm them up and they just hurt. For two, there is no oxygen in 20 degree air. I was exhausted after an hour of work today. Finally, sweat freezes.

The kids arrived home while I was toiling away. I cam in for a quick break and the boy was holed up on the couch reading, while the lass was working on a paper. I went back out and decided to ask the boy for some help stacking what was left of the wood I’d split. He did so and together we finished up the project.

Shortly after that, we both went inside and the boy resumed his perch on the couch. I went to go shower up and noted that he was staring off into space as I headed upstairs.

When I came back down 15 minutes later, he was fast asleep. In the same position I’d left him in, just his eyes were closed. I can even imagine what he must of thought, “Hmm, eyelids heavy, I’ll just let them …. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ”

And there he remained for about 3 hours. So either he’s a bit sick and fighting something off or he’s going to wake up 4 inches taller tomorrow.

It turned out that today’s hockey tryout was for a new travel team the youth league is trying to put together. That meant it was actually optional for him since making a bigger commitment to hockey isn’t in the cards. We didn’t know that until after it was all said and done. He’s going to be going into a black belt testing cycle after the New Year and that will take a bigger commitment from him at the dojang. There’s only so much of him to go around.

It would be different if hockey was something he loved. On the way over to the practice, he mentioned the travel team and said unequivocally that he didn’t want to play any travel hockey. He also said he wasn’t looking forward to being on the ice for 3 hours. He liked hockey, but not that much. Karate, on the other hand, is a different story.

So he participated in the tryout and I thought I knew what to expect- a kind of half-hearted effort. I’ve watched him enough and seen his effort level when he’s really not into something and his body language makes it pretty obvious he is not focused on the task at hand. It drives me crazy, but I bite my tongue and remind myself he’s young. I once half-assed my way through some sports and eventually came around. I just have to trust he’ll do the same.

That’s what I expected, but what I witnessed was something else entirely. He was focused and alert. His body language screamed effort and paying attention and trying to compete. He performed the skating and puck handling drills as well as I’ve seen him do them. Then they had a scrimmage and I was really impressed. He hung back and played an aggressive defense in front of his goalie, moving towards the puck, keeping it away from the goal. He even pushed a couple of pucks up the ice when he had the opportunity and scored on one of them.

It was really enjoyable to watch. His competitiveness had clearly taken over and it brought out some of his best effort and hockey play.

When it was all done, I told him I thought he’d done really well. I even kidded with him a bit that if he didn’t want to qualify for a team, he shouldn’t have played so well. Naturally, he took it in stride. After 3 hours on the ice, he was tired, cold and hungry. We headed home to take care of all 3 of those.

The Wife returned from her business trip with a crick in her neck. That’s a “crick” like a sore spot in her neck, not like the proper pronunciation of the word for a small stream that’s spelled “c-r-e-e-k.” The crick is a nasty little muscle spasm that I suggested she put some ice on to help start breaking it up.

So the lass retrieved one of the ice packs from the freezer and a dish towel because the ice pack is too cold to put on bare skin. Or, at least the Wife’s bare skin. The thing is that particular ice pack has its own pouch which obviates the need for a dish towel. The lass claimed that she looked for it and could not find it.

So the Wife asked the boy to fetch the ice pack pouch. She even gave him very specific instructions: it’s in the freezer. The little 5 cubic foot freezer that is the bottom third or so of our refrigerator.

Thirty seconds later, the boy was yelling back “It’s not there,” which, in hindsight, was totally predictable. Generally speaking, neither child could find air in a room, let alone a needle in a haystack or, more usefully, a pouch for an ice pack in a freezer. It’s been this way for as long as I can remember. It’s not just for stuff that we want them to find either. They’ll misplace their own things and it almost always falls to the Wife or I to find it- which we invariably do in short order.

Almost 100% of the time, the object turns out to be in a perfectly reasonable and obvious area where they looked but did not see. Once, I found a book of the boys on his book shelf in his room. He was flabbergasted and I recall him asking “What was it doing there?” The mind boggles. This morning, the lass couldn’t find her sneakers. She’d left them on the floor near the Wife’s rocking chair in our family room. The lass “looked” for them by walking back and forth between the foyer and the kitchen, swiveling her head saying “They aren’t anywhere…”

Returning to the missing ice pack pouch in the freezer, the Wife got up to go and look for it. I was busy re-starting the fire. From my spot on the floor, with a lighter in one hand and a starter log in the other (yes, I cheated this time) I called out to both of kids “I guarantee you Mom finds it exactly where we said it was.” The boy said “I looked in the freezer, it isn’t there.”

So, since he looked in there and it wasn’t there when he looked, imagine his surprise when 10 seconds later the Wife said “What was it that Dad said?” She emerged triumphant from the kitchen with the ice pack pouch dangling in her hand.

“How did you find it? I looked in there and it wasn’t there!” the boy cried incredulously. I can’t tell if he’s just really good at feigning it or if he really was incredulous.

“Easy, I actually looked. You didn’t. Sometimes you actually have to move things around to look for something,” the Wife explained.

“Parents have magical powers to find things,” was the boys response. “Something isn’t there and they can just magically make it appear.”

Maybe, perhaps, someday, he’ll figure it out.

Way back during the Summer, the boy asked me if Santa and the Toothfairy and the Easter Bunny are all real. I’d have to paraphrase at this point, but he said it seemed like it was something that parents did for their kids. I remember answering “Do you really think we’d go through all that trouble just to make you guys believe in something like that?” He dropped it at that point.

But he obviously hasn’t stopped thinking about it.

The Wife told me he asked her about it a couple of times recently- Santa in particular. On both occasions, the lass was present so the Wife assured him that Santa was real.

Things that don’t help- the kids went to get their picture taken with Santa tonight. It was a different Santa from previous years, for one. For another, the lass mentioned our Shelf Elf to him and Santa didn’t know who she was talking about. The Wife inserted herself into the conversation at that point to help him out “I’m sure Santa has a tough time remember all his elves?” To Santa’s credit, he picked up on thing quickly. But still, those sorts of slip ups are certainly something the kids pick up on.

Be that as it may, it’s hard not to see the writing on the wall. I half suspect a shelf-elf experiment out of him- where he touches the shelf-elf without telling anyone and then confronts the Wife of myself after Sparky continues to flit about the house.

The only question at this point is whether he’ll spill the beans for the lass as well.

I ordered our newest load of cord wood back in September and it’s been sitting in our driveway ever since. I meant to start working on it in October, but I kept procrastinating. Then I meant to start at the beginning of November. Again, I procrastinated.

The boy has been asking me the entire time when I was going to start. He even was asking to help out. He was hoping to swing an axe this year. I had to put a damper on that one.

The cold hasn’t been remarkable, but it has been steady this Fall. As a result, our supply of ready cord wood has been dwindling steadily as well. We’re going to need to replenish it and the wood doesn’t cut itself. Or split itself or stack itself. Bummer, that.

So today was the day. Right after hockey practice.

I was on top of the wood pile, cutting up logs when the boy appeared down below. He wanted to help. He wanted to use the log splitter and asked if he could start it up. I told him what to do to get it started and also how he could run it. He eagerly set to it. After his first pull on the starter cord, though, it was apparent he’d need help.

I got him up and running and we spent the next couple of hours cutting, splitting and stacking. He ran the splitter including loading the wood. After I was done cutting the wood up, I set to work with the axe to split the other pieces and help the operation along. Nice thing about straight grained oak is it splits so easily.

The boy stuck it out through the whole operation, including stacking the wood up. The stacking was the most tedious part for him. At one point, he disappeared and I assumed he’d had enough. Instead, he reappeared a couple minutes later with some ice water. After his little break, he rejoined the work and we finished up. It was a far cry from the last time when his attempts to help were so short lived. The difference a year makes.

So the boy arrived home with a paper that we both had to sign. He didn’t give me any details on it, so I assumed it was a permission slip or some such. It actually turned out to be, essentially, a contract with the school whereby he promised to engage in good sportsmanship, not to be too rough and so forth and so on for games played on the field. If he violated any of these terms, he would be “banned” from participating in any of the field games for 1 week.

Frankly, I’m not really sure what to think about this. It seems harmless enough and the boy wasn’t being singled out- all students that want to participate in the games like football or soccer had to sign the same piece of paper as well as get a parent to sign it. And who wants to argue with good sportsmanship?

On the other hand, conflict is a part of life and kids have to learn how to resolve it somewhere along the way. If the school is constantly engineering things to avoid conflict, then aren’t they doing the kids a disservice? Life seems to managed now-a-days.

Tonight was looking to be a rare quiet Tuesday night. The lass had Brownies right after school and the boy had his karate class. That may seem like the makings of a busy night, but the schedule was such that the Wife and I easily had things covered. I was tempted to attend an extra karate class myself that was scheduled after the boy’s classes were completed. Dinner was all set and both kids had a good jump on their homework.

Then the boy asked “Dad, could you help me write my first program?”

He’s been steadily interested in programming for awhile now. It started with questions about computers and what “code” is and the like. I wrote awhile back about installing Scratch on one of the computers, which is a sort of visual programming language. He’d worked with that, but lost interest in it after a week or so. Since he’s continued probing about programming trying to understand it better. He’s even taken to asking for a computer of his own so he can learn programming using that.

Tonight was the first time where he straight-up asked me to work with him. I realized I wouldn’t be going to a karate class tonight.

It wasn’t until I actually started thinking about how to teach him that I realized there were some unfortunate hurdles that are necessary for the act of programming, but have little to do with learning to program. Understanding files and executables and how to work an editor are a few.

So for tonight, I worked on my little laptop with him. I took care of the non-programming-but-necessary stuff and let him do the typing and actual coding. At least, as much as I could. We started with the classic Hello World program and went from there. A little anyway. After he played with the print statement in python for a bit, I started showing him the for loop. After printing out a series of numbers, I then showed him how to use nested loops to print multiplication tables. He played with that but wanted more.

The “more” is where I’ll need to do some work. The vast majority of my programming has been relegated to the command line. The choice has been somewhat deliberate- graphical stuff is pretty demanding and more finicky when it comes to design. It’s one thing to read and process files, quite another to define a graphical interface and process user input.

Naturally, the boy wants to learn how to manipulate graphics, which I’d say is equivalent to learning to run before learning to walk. That said, there are code samples available that should suffice as an example, so perhaps he and I will do some learning together. For tonight, however, I was saved by bed time.