Crouching Tiger, Hidden Parent

These days, you read a lot about the clash between supposedly Confucianist discipline and supposedly Western-Enlightenment discipline as ways of developing children who are either successful or creative, or both. To me, proponents of both are attempting to bake cakes using either flour alone or using butter and sugar with no flour.

In the former approach, you will be successful. You might get a lovely piece of rock-hard inflexible gluten that will last forever, or something softer but edible. In the latter, you will always get something edible, but it won't last.

The great news is that life tends to add whatever you missed out on. Parenting is not the sole determinant of most lives. It's the most important in most cases, but how much more important it is compared to environmental and peer influences varies and has varied greatly from place to place and across historical periods.

Think about that greatly scientific Enlightenment household, the Victorian classical stereotype. I think it might have been as gruelling, or more so, than the modern 'Chinese' tiger-parent style so recently lambasted in the newspapers and magazines.

Modern parenting based on reason is certainly a success by accident in a majority of cases, judging from the desired outcomes as opposed to the actual outcomes. And since the mid-1990s, we've known a lot more about how human brains work — and the child-rearing literature hasn't caught up with the truth yet.

Another Neighbour

One of my former neighbours wrote a book which turned out, in a rare surprise for him, to be a bestseller. The title of the book was A Brief History of Time. This was the same neighbour who used to speculate on whether God existed or not, pointing out that Gödel had famously proven that He ought to exist but not proven it well enough to show that He indeed existed.

Sometimes, you wonder whether the dinner conversations and suchlike that whirl around you in your younger years actually shape your older years to such a great extent. All I can say is that. if anything, listening to such things makes you curious about particular things if you are already a curious child.

The first step is therefore to bring up a child to be curious. Then he will look for answers both within and without. And he will develop methodologies for finding those answers. Later, he will develop methodologies for evaluating those answers, and even methodologies for evaluating methodologies. If you happen to be able to provide examples and exemplars, then the child is on his way to having a lot of useful experiences.

Bear in mind, however, that the form of the answer can be physical as well as conceptual, spatial as well as numerical. There are many questions, and their answers come in many shapes, sizes, sounds, smells, savours and sensations.

All I can say is the study of falconry and of falcons can sometimes be of inestimable value in a later life bereft of both. You never know what might turn up, that will turn both salesmanship and hunting into a single word, and make a singularity out of many things.

Random Encounters

I used to live for random encounters. You travel from place to place. You roll a d100. BAM: 1-4 crocodiles, estuarine, giant. You fight, pointlessly and amusingly. You survive. You keep going. It was all wonderful, pointless fun. Then one day, I got to be management. I could look at a roll of 76 (turtle, snapping, colossal) and turn it into a beach barbecue not to be forgotten, as the island sunset turns into an island which is not amused at having its shell decorated with chicken bones.

It has always been fun to be management. But the cardinal rule is: never forget when you were a worker; better still, never forget what it's like to be a client. It makes things so much more fun. I will never forget the day I caught those scouts attempting to forage under the back gate. In my head, the memory of self as a guy who crawled under the athletic field's fence, warring with the concept of crime and requisite punishment.

But some people seem never to have had childhoods, or earnestly put all childish things behind in a literal sense. They would never be caught doing childish things, or thinking childish thoughts – and at some point, the restriction becomes 'I will never be a child in any way'. And then they are caught anyway, caught by that very interesting statement of the Messiah in one of those chapters of Matthew's gospel that serious people sometimes oddly forget to read.

Here it is:

And he called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of them;
And said, "Truly I say unto you, unless you are changed, and become as little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.
"Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.
"And whosoever shall receive one such little child in my name also receives me.
"But whosoever shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.
"Woe unto the world because of offences! For it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!"

Yes, that's it. Along with the injunctions for fathers not to frustrate their children and such, there's this section about how moral offences against children are dire indeed. Sure, the old part of the Good Book also says that sparing the rod leads to spoiling the child, and hence recommends the precise use of the rod as a corrective; but it doesn't say that children in general must get the stick stuck to them unless there is good reason.

Capsaicin Cream

When I was little, I used to play amongst the chili plants. My grandmother was an inveterate horticulturist who grew everything ranging from custard-apple to tea roses to sweet pea and orchids, and she dearly loved being self-reliant in the matter of spices and other things (though they were never in enough profusion to please her).

So there I was, helping dearest grandma to pluck chilis, the small little red ones known locally as 'chili padi'. That evening, I felt a most awesome sensation, as if of a thousand red ants slowly working their jaws through the skin on my back. I had inadvertently got the sap or juice of the plant onto my skin. Water did not quench the burn; profuse sweating (incidental and certainly not by choice) did not help. Grandpa recommended milk, which would have helped, but I demurred.

Finally, I chose to endure and survive. It was a close thing. Exhaustion led to sleep, and on waking, I was mostly OK. There was a little side-effect: my migraines for the day stopped, flabbergasted by a superior show of pain. My grandmother, in her usual cup-is-half-full-of-something-else-anyway mode, said, "Lucky not in your eyes." Yes, indeed.

Flash forward another thirty-odd years (or thirty very odd years, if you must), and here I am, with the same chemical substance on my back, deliberately smeared on. It costs $20 a tube, unlike the five cents I would have paid for the chilis at the local market. Why? To combat middle-aged back pain (or the back pains of middle age). I feel the pain bring clarity and an age of enlightenment. Argh. Ah. Aaaaaaaaah. Why didn't I start this earlier?

Pain is sometimes very good.

Candles

Heh. Some time ago, we bought a lovely Quentin Blake birthday card for our elder niece. She's a sharp one, she is; I remember several occasions on which she managed to outwit her father and her uncles, who are not exactly brainless.

You can imagine my horror in the wee hours of the morning, as I was writing in that card, when I discovered that the birthday cake portrayed in the card (three times!) had only five candles. And she will be seven this year.

Hrrrm. With that finely-tuned aesthetic creativity that comes free with a boat-load of desperation, this uncle sketched in an extra two perfectly good and difficult-to-detect little candles on each instance of that cake. I figure it is a win-win proposition. If the niece fails to detect the ringers, so far, so good. If she does, she should appreciate that Uncle Autolycus actually bothered to draw such excellent candles. I hope.

The theme for this month, I suspect, will be 'The Audacity of Hope'.

Spare Time

Time is a spare thing, an old stickman, a skeletal reaper with a rusty scythe. And yet, as spare as time is, we waste it further. This was my somewhat morbid reflection today. I hear from many parents that their children spend time in a profligate and perhaps rather heedless manner. They seek my advice. Yet, in the background what I hear is my own past – a past filled with joyful memories of computer games and endless trashy novels, slowly being refined towards an education in computer science and the ability to distinguish good writing from bad.

But I didn't set out to make this a long post (pointless, pointed or disappointing). I set out merely to provide links to a series of articles which my filters somehow missed. Here they are. Welcome to The History of Computer Role-Playing Games:

The Early Years (1980-1983)
Yes, I actually played Akallabeth by Lord British. These were my secondary school years.

The Golden Age (1985-1993)
This was the heyday of piracy, and weird computer exploits and other lovely things.

The Platinum & Modern Age (1994-2004)
The age that most of my students grew up in – an age of heresy mixed with iron, blood and innocence.

...like every other age of humanity.

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And on quite another note, here is a brilliant story which deserves to win more than one award.

Scathed

It isn't really a badge of honour or of glory to have had an unscathed childhood. Childhood is a time for building the foundations for learning and growth; if you don't learn the basics at that time, it is not impossible to build - but it is very much more difficult.

This excellent article explores some ramifications of the kind of praise we give the people we remark upon. It helps to explain why I prefer to say, "X has shown himself to be intelligent and determined," rather than, "X is intelligent and has done well." The former is descriptive of what X has done and can continue to do; the latter is more descriptive of what X is, immutably and for a moment in time. It is a subtle distinction, but a valuable one.

So if my students feel that the term reports look unduly harsh or scathing, I hope they take it in the right spirit. I'm not here to give undeserved laurels; I'm here to try to see how they can be even better than they already are. After all, I am scathing to many people, who hopefully all deserve it - and I am not unscathed myself, nor want to be.