Re: Agile education and pragmatic schooling

Hi,

Well, I am the programmer/geek in my household and I'm 100% pro-homeschooling 
for my son, my wife is starting to come around due to the miserable 
performance of the public schools. Our small town ranks 3rd from last in test 
scores grades 3-11. It is virtually impossible to hire a local programmer, or 
even some kind of apprentice here. Walmart opened up a store here a year ago, 
took 1300 applications, 725+ of them failed the (very basic) math test. 400 
of those failures were recent HS grads.  My son was 2 at that time and I made 
the decision to start pumping his head as full of "stuff" as he could 
possibly stand.

> I'd be curious to hear what
> age you introduce your children to computers. 

My son types on the computer I got him every day for the last 8-10 months, He 
has always liked to bang on the keyboard since thats what he sees dad do 
every day. He now knows his alphabet without singing it, can recognize every 
letter without pause and their  and now is moving on to actually typing 
email. Now, I have to admit that his vocabulary is still quite small :) and 
his email's are limited to "mom" and "hi" and things like that.. but for 3 
years old it's not bad :)

I saw a recent news item that talked about how kids who were exposed to 
computers/internet earlier did "some noteworthy percentage" better on 
research and problem solving test areas than kids with little or no computer/
internet access. 

>We've mostly been holding
> off thus far, but I'd expect by the age of 6 to have some educational
> games to let her play by herself at times.

while I do not claim to be any kind of expert in the field, I can tell you 
this dont wait for anything - push information at them through any channel 
you think is right for your child. Flash cards at 1-1/2 is fine.  personally, 
I read the book see-spot-run by myself when I was 2, I had read the old 
testament by the time I was 4. All due to my mom shoving flashcards & books 
in my face from the day I was born and refusing to stop until my teachers 
didnt know what to do with me :)


Have fun
Mike












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