Nostalgia

People often wonder how I got to be so smart and good looking. Well, Chris Brand would tell you it was good genes. That probably has a bit to do with it, cos my Dad is pretty smart too.

Being quite the crafty bugger, my Dad was always buying me things I thought were toys, but were really a cunning plot to teach me stuff that I didn’t care about.

I don’t know where the things came from, but when I had just started primary school my parents got hold of a stack of “Charlie Brown’s Cyclopedias” which featured Snoopy, Charlie, Linus and the rest explaining Geography, History, Physics and all sorts of other things that no kid should really understand.

I didn’t even know who Snoopy was, but I liked the dog from Footrot Flats, so I thought I’d give him a try.

Those books were absolutely awesome. I frequently stayed up to all hours of the night reading about the Kon Tiki, the Wright brothers, The difference between animal and plant cells, why the sky is blue and all the other things that kids wanna know.

Another great thing about Charlie Brown is that he never once encouraged me to attend a protest organised by the Socialist Alliance.

If you have kids nearing primary school age, do yourself a favour, and get a copy of these things. They are only like $10 and could mean the difference between your child growing up to be a worthless drain on society, or a worthless drain on society with a blog, like me!

Other randomly educational things that you can get to supplement your kids’ woefully inadequate public education include:

Legos: Legos are still, without a doubt, the coolest toys ever invented. They also help kids with spacial abilities, geometry, and teach them a very important lesson on why you dont eat things made of plastic.

Meccano: Is like Lego for rich kids. If you have lots of money you can get Meccano as well as lego. I don’t think it’s any more educational but it sure is shiny.

Fishing Tackle: Friends don’t let friends kids Noodle for fish. Buy them a rod and reel and make them tie their own knots. I don’t think my parents intentionally made us rig up our own fishing rods, it was more a case of avoiding the violent rages of Dad when he was forced to untangle our lines and/or re-rig lines that had been snagged.

We stopped asking and just did it ourselves. This taught us patience, resourcefulness, and a healthy armoury of foul language.

After failing to learn how to spot places where fish would live, my brother and I inventend an entirely new form of fishing (to anyone we knew anyway).

Instead of the random chance of throwing the line into the water, where there may or may not be a fish, we would don our diving masks and flippers, and paddle out to the good holes where we could see the delicious King George Whiting swimming around on the bottom. Then, we would slowly lower the already baited hand-line we brought with us, right in front of the fish’s nose. For our efforts, we received an honourary award from the Dumbleyung fishing club.

Dad was very embarassed, not least because we caught more fish than he ever did using our unique method. Note: You should probably also teach your kids to swim if you are going to teach them how to fish.

Computers: I was a hyperactive kid, and always used to enjoy taking things apart even if they weren’t Legos. Like Radios, VCR’s and Shearing Handpieces. My parents quickly tired of this and bought me a computer to destroy.

This being the early 1980’s there wasn’t an “internet”, so if you wanted to get free software, you either had to find another person who had the same kind of computer as you (which nobody did cause my parents had obviously never heard of “Commodore 64s”), or you had to write the programs yourself.

Not being a qualified software engineer in year 5, I was forced to buy magazines which had programs coded in BASIC and type them into the command line. This was, frankly, boring as shit, but I’m sure I learned something.

Buy your kids an old computer and make ’em program their own games! That’ll learn em good! (grrrrr)

Computer Games: You don’t learn much from playing Quake, but the “Civilization” series of strategy games includes, as part of the game, an easy-to-read encyclopedia containing the history of mankind from the stone age to the space age, and everything in between.

(They might be more suitable to high-school age kids, since they are quite complex. On the other hand, if your kids are gifted like me, start ’em on the nation building right now!)

There were plenty of other nerdy things foisted upon me by my oh-so-well meaning parents but I have repressed the memory of the rest of it.

One of the great things that I never had as a kid is called “teh internet”. There are lots of things that kids can read on the internet, such as my blog, that are very educational and FUN! One personal favourite of mine is the collection of old books at Bartleby.com. Free online books with expired intellectual property that you can read in full, without ever leaving the comfort of your chair. Just like a book!

Here’s a good one which I had as a kid. Aesop’s Fables. Mine had pictures in it, but much like Dad’s Playboys, I only ever read it for the articles.

A word of warning: If you insist on buying your kids nerdy toys and therefore turning him into a nerd, please help out by giving him Karate lessons so he can beat up nerd-bashers. (Note: watching The Karate Kid is NOT a subsitute for actual martial arts training.)

Please note that these opinions are my own and are not representative of the Australian Education Union. They would much prefer you taught your kids how we slaughtered the aborigines and the whales and the ozone layer and compassion and how much everyone loved Mao and stuff.

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