Only Foreword
Monday Meta: Topic Redux
Mondays? Making up excuses for missed connections.
I’d like to write here every day, but it’s just not going to happen. In the meantime, little two-week breaks from my rants provide opportunity to let new ideas and experiences marinate. We have a medium-sized circle of friends, and when I’m not playing with the girl, pounding away on a keyboard, or puttering about the garden, we’re usually socializing. And, even if those friends don’t have kids of their own — which most of them now do — they always have opinions on child-rearing. What’s a skepdad to do? Commentate on those ideas, of course.
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Wednesday Wild Card: 2D Characters
Wednesdays? Whatever. Whatever!
One of the other hats I wear is that of a semi-professional writer. Some of the stream-of-consciousness blather that gets posted here might cause readers to doubt that assertion, but nevertheless I do get part of my paycheque from mashing words into paragraphs. Of course one rarely falls into that kind of role if one does not have “the itch” — that nagging, yearning, urge that any artist will quickly tell anyone within earshot is the driving force behind his work — for which neither salve nor ointment can sooth the need to share one’s gift (whatever that may be) with an audience that is often silent and unseen. I write what I need to write — and I get paid. I write what I want to write — and blogs are brimming with opinion, notebooks are overflowing with fanciful descriptions, and ideas are etched out in countless word processor files — yet not a dime ever arrives. In sharing this I’m not trying to offer some round-about guilt-trip for reading these words. Rather, I’m attempting to introduce my motivation (as a passionate writer) in elaborating on a recent podcast discussion (from The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe) about stereotyped characters in children’s media, particularly with regard to so-called “nerds” and “geeks.”
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Tuesday Media Watch: Second Language
Tuesdays? Pondering pointless programming.
I’ve often quietly scolded myself for being fairly inept at languages. I mean, I have a reasonably high proficiency in English due to thirty-odd years of reading, writing, and speaking it. But over the years I’ve stumbled through a number of focused efforts to learn a second language, namely French and German, but sit here today without the ability to do much more than count to ten, introduce myself, and order a beer in either. Both efforts to lean a second language have involved numerous formal (textbooks, school, and evening courses) and informal (travel, websites, multimedia, and broadcasts) attempts to build vocabulary and grammar. But at the end of the day my proficiency will never match that of a native tongue.
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Friday Consumer Culture: Priddy Books
Fridays? Products, from one to five skeps.
We’d likely be kidding ourselves as parents if we thought all the stories we were reading to our very young kids were offering any more benefit than the sound of our voice and perhaps some loose vocabulary development. The girl is seven months old and I’m under no delusion that she is following the plot of “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” or “Charlotte’s Web” as we read aloud from them on a nightly basis. But there is a ritual there and I’d like to think that my voice has something of a calming effect on her little mind. This raises the question as to the value of books in the life of a “Really Young Thinker” when books can really be no more than colourful toys to be grabbed and manipulated by equally young fingers. To help answer this, we were lucky to be given an interesting cloth book as a gift early on, and its only recently that the girl has taken to it with devoted fascination and often giggling delight — so much so that we bought another in the series.
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Thursday Thinkers: Too Young to Share
Thursday? Tinkering Thoughts on Thinking Tots.
Really, you know, the last thing I want for this blog is for a notion towards promoting personal integrity in children as a path to critical thought (see my explanation in “The Three Eyes“) to turn into a rant on teaching kids to share. For one thing, I don’t consider myself to be a particular good “sharer.” For another, I think this whole question of moral integrity might be wrapped a little deeper than some vague small-L liberal idealism of “why can’t we all just get along?” My disclosure is that I consider myself that small-L liberal. But I’m also a bit of a realist and sit squarely on the fence of debate on the benefits of passive versus assertive (and vice versa) involvement in society.
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Wednesday Wild Card: Naked
Wednesdays? Anything goes, really.
If you have never added the “StumbleUpon” toolbar to your web browser (and as much as I don’t want to endorse something I’m not getting payback on!) it is a handy little tool for a kind of targeted randomized discovery on the web. Yesterday, for example, I set the toolbar to hit up parenting websites, and clicked through a dozen articles of various quality before I found one particular gem upon which it was worth commenting.[1] In particular, the article called “Potty-training in a Weekend” reminded me of a conversation I had back in February with some fellow parents who were still getting over the curious shock when they discovered their older siblings (in-law) were making use of the so-called “birthday suit method for toilet training:
“Some parents find that the fastest way to move past the diaper days is to set aside a few days devoted solely to potty-training. Some folks call it the birthday suit method, because it involves letting your little one run around with little or nothing on.”[1]
Tuesday Media Watch: Realistic TV
Tuesdays? Wrapping the mind around too much TV culture.
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the so-called “skeptical mind” and I’ve reconciled with myself that much of what defines that kind of personality is a strong sense of realism. Take that statement literally — the forever-fact-checker, scientific, analytical mind — or take it as a kind of objective observation, but either way there is a strong sense of “let’s not kid ourselves” mentality that bubbles to the surface of our personalities. So when I start thinking about the arguments, for and against, kids and television the skeptic in me needs to take a step back and just say: let’s not kid ourselves here.
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Monday Meta: A Little More Focus
Mondays? Filling in the Blogging and Communication Gaps.
I gotta send thanks out to any of you who have been hanging on during these moments of Skepdad confusion and transition. The whole idea of the Skepdad Blog has been to explore some issues around (a) skepticism, (b) skeptical parenting, and (c) grasping onto an understanding of what do with this little version of me who is growing up in a culture and community rife with superstition and pseudoscientific messages. My objective is and was to do a lot of thinking and writing on the topic — non-expert that I am — and hopefully cobble together a better understanding of the issues. I aimed for that goal for a number of months then came to the frustrating conclusion that I was aiming at a goal that was beyond the scope of either me or a blog like this. I’ll leave you to figure that out.
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The skep/dad blog is a place for rational, science-minded fathers to express their thoughts, opinions, and ideas about bringing up kids to be critical thinking adults in a world filled with superstition, mysticism, and pseudoscience.
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Brad adds: As of October 2007, I'm soliciting interest for skeptics in the Edmonton, Alberta, Canada area who are interested in forming a skeptical society to contact me. Please do so through this blog or via Facebook (through the Edmonton Skeptical Society Group).
- The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact than a drunken man is happier than a sober one.- George Bernard Shaw
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- Memoirs of a Skepchick
- Skeptic Magazine
- Bad Language
- James Randi Educational Foundation
- The Museum of Hoaxes
- Bug Girl’s Blog
- Podblack Blog
- Skeptical Family Forum
- Skeptic’s Annotated Bible
- The Skeptics Guide to the Universe
- The Skeptic Dad
- SkepBitch
- Science Creative Quarterly
- Nye Labs
- Junior Skeptic
- NeuroLogica Blog
- Science Based Medicine
- The Blogfathers
- Skeptoid: Critical Analysis of Pop Phenomena
- Snopes (Urban Legends Reference)
- Skeptical Mom
- Pediatrics
- Skeptical Surfer
- The Philosopher Dad
- Skeptical Kids
- ScienceBlogs
- Claire’s Booklist
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