Col

End of the month, and of this "December days" series; end of 2014. I'm not trying to make any new year's resolutions this year: in 2014 I half-seriously resolved to tweet as Gaeilge at least once a week during 2014, partly as a way to encourage myself to learn more of the language and partly because the verb "tvuít" is just so cute. With the most generous possible interpretation (counting even just a few words in the middle of a mostly-English tweet), I managed ... 23. Oops. So I'm not in a rush to set myself up for anything particular this arbitrary-time-division, but a little bit of reflection seems popular around this time of year.

( looking back, looking forward )

This post is part of my December days series.

ghoti asked me to talk about being a working parent, having initially misread a "being an incoming parent" prompt from a previous day. Due to my particular circumstances, some of this overlaps with a previous prompt, "working from home", but there's probably a bit more I can write about independently.

I tend not to use the phrase "working parent" to describe myself, since any time I try to do ghoti's full-time-parenting job for more than an hour or two I'm reminded of just how much work it is to do it well! (Although today I got both little children to sleep earlier than usual and without an epic tantrum, so am feeling flush with success, at least until it next goes wrong.) I do sometimes feel that the business of earning money is the easy job in relative terms, and it's all too easy to hide in my study when the children are being particularly difficult. I've been trying to do better at avoiding that.

In practical terms, of course, it means I'm not routinely able to do very much with the children during the week, and if we go away for the weekend I normally have to be back in time to work on Monday. More insidiously, if I've been having a stressful time at work then it's very hard to find much energy to play with the children; unfortunately I don't find that one activity helps me recharge for the other, rather the opposite. So I'm very much hoping that my new job in the new year will leave me with more energy for the evenings and weekends.

On the other hand, my job does pay well enough that the children don't lack much (except space, but we're working on that more gradually), and hopefully that will continue. As the primary earner I do feel a pretty strong responsibility to turn my skillset into a comfortable lifestyle for them.

I may have missed some part of this question, so please do say in comments if this is too narrow an answer and I'll try to expand on it.

This post is part of my December days series. Please prompt me!

On our date a couple of weeks ago, I found myself explaining to ghoti the basics of why P vs. NP is an interesting question. (Clearly, we have the best romantic conversations.) I'd like to explain this at a bit more length and to more people. You'll have to care at least a little bit about maths to find this interesting, but I hope I've managed to explain it clearly enough that it doesn't require any specialist knowledge. Note that I'm not actually a complexity researcher, just an interested person with some relevant background.

( the essence of hard problems )

This post is part of my December days series. Please prompt me!

I didn't actually expect to manage a proper December-days post today, so didn't schedule any prompts there. Last night we went to Midnight Mass; J was a bit overwhelmed by the volume during the carol service but otherwise it went well, and my "Creator alme siderum" solo after communion was well-received. (Best compliment: a choirmistress telling you that your diction was excellent and they could hear all the words.)

So far today we have risen late, opened stockings, and are now waiting for Jon to arrive before we start on opening big presents.

I hope you all have a lovely and relaxing day.

Nollaig shona daoibh / Frohe Weihnachten / Joyeux Noël!

This post is part of my December days series. Please prompt me!

I'm catching up on these postings a bit today after a lovely but busy couple of days, including going with ghoti to help to celebrate Chanukah over at liv's yesterday, lighting candles, acting out the story with jack and the children wearing home-made crowns and wielding plastic swords, eating doughnuts and latkes, and playing board games (which I don't think is quite required by the celebration but is clearly always a good idea anyway). Today so far I've mostly been clearing up at least a corner of our messy living room in an attempt to clear enough space to put up the tree; this is late for us, as my family tradition was always Second Sunday of Advent and we've normally roughly gone with that, but I don't actually think it truly matters overly much as long as it's up by the time Christmas itself starts.

It is indeed not always quite the most important thing to keep up with these memes, as a friend wisely observed to me yesterday; all the same, I'm quite prone to forgetting about this kind of thing if I'm not reasonably disciplined about it, so I'm spending a bit of time today getting back into sync. The Christmas season is coming up, but I do have a couple of those posts wholly or partially banked, so hopefully I'll still manage to keep up.

At any rate, badriya asked me about the experience of being an "incoming parent", coming into a child's life through a relationship with a parent. Thanks for this - it's a really good prompt!

( stepdad )

This post is part of my December days series. Please prompt me!

As a follow-up to my post about programming languages, liv asked me: "can you talk about whether you're planning to teach your children programming, and if so how?"

I'd very much like to teach my children programming, yes, for a variety of reasons. One is that it's a thing I'm personally enthusiastic about that I want to share with them. Another is that it's an increasingly useful secondary skill in all kinds of other academic disciplines, whether that's for data analysis or driving complex machinery or whatever, and I'd like them to have that be accessible to them if at all possible. And of course I think it's a worthwhile skill in its own right, as computers become more and more a part of everyday life.

On the other hand, I don't want to teach them just single bespoke skills, such as just one programming language: what I really want to impart is the mental discipline of ordering your thoughts in order to instruct a computer accurately in how to do them, which I think is an aptitude that transfers itself well to all kinds of other things, even though doing that clearly involves learning the nuts and bolts of programming (preferably in more than one languages) and especially for children it needs to involve having fun along the way. There's no point trying to teach programming to children if they find it boring, or if it's too early in their development. (I tried to teach B how to program some years ago, but honestly I hadn't prepared well enough, it fell rather flat, and by the time we revisited it he wasn't really interested, so I definitely want to prepare better this time round.)

ghoti has been planning to start with a plan she'd previously started on while TAing at primary level, namely to start with Scratch (hmm, appropriately the top featured project there is currently a dreidel game) and move on to Rhodri James's Python course. I've generally been of the opinion that it will work better if we wait until J's reading is a fair bit more fluent, and so to be honest I hadn't yet thought much about the details yet; Scratch is more visual than a lot of languages but it still has a very significant textual component.

I think this is still an area where I very much don't think I have the answers and am listening for suggestions. My criteria are that I want them to be able to progress quickly to doing things that will interest them, I don't want them to get bogged down in syntactic vinegar, but I also want them to be using (if not necessarily as the very first step) a language that isn't a toy and that they can write real non-trivial programs in, and preferably one that won't get them stuck in particularly bad habits. Python seems like a pretty good thing to aim for with the support of some decent code libraries and teaching materials, so ghoti's plan generally seems sound here, but I sort of feel the need to work through it ourselves first to make sure we aren't caught by surprise along the way.

Does anyone else reading this have experience with teaching children (other than themselves!) to program? I'd be interested in hearing about what you did.

This post is part of my December days series. Please prompt me!

angelofthenorth asked me to write about languages. I've already written about programming languages this month, so while I do believe that natural languages and programming languages have important common properties and that it's worthwhile for PL designers to think about concepts from natural linguistics, I'll stick to natural languages here.

( tá m'árthach foluaineach lán d'eascann )

This post is part of my December days series. Please prompt me!

pentamer asked me to write about music. I briefly covered this in my post on art earlier in the month, but let's expand on that a bit.

( do re mi )

This post is part of my December days series. Please prompt me!

liv asked me for "something that you've learned or discovered about yourself that surprised you", which is quite a tricky one and it looks as though I'm going to answer it at a bit of a tangent.

( hmm )

This post is part of my December days series. Please prompt me!

ewx prompted me to write about programming languages, and said "be as specific or general as feels appropriate".

( clicky clicky )

This post is part of my December days series. Please prompt me!