A weekly selection of what I was reading, drawing, writing, and doing.

Book excerpt I enjoyed:

“Childhood may be defined as the age of play; therefore some children are never young, and some adults are never old.” (Will Durant, Fallen Leaves)

How to understand British measurements:

Seriously, it IS hard to understand. This is proof.

😂

Many students today have no concept of file locations and folders on a computer:

To be fair, global search is really good nowadays, but still, this blew me away.

They were all getting the same error message: The program couldn’t find their files.

Garland thought it would be an easy fix. She asked each student where they’d saved their project. Could they be on the desktop? Perhaps in the shared drive? But over and over, she was met with confusion. “What are you talking about?” multiple students inquired. Not only did they not know where their files were saved — they didn’t understand the question.

Gradually, Garland came to the same realization that many of her fellow educators have reached in the past four years: the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations’ understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.

File not found: https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z

Why common core math problems look so strange:

As someone who is working on math with my 8 year-old, this was super useful!

Trying to Teach Your Kids the Kind of Math They Teach in School Now: https://austinkleon.com/2021/09/14/trying-to-teach-your-kids-the-kind-of-math-they-teach-in-school-now

40 concepts you should know:

This was an interesting read.

“Benford’s Law: Numbers in natural sets of data are not uniformly distributed (e.g. 30% of numbers have 1 as their first digit). Used by the IRS and other tax agencies to determine if you’ve lied about your finances.”

What I wrote and drew about this week:

What I did, was reminded of, or was thankful for last week:

• I was fighting a cold all week, and took a few days off work and just rested and read books. This week’s update is a little light as a result, but I got to a bit more deep reading and writing as a result. Whenever I get sick and am forced to really take care of myself I find it actually is a useful time to reset.
• Last Monday, Kav and I went to a wine tasting for the first time in what felt like years. I was nursing a cold, so didn’t drink, but I did try this red (and we had a bottle later in the week) and it was super good: Primordial Soup Red Blend, Western Cape NV
• Sam and I got out to a martial arts class last Friday and I also got out on a hike with a local hiking group, both were great experiences. More to come on both of those soon.

Last but not least, check out what I’m up to now.