Learning About Choices

As an educator, I have often found myself at the receiving end of parent's questions about their children. Usually, their child isn't acting the way they would like. Usually, this means that their child isn't acting like them - like an adult. I then remind them that their child is a child and not an adult. This is about the time their eyes gloss over because it isn't what they really want to hear. However, I am a professional and telling them what they want to hear over the reality of the situation would be unethical. Children need to act like children. They need to make mistakes. They need to make bad decisions. Without bad decisions, how will they learn to make good decisions.

Learning to make good decisions as well as good choices is important to a child's development. However, in the area of education and learning most choices have already been decided by the state. Few parents or children get to decide where they will go to school, the educator they will have or even the curriculum they will receive. Educators will talk about creating good citizens who are not apathetic and are involved in civic life yet deprive these same children of any of the decisions in their formative years.

School choice isn't just about private schools being paid by the state, it's about people being free to make decisions about their lives with their money. It's about liberty.

Using YouTube for Learning

My seven year old daughter wanted to learn to use Premiere Pro. However, she didn't want to read the 700 page manual. So, what to do? Perform a YouTube search for videos with the title of "Adobe Premiere animating". You can perform all kinds of searches for all kinds of programs. It is especially useful for graphics oriented programs such as Flash, Premiere, Inkscape and many more.

Here is an example of an instruction video I did on how to draw an eyeball using Inkscape (opensource Illustrator clone).