OMG, it's full of stars!

My Son and My Father, 21st Century Bonding

Letting kids use computers is like feeding them potato chips from Whole Foods. You feel like you're doing the right thing because you associate it with smart people but part of you suspects it's still junk. The after school crew at the Philbrick had lots to say about their digital lives but there were few bridges to their academic lives. Granted there are not a lot of spread sheets or research papers in the third grade curriculum and today's test driven classroom environment leaves little time for browsing the web. Some of the kids reported visiting scientific websites in the course of their studies but beyond that it's still a paper and pencil world in this outpost of the BPS.
On the home front things are a lot different, almost all of the students talked about playing this or that flash game online, with or without parental controls. None of the students are using social networking although one girl loved uploading cell phone pictures to her Mom's Facebook page. A few apparently have email accounts and one boy has an active cell phone. For me at least the biggest shock was the Death of Mario. I assumed everybody had at least a Wii but only two did and even they seemed to prefer computer games, maybe what my wife said, that I bought the Wii more for me than the kids, is true! In my childhood video game consoles were the end-all-be-all of home tech and now they seem to have fallen out of favor. The kids also had certain affinity websites they followed religiously, usually relating to toy lines, book series they were reading, sports teams and so on but none discussed posting things or participating in online community activities.

I'm not sure what it adds up to, I only know my son's relationship with technology in any great detail. I know that just as I used to get up early on Saturday to watch cartoons he gets up to sneak in computer game time before my wife wakes up. He's learned how use the basic commands on my cast off Macbook and is better at Angry Birds than I ever will be. He will explore learning websites when directed to them but much prefers to spread out with a pile of books to do his research, his latest obsession is astronomy. Recently he wanted to go outside and look at the night sky for various planets. The view from our porch was of a light flooded orange and purple city night sky, only a few stars eeked through. Remembering a commercial I had seen, I quickly downloaded the Google Sky app to my android. Pointing the phone at the sky turned the screen into a real time planetarium, the haze was gone and the constellations were made whole and for a moment, I was the coolest Dad in the galaxy.