Monday, February 25, 2013

A handful of links

I've been neglecting this place as we kind of get everything together and while I deal with my own issues going on, but some stuff I've had sitting on my desktop for a bit:

* Parenting Beyond Belief and Raising Freethinkers, both by Dale McGowan, are great atheist parenting tomes and on sale for the Kindle for the next few weeks. The physical editions have a prominent space on our shelves, and they've been indispensable in a lot of my approaches to how I want to handle religion and such with the future spawn. It's not the bomb-throwing type of atheist writing, either, so if you're not an atheist but curious, Parenting Beyond Belief in particular may still be of value to you.

* Three Huge Mistakes We Make Leading Kids, and How to Correct Them was an interesting read. I fully agree with everything he wrote, and the idea of self-esteem over hard work and dedication is a key one for me that it's going to be interesting to break. While we plan to homeschool and thus will miss a lot of that, it's more the mentality of society at large and the "we must never be offended" style of thinking that's becoming pervasive and may be reaching critical mass when our kid needs it the most. The ability to be risky while also being smart is quite possibly the most important thing I can pass along.

* I liked this longish piece by Paul Lockhart, "Lockhart's Lament," which makes an interesting contrast at the start between why we like learning music, but hate learning math. I think it says a lot about how we approach learning, and it's something I keep going back to even though I read this a week ago.