"I'm Bored"

I often hear that from my kids, or I’ve nothing to do.
My recent response seemed to work well.
I looked up at my bookshelf and picked two books, one for each.
One called “UNIX Internals” the other one the O’Reilly SELINUX book.
I suggested that they read these, suddenly they had a lot more things to fill their time.
Funny that isn’t it, although one of my daughters did brave up to page five of the ipv6 administration book out of interest, fairly impressive for a nine year old being able to read 5 pages of rubbish – I can’t be bothered reading that one.

If your daughter is capable of making it to page 5 of a mind numbing book…why not provide her with something she might be able to use. Scratch? Lua? Set her a challenge, don’t scare her away!

You might get some inspiration from this: http://www.heyrick.co.uk/blog/index.php?diary=20140214

The capacity to be bored is a vital sign of intelligence. The world is so full of fascinating things that if you are young boredom is soon dispelled. If you are old the problem is not so much boredom as energy. There are lots of things that I would like to do, which experience teaches me are beyond my present capacity for concentration. si jeunesse . . . etc.

I have noticed that ignorance is a fine sauce to make topics attractive by way of mystery: Egyptology, elementary particle physics, programming even, have been examples. A student called Ratty (at least twenty years younger than me) lent me Zak’s 6502 Assembly Language Programming back in 1978. It seemed to me at the time as arcane and wonderful as a libram of grammarie, because I had no foreknowledge of it.

A girl’s face glimpsed in a crowd can seem beautiful, but when we catch up with her we are disappointed. Music heard indistinctly can seem divine. From nearer it is banal. It is our imagination that provides the beauty, if our senses are provided an appropriate void to let it in.

For that reason teachers should leave a gap for their pupils’ imaginations. Sadly, to our souls’ distemper, our zetgeist pays little heed to this. We are swamped by data and purported facts.

The capacity to be bored is a vital sign of intelligence.

I spent a large part of my childhood being bored. Unfortunately at the school I attended, being able to read adult books at early-junior level (8-10yrs) apparently did not mean that I was a good reader, it just meant that I was an accomplished liar. Amazingly they kept this up after a teacher who knew of the books that I had read interrogated me to find out if I really had read John Wyndams and J G Ballard while the rest of the class were still looking in books with pictures on every opposite page…

There are lots of things that I would like to do, which experience teaches me are beyond my present capacity for concentration.

Ah, my concentration has always been on par with that of a dead snail, so my lack of it is not really anything ususual. My main obstacle is finance. Either to buy the stuff I need, or to cover the “doing something more interesting than going to work” part.

It seemed to me at the time as arcane and wonderful as a libram of grammarie, because I had no foreknowledge of it.

And best of all, it is predictable ! A processor has a set of instructions that it understands. You tell it to do “ADD”, it adds. It doesn’t think “meh, division is more fun” or “I can’t be bothered” or even “my Union says I can refuse to do this”. No, it adds. No more, no less.
It’s quite the miracle that we can get from basic memory shifting and mathematical operations to desktop publishers and web browsers just by pushing the right bits around at the right moments.

A girl’s face glimpsed in a crowd can seem beautiful, but when we catch up with her we are disappointed.

…as we notice the wedding ring, or the hairy ape that is holding her by the arm, or…

Music heard indistinctly can seem divine. From nearer it is banal.

Indeed. Just the other day I was walking around a garden centre in Gétigné and I heard a nice song on the radio. I committed a part of the chorus to memory, then looked it up first in Google then on YouTube.
The song sucked.

For that reason teachers should leave a gap for their pupils’ imaginations. Sadly, to our souls’ distemper, our zetgeist pays little heed to this. We are swamped by data and purported facts.

If this forum allowed for posts to be upvoted, I would hijack a botnet to provide you with the number of upvotes you deserve for that.

For now: +1

Unfortunately at the school I attended, being able to read adult books at early-junior level (8-10yrs) apparently did not mean that I was a good reader, it just meant that I was an accomplished liar.

It could have been worse – you could have been the wonder child reading old testament passages etc to the morning assembly of both infant and junior schools¹. Not fun when your age group is still struggling to master the first Janet and John elements.

¹ Imagine a small child climb steps to a box to stand and read from the lectern facing a sea of faces. Think of the trauma. Ordinary is sometimes a lot nicer.