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Love it, AP! They are lucky to be taught in your home. My dad taught me to call the repair man. It’s not as satisfying to the soul.
Wow AP, you are a trooper!!! I have to pay people to do most of that stuff. Yet they are things we all need done eventually. I can do those things (I used to build guitars at one time, after getting trained by a pattern-maker who would build wooden models from which die cast molds for car parts would be based), so I have a lot of equipment and a certain amount of skills in fine woodworking. But I find most of those items you share frustrating when I don’t do them all the time. I think it’s partly because I am a learner, and at my age, I’ve grown a bit weary of learning or re-learning so much all the time. Each year I learn so many new things — the things I enjoy tend to come to the top of the list when the items are not required in my job.
Merilee Boyack, an LDS speaker says that’s OK though — one of the first steps in figuring out how to train your children is to identify WHO should actually do the training. It would be a matter of finding someone to train my son in the things I’m not good at, or have no interest in learning myself…
Many of those things you mention are taught at free workshops at the Home Depot and Lowes. It might be good to take my son to those events. I am at the point that I still enjoy learning when I don’t have to be the one who not only learns it, but also breaks it down, structures it for others, as my job requires.
SilentDawning: My entire biological family is uber mechanical. We just are. We have “The Knack”
On the other hand, we all lack musical ability. Truly. I have to work 10 times as hard to achieve 5% of the result of someone who has natural musical ability. None of us can sing. It’s like we have mechanical genius and Musical Retardation. In LDS culture, the expectation is that everyone has some musical ability. Sigh. All my children took piano and some instrument while in school. None were very successful. I keep hoping they will marry people who have a better musical gene pool.
The fact that you built guitars is just amazing to me. That is the ultimate in music ability. It means you truly have a good ear. My ears are merely attached to my head. I am SO envious of those who have natural musical ability. It truly is a God Given gift.
My ear isn’t actually all that great. But I have found ways of compensating for it….I play an instrument that doesn’t require a lot of ear playing. Have figured out a simple but effective approach to jazz improvisation after many frustrating years of learning from books. it seems there is a pattern in my life. I try something I find interesting, and then find others are better at it or that it doesn’t come naturally. I go at it in search of deep meaning. I find hidden simple patterns or themes — from a reductionist approach, and then gain deep insight. Next I want to teach people how to do it from a foundation of simple principles, and they think it’s valuable because it’s simple and they get enough results almost immediately to want to continue learning. I was challenged in math as a teenager in high school. My dad hired this math teacher at a developmental school to teach me math. The light came on with a single example — he showed me how formulae work — he took the same simple division problem, and repeated the problem using a smaller and smaller denominator, eventually reaching a point where the quotient was so large the next step would be the symbol “infinity”. For some reason, that one example opened up the world of math to me, and I went on to teach math at the college level. It is my best and highest subject from a student satisfaction perspective and all through my subsequent education as a student. I am not sure what the underlying driver is — I think it’s analytical thinking. I love to analyze things and take them apart, and it’s only when I see things working on a simple level that I am able to understand that all complex things are simply a combination of simple ideas — except in the field of human behavior and motivation!!!
Anyway, back to parenting…I can’t teach my kids anything in school. They don’t listen for some reason. My daughter took statistics and got a “D” last session. After 1 tutoring session with me, she concluded I didn’t know how to use the calculator their class had been assigned (at the moment she showed it to me), and didn’t want me to teach any of the theory/paper-based theory either Strange that I am generally regarded as a good teacher, yet, when it comes to teaching academic topics at home, the kids don’t want to listen
As a report — I did my first bit of teaching of life skills to my son. He checked the oil in three cars last night. So far so good. He’ll do it again as a matter of routine at different times…to make sure he integrates it into his thinking…Momentum established. Next step is something else easy on the list.
SilentDawning: Something we did many years ago .. We were living in a smaller community and we volunteered on election night to help count ballots. The kids got to watch the boxes being brought in from all the precincts, the seals that had been placed to keep the boxes secure. They got to see the process of the boxes being opened … The counts and the verifications. It was a wonderful experience of the election process at a very basic level.
It also allowed them to meet active members of political parties, people who were running for office, and understand that there were real people behind slogans and banners. If made politics much more approachable to them.
Interesting. Sounds like u have created a lot of really good experiences for your children! Sent from my XT1080 using Tapatalk
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