skullaria wrote:
I have to wonder, if he were in 'regular' school, could he even show a teacher his animation without being labeled a potentially problematic child?

Yes, I'm sure someone at the school would misinterpret things and flip out. Cute cartoon... I used to love the chainsaw in the original Doom. :)

skullaria wrote:
My son is 11. One has to keep that in mind. He loves doing animation.
I found this flash movie he did last night and published it.

I am so glad that he IS homeschooled - he's a wonderfully compassionate boy who just happens to like...DOOM. I've been teaching him flash for the last year or so, but I was particularly enamored of this one - it is fairly fast to load, and he's done a great job with his sounds, which is something he's just starting to work with.

I have to wonder, if he were in 'regular' school, could he even show a teacher his animation without being labeled a potentially problematic child?

I'm getting an error from this.

skullaria wrote:
My son is 11. One has to keep that in mind. He loves doing animation.
I found this flash movie he did last night and published it.

I am so glad that he IS homeschooled - he's a wonderfully compassionate boy who just happens to like...DOOM. I've been teaching him flash for the last year or so, but I was particularly enamored of this one - it is fairly fast to load, and he's done a great job with his sounds, which is something he's just starting to work with.

I have to wonder, if he were in 'regular' school, could he even show a teacher his animation without being labeled a potentially problematic child?

OK, got it working in IE. It doesn't like some browsers.

In any event, what I'd say is beyond the risk that some teacher might interpret this as a threat, that the use of a tool like flash would never be encouraged or facilitated by a public school because it isn't common place. Schools tend to support and encourage interests and talents that are both popular and approved by the entire parent body. The schools can't afford to support anything that only one or two kids are interested in and they can't support things that offend parts of the community.

The result is that students with interests like violin tend to get a lot of support, both emotional and material, from the school community. Students with unpopular interests, like animation, for example, don't get much support either inside the school or in the community at large. As far as the school is concerned this doesn't even count as an extra cirricular activity because it isn't officially sanctioned. Its the same as watching television when it comes time to consider things like honors society membership or university admissions.

I think this tends to encourage a lot of medicore violinists, almost none of whom touch the things once they graduate from high school, and discourage a lot of potentially great talents and interests of various sorts, many of which cannot survive in a public school in any way because students honestly expressing themselves will invitably offend some segment of the parent population who have silly ideas about the sort of concepts children are mature enough to handle.

Ultimately, children would be better off if schools attempted to understand and provide support and guidance for their personal individual extracirricular interests rather than providing children with a preset menu of group activities and telling them that they have to pick some, but this would require a lot of personalized attention that is both expensive and fails to serve an institutional goal for which the school system receives funds (such as promotion of the fine arts, or athletics). Children would also be better off, particularly in high school, if parents would not try to protect children from being exposed to eachother's self expression, but thats obviously never going to happen.

Decius wrote:
I think this tends to encourage a lot of medicore violinists ... and discourage a lot of potentially great talents and interests of various sorts

Hear hear.

Ultimately, children would be better off if schools attempted to understand and provide support and guidance for their personal individual extracirricular interests rather than providing children with a preset menu of group activities and telling them that they have to pick some, but this would require a lot of personalized attention that is both expensive and fails to serve an institutional goal for which the school system receives funds (such as promotion of the fine arts, or athletics).

More crucially, this would require that schools not be hamstrung by the politics of the parents and community they "serve". This is almost certainly impossible. I've been forced to consider the notion that publicly financing education results in an untenable educational proposition -- that of serving the lowest common denominator. The only sanctioned topics, not to mention methods of instruction, are those that survive parental outcry, and policians' careerism. The result is safe, bland, boring and quite frequently useless to almost everyone. I think most of us find success in spite of our pre-college education, not because of it.

Children would also be better off, particularly in high school, if parents would not try to protect children from being exposed to each other's self expression, but thats obviously never going to happen.

Indeed, sadly it seems like it won't. So the question of all this becomes, what do you do about it? Homeschooling sounds very appealing, but I'm certain that it cannot work unless a certain critical mass of parents choose that path. I would think that too few results in socialization problems as the kids spend all their time with a small group of people, mostly their own parents. I worry that most neighborhoods can't support this critical mass, not to even mention the need for the parents to be engaged, intellectually progressive, etc. I am cynical in this regard.

Vouchers, or variants thereof, seem to work some places, but I see structural problems in the US approach that makes the idea difficult. I'm interested in learning a lot more about this, but my gut reaction is skepticism.

Thoughts? What's our way out?

Well, the homeschool socialization myth - well, that is just a myth. There's been several studies showing that homeschool kids are often ..better..socialized than their peers. There's been plenty written on that topic already though. We don't find it to be a problem.

I like the European model of tying the money to the kids. If parents/kids are not happy with xyz school, they put the child in abc school, and that is where the money goes.

As for animation being strictly extra-curricular...I would consider it cross-curricular instead...it touches art, math, logic,science, technology...but then I am a homeschool parent and NOT a teacher.

We are working with an old version of software - it keeps it affordable but hence more compatibility problems.

Old software, btw, has been a real gift for us - like DOOM - since the code and hack kits are available my son has been able to learn a from making his own mods, wad files, ect.

It isn't always the money as much as it is the time and the interest.

Decius wrote:

I think this tends to encourage a lot of mediocre violinists ...

There is clearly (a superficial) truth to this statement, but I think it fails to appreciate the indirect value of musical training. I don't have studies at hand but I'm sure they're out there. As in many areas pursued by children, the effort isn't worthless just because it doesn't lead to a professional career in that area. This applies to sports as much as fine arts.

Decius wrote:

Ultimately, children would be better off if schools attempted to understand and provide support and guidance for their personal individual extracurricular interests ...

A lot of superintendents would probably agree with you, but the money simply isn't there to provide the resources that such a strategy would require. Budget cuts threaten even the music programs that reliably churn out those mediocre violinists.

Your phrasing brought to mind the Montessori method, although it doesn't specifically apply to "extracurricular" activities. (One might argue that in Montessori, everything is curricular.) Perhaps Elonka could weigh in on this thread.