Fun in the news

So the first three articles are a few months old, but I’ve been a bit busy lately. And I still think they are worth sharing.

Future space station crew dons Jedi robes for Star Wars-inspired poster – Astronauts are cool regardless, but this takes it to a whole new level.

NPR | Q&A: Blocks, Play, Screen Time And The Infant Mind – We’re not against screens for our kids, but watching how Iddo’s face completely loses any emotion and she zones out most of the time during screen time, we’re definitely keeping it to small amounts and only when we are with her. On the other hand, she laughs and jumps when building stacks or pyramids (“like Daddy’s”) with her blocks. And our (Hebrew) alphabet blocks are also fun to see how many animal sounds she knows right now too.

BBC New | Where teachers’ brains detect student confusion – This is rather cool. They did the study with volunteers pretending to be teachers. I wonder how it would compare to people who actually are teachers. Although you’d have to have them watch a student in the subject they taught to really get a feel for how their brains work. But then of course the government would probably decide to determine “highly qualified teachers” based on contrived situations during brain scans in addition to student scores. And good teaching is so much more than either of those would ever indicate.

NPR | ‘Kiss Everybody’: Voice Mails Live On After Parents Are Gone – I don’t have any voice mails from people I’ve lost yet. But I do have several that I’ve saved on my phone because I enjoy listening to them and they mean a lot to me. Like my nephew singing happy birthday to me or my niece asking what my daughter’s favorite color is or our fertility doctor letting us know that the blood test came back positive, or Brett just calling to tell me he loves me. I need to figure out how to save them somewhere other than my phone. Technology has certainly made a difference in not just how we record our lives but what aspects of our lives we record as well.

BYU News Release | Extra love and support doesn’t make up for being a helicopter parent – I’ve seen some helicoptered kids at college. They don’t do well. And the parents are helicoptering because they love their child, they just don’t know how to love them into successful adults instead of entitled helpless eternal teens. I’m really hoping we don’t helicopter. Hopefully being aware of it will keep it from happening.