This is off-topic (lots of great info here in the thread, though), but I was shocked when I went to buy my kid a graphing calculator for math last summer. It’s essentially the same tech that I was using in high school 25 years ago, and it is still going for the better part of a $100 bill. Homeless people throw away smartphones that do 1000x more than a TI-83 ever will!
Well, it turns out that it’s basically a hustle by the education-industrial complex.
FWIW, when I took my civil engineering exam last year, most powerful calculator you were allowed to have was an HP33 or 35. No graphing calculators.
If they’re good enough for engineers, should be good enough for a kids’ math class right?
I had to buy a TI 83 for a college course many years ago. I used it some but it didn’t do a lot of what I needed it to. Ok so you can graph functions. Awesome. Then they took it away from you when you did the test! The HP on the other hand, has never let me down and is easy to use.
Man, and here I was just struggling innocently to understand parabolas…
It’s true. Graphing calculators are way overrated. My calculus teacher was fond of saying that you should be able to do all of calculus without a graphing calculator.
Here’s another one to add to the list:
We’re thinking this through now. The oldest is 7 and something that came up recently was whether or not to get an old laptop and put some 90s DOS learning games on it. So then I looked into Windows 10 options for blocking internet on certain accounts. It doesn’t seem to exist!
I just wanted 1 account with DOSBox on it so we could play this, this, this, and this – but it looks like I’ll have to disable the machine’s MAC address at the router level which is annoying.
You could probably find instructions for pulling or disabling the WiFi chip. A friend did that to his iPod Touch years ago. That would also leave you with the option to connect it via CAT-5 if you didn’t want to leave it air-gapped.
You might also be able to foul up the networking drivers beyond Windows’s recognition.
Was that written in English? =-P
Jargon and gibberish are indistinguishable to the untrained eye.
Here are my thoughts after trying to follow through on some of the ideas here.
Me: I just found out that one of my teenagers has been using Google Docs to chat and share photos
Boomer: What’s Google Docs?
Me: Discussing challenges of teenagers being online
Boomer: If you sent your kids to school instead of homeschooling them, then they could interact with other kids in real life and wouldn’t feel the need to be online
I am becoming more and more aware about of the myriad of ways by which teenagers communicate online, and it seems impossible to passively monitor this. If your kids are on devices with access to the Internet, you won’t be able to keep track of what they are doing unless you are recording and reviewing screenshots.
It is really difficult to keep your teenager offline. At first I thought it was mainly an issue of schooling, but now I see that online is a primary means by which your teenagers maintain friendships with people that you know and trust. It’s been especially true during this year of COVID, but unless you are in a neighborhood filled with solid Christian families or driving your teenagers to visit friends, online is how they are going to socialize with the sort of people you want them to socialize with.
Although requiring teenagers to use computers and devices in a public space of the house enables better oversight, it also makes it more difficult for teenagers to concentrate on schoolwork when there are multiple younger siblings in the family. This is a serious trade-off. I’ve been working from home this past year, and just hearing people talking nearby or bustling in the kitchen is a distraction, let alone hearing children running around and yelling.
For those who are socially awkward and have very different interests from typical teenagers (such as me in high school), it is possible to find like-minded people online and alleviate loneliness (I’m sure I would have enjoyed that, had it been available in my day).
It’s been pointed out that children on the 19th century frontier may have had no friends within miles and no means of real-time communication and that Amish children today get along fine without the Internet, so why not keep our kids offline even if it retards friendships? I’m not sure it works out the same way, however, because the former was the result of natural necessity rather than prohibition and the latter occurs within a long-standing organic community. Although I am not afraid of displeasing my children or making choices against the mainstream, I am also mindful that the imposition of blunt policies to deal with social problems often backfire (c.f. the courtship movement / IKDGB).
I am coming around to the idea that creating a wall is not going to work, or at least the cost would be too great. Instead, what I will do is manage – retain some restrictions, warn my teenagers of the dangers, check in from time to time, but dispense with the idea that I can monitor or control everything, or even most everything.
I know the orthodox Jewish community goes largely without technology, much like the Amish. Maybe they get it when adults. There’s a certain simplicity to that, but as a kid who grew up hacking windows 95 to get games to run faster, there are certain professions I think they might miss out on.
The question is how to get from here to there. For example, a lot of people saw that there were major problems with the contemporary dating scene, so they decided to revive courtship practices from a century ago, or invent their own. But it didn’t fit organically in the culture and created many problems.
So I completely understand what you are saying here and so please take my push back as friendly push back and quite possibly intended for others that read your comment. You certainly can’t control everything. That is frankly one of the main dangers of “Homeschooling.” (Yes, I am aware that I spelled that with a capital H… 
) However, there is a helpful distinction between controlling and actively protecting. I say this because my own tendency has been sinful here. I can’t really control and so I haven’t taken all the steps that I need to take in order to protect as best I can or as wisdom would dictate. In fact, much of what I have done has been at the consistent prodding of my helpful and godly wife.
Look, if kids are determined to get to nasty stuff online, there is really little that we can do to stop it. My responsibility as a father is to try to make it more difficult to do so as a deterrent, as well as try as much as possible to limit the introduction of this leaven into the soul and eyes of my sons primarily, but really all of my children. That is what I think should be the focus of our help to our children in this area as they enter the age of using devices. How to I limit the assault as much as possible to avoid this sin taking root and becoming established. No, we can’t prevent everything…but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t real value to preventing as much as we may.
Young teenage boys are just so susceptible to this temptation. In my judgment, our thinking shouldn’t be, “I’ll check in from time to time.” but rather, “This is a soul destroying sin. How can I be the greatest help to my son in fighting it?” It seems wise to me to place every speed bump that I may in the way of my sons to help protect them.
This is going to look different for different families. It will look different for different ages. It will look different for different children based on their proclivity to sin and their own desire to fight their sin. But what we mustn’t do (preaching completely to myself now as I have been guilty of this) is abdicate this responsibility because it is difficult to make these distinctions and decisions.
May God give us all wisdom as we navigate the age where the adulteress isn’t just calling from her tent as we walk by, but beckoning from our own living rooms and computer rooms.
Actually I’m rather fond of the way the orthodox Jews do dating. High community/parental involvement. Heavy expectations of purity, but much love provided by family. Marry young. I’d love to see this style of dating in the prot world.
I think one of the issues we face is what to do about online curriculum? If you put a PC in the middle of the living room, the kid won’t be able to focus. If you put it in the school room, off the beaten path… well…
Options:
I’m leaning towards 2 at this point, but have to find some nice offline materials. Perhaps youtube-dl to the rescue.
Cloud flares DNS for families:
While that 1.1.1.3 DNS looks promising, it’s just as they say, “a layer of protection”. It doesn’t prevent someone from visiting a content aggregation website (e.g. YouTube or Reddit) and accessing all types of content there. Also, Cloudflare doesn’t provide many configuration options (you can choose from blocking malware, adult content, or both). You get protection from Cloudflare’s (or Google’s) definition of adult content. NextDNS provides many more configuration options.
I’m leery of technological solutions to technological problems. At root it’s a spiritual problem, but it’s much harder to lust after lewd images if there is no access to lewd images. The benefits of the Internet are so many that it’s hard to imagine modern life without it, but technology scales faster than societies can respond with new laws and ethical norms (see Does Technology Evolve More Quickly Than Ethical and Legal Norms? | L.M. Sacasas).
At work I am an advocate of Cloudflare, but I don’t trust their family product since they have committed to not treat homosexuality as something from which to protect your family. Any good product would at least make it configurable.
I really like DNS filtering solutions, and I’m currently using https://cleanbrowsing.org. There is a small fee to be able to do custom filters, but I think that should be a no-brainer for a Christian man.
I remember seeing the Cloudflare announcement back in 2020. They didn’t have any ability to customize filters back then, so I gave it a pass. It’s not clear to me whether they have them now. But @Michael makes an important point: regardless of the DNS filtering solution you pick, you are generally at the mercy of their decisions about filters.
Content aggregation sites are the big problem with DNS filtering solutions, and there is no easy way to solve that problem. But ask yourself the question: “How much worse would my life be if I removed access to Reddit on this device? Or Youtube? Or Amazon?” We have no lack of options to buy things or watch things. I think that the answer, in most cases, would be, “my life would be much better, actually!”
We ripped movies to Plex and Saturday night is movie night. Kids are 7 and under.