Hey, folks, Joel here. I'm hijacking Kimberly's account for a day. Mua-ha-ha!!!

Yesterday I was helping AZ with his Chicago Landmark speech. He was given the assignment to write a 3-minute speech and build a scale model of the 111 S. Wacker building. Research took the form of a few hours spent online. He had hand-written his speech, and I was taking dictation.

In the process, there were 2 particular spots of the speech where we discovered he lacked a certain bit of information. As I'm typing along in Word, he comes across the acronym "LEED" and says, "I don't know what that stands for." So I jump over to Firefox and Google it and get a definition in about 10 seconds, which I cut and paste right into the document. Later, he mentions a physical feature of the building that he was uncertain of, so I hop over to Firefox again, Google "111 S. Wacker", click a pdf link, and in 10 seconds I'm looking at a picture of the feature in question.

At this point the following occurred to me: 10 years ago, if he was doing this report, the same process would have taken him weeks of effort, hours and hours of research, and more hours of travel to and from libraries, downtown Chicago, and photo processing labs. He would also probably have had to schedule interviews, by phone or in person, with various architectural professionals. Just the simple question "What does 'LEED' stand for?" would have taken a couple of hours at the local library, and possibly a longer trip to a college library or a series of phone calls to various libraries and government offices. Instead, just sitting here on my backside, I can pop open multiple hugely powerful applications, tap into VAST databases of information stored thousands of miles away, and in a matter of SECONDS learn all sorts of new things.

That's mindblowing enough, but perhaps even more profound was my realization that AZ won't understand for years -- possibly he never will -- the magnitude of the changes wrought by this technology. Maybe someday 15 years from now, he'll be sitting around working on a paper for college and he'll look up and say, "Holy frak, how did people used to DO this?!?"

And the pace that technology is racing along at is constantly accelerating, too. Before 1844 (the invention of the telegraph -- which, by the way, I just jumped to a new browser window to look up, instead of tripping down the block to the library) if you wanted to know something that was happening more than 50 miles away, you had to write a letter and have it physically walked to it's destination, then wait for the addressee to read the letter, then wait for the reply to be physically walked back to you.

Over 30 years later, in 1876 (Google again) the telephone was invented. Only 9 years later, AT&T opened, and true large-volume, long-distance information exchange became possible. But still, some person at the other end had to DO the research, then get back to you. Faster, yet still quite cumbersome.

So it took almost half a century to make possible remote research, and decades more to make that possibility available to every community. (AT&T only served a few major northeastern US cities when it was founded in 1885.) And it STILL involved, at some point, someone actually getting up and going to the library to do actual work.

In the past decade alone, we've completely eliminated the need for anyone to bestir themselves from their comfortable perch to do even very deep levels of research on any but the most esoteric of subjects. Seriously, check out the title of this paper on... well, something medical, anyway... that I was able to discover with 5 seconds of "work":

Subatomic and atomic crystallographic studies of aldose
reductase: implications for inhibitor binding.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15095001

I can't even figure out HOW that relates to medicine. Even if you physically went down to a hospital and asked around, you couldn't find this information. You couldn't even stumble across this kind of information, because nobody knows that this is even a question you could ask. And yet, because some dude discovered that certain types of sand can carry electric current, and because some even older dude discovered that electricity can be made to flow in a current, and because some even OLDER dude discovered that electricity, -- not that it did anything, just that it is -- here we are.

What would impress a visitor to today's America from 200 years ago the most? Transportation? No, all of that can be explained in terms of physical laws that people have always known. (Explosions push levers that turn wheels that make cars go, or the wheels turn giant fans that push against the air and wings shaped like bird wings lift the airplane into the sky.) Skyscrapers or suspension bridges or any of our great feats of architecture? No, those are all extensions of existing disciplines using stronger materials, and besides, didn't people build pyramids and hanging gardens and great walls thousands of years ago?

No, nothing physical, nothing analog, because that's all just building on ideas that have existed for millennia. The digital revolution is truly that: a revolutionary new TYPE of concept, one that had never before existed. Suddenly, now, nothing has to have a physical existence to exist. Try to explain to anyone from a pre-digital age that even though you can see ANYTHING -- people, places, things -- that object ISN'T. You can see a building, but there's no building there. If you look at a real building and close your eyes, the building is still there, but the things you see on a computer screen only exist as ideas in your mind and only while you are looking at them. Where does that picture go when you click a new link? The only proper answer is that it can't go anywhere, because it never WAS. Electronics don't even work via the presence or absence of specific electrons; they work through electronic potential. One of the first things you learn in chemistry -- or the first time you hear about quantum theory -- is that you cannot point to one electron, only to a region where an electron might be. To have a physical identity, you MUST be able to point to a thing and say, "This is it." But a digital idea, an electronic image, built of electron clouds, by definition cannot be specifically pointed to.

*******

Um... wow. OK. Well, this is a prime example of why I was voted simultaneously "Most Outrageous" and "Most Profound" by my high school class. I suppose.

AZ brought home all his project stuff today and received much praise. Then he sat down to work on the speech he's writing for his latest school project and cranked out a very good, informative paragraph in about an hour, leaving him free to play and read for the rest of the evening. See how much better life can be when you have all your materials at hand? Keep your fingers crossed this sinks in.

Anyway, here's the story... there were a few specific dates he had trouble finding in the research materials he had already printed out, so I told him to go ahead and write and leave blanks for the numbers, which I would help him look up to fill in later. The speech is about a skyscraper in downtown Chicago (this is the final project for their architecture unit) and his particular building was in development in late 2001. During his research, he found an article about the events of September 11 causing the architect to have to make major design changes to the building before anyone would consent to lease it. AZ did a very good job of explaining the redesign in his writing this evening, but he didn't know the year or the specifics about what really happened on Sept 11 to make companies not want to move into a funkily designed skyscraper.

So as he's reading me his latest paragraph he says "After September 11, [blank] they realized the had a flaw in their plan" I filled in "2001" and he seemed impressed I knew that off the top of my head. When he was done reading his paragraph, I started to explain for him some of the background so he could understand better and edit a little. I said "you know how I knew you were talking about September 11, 2001?"

He immediately says "Did you remember seeing that building when *you* were a little girl?"

At least he's not one of those kids who thinks his parents had dinosaurs for pets...

When I stopped laughing I pointed out that *he* was born before September 2001. In fact, the terrorist attacks happened on my last day of maternity leave. Makes it easy to remember the date he first rolled over, since he waited until I went to the office to do it.

I suppose it's a little sobering to realize that most of his contemporaries and their younger siblings are growing up with that horrible day being just something from the history books, but I can't help but smile at the way even a very intelligent 8 year old thinks of anything before his own memory as being something from when his parents were kids.

My 8 year old is in a combined 3rd/4th grade gifted class this year, so he's going through the usual transition to 3rd grade plus the jump to a challenging class full of gifted kids from his "normal" second grade classroom. He loves his new school, his teacher, the challenge (after his first social studies test, I asked him how it was and he responded "It was awesome! It was hard! But not too hard, Mom, I think I did a good job" - he got an A) and everything about school.

The problem is that he is really struggling with getting and staying organized. I'm told this is a normal thing for third grade, as they are expected to do a lot more self-management, but with the addition of the research project-based format of the class, it turns out to be a really big deal when he forgets to bring home his research notes or whatnot.

Last week was a horrible week. He had a 3 week project due last Tuesday, after the long weekend. But Friday night he realized he had left his entire folder of information he had gathered, up to and including the description of the assignment, at school. We spent the weekend basically redoing a lot of research and Monday night an hour after bedtime he was still not done, so I decided he'd turn it in late, wrote his teacher a note and sent everything we *did* get accomplished to school with him so she could see the progress he'd made and he could work on it during open time.

He left the whole shebang at school again that night. My husband nearly exploded. He ended up turning in the project 2 days late (couldn't work on it that night - no materials) costing him two letter grades (on what would have been 100%). He proceeded to forget something EVERY DAY for the rest of the week. Different things each day.

His teacher has some suggestions for organization on the school end, which we are working on, but in the meantime he does well for a day and then forgets something the next. His excuse is usually "I guess I wasn't thinking - I guess my brain was turned off"

At this point we're trying to figure out how to punish him, as none of the constructive changes we're making are lasting. He's already grounded until the end of the month, which included missing the school dance he had been looking forward to. We've taken away all extra curricular activities except for one (removing him from that would leave a hole in a team and impact lots of kids). Grounding includes no video games, no playing with friends after school, etc.

We're using a "three strikes" system for allowance that we implemented last year to help with some other school issue he was having (talking in class, I think). That worked with the past problem and we've kept it up. He gets his allowance each week if he doesn't get three strikes, he pays us a quarter a strike (and gets nothing) for more than 3 in a week. Clean slate every week, with a clear savings goal he's working towards. It worked great until about 3 weeks ago, suddenly he's $10 in the hole, so it's no longer hitting him as directly 'cause it's a growing IOU, instead of him having to dig quarters out of the piggy bank.

There's nothing more to take away punishment-wise. He's adopting a very mature "I screwed up, I need to do better" attitude. A good skill for dealing with disappointment later in life, but not motivating him to do better now.

Any advice?