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Back when Steve Jobs died, I found this quote in an interview with him from 1995. There were many important things that he said over the years, but this one really resonated with me.

Heathkits were really great. Heathkits were these products that you would buy in kit form. You actually paid more money for them than if you just went and bought the finished product if it was available. These Heathkits would come with these detailed manuals about how to put this thing together and all the parts would be laid out in a certain way and color coded. You'd actually build this thing yourself. I would say that this gave one several things. It gave one a understanding of what was inside a finished product and how it worked because it would include a theory of operation but maybe even more importantly it gave one the sense that one could build the things that one saw around oneself in the universe. These things were not mysteries anymore. I mean you looked at a television set you would think that "I haven't built one of those but I could. There's one of those in the Heathkit catalog and I've built two other Heathkits so I could build that." Things became much more clear that they were the results of human creation not these magical things that just appeared in one's environment that one had no knowledge of their interiors. It gave a tremendous level of self-confidence, that through exploration and learning one could understand seemingly very complex things in one's environment. My childhood was very fortunate in that way.

I used to do little electronic kits when I was a kid—we couldn't afford Heathkits—and I, too, think they had a profound influence. Not only do you realize that there's no magic in everyday things, you discover that they're actually far more amazing.

I think about this every day. I drive to work in a vehicle comprised of thousands and thousands of parts from all over the world, designed by a company in England; assembled in a factory in Germany; powered by decomposed dinosaurs dug up in the Middle East and turned into fuel by Texans; and listening to songs selected randomly from a library of thousands on a device that is several orders of magnitude more powerful than the most powerful computers of my childhood. And all I had to do was go to a couple of stores and plunk down some money, an amount that I considered very reasonable.

I mean, who needs fantasy or science fiction? Harry Potter's wand doesn't hold a candle to the productive wonder of global capitalism and the power of the human mind.

The other reason why this hit home for me is that I have kids and I want to impart this sense of wonder to them. It reminded me of Richard Feynman's father. We watch How It's Made and MythBusters and I patiently answer their "why" questions no matter how trivial. I am careful not to overwhelm them or impose my interests on them; I realize that this parenting thing is a marathon and I'll get to everything I know and love eventually.

Since I included little background in my previous entry, let me begin by saying that I was identified as gifted in kindergarten and spent my entire educational career in advanced, honors, and gifted classes. There were times when no gifted version of a class or subject was available which necessitated exposure to the regular curriculum. So I've seen both sides of the situation and have ample experience being bored.

Furthermore, I'm a programmer and manager by trade. Much of programming and management is routine. The beginning of most work is fascinating: you design a system, lay the groundwork, and build something from nothing. But execution tends to be repetitive and detail-oriented. Once the program is out in the wild, maintenance and expansion are very rarely sexy or exciting.

The ability to keep at a task day after day, month after month, year after year is invaluable. It is often what makes the difference between a decent performer and an excellent one. But if your entire childhood is spent flitting about—leaving when the going gets tough—then you're likely going to continue that pattern as an adult and money will only go so far at motivating you to do the menial work. This will manifest itself as being a prima donna, changing jobs frequently, or general dissatisfaction with work.

One response to my entry attacked something that I never said: that the goal of education was boredom and "getting along with peers." While I did not elaborate the point sufficiently, I did say that tedium was not the purpose of education. Clearly, the purpose of education is to give a child the knowledge necessary for being an employed adult. (Making good choices and learning to be happy are more the purpose of parenting.) But that doesn't mean knowledge is the only thing you can get from it.

Off the top of my head, here are some useful skills that you get alongside an education:

• Taking direction from a variety of superiors
• Dealing with irrational people
• Managing one's time and priorities
• Doing tasks that one doesn't particularly enjoy
• Collaborating with others to get tasks done
• Learning to stand up for oneself
• Dealing with objective evaluation
• Dealing with people who don't like you
• Doing repetitive practice tasks to acquire mastery
• Balancing extracurricular activities with school work

Few of those can be acquired from homeschooling. They are all part and parcel of being an adult employee in a modern workplace. It's best to develop them in a relatively risk-fre setting like school—working on them on the job can easily result in a job loss as one makes missteps. Again, these are not the primary aims of school but their acquisition is vital to adult success.

School can be boring.

Let me put the emphasis where I mean it: school can be boring. So can work. So can life.

I'm not going to say that the purpose of school is to be tedious. But learning and mastery aren't supposed to be effortless. You have to learn things that maybe you don't want to because they're a) foundational and b) important. For a child, it'd be great to stick only to what interests you and skip the math drills. And it's tempting to think that a child-centered education might result in more engagement and thus more learning.

But that's not how life works. You can't only work on the fun projects at your office; someone needs to wipe out the toilets; and there's always paperwork to be filed. There's going to be a boss and he's going to tell you to do things. If you cut and run because man that guy's always droning on about the proper sequence to assemble the widget, then you're not going to be employed for long.

Knowing how to handle being bored and follow directions is a life skill. Finding the value in relationships with people unlike yourself (or maybe even beneath your level of intelligence) will serve you for the rest of your life. School is a great place to acquire and practice those skills. If you indulge your child's self-absorption, you're not doing him any favors and disappointment is going to be a theme throughout his life.

My wife was an elementary school teacher prior to having our children. She said that she considered starting a new career instead of going back into education; she thought of nursing as a profession, preferring to deal with blood over dealing with the parents.

She sent me this opinion piece about "what teachers really want to tell parents" today and indicated that it was spot on. After reading it over, I can say that I have seen a lot of these behaviors and issues in my interactions around the school.

One big omission from this list is to separate your identity from your child's performance. I think this is what underlies so many of the other negative behaviors enumerated in that article. From my vantage point, half the time these parental flareups look like "I'm not the type of person who would have a child that turns in a half-assed science project" or "My child must be gifted because I am gifted." Kids fail or are of normal intelligence—even your unique snowflake—and you're just driving your kid's teacher crazy.

I'm not a perfect father, but I feel the best about my parenting when I'm letting them sort things out for themselves. It is very hard to not intervene when they're struggling, but that struggle is necessary for them to truly own their knowledge or wisdom.

I just finished listening to an audio version of Richard Feynman's The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. Overall it was pretty mixed in its content, but what was good was really, really good.

One story he repeatedly shared—the book is a collection of individual essays and documents from Feynman's life so it's replete with repetition—is about the walks through the woods that he used to take as a child with his father, a uniform salesman. Other boys in his peer group would ask him if he knew what some bird or tree was called and mock him when he didn't know because their fathers taught them such things. The difference was that his father taught him that knowing what something is named tells you absolutely nothing about the thing itself, only what words humans use to refer to it.

His father would ask him how a squirrel moves and Feynman (the child) would reply that it was by using his muscles. His father would say, "Nope, it's because the sun shines." Feynman would look at him quizzically and his father would then ask a series of questions that delved deeper into each succeeding premise until the ultimate cause was clearly that the sun was shining. His father had no scientific training, but he wanted his son to become a scientist. (I must confess now that I may have gotten the specifics of this story—and any others I relate—incorrect since I can't readily go back and verify my memory. I do, however, know the gist of them.)

On another walk, they were really studying trees and Feynman's father told him that on all these walks they had really only gotten to know half of the forest's workings. Feynman was again curious and his father pointed out that they had been focusing solely on living things. Death was an important process in the forest and so he proceeded to search for evidence of chains starting with things dying. They found rotting trees, animal carcasses, and so on.

The last story about the interaction between the Feynmans that struck me was how Feynman's father used to tell him bedtime stories from different perspectives and Feynman the child had to guess who his father was using. Sometimes it might be a Martian, other times it was a bug in the carpet. Feynman related that these stories exerted a powerful influence on him at the time because they seemed so vivid as his father described the world as viewed from an ant's perspective.

These stories (and there were many more that I enjoyed) illustrated the power of showing rather than telling. Feynman's father could have delivered extensive tales of biological processes or everyday bedtime stories. Instead, he took the opportunity to present lessons—in stepping out of your own way of looking at things, in looking beyond the obvious workings of our world, in getting to the root causes of the way things are. He did it through means a child could understand, which made it accessible.

The main thing that Feynman says his father instilled in him was that the world was full of wonder. This curiosity manifested itself in his interest in physics, but it could also show up in his forays into psychology and his generally skeptical manner. He emphasized that curiosity was its own reward.

These are the things I want for my children, things that I have enjoyed throughout my life. I hope that I can do it in a similarly inspiring fashion, rather than a clumsy, lecturing style that turns them off. Feynman's The Pleasure of Finding Things Out is an excellent source for the former and well worth it for any parent who desires the same.

Someone at work mentioned that schools were discouraging the use of red pens to indicate errors, but I didn't believe it. I guess I was wrong. Two anecdotes stood out:

"I know a teacher who will ask questions in class, and if the student answers wrongly, she'll say, 'Hold that answer, I'll be back with the right question soon,' " said Warner Robins High school counselor Beth McConnell.

Last year, at Fort Valley Middle School, students who made A's were called out of class for a party in the school gym. This year, that celebration was opened up to all students with passing grades, said principal Quintin Green.

This is so wrong. I'm lucky to be married to an educator who believes that article is bunk. She taught third grade last year and gave "D" students Ds. Parents freaked because their children had always been "A" students before—except they hadn't. There is a certain strain of teacher that is all too happy to engage in grade inflation because it makes her job easier by removing any chance of confrontation.

It sickens me and it sickened my wife. She tells me that the kids are generally okay with red marks, poor grades, and criticism. They know when they aren't performing well and getting such grades affirms this. She said that parents are the ones who can't handle it; they've actually gone to her principal to contest the grades. Sandi, of course, had all the documentation to support her assessment so the parents would generally get their children transferred to an easier class, where they would get nice and inflated marks.

There is an interesting contrast to be made between her public school experience and her private school experience. She taught kindergarten for two years at Rancho Solano. In those classes, the kids learned to read, count, and generally everything that she later taught in first grade at a public school. Oh, and these kids were four years old. Her expectations (and the school's) were high and the kids rose to meet them. When a parent did disagree with her teaching style (which was very rare), the school stood firmly behind her so long as she was right.

She would go back to a private school in a heartbeat, but she's not sure if she would ever go back to a public one after her tenure there.

If ever there was an indictment of George W. Bush, this article is a resounding one. His "No Child Left Behind" initiative is one of those things that he hails as indicative of his compassion and would probably consider his legacy.

Unfortunately, in today's publicly-funded educational system, money allocated for a new project must carve out funds from existing projects. The message sent by this new program is clear: the dumb must be raised up. The zero-sum budget game of public education adds in an implicit corollary: the bright must be brought down.

This, I must say, is a travesty. Speaking as a recipient of gifted education throughout my public school career, I think that I would have tuned out if I hadn't had a daily respite from the doldrums. Being able to associate with other smart people who had all sorts of quirks that were as egghead-y as your own—think Head of the Class but younger—was literally a life-saver (or, perhaps, a mind-saver).

If you believe that children are our future, the gifted are the particular subset of children that are most likely to represent our future. The mass of public school children will, by and large, become the future construction laborers, service workers, and auto mechanics of our country. All of which, mind you, are perfectly respectable jobs and will enable them to live their lives and raise their families.

But to condemn the gifted to wallow in the banality of their regular classrooms is indefensible. In a more perfect world, the fact that such a law was passed with such inevitable and foreseeable consequences would be damnatory and result in Bush II's inability to achieve the Republican Party nomination. That it isn't points to the sorry state of affairs the GOP finds itself in.

As a liberal-arts major working in a field unrelated to said major, I second Alex Tabarrok's advice. Well said! Many of my colleagues constantly lamented the poor pay of an academic and considered it an indictment of our society—but one of many so considered I assure you—that historians' works didn't sell better and that their influence was so marginal. I was always glad for it, knowing their views and opinions, but it always struck me how envy-ridden they were.

I'd wager that it's precisely because they didn't have real jobs outside of their teaching assistantships and probably never had. Insulated in the ivory tower, it's easy to construct castles in the air and weave unreal theories. You get paid whether your ideas are ludicrous or sound. In fact, you just may get paid more for more controversial and "avant-garde" espousals. The real world (by which I mean the business world) just isn't like that.

Many of my fellow academics were positively riddled with disdain for their students. They saw the lack of acceptance of their ideas among their pupils as a sign of the students' mental deficiencies, hidden racism, or conservatism. Never once did it occur to them that their views were preposterous or that their premises inconsistent with reality. I'm not suggesting that they were crazy because they disagreed with me, but they were just so unfounded and derivative—unfounded in reality and derivative of the scholars they read.

I, for one, would love to start a business around history. The melding of my interests and the entrepreneurial spirit of the venture would suit me well. But the difficulty is that I can't come up with any good businesses. I've got some great ideas, but I can't figure out how to make money at them. And I'm not going to do the one without getting the other straight.

Just think about who would pay for historical work to be done and you'll see my trouble. Corporations have a lot of money but producing historical accounts of them would probably take more time and money than they'd be willing to spend. Plus, the research might unearth unpleasant facts or be heavily restricted due to the necessity of protecting trade secrets. Individuals pay for history quite frequently, but that's in purchasing books. How to get them to pay more generally is a tough nut. I'll crack it in due time, but it's going to take thought.