As utter
dork parents, we are doing our darndest to make our daughter the kind of kid who will play Dungeons and Dragons, correct her teacher during the physics lesson, join the drama club, and have thick tape holding her glasses together. In other words, we are grooming her for total geekdom. As my better half said recently, "It's gonna make the whole dating thing so much easier on us."
Therefore I was pleased to see other parents encouraging the same kind of behavior. Geekdad from the ubergeek source, Wired,
put in a plug for kids watching one of our favorite shows,
MythBusters. We adore this program because the hosts are appropriately hilarious, cute, and dorky; they encourage experimentation and skepticism; and best of all, they blow lots of shit up. Heh heh, cool.
I, like Geekdad, highly recommend this program for all ages. In fact, we just turned my engineer stepfather onto the show, and now he watches it religiously. Explosions and critical thinking for the whole family served up by funny people: what more could you want?
I'll also give a shout-out to another one of the dork programs we watch as a unit, called
How It's Made. It's a completely straightforward look at how, um, stuff is made. They cover everything from a crayon factory to fish husbandry with the same unflappable delivery and bad puns. It's low tech and literal and Canadian and we like it. See? You can learn things from television.
