perfidy

Festung Buckethead, located deep in the mountains of exurban Washington, DC, is a place of learning and happiness. Between the racks of weapons and food stored for the apocalypse, we manage to set aside a small space for the education of our offspring.

Our oldest is now six years old, and his education is moving past the difficult initial stages of teaching him how to pay attention and not fidget, and moving into real larnin’. He reads, and ciphers; and planning for the furtherance of his education is in full swing.

Mrs. Buckethead, a public school teaching survivor, is in charge of most of this effort, while I make faces around the edges of her real work. Seeing as she is 1) an experienced teacher, 2) vastly more organized and thorough than I, and 3) not distrac… ooh, shiny! Where was I? Oh, those reasons make her stewardship of education planning eminently sensible.

Nevertheless, she condenses the results of her tireless research and analysis into small bite sized pieces that I can easily gum and swallow.

And last night, we had one of these information dumps. She is interested in purchasing the A2 curriculum, which is a more or less an improved version of the Robinson curriculum; the which to use as the basis for our ongoing pedagogical efforts. The original Robinson curriculum was developed by, you guessed it, Robinson. Who wanted to educate his boys with minimum fuss and maximum effectiveness. He was an engineer, not an education Ph.D, so he went about doing this in a way that appeals to my inner geek. By all accounts, it is a fantastic program, and you can get an entire K-12 education package with public domain resources, worksheets, etc., all on a package of discs.

The sad thing is, a lot of the material is not stored in the best formats - books as folders of .tiff files, and the like. So the A2 people rationalized it, and now it's all in .txt and PDF files, which are more suited for this modern internets age.

So anyway, we're looking to drop a C-note on this program. But there are no books, no preprinted worksheets, just ones and zeros. My wife was saying that she’d either be printing whole books out on our hp officejet 5510 - or we’d have to hunt down live books in the wild, and buy, skin, and mount them for our son to read. And it occurred to me that that kind of defeats the whole point.

Do the math: Print cartridges are expensive. Books are expensive and can stub your toe. Right now, we need new print cartridges about every six months. If we’re increasing our printing by a metric shitload, we’d be changing print cartridges at least every other month on the new plan, minimum, and likely more often. Given the way that hp rapes you on the cartridges (the first one’s always free), that’s $500 bucks a year right there. Buying books - public domain books that are available for free on Project Gutenberg, or that are already on our curriculum discs - would add hundreds more dollars - a minimum, according to list, of $250.

It will actually be cheaper to buy our son his own Kindle DX.

We can fit a year's worth of educational reading on the Kindle, and it is maximally portable. The boy won't be tied to the computer, and he won't have to lug around lots of books. And there are bonuses. The Kindle has a built in New Oxford American dictionary, just select a word, and get a definition at the bottom of the page, without having to leave the book you’re reading. That sealed it for Mrs. Buckethead right there - being able to look up words right when you hit them is key. And having the dictionary right there makes that process easy.

Free 3G wireless for the life of the device, and built in access to the Wikipedias. Annotations and notes. Plays audio files. And, since it uses the fancy E Ink technology, the battery lasts for weeks as long as you have wireless turned off. The screen is huge - like ten inches, and font size is adjustable, so the boy will have no problems reading on it. Also, it’s not like a backlit LCD screen, so you can easily read it outside, in the sun. It has 3 GB of storage, so we could put huge amounts of material onboard.

The downside, so far as I can tell without actually holding one, is that file management on the thing is a real pain in the ass. You are encouraged to email your personal documents to the Kindle’s email address, though you can use the USB. And, on the device, all your personal documents are just dropped into one folder, no sorting, sub folders or tagging allowed. We’ll have to manage the files for the boy’s studies on the computer, and move them over in chunks, so that he won’t have to wade through thousands of files to find what he needs.

I looked at some of the other ereaders, and it doesn't seem that any of them match up, on price or features, to the DX.

What I’d really like, though, would be the Primer from Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age. But failing that, a touchscreen version would be nice - it would make navigation easier. And better file management would probably help. Amazon is marketing this (among other targets) towards college kids, for replacing expensive textbooks. The homeschool market is small but growing - one could probably make some money putting together packages designed to be used with this sort of technology.

On balance, though, one downside does not outweigh many upsides. And it tickles my fancy to think that I will be buying a $500 state of the art electronic book reader to save money. Granted, we’ll still be buying real books, and we’ll still be printing out worksheets and the like - but the volume would be manageable, and the bulk of his reading will be on the Kindle, which means that his education becomes more portable, more convenient; and that means that we can do more of it.