Sorry about the short notice. I was trying to find out if there’s a way for non-AOL members to listen to this. Apparently not.
Anyway, if you have AOL, their kids radio station KOL will be interviewing me today at 2:30 PST (in a little over 2 hours from now).
I believe it’s a call-in show, where kids get to ask questions of the “expert.” We’ll see how it goes! We’re not allowed to give out any specific web addresses, but she didn’t say I couldn’t mention 1-800-UNICYCLE as a place to find product…
That would be what we call “How to not get invited back.” However I did consider the possibility of mentioning people could call 1-800-UNICYCLE, but the topic of where to get one didn’t come up.
Yes, AOL sucks, but it commands a huge audience, including several of my nieces and nephews. The deaf community now has less reason to rely so heavily on AOL, because it’s easier to use AIM from other programs now, but they still cling to it, as do millions of others, because they know how it works.
The interview was fun. It was a little weird, going from my quiet kitchen to suddenly speaking with a hyped-up DJ with an English accent. I only got to say hi to him in the last 20 seconds before we went on, and I tried to gear up to his high-energy pace, and picture a room full of 6-12 year-olds to aim the discussion at.
It was a basic description of unicycling from ground zero, with only one picture for the kids to look at; the shot I used to have on my avatar of me riding a banked curve on a mountain bike dual slalom downhill course. All in all, I hope I put the right idea into some kids’ minds, and that the picture may have inspired some to try doing it themselves!
The thing was, and I had to stop myself from saying it, that I don’t exactly remember how to do long division. And I’m not worried about it. Unless there’s a big holocaust, I will always probably be able to pick up a calculator. I wear one on my wrist…
But I use long division as an example of something that’s annoying to kids in the KOL age range, but something they have to learn whether they like it or not.
When I heard it, I was wondering if I even remember how to still do long division. But thinking about it now, I could figure it out if I ever needed it.
Are you guys serious? You never pick up a pencil and paper or a stick and the dirt and do a division problem? People forget how to do that? You’re always that close to a calculator? I still do them regularly just so I don’t have to find a calculator. I’ll bet there is an age cut off that’s very sharp around the development time of the cheap, four function calculator that is defined by this phenomenon.
Usually the common division problems I encounter are ones easy enough to do in my head. After that, the most common division problems are then pretty complicated and are dealing with large sets of numbers.
