It is early Saturday morning.
My son, Daniel, has been up for hours writing code and sitting on his bedroom floor soldering electronics onto his Arduino. When I passed his door earlier, he was so focused he barely looked up. He is twelve. My seven-year-old, Alannah, is in her pajamas, and I hear her bare feet pad down the stairs somewhere behind me. She comes and stands by me in my study where I am working intensely on a project, rubbing my lips in concentration and figuring something out.
She leans against my swivel chair and it swivels, and I ask her if she could stop that. She looks at my large dual computer monitors and asks me a question about what’s on the screen. I’m animated at the prospect of talking about my interests. I explain to her how my progress is marked out in these elaborate Excel spreadsheets and colored charts, and how I’ve set it up so that a 3D bar turns red if I miss more than two days or if the average weekly rate of progress goes down.
Like no one else in the fa…
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