hacker
My 8-year old nephew, the really clever one that’s unusually quick for his age on the computer, has managed to guess his mother’s password. Of course, having discovered something neat, he had to go tell everyone to inflate his “street cred”. Thankfully, it looks as though he is not getting in trouble for this. His Dad, my brother, was bragging about it this weekend. Mom has learned to pick a password that is stronger than just a number plus a word found in the dictionary.
This nephew reminds me a lot of another one of my nephews from another brother. Besides the quick study of all things binary, I’ve watched him get into a hyper-focused bubble-like trance when learning marksmanship with my bolt-action .22. (When teaching kids like this, make sure to give them one round at a time.)
Seeing these kids excel at tasks that they self-motivate themselves on, reminds me again that the label “attention deficit disorder” (or any of the other names on the euphemism treadmill) really don’t fit. Nor do I approve the popular remedy of indiscriminately giving these kiddies the functional equivalent of crystal meth in pill form so that they will settle down and focus. (I won’t reject the therapy out of hand, or say it’s never appropriate, but there’s got to be a reason why it’s a very popular prescribed pill, and I think you’ll get a lead on the answer if you just google “homework drug”).
Fortunately, my nephew’s million-thoughts-per-second-yet-still-can’t-remember-to-brush-his-teeth-when-sent-upstairs scatter-brain is tempered by my sister-in-law’s amazing patience-fu.
