If William Wordsworth Were Writing Today

Introduction

What if William Wordsworth (1770-1850) were writing today? And what if he had a corporate-type editor? Imagine the instant-messaging dialogue that might take place after the great poet submitted a new work for review. Actually, you don’t need to, because that’s what this post is about. The launch point is this timeless Wordsworth poem, from 1807.

Wordsworth’s poem

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
 
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of the bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
 
The waves beside them danced; but they
Outdid the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
 
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils. 

The dialogue

BANES: well i’ve read the poem and i think its a good start. a solid start

WORDSWORTH: Actually, it’s complete.

BANES: dont need to add anything

BANES: just tighten it up a bit

WORDSWORTH: I don’t see your point.

BANES: well you know poetry its so good at being sucint. thats  why its so popular right. i  mean those who still read poetry want concise

WORDSWORTH: My poem is under 200 words. That is not long.

BANES: its all relative

BANES: what is that poem about the subway and petals on a wet black bough so good can you do more like that

WORDSWORTH: If you’re asking me to plagiarize Ezra Pound, no. If you want me to adapt my style to imitate him, hell no.

BANES: no nothing like that just concise

BANES: like that first stanza maybe get that across in one line

BANES: get to the point faster

WORDSWORTH: Oh, I see. So I could get the entire poem down to the size of a tweet.

BANES: exactly

WORDSWORTH: I was being sarcastic.

BANES: no need for that i am trying to help

WORDSWORTH: Every word in every line is essential or I would have removed it already. That’s what makes me a poet.

BANES: you need to adapt

BANES: modern readers = shorter attetnion span

BANES: no time for flourishes etc

WORDSWORTH: Well then just call me a pagan suckled in a creed outworn.

BANES: what are u talking about

WORDSWORTH: I gather you’re unfamiliar with my earlier works.

BANES: really what are you talking about and never mind your earlier works

BANES: you have currency now so lets leverage that

WORDSWORTH: I assume you’re referring to Taylor Swift name-dropping me in her song, literally one line after decrying “some namedropping sleaze,” ironically enough.

BANES: taylor swift yes exactly

BANES: we need to get on that

WORDSWORTH: I won’t disgrace myself by pandering to pop culture.

BANES: i'm trying to help you here. u want to be replaced by A.I.?

WORDSWORTH: If you think ChatGPT can write poetry, you’re delusional.

BANES: look, you know why coleridges poems are so successful? He’s writing about big-screen TVs, pleasure domes, and opium trips. your writing about dancing flowers

WORDSWORTH: Have you even read my poem?

BANES: yes

BANES: in fact i found some errors

BANES: like, i'm sure you saw lots of flowers but not continuous, not 10K

BANES: and lakes dont have waves

WORDSWORTH: Actually, Windermere lake is the largest in England and does have waves. As usual you have no idea what you’re talking about.

BANES: look work with me here you have some good stuff here, lonely = emo can resonate with readers

BANES: just tigten up a bit and we’re good

BANES: and doesnt matter what lake, actually not saying which lake is better

BANES: in fact i wanted to ask you

BANES: poetry now needs to be hyper local

BANES: i'm thinking different versions of poem by region

BANES: can we do one for CA and change from daffodil to poppy (state flower

WORDSWORTH: I am not a staff writer for a tourism board. And I’m not rewriting the final rhyming couplet to support “poppies.”

BANES: about that rhyming

BANES: kind of passe

WORDSWORTH: Taylor Swift uses rhyme.

BANES: touche

BANES: but getting back to the number of flowers

BANES: never ending line & 10K, nobody is buying that

WORDSWORTH: I’m employing a standard poetic device called hyperbole. I guess they didn’t teach you that in business school.

BANES: why cant you just be more precise

WORDSWORTH: Are you my editor or my fact-checker?

BANES: readers dont want to be decieved

WORDSWORTH: Are you going to revoke my poetic license?

BANES: look maybe i dont have a fancy degree from Oxford but i know my stuff

WORDSWORTH: My degree is from Cambridge.

BANES: whatever

BANES: look there is an incosistency in the poem you start with lonely & brooding and then later your all talking about bliss of solitude

BANES: not as strong as other parts need to tighten up

WORDSWORTH: This just demonstrates how completely you have missed the point. “That inward eye which is the bliss of solitude” is exactly what this supposed audience of modern readers has lost, due to the constant intrusion of Twitter, Snapchat, and the never-ending smartphone “feed.” There is no more bliss because there is no more solitude. And nobody can just enjoy their natural surroundings without stopping to snap photos and share them on Instagram.

BANES: nobody says instnagram anymore its insta

WORDSWORTH: You know what? We’re done here. You can take our contract and shove it. I’ll just put my poem on my blog.

BANES: actually i wanted to talk to you about that

BANES: its time to monetize your blog

BANES: adsense can make us some money if we get the seo right

BANES: untapped potential there

BANES: you already did the work

BANES: dont you want to get paid

BANES: hey are you still there

BANES: ???

BANES: hey

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Family Internet Use Policy

Abstract

Generally, parents don’t go snooping around in their kids’ laptops or phones.  We want to respect our kids’ privacy.  And yet, these devices are like mega-megaphones, capable of blasting our kids’ unbridled ideas and photos all over the Internet.  Privacy in this realm is an illusion:  even with peer-to-peer online communication, kids cannot prevent their supposedly private content from being posted publicly or forwarded.  I describe here a way for parents to put much-needed limits on our kids’ online autonomy.

Introduction

My community has been through a serious scandal.  Some high school kids formed a secret Instagram group and, over a period of weeks, posted a lot of racist and misogynistic content (e.g., doctored photos and hateful sentiments).  Only a couple of kids were actually contributing content, but 14 or 15 others followed along, on an ongoing basis, instead of leaving the group.  What’s more, a number of these followers posted supporting comments and/or “likes.”  (It is widely hoped, but impossible to establish, that peer pressure was a stronger force here than bigotry.)  Finally one kid blew the whistle, and the whole thing unraveled, to the great shame of the students and families involved.

This episode has engendered a lot of soul searching among us parents.  We like to think we are instilling proper values in our kids—that we really know these people—but how can we be sure?  It’s easy to appraise the benefits of private music lessons, great schools, and organized sports teams, but how do we measure character and virtue?  At a minimum, how can we feel confident that our own kids won’t be embroiled in the next Internet scandal?

In this post I describe a solution.  It isn’t complicated, but it’s difficult.  I propose that every family establish and enforce a family Internet use policy.  The idea is to put limits on the secret online life that modern kids have, that gives them total freedom of expression with no parental supervision.  If we fail to instill the values and character we’re looking for, at least we can safeguard our kids against shaming themselves, their families, and their community.

A sample family Internet use policy

My family Internet acceptable use policy is based on the one my employer uses.  To wit, “[Company] monitors employees’ use of [Company’s] communications devices, computer systems and networks.”  I have told my kids up front, “I know your computer password and network logins, and reserve the right to read any of your online correspondence.  Consider nothing on your computer to be private.”  (If my kids had phones, those would be fair game, too.)

The premise here is that kids are less likely to post or consume offensive content if they know their parents can see it.  If this seems Orwellian to you, remember than in 1984 it was the government snooping, not parents.  I have a right to know what my kid is doing on the Internet, just as my employer has a right to know what I’m doing with the tools they give me.

Your policy doesn’t have to be this restrictive, of course—but you should have a policy, and something with more teeth than “Do whatever you want and we’ll hope for the best,” or “If you do something bad we might take away your phone.”

Do my kids tolerate this?  Yes, though of course they’re not thrilled.  Fortunately, I got an early start with this policy.  I introduced it before my kids were even online, so they were fine with it initially.  In fact, as they hadn’t yet developed the recklessness of teenagers, they were rightly concerned about accidentally stumbling on gross stuff online.  As they’ve reached their teens, their feelings have changed, but my wife and I won’t budge and they know it.  At least they’re used to the constraint.

So is this a perfect fix?  Probably not, but I’m sure it helps.  Without parental oversight, a kid is bound to be more bold and less inhibited with his or her expression.  I guarantee that the kids in my community who posted offensive photos to that Instagram account would not have printed hard copies and left them around the house.

Isn’t social media visible to parents anyway?

Kids might have you believe you can keep an eye on their virtual life via the public nature of social media.  But this isn’t true anymore.  Snapchat is all about messages and photos that are designed to be temporary. (Of course they’re actually not; your kid’s blunder can be captured for eternity by another kid’s screen grab.  It’s true, though, that once that transmission leaves your kid’s device, it’s too late for you to see it.)

Do parents grasp this?  Not always, as I learned from a workshop given by My Digital TAT2, a nonprofit organization seeking to promote responsibility in the digital era.  The lecturer quoted a teen correspondent as saying, “My favorite thing about Snapchat is that my parents don’t understand it.”  Most teens using Snapchat and Instagram have two accounts each:  one that their parents know about, and one that they don’t.  Many have a third account with which to assume a fictitious identity, which they use for retaliation and/or catfishing.  With all this subterfuge about, doesn’t it make sense to have access to the source of our teens’ online content—that is, their devices? 

Again, the point isn’t that you’re always snooping—it’s that your kids know you could, and behave accordingly.  As I candidly told my older daughter, I have peeped at her online correspondence exactly twice so far.  I explain to my kids that I generally don’t bother checking up, because I trust them—but I have to reserve the right to do so, or my policy goes up in smoke.

A kid’s right to privacy

Is my stance fair and reasonable?  Or am I violating my kids’ right to privacy?  That begs another question:  do kids even have a right to privacy?

Of course they do!  When one of my daughters was ten, she kept a diary.  Although I was sorely tempted to read it (because it was surely very cute), I honored my promise not to.  Likewise, I wouldn’t eavesdrop on my kids’ face-to-face conversations or phone calls, and I wouldn’t read a letter they got in the mail.  But the Internet is a game-changer.  It gives these kids the capability of broadcasting their ostensibly private communications to 3 billion people.  Mistakes are made, due to these kids’ own poor judgment, that of their friends (or “friends”), and by sheer accident.  I consider it irresponsible to give kids total autonomy online.

Setting limits isn’t just a parent’s right—it’s our job.  Are adults allowed to keep loaded guns around the house?  Unfortunately, they are.  Is it a good idea to give kids access to those loaded guns?  Of course not!  But think about Internet platforms like Snapchat, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter:  they’re dangerous too, in their own way.  You almost couldn’t devise a more efficient way of giving teens new ways to screw up; of catching them in the act of screwing up; of widely publicizing the screw-up; and of documenting, time-stamping, and definitively establishing the fact of the screw-up, and the identity of the perpetrator, for all time.

Consider this scenario:  the year is 1980.  Teen 1, who is stupid and ignorant, tells Teen 2 a racist or misogynist joke.  Teen 2 laughs (maybe not because he even thinks the joke is funny; maybe because he’s uncomfortable).  Teen 3 overhears this exchange, and tells Teens 4 through 20 how racist/misogynistic these two are.  The damage is limited, because it’s all hearsay.  Teen 1 denies telling the joke, Teen 2 denies hearing it, Teen 3 is largely ignored, and Teens 4 through 20 shrug and move on.  Years later, Teen 1, who has become less ignorant, is privately ashamed of having told that joke, and Teen 2 is privately ashamed of having laughed.  They were just stupid kids, and thank goodness they can put that joke in the past and move on.  That’s pre-Internet.

Today, a couple dozen parents in my town—good, respected people, contributors to our community—are suffering deep shame because there is irrefutable evidence that their children consumed and in some cases “liked” racist and/or misogynist online content.  There is no way to repudiate the evidence; about all these beleaguered parents can do is assert that their kids aren’t actually hateful, that they were just swept away by a hateful meme.  That doesn’t go very far … not with the victims, and not with the community. 

Of course this isn’t an isolated case; these scandals are popping up everywhere.  And yet we parents have been standing back and allowing our teens unfettered access to these volatile Internet technologies.

The crux of the matter

Whether or not you agree about the non-sanctity of a teenager’s connected device, we need to help our kids understand something fundamental:  there’s no such thing as Internet privacy.  Once a photo or sentiment leaves your kid’s device, it’s a short step away from the great unwashed Internet.  If copy-and-paste isn’t available on the app that was used, screen grabs always are.  Any content that touches the Internet can be posted publicly and/or forwarded, whether by a recklessly playful or vindictive pal, or by mistake.  And we’ve seen that the law does not uphold the anonymity of Internet haters; consider this landmark case.  If a kid (or adult) thinks he or she can safely communicate his or her darkest thoughts via the Internet, even under some kind of shadow identity, he or she is mistaken.

Why isn’t it considered bad parenting to give these kids unfettered access to fun, easy, powerful online tools capable of permanently disgracing themselves and their families?  Probably because the beloved tech companies behind this Internet revolution are having their way with us.

The Internet and FOMO

I can’t think of a parent who hasn’t complained about his or her kid being glued to a screen all day, but nobody seems to know what to do about it.  In many cases parents are afraid of what would happen if they took away a kid’s phone or laptop.  (Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Veldt,” published in 1950, was eerily prescient in this regard.)  The Internet and its addictive social media trappings weren’t dumped on us; they evolved so gradually we never saw the danger coming.

Meanwhile, to push back against technology is to seem backward, unsophisticated, and out of touch.  Society expects all of us, including students, to use the Internet daily.  As we adults suffer our own insecurity around keeping up with the rapidly evolving online culture, we are tempted to celebrate and emulate our kids’ prowess.  We blithely accept this totally separate virtual world, which becomes a constantly growing blind spot, like a locked door between ourselves and our kids.  In the process we lose touch with our kids’ morals, standards, and character.  Kids are typing things online that we’d shudder to hear them say out loud, and sharing photos that might shock us.

So if parents aren’t policing this, who is?  The Internet platforms themselves?  Yeah, right.  Remember, Mark Zuckerberg’s first online venture was a site where you rated your fellow students in terms of who was hotter than who.  He and his ilk most certainly do not have your kids’ backs. 

Consider this excerpt from a New Yorker article, which describes the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s misgivings about the Enlightenment, and how it threatened the idea of a universal moral code: 

It becomes impossible to settle moral questions or to enforce moral rules; the best we can do is agree to disagree. Such a world falls into the hands of managers and technocrats, who excel at the perfection of means but lack the tools with which to think deeply about ends.

I don’t have strong opinions about the Enlightenment, and MacIntyre was writing in the ‘80s, but that last sentence fits social media companies to a T.  The means of capturing and directing people’s attention are being perfected, but the impact on society is being largely ignored.  Venture capitalists are backing the companies best poised to monetize this stuff; they’re not throwing money at watchdog outfits like Digital TAT2.  Popularity—measured by the number of eyeballs on your app, the number of “likes,” and the number of links to your content—comprise the currency of our era.  (We parents are somewhat complicit here.  I’m sure many a parent dreams of his kid becoming the next Zuckerberg.  I doubt many are hoping their kid becomes the next great moralizer.)

Platforms like Instagram and Snapchat have our kids’ attention.  To an increasing degree we parents do not.  The scale is tipping increasingly toward a peer orientation where our parental influence is marginalized.  Only by reigning in the access to this virtual world can we hope to maintain our crucial role in guiding our children.  Failing that, the least we can do is limit the damage they can do online.

More albertnet posts on this topic

Dopamine, Parenting, & Social Media

Teens, Texts, & the Marshmallow Test

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For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Exploiting Our Children's Brains

Introduction

Some big news recently:  Snapchat (which is like Instagram but with a “this-message-will-explode-in-ten-seconds” kind of ephemerality to it) refused a $3 billion buyout from Facebook.  This, despite Snapchat never having made any money.  The reason, of course, is that this novel technology is worth far, far more than $3 billion simply because teens love it.  As we all now know, the world revolves around teens.  (They’ve known this for generations, of course, but we grownups—always a bit slow on the uptake—have only just realized it.)

I don’t have $3 billion to throw around and yet I’d like to personally benefit from the teens, and I’ll bet you would, too.  What do I envy most about the younger generation?  Frankly, it’s their sponge-like ability to memorize stuff.  In this post I substantiate this “sponge” claim, examine what realms of vicarious memory I stand to get the most out of, and provide some ideas as to how to exploit children’s agile young minds.

Are children’s brains overrated?

I’m no expert on child development or the human brain, but—this being just a blog—I don’t have to be.  I would characterize a child’s brain as a miracle of raw processing and storage power, but without a lick of sense.  It’s widely known that a very small child transplanted to a foreign land can easily learn the new language while keeping intact his native tongue.  This is impressive considering that young adults can spend four years majoring in a foreign language in college without attaining nearly the same fluency.  And yet, even my own kids—whom I refuse to believe are below average in intellect—will laugh at even my coarsest efforts at physical comedy.

Not all kids’ brains work the same, of course.  At the risk of over-generalizing, I’ll say that you could divide kids into two rough categories:  1) those who apply their razor-sharp intellects to the task of how to become cool, and 2) those (like my pre-teen daughter) who do pointless eggheaded things like memorizing a bazillion digits of Pi.  I’m glad my kid is the second kind, because for one thing, I don’t want her to get any dates, and for another, in being un-cool she can better relate to her father, who has never been cool and never will.  (As Anthony Bourdain has pointed out, “the essence of cool is not giving a [damn],” and parents bloody well better give a damn, and even if you used to be cool, like he was, “there is nothing cool about ‘used to be cool.’”)

So the best I can do is try to turn my daughters’ willingness to memorize vast troves of information into something I can tap into.  The problem is, kids don’t tend to memorize the kinds of information an adult might want quick access to.  They tend to memorize information that is useless.

Useless crap I memorized as a kid

One bit of information I wish my young self had committed to memory:  did I not bother trying to be cool because I realized that cool was probably an innate thing that I simply didn’t and couldn’t have, or did I not even register, until it was far, far too late, that there was even a such thing as cool?

No matter.  I applied my mind to memorizing all kinds of things, often without conscious effort.  For example, at age ten, my memory acquired all the lyrics to all the songs in Pink Floyd’s double-album “The Wall.”  Not only all the lyrics, but all the background noises and utterances (to the extent I could make them out).  All the tunes, the helicopter noises, the background TV snippets … probably terabytes worth of artifacts from that album.  Oh, and tons of other music as well, including music I didn’t even like.  To this day I’ll get songs from Styx’s “Kilroy Was Here” album stuck in my head.  It’s a curse, especially considering that there’s no room left in my brain to store new information.

That wasn’t all, of course.  Back in ’77, when I heard my brother Geoff listing off all the cast members of “Star Wars,” I naturally committed them to memory myself, no questions asked.  I’m not just talking about Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford.  I’m talking about Anthony Daniels (who played C3P0) and Kenny Baker (who played R2D2).  Never mind that these weren’t actors who went on to have actual careers, where it might have been useful to recognize their names.  (Kenny Baker went on to play a character called “Bruce Foreskin” in the direct-to-video “Boobs in the Wood,” and no, I did not make that up, and no, I have not watched it.)  Carrie Fisher probably doesn’t remember much about her roles in the “Star Wars” movies, having been an adult when she acted in them, but I remember a ridiculous number of her lines (“Get this big walking carpet out of my way,” “Fine … if money is what you want, then money is what you’ll get,” “You came over in that thing?  You’re braver than I thought,” etc.).

I didn’t learn a bazillion digits of Pi because, though I didn’t know what cool was, I knew what a dork was and felt I’d already presented several of the risk factors.  Peers were more judgmental back then, I think.  In contrast, my daughters boldly pursue whatever they like.  (Paradoxically, this probably makes them cooler than I was.  It’s complicated.)

Can kids be ordered to memorize things?

It’s tempting to say that kids cannot be ordered to memorize things.  For example, I have been trying to teach my kids a set of “family best practices,” like saying “thank you” after a meal, but they almost never comply.  I think this is an authority issue.  After dining at friends’ houses, my daughters do remember to say thank you (unless their hosts are lying to me).

Teachers do seem to have enough authority to command kids to memorize stuff.  I still have bits of dialogue rattling around in my head from junior high French class, when I was made to memorize my side of several rote conversations.  These snippets pop up almost whenever I choose what to eat—“Je voudrai avoir un bifteck frites … et une salade, bien entendu!”—and whenever I’m running late—“Zut!  Il est déjà cinq heures!”—with this last utterance continuing to cause me much confusion, every time, because “cinq heures” is 5:00 a.m., and surely these French kids weren’t waiting for a bus at 5 a.m., so why did our textbook say that?  Perhaps the most egregiously useless thing a teacher made me memorize was the entire list of prepositions in the English language, in alphabetical order.  That list survived in my memory for at least a decade; probably I removed it through sheer will.

(Not that I memorized everything I was assigned.  I refused to learn the many parts and functions of the female reproductive system in Health class.  My reasoning was that I don’t even possess any of these organs, though truth be told I was only a little better at learning off the male parts.  I did, however, remember the single most important lesson from Health class, which we kids summarized as “Remember the rule:  protect your tool,” along with like a dozen cruder variations.)

Likewise, my kids are given all kinds of things to memorize for school, and they dutifully comply.  They haven’t yet learned to instantly forget everything five minutes after the test.  For example, my younger daughter was commanded to memorize a really, really awful rap song about the parts of speech, and as she practiced it, my older daughter chimed in, still remembering the song from when she had to memorize it three years before.  (This is why I didn’t let my kids see my own, child-inappropriate “parts of speech” rap:  for fear that they’d instantly memorize it, start singing it on the playground, and get us in trouble.)

A few nights ago my older daughter announced that she had most of the Periodic Table of the Elements memorized; this came on the heels of her little sister memorizing, for school, a poem about an exploding turkey.  Of course my younger daughter had gotten a really late start on her homework and had to memorize three stanzas of the poem in like five minutes, and though she was totally panicked (in fact, perhaps because she was totally panicked) she pulled it off.  This pair of memorization episodes is what got me thinking that I really need to capitalize on this childish parlor trick.  If kids can memorize this much stuff with no greater a carrot than decent grades or their own whims, then I—the holder of dessert and video privileges—should be able to get in on this action.

What should we make our kids memorize?

Oddly enough, even though I curse myself daily for my inability to shunt things into memory like I used to, it wasn’t easy to come up with something for my kids to memorize for my benefit.  The most obvious things adults struggle to remember are passwords, but for obvious reasons I don’t want to entrust my kids with those.  I could assign my kids memorization tasks like remembering the birthdays of my dozen nieces and nephews, but I’ve decided not to, for a couple reasons.  First, since there is a tangible consequence of a failure of memory here (these are kids, after all), I don’t want to take the risk.  Second, it really does seem that the most amazing feats of memory involve pieces of information that are linked:  a poem, a song, or a list. 

I thought about assigning one of my kids to memorize the table of civil twilight start and end times for this area, because those tell me how early in the morning or how late in the evening I can go for bike rides on any given day.  It would be so handy to be able to yell across the house, “Hey Alexa, what time is civil twilight tomorrow morning?  And when are you going to practice your piano?”  The problem is, the civil twilight table comprises 730 data points.  Sure, I could have Alexa memorize the start and end times for the first day of each month, and the average “drift” for that month, to be able calculate this information for any given date, but it’s a non-linear thing and would end up being more of a math problem than a memorization stunt.  Besides, I have a handy printed chart for this, just like I have my nieces’ and nephews’ birthdays in my computer calendar.

I finally got my inspiration after joining a work-related conference call.  This was a high-attendance bi-weekly training thing where a roll call is required, so operators field each incoming call, asking for each attendee’s name, with spelling.  As often happens, the operator had difficulty with my name, even though I spelled it out:  “Dana—that’s Delta Alpha November Alpha.”  She said, “What?  Bana?”  I think this is because I have a girl’s name.  Perhaps she thought it was more plausible that there was a word she didn’t know, belta, and a name she hadn’t heard before, Bana, than that a man could possibly go by “Dana.”  It seems like I go through this issue almost every time I join this conference call.  Maybe the operators are screwing with me.

Anyway, my own struggles notwithstanding, the International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet (aka NATO phonetic alphabet), is a very handy thing to know for spelling things out over the phone.  For one thing, it’s faster than thinking up words on the fly.  For another, it’s less ambiguous (e.g., if I said “D as in dog,” the operator might think I said “B as in bog”).  And most of all, the NATO phonetic alphabet gives your speech an air of military authority—it sounds official.  What seems cooler to you:  “A as in apple, L as in lion, B as in boy, E as in elephant, R as in rabbit, T as in tennis,” or “Alpha—Lima—Bravo—Echo—Romeo—Tango”?

Naturally, you’ve already spotted the flaws with this scheme:  it’s not such a lot to memorize, and I’ve apparently already memorized it anyway.  It’s not like I’m going to pause my phone conversation to yell across the house, “Hey Lindsay, what’s the International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet word for Y as in, uh, yellow?”  So this memorization task falls short of my dream of using my kids as portable voice-activated almanacs.  On the other hand, having any influence at all over what my kids memorize is a nice win as a parent, particularly as they reach their tween and teen years.  Getting them to memorize something slightly useful, for their own edification, is enough for me.

Getting them to do it

I mentioned above how teachers, in commanding children, seem to have more authority than I do.  I also alluded earlier to powers of persuasion I myself might have due to my control over dessert and videos.  Gosh, that was sloppy blogging.  In fact I would never bribe my kids with dessert or videos because that would set a dangerous precedent.  Any intelligent kid would realize, Hey, I could do this cool thing I’m already inclined to do, but since this thing would also please my parent, I should hold out for some kind of reward!  (Believe me, my kids have tried this, but I always refuse, telling them “I will not negotiate with terrorists.”)

So instead, I talked to my wife, in my younger daughter Lindsay’s presence, about how cool the NATO phonetic alphabet is, and then I threw Lindsay a bone by mentioning the game Battleship, which (like many children) she unaccountably enjoys (despite its being completely pointless).  When I was a kid, the play console was very spare and we called out simple letter and number coordinates (e.g., “G-4!”).  Now the console looks all badass, with pictures of military technology like targeting systems, and simulated rivets, etc., and the x-axis is labeled with Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, etc. instead of A, B, and C.  So the kids call out “Bravo-7!” instead of just “B-7!”  I told Lindsay this was probably to help prevent confusion, such as B not being confused for D.  (This probably has less to do with it than the modern hardcore military aura the game tries to create.)  Then I asked her how many of the letter names she could remember.

By afternoon, she and Alexa were talking about this phonetic alphabet, and though I never made good on my plan to print out the list and leave it lying around, I didn’t need to.  At dinner the next night I asked Lindsay how much of the phonetic alphabet she could recite.  I figured that after Oscar, which is where Battleship leaves off, she’d fizzle out, but she didn’t.  She needed hints on about ten of the letters, but she eventually got them.  Then Alexa rattled off the entire list like an old pro.  Mission accomplished!