skullaria wrote:
My son is 11. One has to keep that in mind. He loves doing animation.
I found this flash movie he did last night and published it.

I am so glad that he IS homeschooled - he's a wonderfully compassionate boy who just happens to like...DOOM. I've been teaching him flash for the last year or so, but I was particularly enamored of this one - it is fairly fast to load, and he's done a great job with his sounds, which is something he's just starting to work with.

I have to wonder, if he were in 'regular' school, could he even show a teacher his animation without being labeled a potentially problematic child?

OK, got it working in IE. It doesn't like some browsers.

In any event, what I'd say is beyond the risk that some teacher might interpret this as a threat, that the use of a tool like flash would never be encouraged or facilitated by a public school because it isn't common place. Schools tend to support and encourage interests and talents that are both popular and approved by the entire parent body. The schools can't afford to support anything that only one or two kids are interested in and they can't support things that offend parts of the community.

The result is that students with interests like violin tend to get a lot of support, both emotional and material, from the school community. Students with unpopular interests, like animation, for example, don't get much support either inside the school or in the community at large. As far as the school is concerned this doesn't even count as an extra cirricular activity because it isn't officially sanctioned. Its the same as watching television when it comes time to consider things like honors society membership or university admissions.

I think this tends to encourage a lot of medicore violinists, almost none of whom touch the things once they graduate from high school, and discourage a lot of potentially great talents and interests of various sorts, many of which cannot survive in a public school in any way because students honestly expressing themselves will invitably offend some segment of the parent population who have silly ideas about the sort of concepts children are mature enough to handle.

Ultimately, children would be better off if schools attempted to understand and provide support and guidance for their personal individual extracirricular interests rather than providing children with a preset menu of group activities and telling them that they have to pick some, but this would require a lot of personalized attention that is both expensive and fails to serve an institutional goal for which the school system receives funds (such as promotion of the fine arts, or athletics). Children would also be better off, particularly in high school, if parents would not try to protect children from being exposed to eachother's self expression, but thats obviously never going to happen.

RE: My son's DOOM cartoon