hard knock life

two wsj articles, in particular, resonated with me yesterday, and i've included links and excerpts to them below.

why coding should be added to school curriculums

Not every child who learns to write will become a novelist, nor everyone who learns algebra a mathematician, yet we treat both as foundational skills that all children should learn. Coding is the same, say educators like Messrs. Partovi and Mr. Resnick, who are pushing for it to be available to every child in America.

“When you learn to code, you start thinking about processes in the world,” says Mitchell Resnick, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor heading up the effort to build the child-friendly programming language Scratch.

Whether it’s understanding how complicated systems like economies work or tackling a problem in a stepwise fashion, coding is uniquely suited to training children not just how to solve problems, but also how to express themselves, says Mr. Resnick.

“What’s fascinating about computer science is that it requires analytical skills, problem solving and creativity, while also being both foundational and vocational,” says Hadi Partovi, co-founder of Code.org, a nonprofit organization that promotes coding education. “I’m not sure there’s any other field that’s all those combined.”

family business: helpful or harmful?

When Paul Massey III was attending St. Lawrence University in 2011, he talked to his father about working for the family business, the commercial real-estate sales brokerage Massey Knakal Realty Services.

Paul Massey Jr. told his son that it was fine to go into real estate, but not at Massey Knakal, which he co-founded.

“I gave him the talk,” recalled Mr. Massey, 55 years old, who with partner Robert Knakal sold their firm to Cushman & Wakefield this year for $100 million.

That father-son talk was an unusual one for the head of a big New York real-estate business to have. Many fathers start grooming their sons and daughters to start taking over at an early age.