Gaashk
1mo ago
That would probably be useful.
I felt irritated about the assertion above, but didn't bother spending energy responding to it, because it's basically just boo outgroup. People being motivated by making money is a fully general complaint, and it was two of the three complaints. As for the third claim -- I provide childcare, you are an overeducated babysitter, she is separating children from their parents.
Gaashk
1mo ago
My local schools are not as conservative as Mississippi, but they're in that ballpark. Their two main SEL initiatives are associating emotions with colors ("I'm in the red zone" instead of "I'm really angry and freaking out", or "we need to get in the green zone to be ready to learn"), and Character Strong words of the month (kindness, gratitude, courage, etc). I'm not completely sure what they're trying to accomplish with the color zone stuff, I've never heard the kids actually use it that I can recall. The Character Strong words seem fine. Pretty generic. My daughter's SEL teacher gave us a list of books she'll be reading with all the grade levels, I haven't gone through it yet.
Gaashk
1mo ago
There's little overlap between the schools discussing gender all the time and the schools posting the Ten Commandments.
Gaashk
1mo ago
It seems related to the discussion from a couple of months ago about "The Purpose of a System is What it Does".
Gaashk
1mo ago
I haven't heard about the multiple intelligences lately. It's been a lot of Science of Reading, High Quality Instructional Materials (apparently this has a more specific meaning than I had initially assumed), uninterrupted Tier 1 (basic curriculum) minutes in ELA and Math, and interventionists for elementary schoolers, including adding Math Lab, STEM, and SEL (social emotional learning) to the elementary specials rotation.
I have a relative who's starting a licensure program this year, so perhaps I'll find out what the current educational zeitgeist is.
Gaashk
1mo ago
Elementary schools are a bit paranoid that someone out there might be a murderer, and might come to their school, but I haven't heard any I've been in suggest that their students themselves might become murderers, and should instead choose not to.
Gaashk
1mo ago
I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, they are a foundational part of our civilization, and it's good for people to know about and consider them, so I would certainly address them in the curriculum at some point. On the other hand, they're kind of appropriate as actual classroom rules.
I am the LORD your God; you shall not have strange gods before me.
Clearly inappropriate for American public schools.
You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain.
I don't think religious people even agree about what this means, and also not appropriate for American public schools.
Remember to keep holy the LORD’s Day.
They get Saturday and Sunday off, anyway. It would be an improvement on playing Roblox all weekend, but not seriously taught in public schools.
Honor your father and mother.
Good advice. Public schools like to focus on the dishonorable parents, with messaging like this Mother's Day, think about all the women who are unable to be mothers, or are estranged from their mothers, and how sad they are. This would probably be a net improvement.
You shall not murder.
Schools are very serious about this one.
You shall not commit adultery.
Inappropriate for school aged children to discuss.
You shall not steal.
Schools are and should be serious about this.
You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
Schools should be more serious than they are about this.
You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife.
Inappropriate for children.
You shall not covet your neighbor’s goods.
Schools should be much more serious about this, and especially about flaunting your goods at your neighbor to try to bait them into covetousness.
So I guess that's half of them, where the Commandments and schools align, though they probably wouldn't be comfortable mentioning the possibility of murder, even.
Gaashk
1mo ago
I haven’t encountered all that much of that, in the course of getting an education degree, among other things. There’s a lot of “we have the kids we have, not the kids we wish we had,” which is literally true but often used as an excuse. Lately, the higher ups have been going on a lot about “data” — academic data, behavioral data, data to get kids in trouble, data to get higher staff ratios, and so on and so forth. I don’t like it, much of the data is just a more onerous way of documenting opinions, but it’s certainly getting pushed hard.
Gaashk
1mo ago
I’ve had to unfollow a couple of people I used to be friends with and like well enough in person for this, though I think it may be decreasing. In person they’ll read the body language of people around them, but only positive reactions are allowed on most social media, which was a mistake. There’s probably no solution, women have been spurning each other on moral grounds forever.
Good for them.
I haven't read the others, but as I recall Freddie's position is explicitly that, yes, there are better and worse teaching methods, and that teaching can and sometimes does improve. And that's good! More kids can read when teaching improves! But to the extent that the improvements are important and sustainable, everyone else will pick up on it fast enough, and then everyone will be back in their relative positions again, but now with more people able to read (again: good and worth doing).
The test for that is whether in a decade, (assuming people still care how many kids can read and haven't just switched to voice interfaces for a large chunk of the population) Mississippi ends up exactly where you would expect them to be, based on their demographics. They already have to adjust for demographics to look really impressive. Tenth is good, but not groundbreaking.
You can also get programs that are good but not sustainable, like KIPP. It's sort of sustainable, because New York schools in general are able to absorb all the burnt out teachers leaving there, and supply a constant stream of new, talented, excited teachers. But it's not sustainable at scale, you can't just replace all the normal schools in a state with KIPP schools, because in addition to teacher burnout, you have to have family buy in, which is a limited resource. I suppose whatever Mississippi is doing is reasonably sustainable, or they would have flamed out by now.
Yeah, it wasn't very good. Also the weird speech from Jesus about their legal drama with Paramount. I didn't feel offended, but kind of bored and confused, like their characters should go grill pill at Casa Molina or something. There was a funny scene with Randy talking to his digital assistant with his wife looking grumpy next to him. There was an episode where everyone came in from Denver and tried to order cortados from a few years back was pretty funny. Scott's most recent Bay Area House Party post would make a good episode.
Gaashk
1mo ago
(and just because you filtered out the em-dashes doesn't mean I don't see what you did there)
I looked at the new, improved GPT5 free content I got today, and, lol, there are 18 in a single response. But then it generated a .docx of basically the same content, and lo and behold, the em dashes are gone, and now there are a lot of colons instead. Also, it's formatted nicely with headings. Huh.
Gaashk
1mo ago
Thanks! That is pretty interesting. I did like the few Lovecraft stories I read more than I had expected as well.
Gaashk
1mo ago
I meant I only watched the first actual Avatar, not the other two actual Avatars. But if you haven't read A Fire upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, they're quite good.
Gaashk
1mo ago
I would be more interested in watching the Vernor Vinge version of Avatar, where it's heavily implied they're a downgraded planet that used to be in a higher zone. As it is, I only watched the first movie.
Where to look for what? Interesting artists?
On the one hand, that's likely to be true, like the interesting music coming out of various subcultures in the 90s.
On the other hand, I'm not sure how one would go about looking for that. They have an "artist studio tour" in my area, and although there are something like 40 artists, I didn't find anything I felt any energy from. They were mostly boomers painting hills, or sometimes textural abstract sorts of things.
Gaashk
1mo ago
Is there anything interesting going on artistically lately?
Aside from the obvious, that digital artists are getting supplanted by cheap, fast AI images?
I tried searching a bit, and asking ChatGPT, and mostly people seem to be saying that there are a bunch of different things going on, many of which are identity based and fairly boring as far as I'm concerned. The last large movement I liked was probably Impressionism; Art Deco is also pretty good.
People around here mostly paint the hills and skies, which I think is just kind of a default, I don't know if I'd call it a movement. I guess recently I like the atmospheric, somewhat out of focus landscape artists, like Gareth Edwards or Paula Dunn.
Gaashk
2mo ago
Yes, I think it's something like that.
A couple of years ago, when I was off birth control, I was driving alone and kept puking which is very rare for me, but didn't have anywhere to pull off. Not pleasant at all. Then later that day got an unusually heavy and abrupt period. Probably an early miscarriage.
Gaashk
2mo ago
Meritocracy is probably useful at very high, best in the world levels. Like I said, I wouldn't necessarily have a problem with an actually wise judge, who would look at a surgeon, or researcher, or entrepreneur -- how competent they are, who they're planning to bring with them, how excited they are to become American, etc, and let some number of competent, excited potential Americans over. On balance, I'd rather have Musk as an American than not. Or even Ramaswamy, despite having mixed feelings about some of the things he stands for. If there are 100 Von Neumanns out there somewhere, sure, let them in. If some of them are Chinese, let them in but watch them. If they start complaining about whiteness, or prom queens, or high school football, let them go back. Not that I even care for those specific things, but those are pretty bad red flags.
At the same time, no, I do not want Ramaswamy or Musk to be able to each import ten thousand compliant, desperate engineers from India. Even if they are marginally better than the locals (though I mostly doubt they are). They should have to work with Americans. If they're trying to do things Americans don't want to work on, for wages Americans are not willing to accept, while they should change their plans. I'm not so desperate for a Grok powered humanoid robot army in ten rather than thirty years.
While it's useful to have meritocracy at the top, I'm less convinced of its usefulness at the middle and bottom levels, especially with automation proceeding apace. I would prefer to live in a world where I work fewer hours, then bake, sew, and pick fruit with my kids. I already do that to some extent, and there's a lot of angst about how all the straightforward housewife tasks have been outsourced, and that it's not entirely a good thing. Like the communist Xitter about wanting to lead discussion groups and make clothes out of scraps. Things like sewing undergarments and picking strawberries are fine in moderation, and terrible as a full time job. Keeping a flock of chickens is fun, people will do it at cost. There are a decent number of tasks like that. American boys won't pull weeds for nine hours in the sun for $10/hr, while others might -- but the people who have accumulated nine hours of weeds are doing it wrong.
Gaashk
2mo ago
I suppose I have less of an issue with citizens who have done bad things having to get shit jobs, since they're their home country's problem to deal with either way.
Still, I'm confident that our economic system is robust, and we'd figure something out if we had to. Would our houses be slightly worse? I don't know, since you didn't say what the jobs are, specifically. If it's roofers working in Phoenix when it's 120 out or something, maybe it would be more expensive and certain styles of roof would become less feasible, hard to say, it would be worth trying. Almost everyone used to work in agriculture and repair their own houses, I'm sure the current arrangement of turning everything into an assembly line isn't the only possible one.
Gaashk
2mo ago
picking strawberries is still a job that really sucks
I've heard that mentioned a lot, as a reason it's so, so important to have slaves. It just seems incredibly weak. Coal, sure. It was super important. But... think of the strawberries??
I agree with this. Every time I watch a board meeting, they're pretty explicit about it. It's what people were actually upset about during Covid.
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