The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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We homeschool our kid but this might be fraying our nerves too much.
The public schools here are generally terrible, and the private schools are either religious or hippie-woo garbage that I don't want to waste time at.
There are a handful of Immersion schools, however. Spanish, Japanese and Chinese.
We're white but my thinking is
Yes this is racist. But also... accurate? Thoughts?
Just on the language piece, Spanish is absolutely and infinitely more useful in the US. Wikipedia says that in the US it’s something like 42 million vs 3.5 million and the Spanish one feels like maybe even an underestimate. I’m not saying Chinese is useless - personally I’d view it as #2 most useful second language? But a 10-fold difference increase in speaking opportunities is pretty stark. Frankly everything after that falls off pretty quickly in usefulness, possibly with the exception of French, where the point of learning is more for its own sake rather than an actual expected ROI of any kind. (They say that a second language eventually can help mental development, after a brief confusion period depending on the age, so language of any kind might still be a mild net benefit even without a lasting return, but the significance of this is debated.)
You may have a point about the Chinese school. It’s not all sunshine and roses though, as noted below, but I’d say directionally it sounds like an idea worth exploring for sure.
I'm okay at Spanish and haven't found it very useful. Whereas I feel like I'm somewhat blind to one of the largest cultural and geopolitical transformations of our time by not being able to understand Chinese.
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