down below.

Your High Charisma suave seductive bard is allowed to be fat.

Your nimble and quiet rogue is allowed to be fat.

Your warlock, with the powers of the nine hells at their fingertips, is allowed to be fat.

2) Jack Black

3) Mark Vorkosigan

and would i do that AGAIN?

NO!

preordering a game does *not* say “i trust this dev and they deserve my money to use to make the game that much better”

what it says is “hey boardroom, i will throw money at anything with this logo, even before i know what the game is like”

that boardroom sees that trend. they see theyve made their money back within 2 months of the game being announced… so the next time a lead comes to them and says “we would like to make this game, heres a budget and a timeline” the execs say “well last time we gave you 100 bucks and a full month, but your fans dont really /care/ what game you make, as long as it has our brand. so heres 75 bucks and 3 weeks. make it marketable”

this means more “pre-order exclusives” like cosmetics or different art, filler stuff that a side team can pump out in hours. every store, every platform will have their own version.

pre-orders do nothing but incentivise the shitty money-sponge practices we all hate in games. the point of a pre-order used to be to ensure you got your physical copy, but with most games being digital license anyway, that worry is unrealistic.

However when you wait for reviews, what you show that boardroom is “what we put out actually matters. if we make a shit game, we get shit sales. when we only give a team 2 weeks and a fiver we get shit reviews.”

gimli: oh?!

elrond: the ring tempts all who come into contact with it

They had to write a letter to the NFL team they were assigned to, they had to do a research project to find out where the teams practiced, they had to write a letter to the mayor of the city the teams practiced in, they had to keep track of their team's statistics, they had to do research about the state history of the team they'd been assigned to, and they had to do a presentation.

It was a big project. She provided all the materials, she made sure there were copies of the newspaper sports section in her classroom so the kids could stay on top of stats. The students got this project in their first week at school and it wrapped up right around winter break, so it wasn't like it was an all-day "today we are doing statistics" thing or "today we do research, today we write a letter, today we make a presentation" one-week project, it was five to ten minutes a day in various subjects that got organized into a presentation at the end of the semester. The kids could work together, they could work independently, they could ask my mom or the librarian or their parents or their older siblings for help. They just had to end the semester with a report on the team's history, the stats for the season organized into a chart, copies of the letters they'd sent (and copies of any of the responses they'd gotten), a two-page social studies report on the state where the team played, and a presentation to the class about their favorite thing they had learned while doing the NFL project.

The kids fucking loved it. And for years I spent my winter break going to the classroom and organizing the bulletin board with a huge map of the US and materials from each student's report, showing the work that the students had done that semester. It was a way of getting kids engaged with classwork, because who cares about statistics at 10, probably nobody, but if you get a set of pencils from the Jets NOW you want to learn about the team. The Jaguars sent one kid a jersey one year. The city in Minnesota where the Vikings practice sent postcards for every student. Part of this was happening when Schwarzenegger was governor in California so one kid got the Terminator's autograph for part of his project.

I think maybe the thing that I admire the most about it in retrospect was the way that it taught actual project management to young students. I don't actually know of that many schools that have projects more than a month long for 10-year-olds, and I think it's a great concept. I didn't get something like that until I was a senior in college, and it would have been a great skill to learn younger.

Anyway, in 2006 my mom had to stop doing the NFL project because the district wanted to focus on raising their test scores. She was specifically told that if she kept doing the NFL project she would not be rehired at her school.

She even wrote up what standards each part of the project worked toward - the kids had to make graphs because "organizing information into a bar graph" was a specific standard for students that age. "Writing multiple paragraphs on the same subject" was a standard, which is why the letters to the cities and states were multi-paragraph. The project WAS standards based.

But the administrators wanted to make sure that the students had more practice with reading the kinds of questions that would be on the tests because most of the student body spoke Spanish at home.

My mom taught at that school for another ten years; the school's test scores never showed any marked improvement with test-based lesson plans.

My mom's project wasn't the only thing like that that got cancelled. There was another teacher who had a craft-based thing that was similar, and a 7th-grade teacher who did a kind of history/social studies Magic Schoolbus LARP thing who was told not to do that anymore. Eventually my mom was told to stop having her students write journals for ten minutes a day because it wasn't being taught from the textbook and wasn't being taught to the test.

My mom would check in with kids a couple times a week to see what their progress was looking like, and had hard deadlines for things like mailing letters. There was work that COULD be done at home, but the whole project could be completed in the classroom during class time if the student needed to; many of my mom's students over the years dealt with insecure housing and no internet access so she didn't give assignments that required dedicated workspace at home or that needed more research than a student could reasonably complete in the computer lab during scheduled lab time at school.

(I say 'research project' but these were fourth graders, it was looking at the team's page then the city and state websites for each team and maybe wikipedia for the city/state - it was teaching the concept of research, it wasn't arduous research)

The kids collected an information packet early in the project that was basically a worksheet where they could keep track of stats and could fill in info about the states/cities/teams; they kept these in a folder where they could also keep print-outs of research from the library or clippings from the sports pages my mom brought in.

Because they had these packets, they could work on the project at their desks, so they'd have a couple scheduled 20-minute blocks for the project twice a week outside of the check-ins, and if they finished other work early they were allowed to choose between working on their project, free reading, or writing or drawing quietly at their desks.

The project had minimum requirements:

A 1 paragraph history of the team

1 set of about 5 graphs with the team's win-loss stats and some other stuff like number of touchdowns and field goals during the season, etc.

1 letter to each: team, mayor of the city where the team practiced, letter to the governor's office of each state where the team played with questions about the state

1 3-page hand-written report on the state the team played in

1 2-minute presentation to the class about your favorite thing you learned with a visual aid

Some kids DID hate football, but football was a fairly minimal part of the project. Some kids also hated making graphs and some kids hated writing letters and some kids hated learning about the states. The kids didn't need to know the roster or watch the games - a lot of kids didn't have TVs or access to games - football was an entry point, not the purpose of the research. The reason it was NFL-based was because the NFL season was spinning up as school started and because there were about as many NFL teams as there were students in the class (32, but the district wouldn't allow anyone to have the Raiders, so 31 and the kids would get 30 of them and my mom would take the other 1 and track them).

Like, there was one kid who went Ape Shit when she discovered that the Minnesota state flower is the Showy Lady's Slipper and she made as much of her project as she possibly could about orchids. She did this beautiful illustration of the flower for her visual aid for the presentation and that's what went up on the board for her. She didn't care about the Vikings, she got REALLY interested in flowers.

There was a kid whose biggest chunk of the report was about the gold rush. One kid dove into research about pirates. But also a lot of kids did like sports and would do a lot of research on the actual team.

There are few people in the notes going "lol, i would have failed that project i hate sports" and I actually think that's a HUGE part of the problem that I'm commenting on here and why I think that losing projects like this is an issue.

My mom tried really, really, really hard to create opportunities for her students to succeed. I think that most good teachers do that. Most good teachers don't ever want to give a student a failing grade, so they do what they can to teach to all different kinds of learning styles and interests and literacy levels and math competencies.

Standardized tests don't do that.

My mom could tell you which of her students struggled with reading comprehension, which ones had a lot of trouble with English but could get their work done with time and support, and which students were simply Spanish speakers who could not read English because they had moved to the United States three months before the school year started and needed information translated. She could pair up bilingual students with different levels of English acquisition, and she made sure that she could explain at least the basic instructions of her assignments in Spanish.

Standardized tests don't do that.

I can't tell you how frustrated she used to get that she had so many students who were good math students who would score low on the math tests because they were word problems written in English.

BMI is supposed to be a statistical tool that is used to determine the average height to weight ratio of a population, nothing more. Just a tool that is used to report a population average. BMI becomes a problem when it is used to judge whether individuals are likely to become ill, because that's not a thing that BMI can do.

Standardized tests kind of make sense as a statistical tool to measure the average skills of a particular grade level in the district, but they are SHITTY at measuring individual competencies beyond test-taking ability. And when your goal is to improve the average score, the way to do that (theoretically) is to improve students' test-taking abilities by giving them practice tests and by teaching them how to take tests, not by pairing them up with a desk buddy who can help them read the word problems.

Like.

Most of the (elementary) teachers I know consider it a pretty big personal failing on their part if they have failing students. A lot of teachers are invested in helping students succeed and will do A LOT to accommodate their students' varying skill levels and interests to get them up to grade level *for the sake of the student* and not for the test. They WANT students to stay with their peer group, the DO NOT want to hold students back and they understand how stigmatizing that can be but they ALSO know that advancing a student who is far below grade level in reading will not help them be at the next grade level in reading.

They've got nine months. The teachers and the students have nine months together, and that's not a lot of time for one teacher to make sure that thirty kids are on the same page, and it's worse when you have constant benchmarks and have the students spend time writing down what standard they're supposed to be applying instead of giving them more exposure to and assistance with the subjects they need help in.

God, teaching the STUDENTS to identify the standards they were working towards seems like such a ridiculous waste, like, "here, learn this keyword pattern matching that will apply nowhere else in your life ever but that the teacher needs you to do so they can check the box that the district is forcing them to check."

And I know teachers aren't perfect and I know a lot of teachers are shitty and I know that sometimes kids DO actually do better when it's a relatively unbiased test that allows them to advance to the next grade instead of the assessment of a teacher who might genuinely be a shithead who wants to hold kids back because they're a racist piece of shit.