Standardized Edutainment

Do Now:

And frankly, it makes very little sense that America's 250th anniversary should commemorate the Declaration of Independence.

Consider the following:

We weren't a country yet

We still wouldn't be a country for several years

We were, in fact, in the middle of a war for independence

It's not even a legally binding document (King George III didn't sign it)

So if you, a randomly sampled citizen of the United States of America, are asked what happened 250 years ago that we are ostensibly celebrating this year, you might be able to recall the correct answer from your education. Maybe you can perform 4 digit arithmetic (somewhat difficult) to help you get that answer. But most likely, you will choose the option that feels most correct.

The Declaration of Independence was basically a wartime propaganda measure, a manifesto by the educated elite of the continental colonies, with the express intention of rallying the citizenry to fight against the British instead of for the British. And yes, it is also more complicated than that, but it's been given so much mythological importance, as if it's Scripture, rather than a hurried, sweaty compromise.

The tags on your last reblog (about how the zine is a bit of a money sink) made me think -- is there a place we could donate to help it? You mention the stamp fund in your pinned, but if there's a donation link somewhere, I am blind to it.

I'd happily kick in like, $5-10 month for the zine. I know that isn't a lot but ideally it wouldn't just be me 😅

For the uninitiated, since January I've been publishing a monthly zine, The Some Times, mailing out free physical copies to subscribers on the 13th of each month. I was motivated by my nostalgia for magazine subscriptions in the early 2000s, so I've made a concerted effort to keep the project as offline as possible. I prioritize snail mail over email (digital copies are available upon request, but very few people have opted for that so far), I post the issues on my blog with a one month delay so subscribers get to read them first, and I have not set up any digital payment methods. The stamp fund is an informal thing; several people have sent me donations in the mail (some cash, but most have been postage stamps), and I give each of them a shoutout in the following issue's Letters to the Editor article.

I don't want to charge for the Some Times because it reaches way more people when its free. But that also means that readership has grown WAY beyond my wildest expectations; 108 subscribers and counting after only 6 issues. I thought I'd reach maybe 20 people all year, mostly mutuals or family members if I begged them, but this project has really taken off!

Last week I broke down the cost to produce a single physical copy of the zine and mail it out

Toner: about 6.667 cents per page or 13.333 cents per sheet (usually 6 pages/3 sheets per issue, so that's 40 cents) Paper: I print on purple paper instead of white, so it's 2.4 cents per sheet (7.2 cents per issue) Envelopes: about 8 cents a pop Address labels: about 30 cents a sheet, but I can fit more than 30 names on each one, so it's less than 1 cent per subscriber (call it 1 cent exactly when accounting for 1/30th of a page worth of toner) Stamps: 78 cents domestic, $1.70 international (postage goes up to 82 cents and $1.79 respectively after July 12th) Total: $1.34 domestic ($1.38 next month), $2.26 international ($2.35 next month) for raw materials. Accounting for labor and PO Box rent, let's call it $3 domestic, $4 international total (the cost of labor/rent is fixed each month so the cost-per-issue goes down the more people subscribe)

Is it worth $3 - $4 per person per month? I don't think I'd have gotten anywhere near 108 subscribers if I had paywalled it from the start, and I'd feel bad charging for it now after it's been free for so long. I've considered setting up a Patreon as a tip jar, but even that makes me feel iffy because then it becomes an obligation rather than a hobby. If people are paying for it, then I gotta provide, come hell or high water. I don't know... That route just doesn't seem right to me, at least not yet.

The best way anyone can help out is by contributing to the stamp fund. My PO Box is always open, not just for donations but for submissions too; pet photos, drawings, recipes, entire articles, you name it. We've built a really nice community this year, and I'm truly humbled that this project has resonated so far and wide (38 states, 4 Canadian provinces, and 6 other countries).

My entire backlog is available on my pinned post, and the window to subscribe for Issue 6 is open until July 6th (after that, you'll be signed up for Issue 7 instead). There are articles about astronomy, cartography, library science, book and movie reviews, cryptids, linguistics, fantasy worldbuilding, and even personal ads to start a reader-to-reader penpal network.

heyyy so I wanted to start something because it kind of feels like we as students always talk about “the future” like it’s something that’s going to happen to us instead of something we actually shape and I don’t really buy that idea anymore.

we’re literally growing up in a time where economics, AI, policy decisions, and global systems are changing faster than anyone can fully explain in a classroom. and most of the time, we’re just learning about it after the fact. so I started thinking… what if students weren’t just readers of that stuff, but actual contributors to it?

SOOO i’m trying to build a student-led global publication focused on economics, public policy, technology, finance, and future trends. not like a typical school newspaper, more like a space where students can actually write real research, publish serious ideas, and collaborate across schools and even countries.

the goal isn’t just “content.” it’s to create something that feels like a mix between a publication and a youth research network. students can learn how to think, write, and lead at a much higher level than what we usually get access to.

and yeah, it’s early. but that’s kind of the point. it’s being built from scratch, which means the people who join first are literally shaping what it becomes.

if you’re someone who’s into economics, policy, tech, writing, or just wants to be part of building something global with actual structure and ambition behind it, this might be for you.

we’re looking for founding team members right now: editors, writers, designers, website/help with ops, social media, basically anyone willing to build.

if you want to apply, the link is in the bio of the Instagram: @globalyoutheconreview

and honestly, even if you’re not sure, it’s one of those things that could actually be a really solid opportunity for college apps and experience because you’re not just “joining” something… you’re helping create it from the ground up.

I'm not a student. I have not been a youth since the more recent Bush administration. But is there anything I can do to help or otherwise become a part of this?

i see what you're referring to, but that "never get that final block in place" thing is what infinity is for. the infinity is kind of for the moment when you do the final thing in a never ending pattern. its the last number. there is no last number. its there. you can see it. you cannot get there. but what if you did? then you'd be at two. you are at two. you measure the corners of your house. its a little bigger on the inside than the out. hm.

Assessment Item:

Everything I know about that field comes from NPR and Freakonomics, which isn't enough to validate the claims that I want to make.

unhinged rant on The Lorax by Dr. Seuss

*the book, from the perspective of a >9mo pregnant anticapitalist disaster who's read it to a 2yo about 23,000 times in the past 6 months

I bought The Lorax for my kiddo based on vague memories and the charming line about caring a whole awful lot. The back of the book describes it as a book "about standing up for what you believe in."

The first time I read it to jog my memory, I was pleased to remember the Lorax angrily showing the Onceler the consequences of his actions, the irony of the Onceler watching his possessions crumble (and his family leave) after the trees are gone, the emphasis on restoration at the end. The truffula seed reminded me of the pawpaw seeds I was stewarding.

In subsequent reads, I grew more frustrated at the Onceler. He tells the story in an apparent act of accountability, but he still charges for it? He still describes the Lorax as bossy and makes comments about his attitude. He puts a lot of emphasis on his own prowess at engineering.

I came to think that the Onceler is actually a better stand-in for corporate profiteers than Seuss may even have intended, since he destroyed an ecosystem for personal profit, takes the retelling of the story as an opportunity to express that he's worried about it with all of his heart, and then shoves off responsibility for restoration onto a literal child when he could have spent the intervening decades growing trees and undoing his mess. This is just a Coca-Cola recycling campaign.

And then, by engaging uncritically with the Onceler's pleas, does the book itself endorse this sort of corporate responsibility-dodging?

But of course, the comparison breaks down because a proper capitalist would either have established a truffula farm free from all those pesky creatures to keep the operation going, or packed up and left with his family when there was no more profit to be wrung from that particular piece of land.

So then, why does the Onceler stay and watch his buildings crumble, cold under the roof, and make[s] his own clothes out of miff-muffered moof? Why not go on to the next big opportunity? Maybe he really does feel bad, but it's hard to square that with his ineffectual moping and charging for the story. I'm more inclined to think that he's so invested in the story of his own genius and the tragedy of his situation that he's stayed there wallowing in self-pity instead of either moving or fixing things. He's an individualist, but not the poster boy of capitalist success. He's a victim of his own ideology.

tl;dr: the books says:

The Onceler is a loser (in both capitalist and environmentalist ideologies)

it's important for us to step up and save the environment as private citizens after the companies make puppy dog eyes about it

CCSS.ELA.11-12.1: Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text, including determining where the text leaves matters uncertain.

CCSS.ELA.11-12.2: Determine two or more themes or central ideas of a text and analyze their development over the course of the text, including how they interact and build on one another to produce a complex account; provide an objective summary of the text.

Pre-Class:

Students independently read The Lorax by Theodore Geisel written under the pen name Dr. Seuss. Additionally, they may elect to watch The Lorax (2012) by Illumination Studios.

Do Now:

Individually or in small groups, students read @dinosaur-ears's brief, high level analysis of The Lorax. Afterwards, they should share their thoughts with each other and/or on paper.

Class Discussion:

Students share their thoughts about the thesis and whether they are, disagree, or have anything to add.

Direct Instruction:

Walk the class through what makes this a good critique, as well as where it falls short (due to being a rant instead of a true academic exercise presumably to distract the author from the extreme unpleasantness that is convulsions).

Higher Order Learning:

Students visit the Juvenile section of their school's library. Alternatively, instruct them to do so independently at their local libraries. If necessary, permit them to use an app or other web service to access the necessary materials, but there really is no substitute for the feel of a children's book in one's hands.

Please have a moment of silence for the people who were killed instead of freed when news of emancipation finally reached the furthest corners of the american south.

have another moment for the ledgers, catalogs, and records that were burned and the homes that were destroyed to hide the presence of very much alive and still enslaved people on dozens of plantations and homesteads across the south for decades after emancipation.

and have a third moment for those who were hunted and killed while fleeing the south to find safety across the border, overseas, in the north and to the west.

black people. light a candle, write a note to those who have passed telling them what you have achieved in spite of the racist and intolerant conditions of this world, feel the warmth of the flame under your hand, say a prayer of rememberance if you are religious, place the note under the candle, and then blow it out.

if you have children, sit them down and tell them anything you know about the life of oldest black person you've ever met. it doesn't have to be your own family. tell them what you know about what life was like for us in the days, years, decades after emancipation. if you don't know much, look it up and learn about it together.

This is Juneteenth.

#STORY TIME. SIXTH GRADE

#my math teacher chewed me out in front of the whole class for not turning in an assignment EVEN THOUGH DID

#so she handed me a paper and thought I could do it in class and then turn it in fora late grade

#she called me out telling me was being defiant and threatened to call my grandmother

#time skip. she's handing back graded papers. at this point had completed the missing assignment

#AND WHAT'S THIS? SHE HANDS BACK TWO OF THE SAME PAPERS. BOTH WITH TWO DIFFERENT DATES

#ONE BEFORE THE DUE DATE. AND ONE AFTER #SO HAD COMPLETED THE PAPER. IT WASN'T A MISSING ASSIGNMENT

#ANDI GOT NO APOLOGY FOR IT

#still hold a grudge to this day. I'm sorry Im not letting that slide #reblog

#another story is with one of my elementary teachers #in language arts

#after reading an article/ story we were expected to have the page filled with notes #well we did so. but it wasnt enough

#instead of. y'know. encouraging us to analyze a little more we were constantly shamed for not doing enough

#like whole class time telling us how mad she was LIKE. TELL US HOW TO IMPROVE

I have lost a few paper assignments. But I always assumed it was my fault for being disorganized, not the student's fault for not turning it in. Like, yeah, I asked them to check everything and be sure but... I really cannot care about the piece of paper with answers written on it.

Unfortunately, The System needs a grade. And teaching can be very stressful. But what the fuck, why didn't they apologize?

What other stories do people have?

"there are things I need to do" → "there are also things I want to do" → "I can't do both" → "Guess I'll do nothing" → repeat

Social Emotional Learning, grades 5 through postgraduate, Time Management

Note: this lesson is also appropriate for lower grade levels, but higher grade levels tend to have fewer responsibilities during their unstructured time. It is still recommended to teach this skill early, before it becomes a lifelong affliction.

Do Now:

Provide students with the graphic, as well as this definition of Unstructured Time.

Unstructured time is when you have enough time to do something, but not a plan for what you're gonna do.

Individually or in small groups, students should write reflections on the following questions:

Have you ever gotten stuck in this cycle?

Why do you think people get stuck in this cycle?

How do you think it feels to be stuck in a cycle?

Direct Instruction:

Both structured (like time at school or at sports practice) and unstructured (like time to yourself in the evenings and weekends) are important. You can't live your whole life doing only one or the other. Well, that is to say, you can but it's usually not as good of a life.

Sometimes celebrities and important business people have practically every minute of every day planned out for them. This usually makes them miserable, even if the things that they are doing are the things that they wanted to do not having any control over your life feels really bad.

But you can also imagine somebody on an island Paradise, with no clocks and no expectations put upon them. Endless freedom, but without regularity it starts to feel strange, even meaningless. People in this kind of situation (rare but it does happen) usually create their own daily routines (fishing in the morning, cooking in the afternoon, crafting at night).

People need both. So why do some people get trapped in the cycle? It's called Decision Paralysis. Maybe you have too many options of what to do, or maybe you can't tell what's most important. The brain gets stuck, unable to decide, and like a deer staring at the headlights of an oncoming car, it freezes, unable to act.

So what can we do?

Guided Activity:

Recently, I had an entire day of unstructured time. The first thing I did was make a list of things I Wanted to stop and things I Needed to do.

How would you go about making sure you did as many of them as possible?

Students make suggestions, but you can offer the following exemplars:

Do the Needs, then reward with Wants, then back

Set a timer for each task so you don't get lost doing only one thing all day

Figure out the most important ones and do those first

Get the shortest tasks done first so the last gets smaller faster

Higher Order Learning:

Students work individually to figure out a list of Want2s and Need2s for the upcoming weekend. Then, they write out steps of a plan that will help them make sure they don't get caught by Decision Paralysis.

Emphasize that what's most important is that your unstructured time is time well spent.

If you only do your Want2s then you'll regret it later.

If you only do your Need2s then you'll feel like it was time stolen by responsibilities.

You don't have to get everything done on the list, either. It's not a game with a high score.

HW:

If you have animal-pets that are only active during a narrow-ish daylight time-window, then both the mandatory Basic care-tasks AND the additional playing-with-them that you may want to do for fun, need to happen in their activity-window, or in the even narrower overlap of your unstructured-time with their activity-window. You're going to regret neglecting the animals' Basic Care Tasks in favor of playing a not-time-sensitive Video Game, more than you're going to regret Not doing The dishes before playing a not-time-sensitive Video Game, and you're going to regret Missing Out on playing with the animals while they were awake more than you're going to regret Not Reading a Book that you can also read at Night.

& Revised

Further exemplary suggestions for Guided Instruction:

The essay nobody asked for, but I've been reading about for around a week, and now can explain very easily and intuitively.

When electricity flows from a region with low impedance to a region with high impedance, a reflection of the signal passes back up the cable towards the source. This tends to make the most intuitive sense to people - after all, the high impedance region is easy to imagine as a traffic jam, and the ripple going up the line is just all the electrons having to slam their brakes. We've seen this before.

However, you get an identical ripple when going from a region with high impedance to a region with low impedance, which kind of mangles that analogy. You don't see traffic jams in regions where the speed limit goes up, just in places where it goes down.

And so for that, we're going to have to break the signal into two parts.

V=IR is bread and butter, but nobody accounts for those in time. Everyone does DC steady state analysis, and this is slightly weirder. So in a line with low impedance to high, you just look at how much V (voltage) you need to push the same amount of current (I). Since R is getting bigger, you now run out of voltage before you run out of current. So all the voltage gets used up, some of the current gets used up, and the current that no longer has enough voltage to get pushed forward can't enter the new material and thus bounces backwards up the line. The reverse happens with high to low. You now run out of current (I) before you run out of voltage (V) because R got smaller and energy must be conserved, so you get a voltage wave that bounces up the line. So any time R changes you have too much of either current or voltage and the extra gets sent back.

Hello Tumblr! 

@jubs here, today, to tell you about a feature we're building: Comments by author!

Comments (or replies) have been around for a while, but they have always been tucked away from your regular feed, and so we're working on a few ways to integrate them into the rest of our experience.

Soon, blogs will have a Comments tab alongside Posts, Likes, and Following. There, you will be able to see posts other people have been commenting on, and, more importantly, find your own comments! This was not possible before, except through notifications if someone engaged with your comment.

We're also working on a way to surface posts commented on by people you follow in your feeds. You will be able to find those in the For You tab, and later, alongside chronological posts in the Following tab.

So, how do you identify those posts in the feeds? 

Replied posts will show a small preview right there in your dashboard, before you click anything. 

there is a fucking statue of a kid who lived sometime in the 1200s, around 800 fucking years ago, because we have pieces of his homework that he doodled on while learning how to write. this is one of his drawings:

when I was googling him (because I couldn't remember his name), I stumbled across this twitter thread about him, which includes a different doodle by an italian boy in the 1400s of knights besieging a castle:

It's at the back of one of his schoolbooks for learning Latin.

Do Now:

Turn and talk.

What do you think it was like to be a kid 500 years ago? How would it be different than being a kid today?

Class Discussion:

Discuss their thoughts from the Do Now, then transition into showing the doodles provided by @bemusedlybespectacled without providing any context. Ask them when they think those drawings were done and how they can tell. In the former, note that the drawing is done with a stylus instead of a pencil, and in the latter have the students observe that there are castles, horses, and bows and arrows.

Direct Instruction:

Explain to students that historians only know about what happened in the past because of what people in the past left behind. Old books and scrolls tell us what they used to believe, or about the lives of important people. Old weapons and tools show us how good their technology was. For example, show the stone age spears vs the 18th century pole arms.

Drawings of plants and animals show us what animals used to live there and what they looked like. For example, the Lascaux cave paintings in France

Or the painting of watermelons from 17th century Europe

Guided Learning:

Ask students to turn and talk to discuss the following question.

What will people in the far-off future know about us from what we are leaving behind right now?

Regroup and hold another class discussion about what current humans are going to leave behind for people in the future to know about how we live.

Then, ask one last question.

What do you want people in the far-off future to know about your life?

Higher Order Learning:

& Approved

Relevant standards for this lesson: