Let’s see what today’s hyperfixation is!

My boss, putting on white grease paint and a red wig: Oh, of course! Let’s do it quickly so that you’ll want to keep working with us since you’re going to be making business decisions!

Me: I would sell you to satan for one corn chip and I’m allergic to corn but before you do this maybe you should call someone who is actually on our contact list for our customer and see if they’ve ever heard of this stranger.

My boss, looking through a selection of shoes that honk when you walk: Oh, but she said that it was very important that none of the employees know what was happening because they’re making staffing changes.

Me: As your lawyer I recommend that you just call a single one of our contacts and see if they’ve ever heard of her name.

My boss, shoving all of our technicians into a VW beetle: You’re not my lawyer.

Boss: On the bright side, it’s only the last five

“Hello I am [name] from [security firm] we’ve been hired to verify the security of the facility I need to see your computers.”

“Erm…I’ll have to verify that with my managers.”

“Congratulations, you have just passed the security verification.” [Scribbles on clipboard] “But in all seriousness I do need to verify your security so I need to see your computers.”

By which I mean, asks used to be WAY more of the tumblr economy. They used to be more common to send, and receive, and see. They were integral to the collaborative, forum-like behavior of old tumblr communities, not even to speak on the HUGE number of ask-blogs that used to exist to only be interacted with in ask-form.

(I recommend checking out the full thread here, it's both heartfelt and contains a lot of cathartic roasting)

That said, I will share this segment because it reveals that...

Elon was sharing confidential health information publicly while also basically saying that he fired him for being disabled while also accusing him of faking it.

So between this entire shitstorm, the best way this can be summarized is:

Doctors are to black women what police officers are to black men. That may seem controversial but I believe it to be true and I speak from personal experience.

If you've seen this TikTok you know that a 2016 study showed that 50% of medical students and residents thought that black people couldn't feel pain the same as white people.

And we learned from this video that because of a 1999 study, to this day, there's a black correction factor for the creatinin levels in black people's kidneys, meaning we're less likely to recieve a kidney transplant if needed.

So if you go to a doctor, feel you aren't getting proper treatment or they refuse the treatment you've requested, say to them the following:

If you weren’t already going to spread this advice because black women are at risk, then spread it because it’s applicable to everyone else as well, including you reading this.

YOU🫵'RE 🫵 NE->XT.!! moTHERFUCKER!!!!

The only things that work without rest are machines; literally everything that lives requires rest.

So, when you see trees in a forest, they stick up outta the ground, some distance from each other, and you're like 'these are unconnected critters,' right? But! The thing is! Just like the trees in the picture are connected above-ground, trees in a forest are normally connected below-ground. There's this whole complicated thing involving a symbiotic relationship with fungi, but we're gonna simplify it to this: trees connect to each other through their root systems.

And they use it to share resources, across the whole forest.

If there's a tree over here growing in soil with a lot of, like, potassium, they'll pull up more potassium than they need, and send it out through the root system to other trees that are living where there isn't much potassium.

And one of the coolest things? Trees communicate their needs. If a tree is sick or damaged or starving, they send chemical messages out through the root system that tell the other trees to send them more food and tree-equivalent-of-immune-system.

Trees will share so much of their resources, they'll even keep trees alive that are almost entirely dependent. Like this tree! The tree above is getting some energy from its leaves, but no other nutrition of its own. And it wasn't able to link up to the shared root system. So the other tree reached out and hooked up to it directly, feeding it all of the nutrients it needed!

You see it more commonly the other way around: in an old-growth forest, where the roots are well-established, you can find stumps where a tree was cut down a century ago... but if you scrape the stump it's still green wood. The tree's still alive, without a single leaf. Because all the other trees in the forest are feeding it.

I promised to talk about matriarch trees, so here's where we get to them.

In a very old forest, you have very old trees. You have some trees that are so very, very old, their own roots cover entire regions of the forest. Their leaves reach up to the sky over everyone else. And after so long, they've developed to where they can take in way more resources than they need.

So what do they do?

They feed baby trees.

Baby saplings in an old forest can't reach up to the sun. There's no light down there. And their roots are too small and shallow to dig down to the nutrients they need. So the matriarch tree will draw energy from its towering canopy, and nutrients from its massive, ancient roots, and feed them to the little trees that are too small to feed themselves. For anything she can't get on her own, she'll act as a central hub, taking in spare resources from the rest of the forest and giving them to the little ones.

And one of the best parts - she won't just do it for her own species. She'll connect to all kinds of trees, because they're all necessary for the ecosystem to work. She'll adopt the whole forest's children.

Sometimes in forests you'll find a spot where there are a lot of small trees in an open space around an old, fallen tree. People generally assume they could find more light there, or maybe the soil's more fertile from the decomposition.

But no.

(Sorry teacher rant incoming)

But to the subject at hand, tldr is that I tried.

I taught a certain classic every year. I tried hard to make it engaging and learnable. I had a poster board with crime scene map. We watched the movie along with it. We made connections to our life, comparing cultures. I had a "setting exploration station" day with snacks. I used reading strategies.

Problem 1 was that they refused to read at home. Problem 2 was that they have trained their brains against having an attention span.

It was a 12 hour book. That's a long time of just reading. So, I conditioned them to grow their attention spans by having regular amount of reading a day and then speeding up the reading track a little once they were getting it. I got students read-along adhd help bookmarks to help. It was experimental, I admit, when I upped the speed again because it was getting to the end of term and we were running out of time. But I asked several check for understanding questions, which my students answered accurately confidently. Those who got lost had the crime board and movie to help, which was better than telling them to read at home at moving on pretending they did (even my honors students wouldn't). And also, those who fell behind in the actual reading still were exposed to important literature. My goal also was because I noticed their reading scores were dropping due to focus, and so I hoped the reading and listening was to improve their that. Another of the issues I'd noticed is students lacking fluency. They would get stuck on words they don't know and quit reading right there. So, the speed focus was to help them build stamina to keep going even if they don't know every word or understand every sentence (a skill that got me through classics as a teen). It was rushed due to year-timing, so maybe it was a terrible plan, idk, I'm still researching, but it seemed to be working and the data seemed good.

We got through a classic with students able to answer deep questions about the book with references. And the overall reading scores when up for every class except my biggest, most discipline-challenged one.

But then there was problem 3. My principal came in during a tiny part of the reading that happened to be near the end of book and we were rushing to finish. Despite the fact that students answered every single one of my check for understanding questions accurately, I was chewed out for it. I explained my research and reasoning, but was still told I was a terrible teacher (again based on one short time they were in my classroom). Even with having an engaging activity as part of the lesson, the principal was hyperfixated on the fact that my students were reading too much.......in an English class. The evidence that my students weren't engaged? They weren't smiling and were staring at their books. Btws, every dang kid in that room had their book open, but no my lesson was too boring and utterly useless and I was a terrible teacher who had completely wasted my students' time in an irredeemable manner. My students needed to be jumping off tables with joy or else they couldn't possibly be learning. I wanted my kids to do hard things, but admin only wanted them to do hard things if they were exciting and colorful.

But at the same time, there was also a push to use the very boring and time consuming textbook that had quiz questions that even I didn't always guess right bc they were terribly written and showed no understanding of the book, which is another story. So even when I was colorfully "engaging" I was wrong.

In the end of the fiasco, felt pressured to never teach that book again and never challenge my students if I wanted a job.

Problem 4.

I mentioned my worst class. It was over 30 kids after lunch. All the classes were like this, but I got the others into shape by this time of year. But this class was rude and full of students with neurodivergences and behavioral and home concerns that set each other off constantly. I taught an etiquette lesson once and these kids were actually surprised when I explained why certain behaviors were rude. They had "only person in the room" syndrome. Someone at home simply hadn't taught these kids how to exist in society. (Same person at home who wasn't helping them read is my guess). Trying to get them to read a classic with the constant complaints and angry comments and straight up swearing at me for making them read it was exhausting. One of my coworkers had been teaching for many years and confirmed that behavior is making teaching harder and harder every year. We live in an "Every thing goes" society where tiktok makes these students think that rules and being made to do hard things is some kind of oppression.

(Also admin was again unhelpful, the kind where if I sent a kid to the office it was my fault).

So yeah. After years of teaching an important classic, and each year getting harder, I gave up.

I moved to a school with waaaay better admin, but when my new team decided on a more contemporary book that better engaged the students' attention, I didn't fight it because I'm so so tired.

Anyway, like I said before. I'm trying. I'm trying to teach them to read. But gosh it gets harder every year. I still want to teach classics, but I'm not even sure how any more. I decided my PD research for next year is going to be about getting students to read. But there also isn't a lot of accurate research out there. A lot of it is elementary focused or requires time that doesn't exist in a high school setting or is testing the wrong thing that doesn't make sense in a modern classroom setting. But I'll keep looking. Students are also behind. There's all that research on how parents need to read to their kids, but the kids I get are largely the ones who never got that support. And then I have a few advanced ones that I have to also consider, and it is hard to differentiate between 30 different kid's learning levels.

Pedestrian traffic lights