Born too late to participate in sixteenth century Spanish mysticism, born too early to experience life as an Episcopal space monk, ankles draped over into the water, fishing the seas of Jupiter’s moon Europa.
This is the kind of messaging you really want to be seeing from the global hegemon
It’s sad how much of what is taught in school is useless to over 99% of the population.
There are literally math concepts taught in high school and middle school that are only used in extremely specialized fields or that are even so outdated they aren’t used anymore!
I took calculus my senior year of high school, and I really liked the way our teacher framed this on the first day of class.
He asked somebody to raise their hand and ask him when we would use calculus in our everyday life. So one student rose their hand and asked, “When are we going to use this in our everyday life?”
“NEVER!!” the teacher exclaimed. “You will never use calculus in your normal, everyday life. In fact, very few of you will use it in your professional careers either.” Then he paused. “So would you like to know why should care?”
Several us nodded.
He picked out one of the varsity football players in the class. “You practice football a lot during the week, right Tim?” asked the teacher.
“Yeah,” replied Tim. “Almost every day.”
“Do you and your teammates ever lift weights during practice?”
“Yeah. Tuesdays and Thursdays we spend a lot of practice in the weight room.”
“But why?” asked the teacher. “Is there ever going to be a play your coach tells you use during a game that requires you to bench press the other team?”
“No, of course not.”
“Then why lift weights?”
“Because it makes us stronger,” said Tim.
“Bingo!!” said the teacher. “It’s the same thing with calculus. You’re not here because you’re going to use calculus in your everyday life. You’re here because calculus is weightlifting for your brain.”
And I’ve never forgotten that.
THIS.
When it’s taught right, learning math teaches you logic and how to organize your brain, how to take a problem one step at a time and make sure every step can bear weight before you move to the next one. Most adults don’t need to know integrals, but goddamn if I don’t wish everyone making arguments on the internet understood geometric proofs.
Scientific concepts broaden our understanding of how the world is put together, which does not mean that most adults ever really understand how light is refracted through a lens or why spinning copper wire creates electricity–and they don’t need to. But science classes in general are meant to teach the scientific method: how to make observations and use them to draw conclusions, how to test those conclusions, how to be wrong and grow stronger from it.
History isn’t about dates and names of battles, it’s about people, patterns, things we’ve tried before and ought to learn from. It’s about how everything is linked, how changing one circumstance can lead to changes in fifty others, cascading infinitely. Literature is about critical thinking, pattern recognition, learning to listen to what somebody is saying and decide what it means to you, how you feel about it, and what you want to do with it.
Some facts matter: every adult should know how to read a graph, how global warming works, some of the basic themes and symbols that crop up in every piece of fiction. But ultimately, content is less important later in life than context.
The good thing is, students who learn the content are likely to pick up at least some of the context, some of the patterns of thinking, even if they don’t realize it. (The unfortunate thing is how the current educational system prioritizes content so much that a lot of students, and a lot of adults, don’t see the point in learning either, and teachers are overworked and held to standardize test grading scales such that it’s hard for them to emphasize patterns of thinking over rote memorization, etc etc etc, but that is a whole different discussion.)
I would also add that giving as broad an education to as many as possible gives everyone the opportunity to follow a career that might use calculus. Or colour theory. Or electromagnetism. Or [insert specialism here]. If we gatekeep specialisms, those careers are only available for the ones who were privileged enough to have the background training. That’s why Classics as a degree subject is full of private school kids: it’s not offered in state education.
So many complaints about how useless calculus is but then all of a sudden March 2020 everyone was talking about “flatten the curve”. ie changing rates of change ie calculus
The average person actually DOES use and rely on a lot of the concepts that people like to complain we “never need again after hs”
when referring to yourself in your head, what pronoun do you use?
first person (“i need to wash the dishes”)
second person (“you need to wash the dishes”)
third person (“they need to wash the dishes”)
plural (“we need to wash the dishes”)
i don’t think in words
extra secret answer (explain in tags)
If uppercase letters are capital letters then what the FUCK are lowercase letters
Literally lower case, fortunately!
BUT WHAT WERE THEY CALLED TO DISTINGUISH THEM FROM CAPITALS PRIOR TO THE CASE
ooh ok I know this one, the technical terms for upper and lower case letters are majuscule and minuscule, which goes all the way back to when they were essentially two different latin alphabets that were not combined together in written text in the way we do now. there's actually no specific opposite term to capital that applies to minuscule letters.
however... since capital comes from the latin caput meaning head because capitals are used at the head of a sentence or page, if we wanted to have an opposite term for lower case letters we could take it from the latin word for body, corpus. therefore, something like "corpusal letters" maybe?
pedestrian?
Keen-eyed "Junk World" readers will recognize the number six from this classic 2020 comic
"When a prison camp opens in your town…when a DREAMer is disappeared from your classroom…when the President destroys what’s left of the Constitution…They will all say they didn’t know this was coming. And I want the American people to know that they did.” AOC
They deleted parts of the government that still have open grants without actually closing the grants
+
“You want to believe that there must be intelligent and honest people somewhere inside the Trump economic policy trying to limit the damage ... but as with the existence of leprechauns, there is no empirical basis for this belief.” — David Frum
asked my students if they wanted to share stories about what they did over spring break and this kid goes "you know the field behind costco?" and we all nod and he says "I got lost in the field behind costco."
When my students talk over me I do this bit where I quietly tell them I’m really shy and to please let me talk and somehow it works.
Me, literally a performing arts teacher who teaches them how to be confident and loud: guys wait I’m really shy 🥺 guys be niceys to me 🥺 I’m just a little guy 🥺
My students???? Every time????: woah guys shutup she’s literally shy
Why did we ever start yelling at kids when we could just let them be part of a bit, which is a kid’s favorite thing?
How to express to my ex that while I harbor no ill wishes there is really no reason for us to be in communication “as friends”