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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: March 7th, 2024

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  • No Child Left Behind. If a kid failed a grade, the school got less money, which eventually leads either to the school going into a financial death spiral and closing, or just passing kids regardless of whether they understand the work. There are teachers who failed kids, only for the principal overrule them and pass the kid anyway. The next teacher inherits the kid, can’t make up the various learning deficits, and is also forced to pass the kid.

    Teachers have been warning about this for like 20 years. Several years ago, college professors also started warning about it. If you read through some of the threads on /r/teachers, you’ll see some common comments: kids struggle to read and do math. They have no reading comprehension skills. They want everything spoonfed to them, and have no curiosity or drive to find things out for themselves. There’s a group in college now that has no social skills: when they show up to class, they never talk to their classmates, they just sit there staring. They want step by step instructions on how to things, but they often don’t mentally retain those instructions for subsequent exercises, and they rarely generalize that knowledge. They don’t look at manuals to follow processes or resolve issues. When they hit a roadblock on doing something, they just sit there and wait for someone to come, figure out the issue, and tell them how to proceed.

    /r/teachers has been saying for a while now that they’re graduating cohorts of students that are unprepared for the world and explicitly unprepared for working independently.

    It’s not every kid, of course: there’s occasional talk that they’re seeing kids move from a bell curve distribution to a K-shaped distribution: that the classes divide between kids who are curious, or have learning support at home, or whatever, who are doing fine as always; and the other half just aren’t.

    I don’t know what to tell you: mentorship programs help some who are struggling, but businesses don’t want to spend money training people anymore. Questioning candidates about how they’d solve individual problems, or their approach to solving problems in general, may filter out some of the bad candidates but (as with “what’s your worst quality”) that’ll only last until they come up with a standard answer.







  • The article only talks about the war with Iran. But Ukraine has taken out more of Russia’s processing facilities and Russia has announced that they’re no longer going to export [?gas ?petroleum? can’t remember offhand]. Whatever it is, the loss of the additional fuel is also going to drive up the cost of fuel.

    It’s also going to drive to the cost of food - not only in transporting seed and fertilizer to the farm, tractors and combines on the farms, and trucks away from the farms, but also because gas and oil and their byproducts are critical components of several types of fertilizer. Food insecure nations are going to be struggling, and even nations who are comparatively food stable will see rising prices.








  • I’d argue that Tillis retiring is exactly why he’s saying this stuff - it’s his way of playing both sides of the fence He’s getting out while he can still (partially) claim deniability, putting on this show with Noem, and at the same time voting to let Trump continue to bomb Iran unchecked. By participating in this farce now, he limits the amount of flack he’ll get for it from the True Believers, yet he’s also providing cover for Republicans who think ICE has gone too far. And in the end, absolutely nothing significant will change.