Ya know, I’d rather just have plain text website designed for 4 gb or less. I’ve never been in the financial position to have 16 gbs, and it’s far worse now. I just want to not be denied access to text because all websites want to secretly run so much JavaScript and all the other shit. Eventually I’ll give up on the web and just be happy on gopher and Gemini.
There’s sometimes complaints about “I thought you were dead” when the channel has been uploading regularly the entire time.
Every once in a while, if you have the “notifications” on for a creator it’ll just randomly turn it off. I have a creator that I pay $1/mth subscription to, which you would think YouTube would take as a suggestion that I like that channel and show me when they upload something new. Nope! Instead the algorithm thinks I want to watch a fucking Neo Nazi musician.
Rapping takes more skill than just saying a bunch of words fast over the right beat. A lot of middle/upper class white kids do not realize this and are not in the kind of environment to get real feedback on their rap.
My ex was a nepo baby. He had so many speeding tickets. Didn’t give a shit about playing video games on his phone while driving. Fines don’t work when you could spend that same amount on a weeknight dinner without blinking.
Something critical to note is that help is not really out there. This is the kind of news article that usually gets people to post 988, but if you’ve called 988 you know how much of a joke it is. They will “triage” you, where you either get the cops called to take you to hell/inpatient or you spend half an hour plus on hold for someone to say “sorry that sucks :(“
Inpatient institutionalize increase suicide rates after release. You get maybe fifteen minutes of actual “treatment” while the rest of it is being treated like a criminal. Good luck keeping your job after disappearing three days without being allowed to access your phone!
It amazes me when I see TikToks and videos from patients in inpatient facilities in other countries. In the US, wanting to kill yourself means that you are a horrible criminal and you will be punished for it.
Even for students without disabilities, a calculator removes the cognitive demand of the arithmetic. If I am teaching algebra, I want most of their cognition to be taken up by the algebra, not the arithmetic.
I tutored a college student who had dysgraphia. They originally had a calculator accommodation, but this was removed at the request of the instructor.
The student was in no way incapable of learning the material in the class - a remedial math course mostly on basic statistics and presenting data. But they were incapable of remembering most of the multiplication table.
There’s no reason to force a person to do long division by hand. The student was perfectly capable of understanding the process of calculating an average, but actually doing the problem meant that they were counting out by threes on their hand to do 3x7.
I’ve worked with dyslexic students on writing assignments - they are just as capable of intelligently responding to a writing prompt if you ask them verbally. Why should they be punished because they can’t spell (especially when we had like a decade of NOT TEACHING PHONICS)?
I draw a hard line at generative AI, but as long as the thoughts are theirs, I’ve never been concerned too much with students using tools to help them.
Sure, you can do that once. Then you are out the job. Talking about politics will get you in more trouble than raping a kid.
I went into teaching because I care about making the world a better place. It cost me my marriage, it has sunk me into some of the deepest pits of despair that my mental health could take, it has meant physical and verbal abuse.
Buying pencils for kids is the kind of thing that you don’t mind too much, because at least it is a problem you can fix.
Once, I had a student ask me for a pencil. (He’d ask me everyday - usually in response to me asking why he wasn’t doing his work.) He looked me in the eye, snapped it in half, and asked for another.
I gave it to him. Who cares. I couldn’t fix the sinks which didn’t work and stunk because kids shoved shit into them, but I could fix the fucking pencil.
It’s a terrible job where you are expected to save the world and hated for everything you do. But, as a dog returns to his vomit… It’s part of my soul.
First week of the job: “hey, stop talking about your college experiences with the kids. These kids are never going to college, so none of it will ever connect with them.”
Canvas has a very neat “annotation” tool, where the teacher can upload a document and students can write on it and submit.
I also see a lot of canvas assignments where the answer is in an auto graded quiz, but the teacher has the students take a picture and upload to show their scratch work. This can be added as a “question” to the assignment.
There are good ways to use the tools for sure - I did really like that the auto graded quizzes on canvas could use randomized numbers. Eg, when I did speed/distance/time, I could write a word problem where it would randomize the quantities so each student got a unique quiz and couldn’t cheat.
Tools like PHeT/CK12/other simulation programs are also a godsend. Even working with college chemistry, being able to show visual representations of acid/base dissociation or how to balance an equation makes things so much easier.
The platforms are great - the work flow problems are more consequent to the way the school system is set up, especially in the Title 1 hell schools that are left to fall through the cracks.
The most I dealt with was around 36. I had around 28 chairs.
However, the feeder middle school had class sizes of 60+. There were literal riots, with multiple teachers injured, that the district covered up.
Stocks would absolutely not be allowed. I had a student that spent fifteen minutes screaming and cussing me out, straight to my face in front of a principle. When she said “I wish I wasn’t in your class” and I said “me too” - I got in trouble. (She was mad because I wrote her up for literally just walking into my classroom to sell snacks. She didn’t attend classes, she just did whatever she wanted.)
You can buy tisanes/tea with marshmallow root in it that’s good for sore throats!