There’s a new microfiction up at Patreon if you’re the type to be interested in that. Remember, a buck a month gets you access to nearly everything, and $2 a month gets you Click, an entire exclusive novel!
Month: May 2020
In which I reimagine education
Let’s start with this: We should not be returning to schools in the fall. I think it very likely that this will be worse in the fall, not better, and even if we do return at the beginning of the year I don’t see any chance at all that we make it through next winter without at the very least a substantial chunk of the year dedicated to e-learning.
But, for several reasons, most of them perfectly obvious, we should probably try to have schools open in the fall– if for no better reason than the idea of starting a new school year with the kids already at home fills me and every other teacher I know with bone-deep horror. If we want to have a school year next year (and we may not! That’s not an entirely unreasonable position!) we have got to start it with at least a little bit of in-person education or this just isn’t going to work at all.
You saw the CDC guidelines the other day; you also saw, in the same post, me state that the CDC guidelines as they currently exist cannot be fulfilled in any school I have ever worked in. So: how do we do this, in a way that allows in-person education and, as much as humanly possible, maximizes student safety? Oh, and also: this needs to be revenue-neutral, or, if possible, save districts money, because we all know nobody’s ponying up for, for example, doubling the bus fleet.
(Nor should they. Any solution involving a need to buy more buses isn’t going to fly simply because you don’t double your bus fleet for a problem that, even hugely pessimistically, is probably going to be gone in a couple of years once there’s a vaccine. That’s too much of a capital outlay for something like that. But I’m off subject.)
So, I’m taking the following as written:
- That our students are not suddenly going to become any better-behaved or more likely to follow rules than they already are;
- That any solution to this problem cannot cost money and should probably save it;
- That in-person education is necessary to get some knowledge whacked into the brains of these kids, somehow;
- That most classrooms and school buildings are not even a tiny bit set up in such a way to successfully promote social distancing. Put simply, tape on the damn floor isn’t gonna do it; see item #1 up there.
What we are going to have to do– and the legislatures are just going to have to do something to make this legal– is split the kids in half. We can’t stagger arrival times or anything like that; any solution to that not involving doubling or tripling the number of school buses leads to 10-hour working days for staff and teachers and that’s not gonna fly.
Half of the students, and yes-this-is-a-logistical-nightmare-but-we-have-to-figure-it-out-anyway, keeping families in the same building and in different buildings on the same days, so that no one has their kids on conflicting schedules, go to school on either Monday-Wednesday or Monday-Tuesday. I suspect two successive days is better, but that’s a detail. The other half go to school on Tuesday-Thursday or Wednesday-Thursday.
Students who are not in school in-person have e-learning on the days they are not there, focusing on basic skill retention and shoring up deficits whenever possible. New material is covered by a teacher, in class, doing their level damn best to cover grade-appropriate material as much as possible.
Standardized testing is either cancelled or minimized as much as humanly possible.
Fridays can either be rotated between the two groups or, and I think this is my preference, Fridays are always e-learning days. Teachers are on office hours all day on Fridays. In my district, we have two preps a day, one of which is a “real” prep and the other is owned by the office; in this scenario on Mon-Thurs that extra prep, rather than being devoted to daily meetings like it usually is, would be time for office hours and catching up on email from e-learning students who had questions while in-person teaching was taking place.
Now, to be clear, when I say “split the students in half,” what I’m envisioning is that where right now I have a classroom cap of 32 students, my classroom cap would fall to sixteen, meaning that while I might not have room for perfect six-feet-between-everybody distancing I can definitely spread the kids out. It would mean that students with IEPs could also get some face time with their TORs and might actually stand a chance of getting some of their accommodations, most of which are impossible to fulfill during e-learning.
This keeps the buildings at 50% capacity, which, okay, they’re still going to be out in the halls together but it’s a lot better than all of them being together. Other aspects of the school day could be dealt with as reasonable and available per building and district; I don’t love the lunch-in-the-classroom thing but I can see why it might be a deal, and if necessary for some grades we can set up a situation where the kids rotating from class to class is minimized and the adults move instead, or wherever possible try to have classes that are blocked together– my district, for example, could go back to one teacher doing both sections of math and putting Reading/LA together rather than using two teachers, just to keep movement minimized as much as possible.
We’re not putting plexiglass between desks, y’all, it’s just not gonna happen. Pointing desks all in one direction, okay, yeah, I can get with that, those types of things are easy, but social distancing is only possible by minimizing the number of kids in a room at a time– and the only way we can do that is if they’re not all there.
Staff should probably be wearing cloth masks all day, especially since I don’t see a way we can stay 6′ away from the kids. Once they’re seated, that’s one thing, but I can’t help somebody with something they don’t get from six feet away a lot of the time. I would like for the kids (the ones old enough to know what they’re doing, at least) to all be wearing masks as well but … well, look at any time I’ve ever mentioned dress code around here. That may or may not be worth the fight.
What do y’all think? Feel free to share this out, if you like.
4:29 PM, Sunday, May 24: 1,635,192 confirmed infections and 97,495 Americans dead.
PRODUCTIVITY!
I cleaned about half the house today, and in between vacuuming spent a pleasant hour out on the back porch enjoying the one (1) day of nice weather we’re going to get before Too Fucking Hot starts kicking in tomorrow. I will get the rest of it done tomorrow, along with finishing the week’s grading and driving over to my dad’s to give him a Covid haircut.
I also cooked breakfast, but I did that before the rest of the stuff. Turns out the boy likes omelets.
Tonight shall be spent finishing Season 5 of She-Ra, finishing my third playthrough of Nioh 2, and getting as far as I can into The Ten Thousand Doors of January before sleep.
Not a bad Saturday, as they go.
6:56 PM, Saturday May 23: 1,618,471 confirmed cases and 96,983 American deaths.
On Thanos’ ass
My wife just showed me this tweet:
And I horribly disappointed her by not having the slightest idea what the hell could possibly be going on. Apparently– and you’re just going to have to believe me on this, as I refuse to look for it– there has recently been a discussion on The Twitter about why Ant-Man didn’t simply defeat Thanos by crawling inside his asshole and then growing.
Look, damn it, I need something more ridiculous than British money to talk about around here. These are the posts. 🙂
It is unclear exactly how much force Ant-Man is able to exert while growing. In fact, two damn near successive images from this trailer make the problem pretty clear:
You only need about the first thirty seconds, but you see two things here associated with growth: first, whatever system they have built inside the van is strong enough to fling another van off of its wheels and into the air. However, the system in Ant-Man’s actual suit isn’t able to put out enough force to break either the drop ceiling above him or the drywall around him. One assumes that you could use Pym particles to generate quite a bit of force, then, but that capability doesn’t seem to exist in Ant-Man’s suit, no doubt because his actual flesh is weaker than the metal frame of the van.
For the sake of argument, I’m willing to accept that Ant-Man or the Wasp are both able to shrink down enough to get inside Thanos’ suit of armor, and from there, provided that he is not actively clenching, one assumes they could work their way into his asshole if it were absolutely necessary. However, any suit that can’t grow Ant-Man with enough force to break drywall is surely not going to be able to overcome the pressure that the rectal wall of a man able to box the Hulk into unconsciousness could exert.
The good news for Ant-Man is that his suit does appear to have some sort of failsafe in it so that he can’t accidentally grow beyond the point where he hurts himself, or he would surely be larger than the room in the scene above, which I’m pretty sure is from a part of the movie where the suit was actively malfunctioning. I therefore posit that Ant-Man is only able to grow large enough, once ensconced in Thanos’ rectum, for Thanos to notice him, at which point one assumes that Thanos would clench, and things end poorly for Ant-Man, who has no particular level of enhanced strength or invulnerability, especially at that size. If his suit does not have the failsafe built in, Thanos clenches anyway, and one way or another the big purple dude is gonna need an oversized bidet to clean up the mess, which isn’t gonna be pretty.
The correct way, by the way, for Ant-Man or the Wasp to defeat a being on the level of Thanos is not to fly into his ass, but to fly into his ear. I’m pretty certain that the Wasp dropped the Hulk himself at least once by flying into his ear and directing an energy blast directly into his eardrum. Or, in a worst-case scenario, shrink down a bit more and head for his brain, which I’m pretty sure she did to the Red Hulk at one point.
Or, y’know, there’s always distraction. Yeah, this happened. God, The Ultimates was terrible:
In which we’re gonna need a bigger boat
I’ll get to the graphic in a minute; this is gonna be another grab-baggy sort of post. Bear with me.
I just finished mowing the back yard, just in time for it to start pouring outside, so I’m sure all the grass will be regrown in a day or two. I have shared my distaste for lawn work many times before; in fact, bitching about my lawn was one of my first posts around here. My wife, who is more fond of working outdoors than I am, generally handles it; my job is to remove snow, and we collaborate on leaves. You may recall that she broke her foot a couple of weeks ago, which coincided with the weather being nice enough that the grass came back to life; to her credit, she waited for me to figure it out myself that I was going to have to mow the fucking yard and didn’t bring it up until I’d ruined my own day. Having mowed the full mess over the last two days, I have realized something: I feel basically the same way about yard work as I do about writing fiction. I absolutely hate doing it, but the feeling of being done with it is absolutely stellar. I love looking at a freshly-mowed yard. I just don’t want to have to create the conditions to be able to do that. If I ever figure out how to enjoy writing as much as I enjoy being done with writing I will be at Seanan McGuire levels of productivity in six months.
Speaking of mowing: I don’t wear headphones all that often, so it was already kind of weird that I shelled out so much money for the AirPods Pro that I bought a bit ago– but holy shit, am I impressed by how good noise cancelling works. I wasn’t even listening to music for a good part of mowing the yard; I just had the headphones in with the noise cancelling on and I could barely hear anything. Cue someone hopping into comments to tell me that’s going to kill my ears, of course.
Regarding yesterday’s addendum to yesterday’s first post: I think, based on comments, that it is clear that 1) I don’t know anything about Great Britain or their money; and 2) It is absolutely the way people write about their money that is bullshit, thus Option Two wins. I don’t feel like it is unreasonable to suggest that if you are going to spend a fair amount of your time in a book talking about people’s income levels and how much things cost, and the people you are talking about use a monetary system that is no longer in use and is not exactly intuitive, maybe put a chart somewhere explaining how it works? I’m willing to be accused of shocking ignorance on this, that’s fine, there are lots of things I don’t know, but part of the reason I was able to not realize that the shilling got phased out however many years ago was that nobody ever explains what the fuck a shilling is in history books. They just assume you know there are 3.2 shillings in a Cumberbatch and move the fuck on with the narrative. Put a damn chart in there somewhere!
The feasibility study has been returned, and it turns out I’m not actually able to watch the Snowpiercer TV series without spending additional money. I had heard it was showing up on Hulu, but apparently that’s only true if you pony up for some sort of “Live TV” add-on, and … nah.
I will, nonetheless, bow to the will of the interwebs and watch this program as soon as I can do so without spending money for it. That may take a while, however. In the meantime, Avatar: the Last Airbender is on Netflix and I somehow haven’t finished Season 5 of She-Ra yet so I need to up my TV-watching time as a percentage of my day.
I have seen a couple of different variations of the graphic at the top of this post floating around on the internet recently, as well as a couple of different NO NO THIS IS THE INTERNET BEING STUPID types of counter-posts. Folks, the official CDC “considerations” are right here; feel free to look at them yourself and compare them to whatever version of the graphic you’ve seen recently. The paraphrasing is essentially accurate, and the fact that the CDC, whether they’re calling them “guidelines” or “considerations”, doesn’t actually have the power to make their thoughts law doesn’t really matter. The point is, the fucking Center for Disease Control has effectively said that there is no way to safely open schools. Because these “guidelines” or “considerations” or whatever the fuck you want to call them are impossible, and every teacher and other adult who has ever spent any time in schools knows that. I am done for the year, effectively, and my son’s last day was yesterday (I still have some PD stuff over the next couple of weeks, and grades have to be finalized, but there is no further e-learning this year) and there is a lot of time for things to change one way or another between now and August, but the way things stand right now we are not going to be able to reopen schools this fall. Not safely, at least. I know the person in the White House doesn’t give a damn; that’s perfectly clear, but so far the governors have been more reasonable.
Speaking of governors, I had this conversation with my wife earlier:
For context, Woody Whoever’s last name is not Whoever and he is running for Governor as a Democrat, and he is running such a low-key, bullshit campaign that I literally didn’t know that there even was a gubernatorial race this year until seeing his name on my primary ballot. I do not at this time remember his last name and I’m not about to look it up. I did some quick research before I marked his name on the primary ballot (not that it would have mattered, as he was the only candidate) and he seems basically competent, but Gov. Holcomb is one of the few Republicans I’m aware of who I would also describe as “basically competent.” He’s shit on education, but so is everyone else in the damn world. Obama was shit on education. I’ve voted for one candidate who was good on education policy in the last fifteen years or so and she turned out to be a shitty politician and got voted right out again after her first term. It just doesn’t happen that damn often.
Regarding the headline to this post: when I initially wrote it I had plans to tie it into one of the parts of the post, and it was going to make sense and be at least moderately funny in the way my post titles occasionally are, and I have completely forgotten what the hell I was going to tie it into or how– something about classroom size, maybe?– but I’m not going to change it. “I am an idiot” is definitely a theme of this post so we may as well run that shit straight into the ground while we still can.
3:24 PM, Friday, May 22: 1,590,349 confirmed cases and 95,490 Americans dead.
An addendum to the previous post
One of the following two things is true, and I’m not sure which, despite having read more than your average person about British history and literature:
OPTION ONE: British currency, pre-Euro, is bullshit, and I refuse to believe anyone can keep track of how many guineas are in a shilling or how many Robux are in a whangdoodle or whatever; y’all make fun of us for not having the metric system but this is how you do your money?
OPTION TWO: British currency is not in and of itself bullshit, but the way people write about it is; anyone mentioning British currency in any capacity is consistently doing the equivalent of saying “she spent three dollars, two quarters, two dimes and three pennies” instead of the more sensible “she spent $3.73.”
It’s gotta be one or the other, I just don’t know which.
#REVIEW: The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper, by Hallie Rubenhold
The internet has spoken, and several of you seem to think I should be watching this new program. I shall refer the matter to subcommittee, and a feasibility study shall be prepared. I will get back to you once it’s completed.
So: the old adage that you can’t judge a book by its cover is bullshit. Yeah, yeah, I know, deeper meaning and all that, but you actually can judge a book by its cover. In fact, that’s literally what the fuck the cover’s for, beyond the obvious physical necessity of aiding in binding the pages together. And every so often I read a book where I really feel like all I should have to do is show you the cover, and a few of you may immediately choose to make a buying decision based on that cover, and that buying decision is the correct one, regardless of what it is. Because … well, look at the cover, and look at the title, and that’s exactly what this book is, and you already know whether you’re interested in a book like that, and if you are, you will enjoy it, and if you aren’t, you should probably buy it anyway, and maybe your tastes will improve while you read it.
Being poor and female in the late 1880s in London suuuuuuucked, y’all. I was thinking about the Dust Bowl the other day; I have said before, and I will stand by this, that there is no other time or place I am less interested in hypothetically living in than poor and in Oklahoma in the 1930s, because the histories I’ve read of that time are terrifying, well beyond anything I’d have suspected before reading them. And while this isn’t on that level, this is definitely one of those books that gets deep enough into the basic day-to-day lives of its ordinary subjects that you will absolutely be glad to be living— most of you, at least— in America in 2020, despite the current Worst Timeline shenanigans going on. I am impressed at just how much information is available about the Ripper’s five victims in the first place; each of the five women gets a roughly equal piece of the book’s 300 pages, and the common thread is poverty, either from birth or because of the loss of a husband or father. It was easy as hell to tumble into penury in England in the 1880s, particularly if you were a woman and if you had children, and once you got there, you weren’t ever getting back out again.
This is not, to be clear, a book about Jack the Ripper. In fact, very little attention is actually paid to any of these women’s deaths beyond what is absolutely necessary, and their deaths are the one place where the details are mostly omitted. For the most part, each woman is traced up to their final night, and then the book skips along to something from the inquest, or what happened with their bodies, leaving the story of the murder more or less untold. It’s an interesting, but I think necessary, authorial choice– the book is about reclaiming and retelling the lives of the women the Ripper murdered, not yet another book about the man who murdered them.
Also, fun fact: did you think Jack the Ripper murdered prostitutes? You probably did; most people do. There is no evidence that three of the five women were ever sex workers, and only the fifth, Mary Jane Kelly, appears to have pursued prostitution deliberately, as opposed to having been forced into it by circumstances. Most of them were simply poor and unhoused, at least temporarily– and while it’s a throwaway detail and not really pursued, Rubenhold suggests that the reason none of them appear to have fought back was that they were killed when they were asleep. He wasn’t grabbing women off the street and hauling them into back alleys; he was looking for women who were already living rough and had found a quiet place to sleep and killing them where he found them.
Strong recommendation, y’all, for a ton of different reasons. You’ll hear about this one again at the end of the year, I think.
7:57 PM, Thursday May 21: 1,576,542 confirmed cases and 94,661 American deaths.
In which I let the hivemind decide
Six years ago I watched a certain movie and had some opinions about it. I, as I am occasionally known to do, put those opinions on the interwebs for other humans to see. That post is still the number one Google result if you search for the words “Snowpiercer stupid,” and is, somehow, still my highest-traffic regular post on a day-to-day basis:
You may be aware that they have decided to make a television program out of this very silly movie, and that that television program is currently airing, which is responsible for the current surge in pageviews– the post never died; there has been one day since 2015 where it didn’t get any views at all– but I’m not used to it being back up to having three-figure days again.
So here’s the question: do I watch the show? I’m not actually interested in watching the show, but I’m willing to do it for science, if the Internet wants me to.
So, uh, let me know?
3:54 PM, Wednesday May 20: 1,539,633 confirmed cases and 92,712 American deaths.
Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com 