"we are going to cure Americans of their relentless, religious belief in upward mobility" is probably one of the most insane concepts I can imagine but seems pretty popular with internet leftists

I may have talked my daughter's teachers into acquiring paper encyclopedias just because it's annoying that kids get weird and wrong things from Google summaries but also because I unironically think we're going to need to start keeping things to use like low-background steel

Appealing to the ego of older kids who don't want to get dunked on is I think helpful, for the younger kids (K-5) I've had more success playing into their "I don't want someone doing things for me, that's for babies" but also not giving them unfettered access. I work in a K-8 and my daughter is 8

Especially as kids get to middle school age, I show them the LLM just being because it cannot tell what it is reproducing (e.g. recommending eating a rock a day because it scraped the onion or "no African nation starting with K" because of reddit joking) and will make a fool of them eventually.

It's such a weird problem because this whole parade is an artifact of a time when monoculture existed. A lot of these artists aren't even trying to be broadly appealing, they are trying to appeal to a very specific algorithmic models and slices of new media outlets

Fwiw studying the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European has done a lot of incredible things for my thoughts processes on many things especially making sense of how many neolatin/Greek science terms make things weird when they collide with Germanic and vernacular French things (lots of doublets)

Teacher's unions are literally holding together so many local economies

We're incredibly lucky that universal primary and secondary are grandfathered in from Progressive Era American socialism because if we tried to build it from scratch right now it would absolutely never happen in the current political environment.

The gap between an essay written with an academic consultant and an essay written by a 17-year-old, even whose parents went to college, is an enormous gulf that probably easily outstrips the advantage gained by throwing money standardized test scores.

It's not quite on my list of linguistic red flags that someone has reddit brainworms, but it definitely signals trying way way too hard and usually is a cudgel for sneeringly insisting someone most be wrong and ignorant. I should make a formal brainworms list...

That to me is an MattY

I work as a learning support in my daughter's school because I did not want to chase academic jobs and Louis the yard teacher is who I wanted to be and who I am now and I could not be happier. Honestly, fourth graders are not that different an audience for Deconstruction than the college kids

The people critiquing this can either pick "Democrats are fools for not letting 40 million people eat stove" or "Democrats are feckless monsters for letting Republicans kill ACA" but you can't have both.

I'm not sure we have the ability to form political units larger than a city at this point in American history and culture tbh

Wait is this why in Ugly Betty, Amanda claims that someone named Bad Ronald lives in their walls and eats all of Betty's food?