#state standards

[invincible-selfxmade-punk]

For all of you following my teaching drama with the covid generation this year: We found out a little while back that in Texas Greg Abbott is changing our Teaching Standards for social studies next year.

From what I understand, firstly, we will now no longer be teaching geography.

This is a huge problem because this year most of the kids could not tell the difference between cities, states, and countries. They seemed to think that Los Angeles was the state. They thought that Texas was bigger than Russia. They had no idea that Alaska and Hawaii were part of the United States among other atrocities.

We also will not be covering Native Americans or the trail of tears. I'm not sure what else is being erased or left out and I am honestly too scared to look into it just because of how depressing it is going to be.

I am really really afraid that in the coming years I will be forced to stop teaching the holocaust.

I am sitting here trying to figure out what tag this so it will get the most views but there are few words that can express my absolute disgust at this situation, or how appalling it is to have such few options in fighting it.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Just your average male living space.

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[girlwiththegreenhat]

team fortress 2 finally getting rid of the bots after 5 years

work on the team fortress 2 comic continuing after 7+ years

half life 3 development looking more likely than ever with legitimate code, file, and voicework leaks referencing a new non-VR single-player game from valve featuring a HEV suit wearing protagonist and Xen creatures and concepts

shoutout to the valve fan that found the genie lamp. you a real one

[odinsblog]

“Freedom from the river to the sea for me, but not for thee.” The blatant hypocrisy is blatant

#It’s another variant of white supremacy. Netanyahu and the Likud Israeli government are nearly indistinguishable from Trump and the Republican Party — Netanyahu is a racist rightwing authoritarian who WANTS TRUMP TO WIN

Netanyahu is on his way to making Israel a pariah state, and he is an unpopular authoritarian who has always opposed an equitable two state solution. In fact, over his career Netanyahu has worked tirelessly to prop up Hamas, in order to sow division and play the West Bank against Gaza (source)

[i-am-aprl]

[rotzaprachim]

im shaking every single student organizer and screaming that they need to separate a demand to divest from arms funding from the demand for a university to cut off all contact with Israeli and Israeli-American scholars and students, a demand which no university will agree to because implementing it would in many cases be very illegal

[zeiinoviahh]

...and your enemy closer

[canisalbus]

The little Courage the cowardly dog-esque paws on this drawing just sent me for some reason I'm so sorry I just had to quickly doodle a little Machete the cowardly dog XD

.

[brw]

"but hamas is getting funded by extremist islamic hate groups!" do you think the U.S. government and military giving funding for israeli's war efforts against palestinians is a morally neutral and inherently righteous body that had no influence in the politics of southwest asia as a global colonial superpower. do you really think anything you can say about the people resisting oppression can't be said about the oppressors.

[baldwinheights]

there was NOTHING (ABSOLUTELY NOTHING) kamala could have done to win this election. NOTHING.

[hadesknockedupintheunderworld]

The world if people stopped applying their understanding of "conservatism" and "religion/christianity" through a very modern, deeply American view onto Death Note (a manga from the Early-mid 2000s which is very much set in the cultural and societal context of early-mid 2000s Japan and all that entails):

[tomorrowusa]

The media double standard which overlooks Trump's deteriorating mental state. (from PBS Washington Week - 8/30/24)

JEFFREY GOLDBERG (host and editor of The Atlantic): Here's the thing. I'll make this observation. I'll own it. If Kamala Harris went from bacon to wind in her interview with Dana Bash, she would, this morning, not be -- the next morning, she would not be the nominee of the Democratic Party. That would have been a very, very strange -- people would have been like, what is going on? Do we just have an absurdly low standard now for the things that Donald Trump says and does? DOMENICO MONTANARO (panelist and senior political correspondent at NPR): I think that there is definitely a double standard, and I think part of it is how each side's voters interpret their candidate. And someone like Donald Trump, Republicans have had the opportunity for years to say this is not the guy we want. Instead, they've continued to get behind him. In every primary that Donald Trump weighs in on, he wins, and then the general election a lot of those candidates tend to lose. I think that from reporter's standpoint, we do have to be careful about how we -- what level we hold both of them to. When I fact-checked Donald Trump's hour press conference, he told 162 lies and distortions within that time period, 2.5 a minute, compared to Kamala Harris' DNC acceptance speech, where she had 12 statements that I found were contextually misleading or needed more.

Here's the entire episode.

The media has mostly shrugged off Weird Donald's unhinged rantings as Trump being Trump while holding Democrats to a higher standard.

We need to be more vocal about the double standard. When Trump has another crazed rant about sharks, windmills, electric batteries, and bacon which gets brushed off by a media provider, ask that provider: What would you be saying if a prominent Democrat conducted a similar unhinged rant?

[i-am-aprl]

[troythecatfish]

[opens-up-4-nobody]

Ok. I work on a floor with 2 bunsen burners and a flamible/combustible liquids cabnet. Last week, I realized I didn't know where the fire extinguisher was (despite frequently using an open flame). Turns out it is out the door and down the hall. About as far from the fire hazards as possible. And I can't stop thinking abt it. Like. That feels fucking crazy right? I ask bc I seem to be the only person who cares. I told my advisor that I think we should have more fire extinguishers and he looked at me blank faced (despite the fact that he had to actively wander around the whole floor bc he also didn't kno where it was). And like yeah, in 20 years they haven't had a fire and maybe they never will but this feels like a fucking common sense preventative measure? It's just tempting fate. The hubris of not putting a fire extinguisher next to a bunsen burner is driving me crazy?? It's not even in the same god damn room! You would have to run out the room, sprint down the hall, open the case, and sprint back to use it! Why am I the only one who cares???

[bodymachine]

regarding the “the american education system didn’t teach ___ so i never learned it” posts, some of you are veryyyy much missing what’s wrong w/ those statements when you give the blanket retort that the american education system actually did teach ___. newsflash: public school curriculums aren’t the same in every school/district/county/state. but to take it a step further, the quality of public education depends on state laws and the funding available to schools, which funding depends largely on local property taxes, which means low-income communities end up with low-quality schooling, fewer extracurricular programs, fewer resources for disabled students, more corrupt administration. the system is not about problems with curriculum, it’s much more and much worse than that.

besides the property tax funding, standardized tests also play a huge shitty role in this mess. schools that don’t have high test scores, i.e. underfunded schools often with majority low-income black and brown students, are considered “low-performing” and actually get less funding from the government as a result, like needed funds can get cut, and their teachers get paid less (and don’t even get me started on how programs like teach for america are sending young, white, fully inexperienced teachers to the poorest schools).

standardized tests are chosen at the state level, so states with huge wealth disparities and obviously segregated districts (like CT where i’m from) are measuring the performance of poor kids and rich kids using the same content and scoring system to arbitrarily determine who’s smart enough to deserve a better funded education. so the tests, i.e. the government, clearly favor the success of rich, white students. and the problem isn’t so much which content gets taught and how, as it is how little the american government actually cares about kids learning and having promising futures. like, education truly isn’t the point of american public schools. what they care about is deciding who gets to thrive in the world once they become adults.

since schools with majority white and wealthy populations essentially set the bar for what kind of performance is “standard,” everyone else whose circumstances (academic or otherwise) don’t allow them to reach that level are set up by the system to fail. being a “low-performing” school means kids are forced to repeat grades, and graduation becomes something out of reach. the schools don’t care about their students’ needs (especially when the teachers and administrators are mostly white), and real-life factors beyond students’ control cause them to struggle in school and they end up getting punished/suspended/expelled at horrifying rates, and yeah there’s a whooooole host of reasons why school can fucking suck and i’m barely scratching the surface.

anyway, what i’m trying to say here is YES the american education system sucks—not just because certain topics related to racism and imperialism and american history and other countries are glanced over or fully left out of curriculum, but also because success is being gatekept by the white and wealthy. it’s actively a racist system. not being taught important things about the world, or not being taught in a way that is actually engaging, is a problem that anyone anywhere can face, but it’s particularly insidious when you realize that the school system is TRYING to harm poor, black, brown, and immigrant communities.

so just to circle back to the real problem on display in those ignorant posts, it really makes me sick that white liberals can develop such a whiny complex around their own insular lack of curiosity when they don’t even know what “american education system” they’re talking about. and trying to look better than them by saying they just weren’t paying attention in school is completely completely beside the point.