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This is basically "Would You Fall In Love With Me Again" from the end of Epic: the Musical. Such a poignant way for Odysseus and Penelope to re-meet after twenty years.

"You don't know me. I'm not the same person anymore."

"That's okay. I'll get to know you again."

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after meaning to get around to it for years i finally listened to almost the entirety of Sold a Story and it is as groundbreaking as everyone says it is. it's also the most confusing, to me, single event in American culture in my lifetime and my reasons for thinking that are pretty complex so im not sure theyre fully formed yet. there's a list of shit in this podcast that made me feel like i was going insane

i KNEW something was going on at a population level, i've been noticing it for years, people kept telling me i was imagining things, but i was RIGHT, two generations of kids have been reduced to barely-literate levels of language function because of this shit and you CAN see it and hear it while talking to people in the world!

the entire adoption of the Calkins programs in the first place were based on the majority of people responsible for American child education deciding basically overnight that "children don't need to learn phonics in order to become strong readers" which is literally and not figuratively equivalent to saying "children can learn algebra without learning what numbers are". it is so self-evidently false i dont even know how to respond to such an assertion. you have to be fundamentally devoid of common sense to think this is true. language is comprised of sounds (phonemes), sounds are represented by letters, letters make up the alphabet, the alphabet makes up words, and words make up sentences. you cant just skip over the parts of this you dont like, it's the basis of our entire civilization. "i dont need to learn individual notes i just want to play to saxophone" okay well. too bad? you cant

american primary education apparently has no communication whatsoever with the scientific fields of human behaviorism, pediatrics, neurology, linguistics, the science of learning generally, and there is next to zero communication between teachers who are actively responsible for educating children and the entire research field of educating children. they just dont talk to each other, at least in huge swaths of the country. in retrospect this is obvious, i just have been assuming incorrectly this entire time that maybe, surely, some aspect of how our public schools are administered is in some way being guided by scientific evidence and research. this has apparently not been the case for 20+ years. Lucy Calkins herself claims she "didn't know" that the research on how children acquire language had been essentially settled by the 1990s, she just wrote her stupid book based on her own self-assurance that what she THOUGHT children were doing when they learned language was correct. she ddin't check, she didnt ask about research or studies, she didn't test her hypothesis, she just told everyone she had figured out how to teach kids to read based on nothing but her own untested assumptions. and everyone was like "okay sounds good". every single person involved in this process is or was in a position of responsibility for educating american children. and almost none of them thought to ask "okay, but have you tested it? does it work?" because they didn't test it, and it doesnt work, and for some reason that was never even brought up

teachers kept being interviewed on this podcast who kept saying things like: "they never taught us how to teach children to read" and "they didn't teach us how children learn so i had no idea how it worked" and then explaining this was why they were so easily hoodwinked by the Calkins program. i don't understand this. what is actually taught during the two year degree programs at teaching colleges? if it's not child psychology, pedagogy, neurology, and actual techniques for teaching children, what are they teaching you to do there? one of my friends who went to a teaching college told me they mostly provided classes on lesson planning.

individual teachers apparently are not reading books or articles or papers on any of these subjects either. so having graduated from a teaching college knowing nothing about children, teaching, or even basic english literacy ("i didn't know how to teach phonics and no one told me" is another thing actual teachers kept saying on the podcast. girl, SESAME STREET can teach basic english phonics, and it does), almost none of them actually do any investigation on their own. they just show up to their workplace (the school) and "teach" whatever admin hands them. ?????????????? how is this possible?

i realized last night in a fugue of post-exertional malaise that the three-cueing method of teaching reading is training children to approach language very similarly to how a large language model does it. they laboriously instruct the children to guess what the next word in a sentence will be, often by actually covering the word with a post-it note and then cajoling and badgering the child until he guesses the word under the post-it, based on the vibes on the sentence he's reading. this doesnt teach you to read, it teaches you to act like youre reading

this isnt directly addressed in the podcast but we used to just teach everyone english like it was an actual system that has parts and rules and structures, because that's what a language is. everyone would start with phonics and the alphabet, then later do stuff like sentence diagramming and grammar, neither of which have been taught in primary schools in decades. i think i was probably the very last generation of kids to get ANY of that stuff unless they went to an exceptional school, and it was only because my 8th grade teacher knew it was important and went against school admin's instructions in order to teach it. the couple days of sentence diagramming and grammar he gave us, out of SPITE, have been more useful to me in reading and writing than the entire rest of primary english education i received in public school, and i didn't even go to a school that had adopted three-cueing stuff yet.

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People comment on posts like they're the first person on the planet earth to tell you about nuance

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Actually, if you have a dynamic disability or if you are an ambulatory wheelchair/mobility aide user it IS okay to lie. As someone who has had surgery if you need the lift/ramp etc or someone is giving you shit for not looking disabled tell them you just had surgery, theyre more likely to give it to you (ask me how I know 🙄). Tell them you're recovering from a car accident. Tell them youre dying. Whatever. You don't owe prying ableist strangers your actual medical history. Do whatever you need to get accessibility and whatever you need to get to safety if someone is harassing you.

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Certain variations of the Trojan war story that were popular in antiquity but aren’t as popular today state that actually Helen was in Egypt the whole time and the Greeks were looking in the wrong place for her. Either because the pharaoh of Egypt confiscated Paris’ stolen goods including Helen when he stopped in Egypt and the Greeks didn’t believe him or because a goddess possibly Athena gave Paris a fake Helen and put the real one in Egypt. For some reason.

None of this makes any logical sense but a lot of people in the ancient Mediterranean really liked this version for some reason. Alternate universe where Helen is just living her best life in the Egyptian court I guess.

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To this day,

"if she's your girl then why is her leitmotif part of my theme" "to highlight the tragedy of how she'll never love you back"

is one of the most brutal pieces of play banter that I've read on this website. One of those shitposts that keep coming back to you. Damn.

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Almost a million protestors in Israel against the war today

A minimum of 300 thousand in Tel Aviv alone, probably closer to 500 thousand

300 thousand Israelis is a little over 3 percent of the Israeli population; if there was an American protest of that magnitude today that would be almost 11 million protestors

Almost a million protestors is 10% of the population, which would be 34.2 million Americans protestors

This is unprecedented

If y'all would just listen to what the actual Israelis want, you'd understand that WE WANT THIS WAR TO END

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the feeling when, it's not your circus and theyre certainly not your monkeys, but you are, in fact, a professional monkey wrangler, who has trained since birth to become the fuckin batman of managing circus chaos, and you can see that whoever is in charge of the circus and the monkeys is not in control of jack shit and you goddamn know that this is gonna go poorly for the monkeys and the public perception of monkey wranglers. And you will inevitably have to listen to a poorly researched news story about the fucking monkeys and then see the Hollywood dramatization of circus disaster "based on a true story" where every goddamn thing is incorrect. And it's not your circus, and it's not your monkeys, and the person in charge doesn't want your help because they think they have it under control, even if they don't and they really don't. And they're gonna bitch at you if you offer. And you really do have your own monkeys in your own circus to manage. So you just kind of watch the unfolding catastrophe happen. Over there. To someone else. With an in depth knowledge of exactly what went wrong and exactly how little effort it would have taken to avoid disaster.

Not my circus,not my monkeys, but no one likes watching distressed chimps rip off people's faces

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Thanks, Dan!

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I’m always surprised that more people aren’t aware of aerial saws. It’s one of my favorite functions of aviation.

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my mom called our lazy susan a sleazy susan by accident once and now I can't call it anything else

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Just make it exist first, you can make it good later

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