#basically he's a phd student (who is TWO months into his course might i add)

[watchmakermori]

just dealt with an absolute wanker at work lads. I don't understand what compels people to be The Customer. like what do you gain out of being rude. everyone's just going to complain about you behind your back forevermore

[singingaboutwishingx]

Hi! I don’t know if anons freak you out - I know they weird some people out. But if you’re up for it I would love the Teacher AU, everybody knows/mistaken for couple? Is it possible to have Josh x Donna AND Sam x Will? Thank you!

hey! anons are all good with me as long as y’all aren’t saying mean things haha.

20. teacher au + 63. everybody knows/mistaken for couple

so here’s the thing: everyone thinks josh and donna are dating, but for the love of god, cj, there’s nothing going on. they’re just so clearly in love. donna, the english/lit teacher and drama club advisor (and, yes, when her freshmen read romeo and juliet, she makes them get up and act out pivotal scenes), has been teaching here since she was straight out of undergrad, so she knows this school like the back of her hand. josh has only been here for a couple of years—after a twenty-year career in politics ended with a bang (and just... really not in a good way—the incident basically ended up with him blacklisted from washington), he went to get his teaching certification because he may no longer be able to affect change in the government, but he can help the kids for the future.

when josh first arrived, his classroom was right across from donna’s. she sort of took him under her wing, showing him the best staff bathroom and times when the teacher’s lounge was emptiest. in the month before school started, when they were preparing for the year, they ate lunch together in donna’s classroom every single day, sometimes with cj and sam and will, sometimes not.

the rumors really start flying when they both chaperone homecoming. josh got donna a corsage as a joke, seriously, sam, it doesn’t mean anything. (it wasn’t a joke. he had a huge crush on her.). by the end of the year, they’ve been asked by nearly every teacher, a few bold students, and even a couple of nosy parents if they’re dating, to which they parrot out the “no, we’re just good friends.” who are they kidding, though? they’re both so gone for each other, and it’s pretty obvious.

and so, on the last day of school, after the bell has rung and the halls have been deserted, josh knocks on donna’s doorframe as she packs up her books for the year. “can i come in?” he asks shyly.

“yeah, of course.” she waves him in, and he leans back against a desk in the front row. “so, your first year teaching. how do you feel?” she looks up at him with a smile that melts his heart.

“i won’t lie, it was really hard. i mean, you were on the receiving end of all my frantic eleven pm texts. that being said,” he pauses. “it was nice to have a friend. made things easier. and better.”

she stands up, placing a tote of books on her desk. “i’m really glad to hear that. will really is such a good friend, isn’t he?” she says, making both of them laugh. “you think you’ll stay?” she asks quietly.

“yeah,” he says. “yeah, i think i will.” josh hesitates. “there is one more thing i need your advice on this year, though.”

she grins at him. “shoot.”

“over this last year,” he starts, standing up and walking around her desk so they’re face-to-face. “there have been a lot of changes in my life. and one of them... is that i’ve started to have feelings for someone i work with. and we’re really good friends, and i don’t want to ruin what we have. what should i do?”

“well,” donna says, a hint of a smile playing on her lips, “maybe you... maybe you should just kiss her. and see if she kisses you back. i’m generally not big on surprising people with a first kiss, but i really don’t think she’ll be too surprised.”

“you know what i think?” he steps closer.

“what?”

“i think you,” he murmurs, snaking an arm around her waist, “give excellent advice.”

and when he kisses her, it’s perfect. it’s brief, chaste, but they don’t let each other go after.

“josh,” she runs her thumb along his cheekbone, “i think we might have to address some rumors we’ve been denying.”

“oh, who cares? they can find out when they find out.”

now, everybody thinks josh and donna are dating, but everybody (well, the teachers, at least) knows sam and will are dating. will, who teaches science and coaches the science olympiad, is a little awkward, but he has the gift of being really, really good at explaining physics. sam teaches junior/senior/ap english, and there are a LOT of pretty little liars jokes whispered amongst the students. he’d like to think of himself as more of a dead poets society kind of guy, though.

anyway, sam and will come in the same year, and they instantly hit it off. they’re still young and idealistic and in the closet to most of the people in their lives. they end up spending a lot of time together out of school. after a school-wide drama surrounding a sophomore’s coming out, will quietly admits to sam that he’s gay, and sam is like “oh, thank god. me, too.” they had both had an inkling that the other might not be straight, but they were both too afraid to talk about it (and their budding feelings for one another certainly didn’t push that conversation to the front).

it’s only a few months after that they admit their feelings and start dating. they have to keep it really, really quiet (they live in a somewhat progressive area, but two gay teachers dating each other? not ideal.). the only times they’ve ever actually gone out together, they’ve been out of the state. it’s really not that bad, though, because they would both prefer to stay in, anyway.

neither of them have ever said a word, but the rest of the staff knows. they know. during one of their lunches in donna’s classroom, cj casually mentions that she has a friend she could fix sam up with, and he just kind of clams up and spits out that he’s seeing someone. not anyone cj knows. just someone. sam doesn’t really like to talk about his love life, sorry. when she extends the offer to will, she gets a similarly vague, mildly panicked response. he’s also kind of seeing someone. it’s not super serious, but he’s not really looking at the moment. but thanks.

and so without sam and will having to have told cj, josh, and donna, they know. and after a few similar incidents with other teachers, the whispers start. no one dares say anything to their faces because they’re pretty sure will would quit out of embarrassment, and he’s the best science teacher they’ve got. they’re sure as hell not letting him go.

it’a not until a few years into their relationship that things take a turn. there’s a weeklong teacher conference in san francisco that summer, and it’s the perfect excuse for sam and will to take a trip. it’s almost intoxicating, honestly, to get in the same car without worrying who will see, to go out to dinner and hold hands across the table, to kiss on street corners without a care in the world.

they take a day’s detour through las vegas on their way back, and in a brilliant, fifth shot-idea, will turns to sam and simply says “let’s get married.” and thirty minutes later, they’re exchanging rings without thinking of the consequences. when they’re finally in the post-hangover stage, they decide they can just not wear the rings at school.

what they forget, however, is taxes, and when they have to file as “married”, people actually start talking to their faces. sam and will add weirdly shocked by the fact that so many people knew they were dating before, even though they were very bad at hiding it. they’re even more shocked by the fact that no one seems to care. no one is mad (mostly because they’ve all had years to adjust).

eventually, it gets out fully, and there’s somewhat of a scandal, mostly among conservative parents, but it’s shut down very quickly by principal mcgarry and superintendent bartlet (jess, i’m borrowing your brilliant idea). they put out a statement that essentially says “look, if you don’t like it, don’t send your kids here. we don’t know why anyone would want to take their kids away from a phd-level science teacher who has miraculously chosen to work here and a teacher who’s been cited as influential for a pulitzer prize nominee, but if you’re homophobic, we can’t do anything about it. teachers dating isn’t against the rules. suck it up.” after that, it blows over pretty quickly.

color palate/vibes: the gray of lockers, the bright secondary and tertiary colors of well-decorated classrooms. cute notes written on post-its in donna’s pretty terrible handwriting, snow days curled up in front of sam’s fireplace, being very, very careful not to look too long at the other in public (and failing miserably).

send me two tropes and a ship and i’ll tell you how i’d combine them into one story!

[currentrepairs-blog]

Why Practical Skills Will Matter More Than Your Degree In The New Economy

When Giancarlo Martinez applied a few years ago to be a web developer at Genome, a digital marketing firm in New York, he was confident that he had the ability. But he couldn’t help but wonder whether company recruiters would be able to recognize his chops—and even if they did, he worried that they still might not give him a chance.

The reason: Although he had gone to coding school, Martinez was largely self-taught—”Staying up until 6 a.m., Googling things, and just figuring it out.” Others angling to work at Genome, he presumed, “probably had master’s degrees in computer science.”

“I was very intimidated,” recalls Martinez, now 26.

But Genome was welcoming. “At the end of the day, it’s not the piece of paper on your wall,” says Stephanie Plumeri Ertz, who interviewed Martinez for the position. “It’s what you can turn out.”

To seal the deal, she gave Martinez a test, asking him to follow a set of technical specifications while designing a webpage featuring cupcakes. Martinez showed a solid command of the basics. He also added a few impressive flourishes, including an animation of a conveyer belt that churned out cupcakes heaped with frosting, which tumbled off the end of the assembly line and dropped into the mouth of a cute, if voracious, blue robot.

“The coding challenge became my golden ticket,” says Martinez, who was immediately brought on for $70,000 a year—a huge bump from the $40,000 or so he’d been scratching together through a string of less stable tech jobs and freelance gigs.

Among the big questions now confronting the U.S. labor market is this: How common will stories like Martinez’s become?

Given the passion with which some business and educational leaders talk about it, you might well imagine that we’re on the cusp of a major revolution.

Skills, Not Degrees

“Getting a job at today’s IBM does not always require a college degree,” the company’s CEO, Ginni Rometty, has asserted. “What matters most is relevant skills.” Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn, has been pushing the same message at his company. And David Blake, cofounder of the learning platform Degreed, has put it like this: “It shouldn’t matter how you picked up your skills, just that you did.”

But others are decidedly cautious, noting that longstanding cultural norms and institutional inertia stand as powerful roadblocks to this new way of thinking. Some experts are particularly skeptical that a skills-oriented approach to learning and hiring can transcend the tech industry.

“We’re in the early innings of this transition,” says Mike Adams, cofounder and chief product officer of MissionU, which offers an educational alternative to a traditional degree by focusing on skill building and job placement. Indeed, he anticipates that it will take “decades to shift” to an environment in which capability trumps academic pedigree on a wide scale.

The situation is evolving—but “not fast enough,” adds Karan Chopra, executive vice president of Opportunity@Work, a social enterprise whose signature program, TechHire, has enabled thousands of Americans from underserved communities to access training and jobs. (Among them is Martinez, a native of the South Bronx, who was supported by the NYC Tech Talent Pipeline, a part of the TechHire network, to help pay for a six-month stint at Flatiron School so that he could polish his coding skills before auditioning at Genome.)

“It’s important to realize that this is a problem of collective action,” Chopra says. “Individual employers changing their hiring practices one at a time won’t work—or won’t work quickly enough. A critical mass of employers needs to shift behavior, signaling to the rest and influencing a change in the way the market operates today.”

To be clear, no one who is advocating for a skills-centered system is suggesting that learning isn’t essential. In fact, the idea is that ever more of us must engage in lifelong learning as automation and other technological advances render our skills obsolete. Having only a high school diploma is not sufficient to land and hold a job anymore.

The goal, then, is to make all kinds of courses readily available in physical classrooms and virtual settings alike, allowing folks to acquire know-how that’s useful in the real world and then demonstrate their prowess to employers.

Under this scenario, it is envisioned, many will still obtain four-year degrees. Many others will earn two-year degrees or technical certificates. Meanwhile, the continued emergence of even more affordable options—such as online badging regimes, which can signal when someone has completed an area of study and mastered a discrete skill—will enhance the job prospects of those currently being left behind.

A False Choice

“Making it skills versus credentials is a bit of a false choice,” says Beth Cobert, CEO of Skillful, an initiative of the Markle Foundation that, in partnership with Microsoft, is aiming to give educators a sharper picture of which skills are in demand in their region while helping businesses adopt skills-based hiring and training practices. “This is about changing mind-sets.”

The difficulty in doing so is that the vast majority of businesses and individuals are largely locked in their old ways.

Despite employers’ constant gripes that they can’t find enough qualified workers in a host of industries, many are screening out those who lack a bachelor’s degree—even though they could tackle the tasks at hand without one. “An increasing number of job seekers face being shut out of middle-skill, middle-class occupations” because of this phenomenon, Burning Glass Technologies, a provider of labor market analytics, warned this month. “This credential inflation . . . is affecting a wide range of jobs from executive assistants to construction supervisors.”

For many families—and the battery of institutions of higher education eager to win them over—there’s also little interest in reconceiving how to best prepare their kids for what lies ahead. “People still build their identity around being a four-year college graduate,” says MissionU’s Adams. “That has a pretty strong stranglehold on society,” even amid deep concern about swelling student loan debt.

Martinez felt that tug himself. His stepdad didn’t approve of him skipping college. And his mom, who is from the Dominican Republic, also had misgivings at first. “As an immigrant mother, she always expected me to have a degree,” he says.

Another issue is how hard it can be to exhibit one’s skills outside of tech. If a company is looking for a Python developer with a certain level of experience and competence, “it doesn’t matter whether you come from high school or come from a PhD” program, says Spencer Thompson, the founder of Sokanu, a career-matching platform. “If you can prove those things, that’s great.” But suppose someone wants to be a heating, ventilation, and air conditioning technician?

“How do you measure whether a person is a good HVAC installer?” Thompson asks. “What are the . . . atomic units of being an installer, and how do you actually measure whether somebody is good or bad at those things? That’s where the whole model just completely breaks down.”

The Skills Embedded In The Study Of Literature

Even tougher to see, perhaps, is how the liberal arts can fit in. But Cobert proposes that—beyond having considerable value in their own right—such subjects might be radically reconsidered to capture what employers find most meaningful. “When you take Victorian literature,” she says, “we do not break it down to show that you learned writing skills, you learned critical thinking, you learned how to respond to feedback.”

Others also are hopeful that new avenues for highlighting skills are starting to open up, not necessarily as a replacement for formal education but as a companion to it.

“I don’t think it’s about tech at all,” says Connie Yowell, the CEO of Collective Shift, a nonprofit whose platform, LRNG, teaches tangible skills to young people, gives digitals badges (sometimes called “microcredentials”) to track their achievements, and uses these markers to unlock academic credit, internships, and jobs. “This is the future of learning.”

Adams, of MissionU, is somewhere in between. He believes that tech is a sweet spot. That’s why the first two cohorts completing his program—about 50 people in all—are concentrating on learning data analytics and amassing a portfolio of work to share with potential employers.

Yet MissionU, unlike many tech boot camps, also teaches general business skills, in part through a self-paced project in which students research a topic and present the findings in Excel. This can offer concrete “evidence that you can solve problems” inside a company, Adams says—and, sure enough, employers have begun to regard this assignment as a good indicator of fundamental business proficiency. Because of it, Adams foresees some MissionU graduates finding their way into human resources and other functions, not just being data geeks.

As for Martinez, he has done well for himself. After leaving Genome, he went to work at Yashi, a video advertising company. Once again, he found a boss who admired his skills and didn’t care about his schooling. “It’s not about the path you’ve taken, but what you bring to the table,” says Dipak Shetty, who hired Martinez.

Recently, Martinez moved from New York to Austin, Texas, where he’s mulling what to do next. He may take another job in software. Or he may attempt to shift into a broader management role. For that, though, he acknowledges that he will be forced to finally get a university education, maybe even an MBA.

“If I were to pursue a business job,” he says, “I definitely need a degree to compete.”

After all, skills are everything. But for all too many employers, credentials remain the only thing.

[popofventi]

Mental Yoga Sunday / 5 Favorite Long Form Reads of the Week / Issue No. 13

"The city takes a breath on Sunday. Of all that’s lost with the pursuit of what’s next, I hope we don’t lose that…"  -- Hawksley Workman

Mental Yoga Sunday is a callback to those lazy mornings and afternoons spent reading the newspaper or finishing up a dog eared novel. Days lost in long shadow in a hidden corner full of nothing but quiet and weak wifi. Immerse yourself for a spell in something longer than a text string but shorter than a binge marathon. Here are my favorite long form reads this week.

1

Leaked Recording: Inside Apple’s Global War On Leakers (The Outline)

A recording of an internal briefing at Apple earlier this month obtained by The Outline sheds new light on how far the most valuable company in the world will go to prevent leaks about new products.

The briefing, titled “Stopping Leakers - Keeping Confidential at Apple,” was led by Director of Global Security David Rice, Director of Worldwide Investigations Lee Freedman, and Jenny Hubbert, who works on the Global Security communications and training team.

According to the hour-long presentation, Apple’s Global Security team employs an undisclosed number of investigators around the world to prevent information from reaching competitors, counterfeiters, and the press, as well as hunt down the source when leaks do occur. Some of these investigators have previously worked at U.S. intelligence agencies like the National Security Agency (NSA), law enforcement agencies like the FBI and the U.S. Secret Service, and in the U.S. military.

The briefing, which offers a revealing window into the company’s obsession with secrecy, was the first of many Apple is planning to host for employees. In it, Rice and Freedman speak candidly about Apple’s efforts to prevent leaks, discuss how previous leakers got caught, and take questions from the approximately 100 attendees.

The presentation starts and ends with videos, spliced with shots of Tim Cook presenting a new product at one of Apple’s keynotes, that stress the primacy of secrecy at Apple. “When I see a leak in the press, for me, it’s gut-wrenching,” an Apple employee says in the first video. “It really makes me sick to my stomach.” Another employee adds, “When you leak this information, you’re letting all of us down. It’s our company, the reputation of the company, the hard work of the different teams that work on this stuff.” - FULL ARTICLE

2

Why My Guitar Gently Weeps (The Washington Post)

The convention couldn’t sound less rock-and-roll — the National Association of Music Merchants Show. But when the doors open at the Anaheim Convention Center, people stream in to scour rows of Fenders, Les Pauls and the oddball, custom-built creations such as the 5-foot-4-inch mermaid guitar crafted of 15 kinds of wood.

Standing in the center of the biggest, six-string candy store in the United States, you can almost believe all is well within the guitar world.

Except if, like George Gruhn, you know better. The 71-year-old Nashville dealer has sold guitars to Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Paul McCartney and Taylor Swift. Walking through NAMM with Gruhn is like shadowing Bill Belichick at the NFL Scouting Combine. There is great love for the product and great skepticism. What others might see as a boom — the seemingly endless line of manufacturers showcasing instruments — Gruhn sees as two trains on a collision course.

“There are more makers now than ever before in the history of the instrument, but the market is not growing,” Gruhn says in a voice that flutters between a groan and a grumble. “I’m not all doomsday, but this — this is not sustainable.”

The numbers back him up. In the past decade, electric guitar sales have plummeted, from about 1.5 million sold annually to just over 1 million. The two biggest companies, Gibson and Fender, are in debt, and a third, PRS Guitars, had to cut staff and expand production of cheaper guitars. In April, Moody’s downgraded Guitar Center, the largest chain retailer, as it faces $1.6 billion in debt. And at Sweetwater.com, the online retailer, a brand-new, interest-free Fender can be had for as little as $8 a month.

What worries Gruhn is not simply that profits are down. That happens in business. He’s concerned by the “why” behind the sales decline. When he opened his store 46 years ago, everyone wanted to be a guitar god, inspired by the men who roamed the concert stage, including Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimi Hendrix, Carlos Santana and Jimmy Page. Now those boomers are retiring, downsizing and adjusting to fixed incomes. They’re looking to shed, not add to, their collections, and the younger generation isn’t stepping in to replace them.

Gruhn knows why.

“What we need is guitar heroes,” he says. - FULL ARTICLE

3

The Future of Language (Ozy)

In Norway, there sits a literary time capsule that is slowly filling with the unread manuscripts of the world’s best authors. Margaret Atwood was the first to submit her unpublished novel — Scribbler Moon — to this experiment, dubbed the Future Library Project, back in 2014. David Mitchell followed a year later, and the Icelandic poet Sjón after that. If all goes according to plan, a new author will submit a work every year, until the capsule is opened in 2114. Many of these authors will never live to see the reception to what could be their greatest work.

Just outside Oslo, a forest is growing with 1,000 spruce trees — near saplings that, by the time the project finishes, will have filled out enough to be cut down and turned into print editions of the time-capsuled books for future generations of readers. The question is: Will the books printed from this forest — or the words inside their pages — be recognizable? So much has changed in the last century, both thanks to the rapid rate of technological advancement and shifting demographics. OZY imagines how those things could continue to define language and literature 97 years down the road. - FULL ARTICLE

4

Supertasters Among The Dreaming Spires (1843 Magazine)

Are wine connoisseurs scientists or charlatans? Dan Rosenheck experiments with the Oxford and Cambridge wine-tasting teams

It smells like sweaty cheese in here,” thunders Domen Presern, a chemistry PhD student, announcing his presence at a second-floor Thai restaurant in Oxford. “Something with lactate crystals. Manchego?” “No,” retorts Janice Wang, on a break from her psychology dissertation. “This is definitely Morbier.” A few seconds later, she reconsiders. “I can see where you’re coming from,” she says, “but it just shows you’re not attuned to Asian flavours. Asians know it smells like fish sauce.”

The room didn’t smell like much of anything to me. Then again, I haven’t been training to become a human bloodhound. By contrast, the noses of Wang and Presern were on top form: they had just wrapped up their penultimate training session for the Varsity match, an annual blind wine-tasting contest held between teams from Oxford and Cambridge since 1953. They had spent the previous three hours simulating the actual event with two flights of unidentified wines – six whites and six reds. They filled out sheets guessing the age, grape varietal and geographic origin of each, alongside notes describing subtleties of scent and structure that made distinguishing Manchego from Morbier look as easy as apples from oranges. At “the Varsity”, as competitors dub it, experienced judges mark the submissions anony­mously. The team with the higher score gets to represent Britain at a taste-off in France, and the top taster receives a £300 ($375) magnum bottle of Cuvée Winston Churchill, a Champagne made by Pol Roger, the event’s sponsor.

This Varsity match is less well known than the Boat Race contested by the two universities’ rowing teams, but the blind wine-tasting societies have no trouble luring reinforcements at freshers’ fairs. Most recruits will lack the keen palate and dogged devotion needed to identify and memorise the flavour and aromas of dozens of varietals from hundreds of appellations. But those that do often have a bright future in the British wine trade: prominent critics like Oz Clarke and Jasper Morris cut their teeth in the contest.

Depending on your perspective, the Varsity is either an exercise in futility or a potent rejoinder to conventional wisdom. One academic study after another has found little scientific basis for wine criticism. Everyone has read florid promises of “gobs of ripe cassis”, “pillowy tannins”, and “seductive hints of garrigue”. Yet the relationships between such mumbo-jumbo and the chemical composition of a wine, between one taster’s use of it and another’s, and even between the same drinker’s notes on the same wine on different occasions tend to be faint at best. Articles arguing that, as Robbie Gonzalez of the blog i09 pithily put it, “wine tasting is bullshit” have become reliable clickbait. - FULL ARTICLE

5

The Ken Doll Reboot: Beefy, Cornrowed, and Pan-Racial (GQ)

For decades, he achieved icon status by being a basic, buff, blue-eyed bro. And for years, that was enough. No longer! Starting today, as part of a wide-ranging relaunch, Ken has cornrows. And he’s Asian. And he’s skinny. Or sometimes even fat (sorry, “broad”). Caity Weaver went deep into the valley (and design center) of the dolls to get an exclusive glimpse of Mattel’s new take on the all-American male.

Meet Ken: He is a beefy Asian man with 20/40 vision who frequently works out of doors.

And, meet Ken: He is a young record executive who expresses himself through bold sneaker attire while simultaneously being an African-American man of average build.

And, meet Ken: Against the better angels of his nature, he has bleached his hair peroxide blond, and now is determined to travel on an airplane in comfort and style.

And, meet Ken: He has a man bun, and that’s his whole thing.

In a condition of affairs at worst disastrous, at best depraved, Ken, Ken, Ken, and Ken are all dating the same woman.

Her name is Barbie. - FULL ARTICLE