Obviously the health officials did not talk to anyone even loosely affiliated with an actual school. For reasons big or small, terrible or sympathetic, parents send children to school sick all the time.
Schools have spent decades encouraging nonsensical levels of attendance, rewarding kids who don’t take a single day off all term/semester/year, and even punishing kids who take “too much” time off sick. Kids who actually get ill enough to stay home miss out on fun things and “prizes” and awards, because going to school with the flu (or almost anything else) is considered right, good, and necessary.
Then a pandemic comes along that solidly half the population insists is “just the flu” and you think people are going to forget that you indoctrinated them to believe that if they were capable of being conscious (and sometimes not even then) they should be in school? (And later, in work – this is at least part of the point of this stuff, training you to work while sick).
To say nothing of the simple fact that parents are frequently without childcare options and are forced to be in work even if they should be isolating. That’s also a huge problem.
Geometry was so fuckibg stupid omfg “prove this is a triangle” I literally know it’s a triangle like intuitively bitch
Yep, rant time. High School Geometry, the way it was taught to me (late 90s in the US public school system – I would have been 13 at the time and most of my classmates were 15-16, for a frame of reference) is incredibly dumb and extremely valuable.
Let me explain.
The reason why you need to “prove this is a triangle” is because HS Geometry is really trying to teach two classes at once – geometry and mathematical logic.
Mathematicians use Triangles to teach logic because Triangles are simple – they have three vertices, three lines, live in a 2D world, have simple and easy to understand laws (when in a Euclidean world, that is, but that’s a different awesome ballgame), and they’re awesome. However, academia has decided that, “well, we teach Triangles in this class, we need to teach Logic, Logic works best with Triangles, therefore we teach Triangles and Logic in this class!”. That’s not actually sound logic!
Look at why Mathematicians use Triangles again. Those all sound great to people like me who already know these things about Triangles and are likely the ones practicing this pedagogy rather than someone looking at the situation from the perspective of a kid. It makes zero sense to the kids who just want to know what makes a Triangle a Triangle without knowing how to get to Triangle from Lines In The Ground. Some kids (like me) survive in Mathematics in spite of the nature of how we teach, and that’s just wrong. These styles of curricula are treating the idea that is supposed to be taught (”this is a triangle. See? It has three sides, three vertices, …”) as a law (”this is a triangle because you obviously know your shapes”) instead of something that can be proven. That’s not proper logic, that’s either circular (”Triangles are Triangles, duh”) or authoritative (”This is a Triangle because I said so, now prove it!”) instead of letting kids actually think for themselves and figure out new and interesting situations because they follow basic logic – which is the entire bloody point behind teaching kids mathematical logic to begin with.
Logic is incredibly useful to teach. It is practically a foundation of people learning things both inside and outside of mathematics. Teaching Mathematical logic before Geometry… heck, before Basic Algebra, makes a lot of sense. It lets kids see the “why” behind mathematics and go off in their own worlds, the ones that gets kids asking “wait, what if two parallel lines could intersect after all, what would that look like?” and you get to introduce someone to Perspective Geometry (3D art, optometry, computer graphic design…). Mathematics, regardless of what has been taught, isn’t a linear progression from A to B to C so much as an open world RPG where you ignore all of the mainline plot because the sidequests are much more interesting. Why do you think the person typing this does so bad in certain areas of mathematics (advanced calculus) and so freaking awesome in others (Probability)? Because I ignored the mainline plot and went for the shiny things that taught me how math rocks work.
If someone taught kids Mathematical Logic at an appropriate time in their academic lives, you can expect students to actually be able to “prove this is a triangle” – because they already know how to formulate basic mathematical logic to begin with and you’ve given them the tools to learn instead of making them think they’re dumb because they don’t know how to use the tools you’ve given them. On top of that, HS Geometry is no longer a “this is the next step in your academic career that you must do” so much as “this is a plotline that you can pick up if you want, and the rewards kind of make you feel like you’ve discovered a universe on a bad acid trip”.
I thrived in this environment, because I had already had a strong background in other types of logic (philosophical and binary/computing logic), which is tied to mathematical logic. In short, I was taught how to learn before expecting to regurgitate garbage factoids about three sided two dimensional figures in a Euclidean world. I was actually able to take the steps the mathematicians intended students to take back when they designed the dang class to begin with.
That’s why you’re supposed to be able to prove something is a Triangle. Not your fault no one taught you how. Mathematics can be (and are) beautiful and can expand the minds of those who learn it. It can also be frightening and contract the minds of those having it crammed down their throats. Guess which is the most popular way of teaching this?
Tune in next time when Old Man aetherspoon has other bold takes like how very basic Calculus should be taught to six year olds and anything more advanced should be college level only or much further down those proverbial quest arcs. Or that any mathematics class considered to be a weed-out class is horribly antithetical to the entire concept of mathematics.
* Yes, I used mathematics logic to disprove the teaching methods of mathematics logic. Deal with it.
I was recording a Let’s Play and he was hiding for the last part. The moment I stopped recording, he hopped up on the cat pedestal that I had on kittycam for him. Figures.
me: wow i didnt know there was a bard’s college in skyrim that you can join. will my character be able to play instruments? i wonder what kind of new and interesting quests are involved?
bard’s college: go into the Draugr Pit™ and find the Old Fucking Shit Drum for us
Hi! I was one of the quest designers at Bethesda working on Skyrim back in the day, and one of the storylines I was working on before I left was the Bardic College.
Originally, the college invited you to join as an inspiration to the other bards, and as such they would assign you a bard to follow you around and witness your deeds so that they may be remembered in song. I had planned to give the player a bardic companion who would sing songs based on things the player might do.
There was a quest with a fun junior bard who would compose a song about you based on how you acted in the quest and solved problems, and have that song spread through the inns in the world. This sort of heavy branching-and-remembering is something I loved doing in Fallout 3’s Wasteland Survival Guide, so I felt the extra dialogue budget would pay off. The goal was to give the player their own version of Sir Robin’s minstrels in Holy Grail, because we knew what sort of nonsense players get up to.
(Speaking of “nonsense players get up to”, I also designed the Sanguine quest where you retrace your drunken steps, loosely inspired by the classic “I played Oblivion blackout drunk and here’s what I found the next day”. We unofficially called it “Dude, Where’s my Horse?” But that’s a different story.)
Anyway, they ended up cutting that quest along with the orc clans storyline and a bunch of other things I had in the works. That sort of thing happens a lot, especially in ambitious open-world games, but between that and the terrible pay and other issues, I ended up leaving Bethesda to work at another studio. In return, they bumped my name out of the designers’ credits and down to “Special Thanks”, with people’s kids and dogs and the like. Shame we don’t have a union or anything to prevent that, but that’s hardly the biggest problem in the industry.
And that’s the tale of the Bard’s College Quest That Cold Have Been! And if Bsoft doesn’t sue me into Oblivion for saying all this, maybe someday I’ll tell you about the game of riddles that I wrote for Sheogorath.
The music from Hereditary and the 7 shots of a chicken being penetrated with a block of cheese are what make it.
My absolute favorite part of the notes is the person who said this chicken recipe had no seasoning. You witnessed someone douse a chicken in a bath of butter, garlic, parsley, salt, stuff it with more garlic and shove an entire block of cheese up its chussy. Do you…not know what seasoning is?
The fuck of it is that if I didn’t see the process of cooking this thing I would wanna eat it
