asked a student what their favorite animal was today and they said “a cheetah AND a sloth” and I said “wow smart, you’ve got both ends of the speed spectrum covered!” and they looked at me like I was the only sensible adult they’d ever spoken to
original image: four panel comic titled “Proximity” by @JNYMFG (op). Each is numbered in the corner, counting from 3 down to 0.
Panel #3 is yellow-toned, with an over-the-shoulder shot of a cheerful man reading the newspaper headline MORE WAR and thinking: “How awful… but I have my own problems!” Panel #2 is orange-toned, showing a distraught woman reading the same headline, and thinking: “But my husband has family there!” Panel #1 is red-toned, showing a pensive man reading the same headline, and thinking: “If I’d stayed, maybe I could have saved them.” Panel #0 is entirely blacked out.
reblog image: photo of poem titled The Diameter of the Bomb. Poem reads:
The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters and the diameter of its effective range - about seven meters. And in it four dead and eleven wounded. And around them in a greater circle of pain and time are scattered two hospitals and one cemetery. But the young woman who was buried where she came from over a hundred kilometers away enlarges the circle greatly. And the lone man who weeps over her death in a far corner of a distant country includes the whole world in the circle. And I won’t speak at all about the crying of orphans that reaches to the seat of God and from there onward, making the circle without end and without God.
Yehuda Amichai (translated from the Hebrew by Yehuda Amichai & Ted Hughes) /end ID
I love that, like. He KNOWS the audience want to clap and so he’s using them as an extra instrument. He turns around and goes hey, stop, and hopes they understand conductor gestures and it works, and then he has clapping he can use when he wants
It’s sad how much of what is taught in school is useless to over 99% of the population.
There are literally math concepts taught in high school and middle school that are only used in extremely specialized fields or that are even so outdated they aren’t used anymore!
I took calculus my senior year of high school, and I really liked the way our teacher framed this on the first day of class.
He asked somebody to raise their hand and ask him when we would use calculus in our everyday life. So one student rose their hand and asked, “When are we going to use this in our everyday life?”
“NEVER!!” the teacher exclaimed. “You will never use calculus in your normal, everyday life. In fact, very few of you will use it in your professional careers either.” Then he paused. “So would you like to know why should care?”
Several us nodded.
He picked out one of the varsity football players in the class. “You practice football a lot during the week, right Tim?” asked the teacher.
“Yeah,” replied Tim. “Almost every day.”
“Do you and your teammates ever lift weights during practice?”
“Yeah. Tuesdays and Thursdays we spend a lot of practice in the weight room.”
“But why?” asked the teacher. “Is there ever going to be a play your coach tells you use during a game that requires you to bench press the other team?”
“No, of course not.”
“Then why lift weights?”
“Because it makes us stronger,” said Tim.
“Bingo!!” said the teacher. “It’s the same thing with calculus. You’re not here because you’re going to use calculus in your everyday life. You’re here because calculus is weightlifting for your brain.”
And I’ve never forgotten that.
THIS.
When it’s taught right, learning math teaches you logic and how to organize your brain, how to take a problem one step at a time and make sure every step can bear weight before you move to the next one. Most adults don’t need to know integrals, but goddamn if I don’t wish everyone making arguments on the internet understood geometric proofs.
Scientific concepts broaden our understanding of how the world is put together, which does not mean that most adults ever really understand how light is refracted through a lens or why spinning copper wire creates electricity–and they don’t need to. But science classes in general are meant to teach the scientific method: how to make observations and use them to draw conclusions, how to test those conclusions, how to be wrong and grow stronger from it.
History isn’t about dates and names of battles, it’s about people, patterns, things we’ve tried before and ought to learn from. It’s about how everything is linked, how changing one circumstance can lead to changes in fifty others, cascading infinitely. Literature is about critical thinking, pattern recognition, learning to listen to what somebody is saying and decide what it means to you, how you feel about it, and what you want to do with it.
Some facts matter: every adult should know how to read a graph, how global warming works, some of the basic themes and symbols that crop up in every piece of fiction. But ultimately, content is less important later in life than context.
The good thing is, students who learn the content are likely to pick up at least some of the context, some of the patterns of thinking, even if they don’t realize it. (The unfortunate thing is how the current educational system prioritizes content so much that a lot of students, and a lot of adults, don’t see the point in learning either, and teachers are overworked and held to standardize test grading scales such that it’s hard for them to emphasize patterns of thinking over rote memorization, etc etc etc, but that is a whole different discussion.)
I would also add that giving as broad an education to as many as possible gives everyone the opportunity to follow a career that might use calculus. Or colour theory. Or electromagnetism. Or [insert specialism here]. If we gatekeep specialisms, those careers are only available for the ones who were privileged enough to have the background training. That’s why Classics as a degree subject is full of private school kids: it’s not offered in state education.
