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@davidaugust@mastodon.online
2025-08-29 00:14:28

Clearly we need the police or ice to be at the doors of schools to summarily execute by gunshot the kids as they arrive to school the first day of the school year. This denies school shooters targets and satiates the police for at least five minutes. It is win-win.
Additionally, think of what we’ll save in school expenses for every subsequent year of school. This really is a no brainer. No common sense gun control laws needed.
/s

@davidaugust@mastodon.online
2025-06-27 17:47:33

The challenge of HEPA filters in the classrooms.
h/t @…
source: xcancel.com/kadamssl/status/19

screenshot of a thread by Kathryn @kadamssl: 

A new development in the sociological experiment of denial, backlash, and normalization: The moms are piling on the poor soul who sought suggestions to on how to get HEPAs into the classroom. 

🧵 

Jun 26, 2025 · 4:05 PM UTC

Common Criticism 1. We don’t even have air conditioning in classrooms, and you’re worried about HEPAs?! 

Answer: Has it occurred to anyone that kids need BOTH and not neither? 

Common Criticism 2: HEPAs won’t do anything. Ju…
screenshot of a thread by Kathryn @kadamssl: 

Common Criticism 3: Are you going to pay for them?! (They’re too expensive.) 

Answer: First of all, the school boards *should* be purchasing & maintaining HEPAs. With all of the hand waving about absences, you’d think investing in staff & student health would be a no brainer… 

Second: Is anyone considering how expensive it is to have a sick child and/or to be sick themselves? Even with socialized medicine in Canada, it costs 💰 to take time off. I…
screenshot of a thread by Kathryn @kadamssl: 

Common Criticism 4: If the schools were ever going to get HEPAs, they would have done it during COVID. There’s no point trying now. 

Answer: ‘During COVID’ is now & we will need airborne mitigations now and for the foreseeable future. Remember, policy moves slower than science... 

Just because it hasn’t changed YET doesn’t mean it won’t. But it will take pressure from citizens, parents, advocacy groups, and any other concerned individuals to get …
@ruth_mottram@fediscience.org
2025-06-24 16:59:34

I used the acronym "LLMs" after the word "AI" in a school parents' meeting today and only one other parent ( my husband) knew what it was.
Is it just a bit of jargon? Completely unknown? Or am I out of touch?
jargon but also a word people use
not jargon but a bit obscure
No idea what you're talking about
I'm a techbro who wants to know what people think

@davidaugust@mastodon.online
2025-08-22 00:06:56

Just made a back to school collection on my Threadless store to suggest stuff I think people should get for the students in their lives, or themselves. So basically some shameless self promotion.
Enjoy: davidaugust.threadless.com/col

@jrm4@mastodon.social
2025-07-22 14:47:36

You don't need to *agree* with Hakeem Jeffries being lukewarm on Mamdani; but you do need to understand where it's coming from.
Because if you think it's because *Jeffries* is some kind of corrupt old school insider, you're an idiot.
It's a complex game and behind the scenes maneuvering matters, like it or not.
#uspol

@unchartedworlds@scicomm.xyz
2025-07-24 07:30:11
Content warning: a nice thing - yesterday's BiCon pre-meet

Hosted a BiCon pre-meet yesterday, online. Conveniently there were exactly 12 people there for most of it (not counting me), perfect for dividing into threes! I kept switching the groups so that people could meet different people.
We talked about how we'd each like BiCon to be, and how we could make it more likely to turn out that way.
Top tips: get enough sleep, eat enough food, and don't try to do everything!
Then we also talked about what contribution we might like to make - though I also said, just being there and being friendly and making BiCon more varied is a contribution in itself :-)
Several of the people who'd come along turned out to be already signed up to offer workshop sessions, so we heard a little bit about those.
Two tasks currently available if you want one are (a) keeping an eye on the Zoom setup for the hybrid events, (b) leafleting at Pride on Saturday, so that more people know about BiCon for Sunday. There's usually also opportunities to assist with being welcoming at reception.
In-person BiCon starts tomorrow, and runs Friday till Sunday. The venue is a couple of buildings belonging to the girls' high school, in between the Forest and the Arboretum. I tagged along for a site visit the other day and I think it's pretty good for air quality.
Apparently about 70 people have booked so far. It's also possible to buy a ticket on the day, so that might not be the final total.
As I reminded people last night, you don't have to be bi to come to BiCon! And if you _are_ bi, you don't have to be any particular amount of bi :-)
#BiCon #Nottingham

@callunavulgaris@mastodon.scot
2025-08-22 15:00:23

Well I didn't expect my mother to be fixated on the idea that people think she's gay when I went to the hospital today 😄 I have a horrible feeling that as her mind succumbs to #MSA she's having boarding school flashbacks. While I can see the funny side of reassuring my mother that no-one thinks she's gay but that it wouldn't matter if she was, it's cruel if those days she's…

@UP8@mastodon.social
2025-08-22 02:31:58

I think I shot these grass heads in the meadow above the Belle Sherman school looking across the basin of Cayuga Lake -- did you know grasses are flowering plants too?
#photo #photography #grass

Roughly five grass flowering structrures are close to the camera and in focus,  rising above a grass meadow that fills the bottom 1/4 of the frame with yellow,  the 1/4 above that is dark brownish grey,  a distant hillside,  and then the part above that is a bluish-grey sky
@ginevra@hachyderm.io
2025-06-20 00:35:29

Language learning has been part of me since high school. I'm solid in 2 non-English languages, crappy but survivable in 2 others. I've played with & started learning others many times.
I'm real busy rn, but language learning could be a fun thing to do for myself & make me feel like I'm still me.
But I'm stumped about my language picks. I learnt the obvious European languages in school; later tried key Asian languages. What do I want to do now?
African languages? I won't be getting a chance to use them much in Aus, & I'm unlikely to get to a stage where I can read literature.
I tried Slovenian/Slovene on a whim & really love it, but I'll never go there. Is the practical but unfun answer grind out more kanji/hanzi? Or is whimsically learning a language spoken by only 2.5 million people reasonable? I will continue struggling through with Ukrainian, 'cause I think it's important.
#LanguageLearning

@rasterweb@mastodon.social
2025-06-17 02:55:46

A friend of mine just retired after 28 years as a teacher… I’ve been working for 31 years since I got out of school and probably have another 10 to 15 (or more) years before I can even think about retirement.
(I’m not jealous, I just wish we had a better system where people didn’t have to work their entire adult lives.)

@inthehands@hachyderm.io
2025-06-16 17:14:59

When I say that I wish the bubble would burst so we could start having actual conversation, this is the kind of thing I’m talking about.
In the meantime, not being a researcher myself in any kind of position to critique the paper, I’m happy to just look at it and cherry-pick the conclusion that I think is unequivocally helpful regardless: we all (students in school, students of life) should cultivate active, engaged minds that work with ideas by •doing• and •creating• instead of simply passively receiving.

@samir@functional.computer
2025-07-17 20:29:10

@… I think the motivation will strike when my kid starts coming home from school and asking me to help with homework. 😜

@davidaugust@mastodon.online
2025-07-24 16:16:33

"I think my high-school acting career lasted a day."
-Dennis Farina
#acting #coaching #inspiration

@chris@mstdn.chrisalemany.ca
2025-07-25 12:35:28

The average undergrad tuition fee in the 1974/75 academic year in Canada, across all disciplines, was $547 ($3445 adjusted to 2025)
Fees 50 years later in 2024/25 were $7360 ($7496 adjusted)
That is more than double. 117%.
And I *know* from personal experience this is a low ball average. If I could find a breakdown by discipline or by length of study for today, some would be even more obscene.
What has changed? Any occupation outside a minimum wage paying job demands a 2-4yr undergraduate diploma or degree, if not more.
Think about the 1970s and how common it was for people to get good paying jobs, leading to careers, without even high school education. Our free education stops with high school.
My family is a good example.
Mom and Step Dad: teacher college/degree. One got a Masters mid career.
Dad: didn’t complete HS
Father in law: didn’t complete HS
Mother in law: completed HS mid-career
Leadership positions and full careers demand a Masters or PhD requiring 5-10 years of study after HS!
Add in the cost of food and housing and the massive cuts happening at all colleges and universities because of the loss of international student tuition and I am going to go out on a limb and say our students today are going to pay double the price for a far worse experience than possibly any time since the Second World War.
Public education should be free.
Food and Housing should be controlled.
If the only thing government cares about is the economy, then they are setting us up for failure, and have been for decades.
(Don’t get me started on the kinds of “values” Canadian governments demonstrate when International student tuitions are 5x more than domestic students, let alone the inherent revenue risk in that funding strategy that has now come home to roost)
#canpoli #cdnpoli #education #university #college #canada
(
74/75 Source Stats Can: www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/e
24/25 source stats can: www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/e
cc: @… @…

@davidaugust@mastodon.online
2025-08-10 16:16:32

"I think my high-school acting career lasted a day."
-Dennis Farina
#acting #coaching #inspiration

@davidaugust@mastodon.online
2025-05-31 16:16:32

"I think my high-school acting career lasted a day."
-Dennis Farina
#acting #coaching #inspiration