J.K. Rowling Used to Want to Debate Gender. Now She Just Insults Trans People
J.K. Rowling's diatribes about trans people on Twitter have completely taken over her timeline — and they're only getting worse.
Open Society
Generative AI Is Totally Shameless. I Want to Be It
What I love, more than anything, is the quality that makes AI such a disaster: If it sees a space, it will fill it—with nonsense, with imagined fact, with links to fake websites. It is simply put: shameless.
Her speech using a voice app made history in Congress — and sparked a larger disability conversation
Some people with disabilities hailed Rep. Jennifer Wexton’s use of text-to-speech technology, but say there is work to be done to advance representation for those who communicate differently.
Learning Under Neoliberalism: Ethnographies of Governance in Higher Education | Berghahn Books
Independent Publishing since 1994
The real cancel culture
In 2020, Bari Weiss quit her job as an editor and writer at the New York Times editorial page in a huff. In her public resignation letter, Weiss argued that she was forced out because the paper had become "illiberal" and her more conservative beliefs made her "the subject of constant bullying by colleagues."
9. Ethology
(April 19, 2010) Robert Sapolsky looks at the biology of behavior through the ethological lens: observing animals in various natural environments, in their o...
Children Deserve Uniform Standards in Homeschooling
With few states tracking who is being homeschooled and what they are learning, an untold number of U.S. children are at risk of a poor education or even abuse
What Rape Culture and Modesty Culture Have In Common
“As soon as a woman falls outside the standards of what is perceived as modest, those advocating modesty culture immediately join rape culture.”
Public School Funding, School Quality, and Adult Crime | The Review of Economics and Statistics | MIT Press
Abstract. This paper asks whether increasing public school funding can be an effective long-run crime-prevention strategy in the U.S. Specifically, we examine the effect of increases in funding early in children's lives on the likelihood that they are arrested as adults. We exploit quasi-experimental variation in public school funding, leveraging two natural experiments in Michigan and a novel administrative dataset linking the universe of Michigan public school students to adult criminal justice records. The first research design exploits variation in operating expenditures due to Michigan's 1994 school finance reform, Proposal A. The second design exploits variation in capital spending by leveraging close school district capital bond elections in a regression discontinuity framework. In both cases, we find that students exposed to additional funding during elementary school were substantially less likely to be arrested in adulthood. We show that the social benefits of increasing school funding are greater than the costs, even when considering only the crime-reducing benefits.
In both cases, we find that students exposed to additional funding during elementary school were substantially less likely to be arrested in adulthood. We show that the social benefits of increasing school funding are greater than the costs, even when considering only the crime-reducing benefits.
Positive Greetings at the Door: Evaluation of a Low-Cost, High-Yield Proactive Classroom Management Strategy - Clayton R. Cook, Aria Fiat, Madeline Larson, Christopher Daikos, Tal Slemrod, Elizabeth A. Holland, Andrew J. Thayer, Tyler Renshaw, 2018
Externalizing behavior is a significant concern among teachers. Teachers could benefit from incorporating proactive strategies to prevent problem behaviors and ...
Effects of Teacher Greetings on Student On-task Behavior
A multiple baseline design across participants was used to determine how teacher greetings affected on-task behavior of 3 middle school students with problem behaviors. Momentary time sampling was used to measure on-task behavior during the first 10 min ...
Lord of the Flies: How Adults Create Bullying
All over America kids will read William Golding 's Lord of the Flies in school during the coming year. And in most of those "English" classe...
Your School’s UX. What is it? And where to start.
Speedchange.at.medium
Quick, what signs are around your school? What does it say on the doors? How do your entries look from the point of view 3 feet above the ground? Or with the eyes of a teenager. (Do you have more than one entrance? Are they equal? Equitable?) What does it sound like? Smell like?
how much more effective we might be if our user interface design was intentional, and intentionally designed to support children?
What do kids see? What do they feel? What do they smell? What do they hear? What is their experience as they move through your school?
One of the things that is clear is that every single thing kids see, hear, feel, smell, taste, sends a message about your school. Every single thing. And many of the messages schools send are as awful as they are unintentional.
“We used to have this ‘no hats’ rule,” says one of our high school principals. “We had it for good reasons, trying to limit certain negative cultural symbols, but, every morning we greeted our children by telling them to take their hats off. It was awful. So now we allow hats, and when the kids arrive we get to just say hello to them.”
Eliminate lunch detention and no recess punishments. Those are cruel punishments which demolish your credibility with every child.
Working graffiti is good. When kids see other kids’ work they get inspired. Which makes the dry erase marker your best friend. Our kids write everywhere. On floors, on Windows, on desks and tabletops, of course on whiteboards. It not only leverages the power of large muscle movement and lets thinking quickly take shape, it gets other kids interested.
Always allow passion time. In every day, in every half day, let kids chase what matters to them. Children, and everyone in K-12 is a child, need space to explore their world, which is not necessarily your world.
Stop ranking children. Throw out your age-based grade levels, your numerical or letter grading, your honor rolls, your “how many books did you read?” Stop separating kids by reading level. Kids in this world have enough to worry about without our arbitrary ratings. And remember, when adults rank kids, bullying begins.
‘Autism is the Arena and OCD is the Lion’: Autistic adults’ experiences of co-occurring obsessive-compulsive disorder and repetitive restricted behaviours and interests - Hannah Long, Kate Cooper, Ailsa Russell, 2024
Obsessive-compulsive disorder commonly co-occurs with autism. Research characterising the interplay between restricted, repetitive behaviours, activities and in...
Embracing Autistic Children’s Monotropic Flow States
Embracing flow states allows monotropic learners to gain deeper knowledge and new skills, which can help build confidence and support their
Monotropism is a non-pathologising theory of autism developed by Dr Dinah Murray, Dr. Wenn Lawson, and Mike Lesser in their article, Attention, monotropism and the Diagnostic Criteria for autism (2005). Embracing monotropism can lead to exciting new possibilities; it allows the potential for deep knowledge, new skills, and the engagement of flow states, which support sensory regulation and good mental health for monotropic people.
Monotropic learners may find it more challenging to focus on a subject that is not intrinsically motivating for them. Fidget tools, doodling, and moving can all help to maintain a flow state, which may help some children cope better and be more regulated. It could improve concentration and learning outcomes and make learning a more enjoyable, less stressful experience. Monotropism is fluid; what works for one person may not work for another, and needs may vary from moment to moment depending on many social, physical, and sensory factors.
The Revenge of the Home Page
As social networks become less reliable distributors of the news, consumers of digital journalism are seeking out an older form of online real estate.
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Call For Evidence: An Aspirational Vision For Inclusive Schools — Centre for Young Lives
The Centre for Young Lives is launching a new drive to develop an aspirational vision for inclusive schools and trusts which delivers the best possible education for every young person regardless of their background or need.
Neuroaffirming care values the strengths and differences of autistic people, those with ADHD or other profiles. Here’s how
Rather than trying to ‘fix’ or change neurodivergent people, neuroaffirming care aims to empower and support unique needs and strengths.
The Problem with Music | Steve Albini
How record labels use A&R flaks and impenetrable contracts to screw artists while raking in millions
The Fixer
For years, David C. Gibbs III and his organizations pulled in millions of dollars while advocating on behalf of child abusers.
Neuroqueer Learning Spaces — Webinar — a summary and reflection 6th May 2024
A summary and reflection of the first Neuroqueer Learning Spaces webinar. “Queer the system, queer the tools and create new tools”…
Education Technology and Skinner's Box
The Rise of Programmed InstructionIn the 1948 utopian novel Walden Two, a small group - a couple of academics, two of their former students and their girlfriends - visit an intentional community es...
But that’s not to say that the influence of Skinner and behaviorism are gone. Far from it. Behaviorism has persisted - although often unnamed and un-theorized - in much of the technology industry, as well as in education technology – in Turing machines not simply in teaching machines.
Composting money and power
Money and social power gradients are abstract cultural artefacts designed to defy compostability – social conventions that we can accept or reject, which are perpetuated by careless and learning di…
Methodists on My Mind
The Belated Changes are Great, but Some Tents are Still Too Big
I read everything Elon Musk posted for a week. Send help.
If your media diet looked like his, you’d be red-pilled too.
‘Let me die’: the mysterious syndrome changing children overnight
Doctors are uniting to find a cure for Pandas, a disorder that arrives ‘like the flick of a switch’ and torments children as young as three
(13) How Gestalt... - Neurodivergent Parenting: Think Outside The Box | Facebook
How Gestalt Language Processing Impacts Learning--
and 4 Ways To Help....
(Or why my ADHD/ Autistic kid...
Deleuze for the Desperate #9: smooth space
An introductory discussion of smooth space in A Thousand Plateaus, with summaries of the examples and models. Different kinds of multiplicity. Theoretical an...
Episode #01: Body Without Organs
Welcome to the inaugural episode of Buddies Without Organs. We began our adventure with our podcast’s namesake — the body without organs.If you would like to...
School as a Polytropic Environment: The Impact on Monotropic Minds
How the polytropic school environment can impact on monotropic thinkers and result in processing mutism.