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Friday: walk, homework
Last night I wound up spending about 5 minutes with A. helping her get something together for her late English assignment. The assignment was about character strengths, weaknesses and motivations. All the hardest things for anyone on the spectrum. We’d talked about it earlier, but she can’t retain the information because it doesn’t fit into anything inside her head. Which I will now need to puzzle out a way to help her with.
This morning, I spent 10 or so minutes with A. helping her get something into the slides for a World History presentation. We didn’t do one slide, because the materials she was working on didn’t cover that part, and so I was not interested in doing further research and suspect she misunderstood something anyway. The assignment was the rise of Mussolini, and she didn’t understand that “rise” in this context means “gains power”. So many questions about how many things out there people just don’t understand.
Anyway, I saw in there a couple sentences about the deal Mussolini made with the Pope to recognize Vatican City as an independent polity or country or WTF. At this point in my life, I know about Kennedy, I know just how large Coughlin’s following was, etc., so there’s no way you are going to convince me the Pope wasn’t super happy to support Mussolini. But there was still a sentence in there about how the Pope didn’t agree with everything about Mussolini. Of course, when I mentioned this to R., he — raised Catholic, quit in college — rattled off the older explanation about how the Pope supported Mussolini because he was at risk of being captive instead cue medieval history explanation. I just asked, okay, but, this is a time of communists vs fascists, and I’m being asked to believe that Hitler running a pogrom, Mussolini being Mussolini, Coughlin doing his thing in the US and Kennedy trying to get England to enter the war on the side of the Germans — in that world, the Pope is afraid of his followers? Really? Only after the war is over, and we find out just what everyone did does the Pope display any kind of concern. Once this was pointed out, R. agreed that yeah, this is just leftover propaganda, and then he told me about the Shenandoah school board putting slaver names back on schools. Gross, but mostly relevant. With Ilyon Woo winning a Pulitzer, Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, Larsen’s Demons of Unrest, I may have to find a new thing to annoy people with, since I think my line about how did the civil war start / the south shot first isn’t going to find anyone unable to rattle off the punchline as soon as I start the question. Maybe I’ll go with something about the Pope and Mussolini.
I have mixed feelings about helping A. with her homework, but the amount of time involved is absolutely _tiny_ (unless you count conversations about Romeo and Juliet, which are _endless_, and we’ve now deployed the Folger side by side, which is terrible, the Arden side by side, which is good, and the Riverside complete, which we had and is decent), and I’m getting some insight into how A. thinks about people and events, and seeing some of the gaps that a school is really going to struggle to perceive — gaps which are really important to figure out a way across for her, if life is ever gonna make any sense to her. Which is by no means guaranteed.
I also dug into TECCA / Connections Academy, the backup plan if Fusion doesn’t work. I knew it was “free” to all K-12 students in Massachusetts and a public school. In conversation with R., the question arose: is it a charter school. Answer, yes! The sponsor is a multi-town cooperative, which is a 501c3, so you can donate to it, and the co-op has a campus and some in person services and stuff, too, which I hadn’t realized. I’m still exploring to what degree Pearson is a vendor for this, versus Pearson is using this as a foot-in-the-door. I mean, if I were Pearson, I know what the answer to that would be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_Academy
ETA:
I walked with M.
R. went to pick up A., so I only had to drive there once today. Woot!
I read _People in Glass Houses_, a Jayne Castle / JAK Harmony novel, set in and around Illusion Town, first of what looks like a duology. JAK does some gothic/horror vibe stuff, but it all has her characteristic sense of humor, lack of gore, etc., so it’s still fun for me, anyway. Another example of JAK fully embracing the Jayneverse, so lots of tidbits for long-term readers to pick up on.
This morning, I spent 10 or so minutes with A. helping her get something into the slides for a World History presentation. We didn’t do one slide, because the materials she was working on didn’t cover that part, and so I was not interested in doing further research and suspect she misunderstood something anyway. The assignment was the rise of Mussolini, and she didn’t understand that “rise” in this context means “gains power”. So many questions about how many things out there people just don’t understand.
Anyway, I saw in there a couple sentences about the deal Mussolini made with the Pope to recognize Vatican City as an independent polity or country or WTF. At this point in my life, I know about Kennedy, I know just how large Coughlin’s following was, etc., so there’s no way you are going to convince me the Pope wasn’t super happy to support Mussolini. But there was still a sentence in there about how the Pope didn’t agree with everything about Mussolini. Of course, when I mentioned this to R., he — raised Catholic, quit in college — rattled off the older explanation about how the Pope supported Mussolini because he was at risk of being captive instead cue medieval history explanation. I just asked, okay, but, this is a time of communists vs fascists, and I’m being asked to believe that Hitler running a pogrom, Mussolini being Mussolini, Coughlin doing his thing in the US and Kennedy trying to get England to enter the war on the side of the Germans — in that world, the Pope is afraid of his followers? Really? Only after the war is over, and we find out just what everyone did does the Pope display any kind of concern. Once this was pointed out, R. agreed that yeah, this is just leftover propaganda, and then he told me about the Shenandoah school board putting slaver names back on schools. Gross, but mostly relevant. With Ilyon Woo winning a Pulitzer, Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, Larsen’s Demons of Unrest, I may have to find a new thing to annoy people with, since I think my line about how did the civil war start / the south shot first isn’t going to find anyone unable to rattle off the punchline as soon as I start the question. Maybe I’ll go with something about the Pope and Mussolini.
I have mixed feelings about helping A. with her homework, but the amount of time involved is absolutely _tiny_ (unless you count conversations about Romeo and Juliet, which are _endless_, and we’ve now deployed the Folger side by side, which is terrible, the Arden side by side, which is good, and the Riverside complete, which we had and is decent), and I’m getting some insight into how A. thinks about people and events, and seeing some of the gaps that a school is really going to struggle to perceive — gaps which are really important to figure out a way across for her, if life is ever gonna make any sense to her. Which is by no means guaranteed.
I also dug into TECCA / Connections Academy, the backup plan if Fusion doesn’t work. I knew it was “free” to all K-12 students in Massachusetts and a public school. In conversation with R., the question arose: is it a charter school. Answer, yes! The sponsor is a multi-town cooperative, which is a 501c3, so you can donate to it, and the co-op has a campus and some in person services and stuff, too, which I hadn’t realized. I’m still exploring to what degree Pearson is a vendor for this, versus Pearson is using this as a foot-in-the-door. I mean, if I were Pearson, I know what the answer to that would be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_Academy
ETA:
I walked with M.
R. went to pick up A., so I only had to drive there once today. Woot!
I read _People in Glass Houses_, a Jayne Castle / JAK Harmony novel, set in and around Illusion Town, first of what looks like a duology. JAK does some gothic/horror vibe stuff, but it all has her characteristic sense of humor, lack of gore, etc., so it’s still fun for me, anyway. Another example of JAK fully embracing the Jayneverse, so lots of tidbits for long-term readers to pick up on.