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.

A. is at Fusion for her first day; we are very excited and hopeful.

Meanwhile, I finally emailed the counseling office at ABRHS again to try to finalize the withdrawal process.

I had sent the counseling office this email on March 20:

“We’ve been working through both identifying some neurological problems she has been having and also finding a different school for her which we think will be less triggering for the problems she has been having.

Today, we enrolled her at Fusion Academy Burlington. We do not yet have a start date for her, but I expect we’ll be figuring that out over the next few days.

We’re not really sure what the process is at this point, but we understand at some point we’ll be withdrawing her from ABRHS but we do not want to withdraw her from special ed.

I’m not really sure what my next couple of days are like. They are currently open, but if we hear back from the neurologist about the results of the EEG, that could change; also, if we have an appointment happen with the new school that could change.

Please let me know how I can help this process go smoothly for everyone.”

The next day I got this response:

“Thank you for reaching out! I am cc'ing here our counseling support staff, xxx and xx, who can assist you with the withdrawal process so it goes smoothly for you all and especially for A. I am sorry to hear she is experiencing neurological problems and hope that things get better!”

And that was the last I heard from them.

In the event, I didn’t have an official start date for A. until Tuesday (of this week) and there was no school at ABRHS on Wednesday (and we were in transit on Tuesday anyway), so I punted until today on poking the school about the withdrawal process. I emailed all three of the people in the counseling office, sat and thought for a moment, noticed I had an extension for the counseling office, and called it. I got xxx, and said, how do I do this, and she was, have your student go fill out the form. I’m like, she hasn’t been there since March. And then xxx says, well, the usual process is to have the student go fill out the form. I just let the pause stretch because, I mean, what, time machine requirement now? On brand as a requirement. I ask if I should come in, and that doesn’t get a better response — something like, you should have told us sooner, and I’m like, _I sent the department email on March 20_, and have not yet heard back and you should have that in your email on March 21.”

Anyway.

Registrar — who had been _awesome_ about rapidly turning around the transcript for the initial application to Fusion early on in this process — called me back, and was generally easy to deal with, and then called me back again to say, drop off the stuff at the front desk, fill out the form there, I sent the official transcript to Fusion and removed A. from PowerSchool. Which, you know, is really all I was looking for here.

As I noted to the Registrar on the first of those two phone calls, I’m not at all sad about pulling my daughter out of a school that pulls shit like this. How overwhelmed are they, over there, one has to ask, but one does not have to stick around for the answer.

ETA:

So, I went into the school and the form was sitting there but it was super unclear what all I was supposed to do at this point. Apparently, withdrawal from school forms really are signed primarily by the student? I’m just like, aaaanndd even when they have an IEP? I mean, the whole thing feels like some weird bad joke of a process. There _is_ a line for the parent to say, “I know my kid is doing this.” But what a ridiculous thing.

Anyway.

I was sent to the library with the form to drop off the Chromebook, stylus and charger. The librarian nearly left the charger at circulation, but I was like, you’ll want that too, right? She was trying to find the stylus without telling me, but I figured it out and handed her that box. She was happy about that. We took them back to someone in another back room at the library, and _that_ person was much younger, and quite clearly used to this process not going well which honestly cheered me enormously. And obviously, people were happy to get the stuff back which, predictably, does not always happen.

Then it was off to counseling with the textbooks and the form, and then I checked out of the visitor log at the front desk and left. I _did get it all done in a single trip_, which was my primary goal in this whole fucking outing. I had not been back to the school since that meeting in the vice principal’s office and intended to minimize my time there because I just do not have the self-control to not say what I’m thinking when I’m there, and that’s basically What the Heck is Wrong Here I Do Not Remember You All Being This Incompetent Before.

I’ve got so many questions about why.

And then I had to clean the pot from the chicken soup he’d made with the wing bit bones and skin. He’d put it to soak because he got the soup way too hot and so stuff stuck to the sides of the pot. It soaked over night and, obviously, _still_ needed 10 minutes of scrubbing.

*sigh*

MEPFP meeting. I finally found out what the heck was going on with that garage exhaust fan. It really is the gift that keeps on giving. Basically, it was there to _remove hydrogen_. What hydrogen, you might ask? Well, if you were recharging lead-acid batteries in the mechanical room, it might generate hydrogen. Were we going to ever do that? NO! Fuck. Anyway. The exhaust fan was one of the items simultaneously on the HVAC guy’s list of “we don’t need” and on the “must back up” list, which is a sign something’s wrong, for sure. What really did in the exhaust fan was the problem it caused with boxing out a space for it outside (garage backs up into the hillside). That really forced conversation about why that was there anyway, and once everyone realized what had caused it to be in the plans in the first place, it went away. I heard about it in MEPFP when the person who caused this cascade of utter bullshit mentioned that if any of these removals had to be undone or further redone, that would take more time. I don’t even know what to say.

We had the president of the solar provider in the meeting today. That was kinda fun. He apparently used to do logistics before he started this company (it’s been a while, tho). As near as I can tell, he is treating the power generation puzzle as a fun toy, which, amen, fingers crossed, let’s hope this works. But I’m not totally optimistic, because there is still some free floating confusion around the requirements and I am unsure how to fix that. When we were still trying to make Enphase work, the electrician proposed two max systems in parallel, which was going to still not be great and we eventually got consensus on Enphase isn’t enough, but somehow the two parallel 200 amp systems are floating around like an evil ghost. I sent an email with something I HOPE will clarify what I want, but the problem is that I don’t know what’s possible or how to implement it and neither does anyone else in our merry crew and a couple key people are on vacation. I guess we’ll revisit this next week.

In good news, however, the _other_ zoom of the day was with Fusion, and I have now signed the registration document woot! So A. can set up her school email account, and we’ve got placement testing scheduled later this week and a start date next week. I am _soooooo_ excited! So is A.!

Probably I am exaggerating.

So, Tuesday, I got up for the MEPFP meeting. Wednesday, I got up for the dentist. Thursday (today), I got up for an 8 am meeting with the vice principal at ABRHS regarding something that happened Wednesday afternoon in the current events club. I obviously was not at the current events club. I got A.’s description. I got a teacher’s description (very vague). I got a phone call from the vice principal on the way to the therapist. I talked to A. about it before the therapist. I talked to it with A. at the therapist. We all trooped in to talk to the vice principal about it this morning.

I then tried to listen to the If Books Could Kill about _Lean In_, and concluded that I truly do hate everyone and I just want nuclear winter already because honestly, that’s what we deserve collectively. If we are in a world in which young, Democrat voting folks think that supporting a group of terrorists that want to segregate everyone by gender over the age of 9 AND attack Sheryl Sandberg for being a capitalist AND then be appalled at an SPLC survey that suggests that men are unhappy about feminism and/or think that men should be valued “more” whatever that might mean, well, I’m out. I’m done. We deserve what happens to us, no matter how horrible.

And then I got the summary from the vice principal about the meeting. And that email included the word “punch” (that had not previously entered the conversation at any point) and the phrase “handbook violation”.

OK. Look, I know I wanted my kid in school because that’s where the kids are, but I can admit when I am wrong. And I am obviously being wrong about a lot of things right now. I talked to A., and she doesn’t know what she wants (fair). I sent an email to the therapist asking for support on the keep A. home on Friday as a mental health day (okay to say no, but boy, a letter in support would be awesome). I replied to the vice principal saying A. won’t be in the club any more, and will be staying home Friday, and please let me know if there is a plan to suspend her on Monday so we don’t send her in to school pointlessly. I also asked for details on the “punch” thing, since that was a whole new thing and I don’t want to talk about anything until they completely spill all of what they have on that. Whatever “that” is. I mean, it’s fictional, but details matter.

We did some research, because I realized I didn’t really know what the options at this point are (obviously, homeschooling is always an option). Turns out MGL says school until 16, and honestly, that’s not that far into the future. So one option is to attend until 16, bail, send a letter of withdrawal and then sit for the GED or HISET. At that point, we can take a couple years (or not) and she can attend college (or not). Obviously, I find this personally deeply appealing because of the travel opportunities that open up.

In the meantime, I remember seeing something go by about a program to deal with chronic absenteeism. We work really hard to make sure the kids go to school and are in school all day pretty consistently, but I’m thinking I’ll just revisit that decision at an absolute minimum. Since the December debacle with the history teacher, we got a notification _at the appropriate time_ about missing assignments in history, and A. and I got her caught up and have been keeping her caught up. But I’m now thinking maybe that was a poor choice.

I’m thinking an absolute nose dive in attendance and homework completion is the correct call at this point. In conjunction with that certificate she got about her amazing MCAS scores, it’ll make our point for us when we pull her next September.

I’m really, really, really sorry I worked so hard to keep my kids in school. That’s easily the stupidest, most damaging, worst decision of my entire post-JW life.

If you are agonizing over your kids’ education, or are homeschooling and wondering if that’s the right choice, or whatever you are thinking about your choices: whatever you did, I fully support that you made the best decision you could at the time. And if you regret it, I absolutely sympathize with you. And also, I am pretty sure that in the grander scheme of things, it is way less important than it feels, and the quicker we get that idea into us, the better we’ll all feel.

I’ll be back later, but I just realized that I’ve had a ton of interactions with people over the last couple of days on this topic and I haven’t left any evidence of it here for me to revisit later.

So: as a little reminder for me. Mulct.

Ok! Let’s see what we can do here.

A friend sent me a reddit post by a teacher in NJ and the comments thread associated with it. https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/1av4y2y/comment/krcjeve/

The poster has a significant cluster of posts, all recent, all very much the same, and the account is comparatively new. The mention of Charlotte’s Web and Bridge to Terabithia was striking to me. I am Old, but when I was a youngster in school Charlotte’s Web was old. Bridge to Terabithia is about as old as the Original Star Wars. Which is Old. I made some remarks to my friend along these lines, and advocating for picking books for the kiddos to read that are Not So Old — more like the kind of Old Charlotte’s Web and Bridge to Terabithia were when we were kids, vs. 40-50 years further down the path. I specifically name checked Jason Reynolds’ Long Way Down and Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming, which would bear roughly (very roughly) the same relationship in time to Kids These Days as Charlotte’s Web and Bridge to Terabithia would have to us.

In the ensuing discussion, my friend asked, “ But how exactly does not getting the cultural references keep kids from learning how to read? As opposed to enjoying or understanding a given book?“

I don’t know that I gave a great answer to that question, because it’s one of those questions that strikes so completely to the heart of the matter. I mean, how can you read, if you don’t understand? You _can_ read what you don’t enjoy — it’s hard, and it’s marginally easier if you at least have some emotional energy. Like, it’s easier to hate read than it is to words-on-a-page-read. I didn’t really fully grasp that until the whole thing happened with Reflections on the Revolution in France (recap: the only book that reliably put me to sleep until one night it didn’t and I’ve been mad at Edmund Burke — like, _hot_ mad, heart rate speeds up, voice gets loud, shaky finger, red in the face want to hurt people who argue with me about it mad — ever since. When it was boring, it was unreadable; when I was mad at it, it went fast.).

But if you don’t understand what is being referred to, you can decode, you can read aloud, but you won’t understand it, even if you memorize it and can recall and repeat phrases in response to triggers. I’m not sure what the point of education is if you are having kids read what they don’t understand and then not devoting adequate instructional time to explain all of it to them in a way that they _can_ understand. It _seems_ like it would be easier to just pick a book that is material they _can understand_.

[Kid homework interruptions have peaked; I’ll be back.

They’re making the kids pick between Sherman Alexie part time indian, Coelho’s alchemist, and John Knowles A Separate Peace. *sigh*]

After trying (and probably failing) to explain the importance of relatability / comprehensibility to readers who are still learning to read and advancing in their development as readers (as opposed to most of us adults who are coasting), I then pointed to a reddit thread about using audiobooks to help kids with reading. I had noticed that at least at some points, the school provided access to audiobooks for the kids through Sora (sp?), and it really seemed to help my daughter a lot. I know plenty of adults — many through my book group — who primarily engage with books through audiobooks for a variety of reasons, and they get different things from the experience than many who read the words on the page and do not listen to it out loud. The sound qualities of written language are important.

https://www.reddit.com/r/teaching/comments/140e8x/english_teachers_what_do_you_think_about_students/

“In my honors class, I realized that some of my students had been looking for audiobook version of their books. I do not read to them because I expect them to read outside of class so we can discuss during class. I never really minded but I'm starting to think whether it's a good idea. I mean, eventually, they should read on their own because they won't have read aloud in tests/real life, etc. However, since they're reading outside of class...I can't really enforce the no audiobooks rule...”

This is clearly a good english teacher, meeting the students where they are. But despite that, this is an english teacher lacking an organized way of thinking about the sonic qualities of written language, and instead defaulting to some super fucked up Must Consume Without Subvocalizing perspective on written language.

I mean, just fucking think about _that_ for a minute.

There’s a comment in the thread:

“I started my school year with Huck Finn, which my juniors found impossible at first. Eventually one confessed that she was listening to audiobooks on YouTube to pass quizzes. At first I was upset then I realized that the the essentials of the lessons were still there. I do discussion questions that require them to cite quotations from the text so they still have to read the actual novel in class or at home.” (And a reply to this comment that made me go, and this is why you shouldn’t be assigning Huck Finn any more, but never mind that now.)

Huck Finn is _really_ astonishing to want to suppress listening to, given that the typical way to consume Huck Finn when it first came out would have been in a family read aloud circle. You know, the way all 19th century novels were meant to be consumed.

All right. Next.

Back to that original reddit. Comments about military recruitment and the ASVAB / PiCAT. I went looking to find out what was currently on the ASVAB, since I haven’t engaged with that test since I took it in the mid-1980s. There is a word knowledge component. There are quizlets to help people study for the word knowledge component. And there are just crazy words in there — veracious (not voracious, veracious), limpid, dulcet, inamorata, mulct.

Yes, mulct.

I’m a descriptivist, not a prescriptivist. Mulct is in the dictionary with a primary definition (fine or tax or some weird hybrid of the two if you are in Iowa) and a secondary definition (swindle or defraud). However, outside of Chapter 99 of Iowa’s legal code, and a few weirdo jurists in Ohio and similar, nobody uses this word. I have _one_ friend who knew the word, and she _only_ knew the “secondary” definition. The “secondary” definition is not in my copy of the 2 vol plus supplement of the OED (yes, both definitions are in the current OED). To me, this says this isn’t a word anyone is using, and google ngrams agrees. Is fleshment a word? No, no it is not. Same reasons. It’s in Shakespeare, but no one is using it any more, and no one really has for over a hundred years.

So, why would you put mulct on a word knowledge test for military recruits? I get that part of what you are sorting for in the military is someone who will put up with your arbitrary bullshit, but shouldn’t it be _the arbitrary bullshit you want them to put up with_? Isn’t this a waste of everyone’s time and energy? In the meantime, the economy is booming, and a lot of the people who have the choice of memorizing a word list that includes dulcet, limpid and inamorata or getting a job at Amazon are going to choose door number two.

I used to just be mad about still teaching cursive (and when I was a kid, not letting me type my homework), and not letting kids use calculators. This round of listening to a friend worrying about whether Kids These Days are Learning Enough, combined with the teachers pissing and moaning about how everyone is on their phone all the time, and the military recruiters saying nobody knows any words any more is just making me feel total despair. Not at the kids. The kids are fine.

But the current crop of adults — you know, my peers, plus or minus — I’m kinda worried about us. We are terrible.

In the end tho, the correct target is standardized curricula and testing. If you standardize, it’s a fucking PITA to do updates. So you don’t. Because it’s easier not to. And the next thing you know, you’ve got tenth graders that can’t make any sense out of Charlotte’s Web, and their teachers who haven’t stopped to ask themselves the most basic questions like,

Why is the Arable family setting the table for breakfast?
How does the Arable family have time to start to kill a runty pig, decide not to, find a bottle and a nipple and feed the pig, in the half hour between breakfast and the arrival of the school bus? How is there a _half hour_ between breakfast and the school bus_?
Why are there so many weapons before breakfast (ax, air rifle, wooden dagger, at a minimum, in the first three pages)?
How come I never noticed the pun in the family’s last name?

I’ve been asking around, and remember, I’m Old. No one I know knows anyone who ever set any table ever for breakfast, even on those rare occasions when more than one person was eating the same breakfast at the same time. Whatever is going on in this book might as well be happening on Mars, with a bunch of visitors from Venus, because it’s completely unrelatable.

TL;DR If a teacher posting on reddit won’t shut up about how her husband is homeschooling their kid, and whining about how awful their school district is, they are probably Doing It Wrong, whatever Doing, It and Wrong might mean.

Also, read whatever you want, and don’t make other people read stuff they don’t want to. Life is short, and learning is too important to waste valuable curiosity and cognitive energy on useless garbage.

ETA: For reference purposes, that chat I was having with a friend about the standardized tests and so forth? That was a _chat between two national merit scholars_. Not fucking honorable mentions. _Scholars_. It’s not like we’re bad at the standardized test taking.

ETAYA: The friend who knew a definition of mulct reads 19th century novels by preference — that’s actually how we originally got to know each other, was reviews of obscure 19th century novelists and their work. I was not especially surprised that she knew the word.

Both kids had therapy. T.’s went long, so he skipped his virtual piano lesson. R. and I went out to dinner after A.’s therapy. And then there was homework.

But it went really well! A. stuck around for current events club, which is only extremely marginally about current events and is mostly her getting more time with her buddies in connections, or, as she calls it, she’s there for the connections chaos. One of the kids was trying to figure out a way to boot linux on his school provided chromebook. He did not succeed, but along the way, A. learned a bunch of things.

A. and I talked about her upcoming essay in English on _Patron Saints of Nothing_. She really disliked the book for a whole lot of reasons, some of which sound to me like there are real problems and others which sound like the author did a good job but A. is not really the target audience. I told her that her essay could be on how much she hated the book and why, and that helped her really connect with the assignment instead of just resenting it. I have also been trying to really understand what the goal of essay writing, in school or wherever else it might subsequently be used for, might be. I mean, _obviously I am aware of what I am doing here_! Duh. Equally, I am quite certain this wasn’t anyone’s idea of why I was being taught to write essays in school. It has not escaped me that chatGPT answers look suspiciously like an automated 3-5 paragraph essay more often than not. And there was a recent The New Warehouse episode (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-new-warehouse-podcast/id1455808373) in which LoPresti from Takt describes a recent AI component of Takt intended to support managers in their communications with workers and also in writing performance reviews that was a delightful example of automating the assembly of relevant data points into a draft for a human to check and then either submit or use as the basis for an in person discussion of some sort.

As with everything, once it is automated, I’m gonna ask a bunch of questions about, so why teach people to do it manually anyway? Also, AI production of writing forcibly reminds us over and over and over again that the format is largely unimportant but the selection of the list items included in the format is crucial. The essay tends to conceal that early work in finding and curating the list items, and of course by so concealing introduces many opportunities for shenanigans. I exploited the fuck out of that as a teenager by writing essays which meticulously hit every specified requirement but were absolutely never imagined as in any way when the teacher was assigning that essay (highly recommend, btw, especially if you have confidence that you can appeal all bad grades successfully — I don’t mean grade grubbing. I mean, you produce an A+ essay that is bonkers but precisely compliant in every way. Occasionally, you will get a humor-free teacher who D or F’s you, and you have to be able to get that fixed if you want to have the GPA necessary to get the scholarships you need because you’re poor and you need help going to college. And you _really_ have to be meticulous about noting every single requirement specified in the class and for the assignment in question, because some people _will_ use any opportunity to ding you when you abuse their assignment this way).

The answers to my questions have been fairly poor, much like answers to questions about cursive or long division or spelling or grammar or really anything else that it’s inexpensive to access fully automated versions of. I have concluded that the value of an essay does not lie in the essay product; it lies entirely in the selection process leading up to the product. And that’s particularly terrible as a conclusion, because virtually all of the pedagogy is focused on the product and streamlining the process of searching for and curating what goes into that product.

Anyway. I don’t know that there’s any useful lesson here. I would _observe_ that the somewhat horrifying events associated with efforts to teach “small group academic discussion” align very well with my observations around essays. I feel like both of these demonstrate the inevitable gear smashing associated with transitioning from “rigorous”, “product oriented” education to SEL. We really need to end up in a world in which we can share our feelings and collectively problem solve, but we are still educating to a world in which feelings are denied and we are required to comply with policy set from above. We’ve been moving along this path for generations, and we’ll keep making progress, but it sure feels slow.

Let’s say you have market in a thing that everyone needs: housing. Let’s say you have people who are not able to acquire what they need in that market. Should you provide MORE housing, change the rules so that “invisible hand” “someone” provides MORE housing, or subsidize some customers in the market so they can afford to acquire what they need in that market?

If you answered that question with anything other than, I Need More Information Of This Sort to answer this question, I _think_ you are probably wrong.

The specific information I _think_ you need to answer the question is: how many customers are in the market, how much housing is available, what specifically are the customers able to pay and what will they regard as “better than no housing at all” (viz couch surfing, sleeping in a car, on the street, in a shelter, at the emergency department, etc.), what specifically do the sellers in the market regard as “better than leaving the housing unsold”.

The stupid first question that must be answered is raw units housing / raw total units desired, but unfortunately, even this is tricky because “better than no housing at all” calculation includes a bunch of elasticity around household size (that is, sometimes, a customer would rather sleep on the street than on his sister’s couch, but not if it is freezing outside; sometimes, a customer would rather spend less and share a unit but not during a pandemic, etc.). There is also the phenomenon of imperfectly connected markets (how far are you willing to commute / can you get a job in another place and move). But if you persistently have demand in a particular defined geography that exceeds numerically total units available, that’s clear cut — you need more unit.

BUT! What if you take effective action to build lots more units but you wind up making it so no one wants to live there anymore. This Is Not Theoretical.

There are also problems of people flowing from one place to another (in very large numbers!) that can destabilize a functional market (in either direction).

Most of our housing problem in the United States is directly attributable to underbuilding after the Great Recession. Some of our housing problem in the United States is further attributable to our failure to build out broadband everywhere — we probably could have avoided some of the mad rush to the coastal cities and then the subsequent exodus which took the asset inflation that occurred in coastal cities and then randomly distributed it around the country as people sold out of coastal cities and rebought Everywhere Else and bid up the prices on the housing in those places.

But I also think that a lot of the problem is our persistent resistance to thinking of the United States, or at least 48 states as being a unified housing market, and the importance of “what housing is better than no housing” / “what minimum rent is better than no rent”. People will sacrifice a lot of housing, if it means they can have a job. Property owners will refuse a lot of tenants when they believe there will be another, much more remunerative tenant along soon and/or if the cost/benefit tradeoff of a tenant is poor (the expected move in/move out/maintenance and general costs of having someone in a housing unit is non-zero, and sometimes the “expected rent” is too low compared to those general costs. Property owners who have struggled to collect rent learn this quick and unlearn it very slowly.).

I really do love democracy, but it is really frustrating looking at housing market failures and how various groups of voters with entirely understandable concerns and desires layer on limits on housing supply and then are surprised by the predictable consequences. I’m thinking about all this because my daughter expressed that what she was learning in school seemed really pointless so I started explaining to her — in response to specific classes and material — what that class and/or material was intended to teach and enable her to do in life. She got it very quickly, but then was like, well, how come no one ever told me (a classic question of childhood and, honestly, adulthood). We also got into questions about What _Should_ Math Be Like (I mean, we’ve had computer programs that could do _all_ the math taught in a high school and a big chunk of a math intensive undergrad since I was in college and I graduated in 1991). I said, well, Math should be taught as a way to solve human problems. I then went on to explain how the kind of reasoning used in a lot of humanities / social sciences / etc. did not reflect the nuance that really good quantitative reasoning can involve. This particular example sprang forcefully to mind.

This is a very new idea of mine, so I am still exploring it. That’s very different from earlier ideas I have had along the same lines, such as, We Really Need to Stop It With Cursive, and, No More With the Clock Faces and Hands Already. I was opposed to cursive when I was a child learning it _because I knew about typewriters_. Printing is fine for short things, but if you need speed and volume, a keyboard is so much better. Cursive, shorthand, etc. — old skool.

Clock faces I didn’t really think about super hard until I was watching reading time off a clock face being taught to friends’ kids and later mine. Then I was like, seriously, Why Are We Doing This Anyway? Also, 24 hour time, please, any day now.

When I was trying to justify to myself why kids need to learn how to calculate with fractions yesterday, I came up short. Hard.

I know the standard rationale: cooking, anything involves English or Imperial like carpentry or blueprints or whatever, you need to be able to cope with fractions. Except I’ve been learning Dutch recipes for the last several (decade plus) years, and so I’ve spent a lot of time on websites converting from metric measurements (by weight, no less!) to something I can do. And honestly, I don’t see fractions in Euro cookbooks. I asked my husband about this idea, and he said, yeah, the English measurements are really going to screw you up, but you could do it in Europe, because everything there is measured in meters.

I’m not cuckoo here — I’m not looking to legislate pi to 3, or say that there is nothing between a couple of whole numbers. I’m here for an argument about representation. Specifically, tho, I’m here in favor of decimalization. A lot of old math books structure their problems carefully to make sure that in algebra, you may have fractions along the way, but you’ll get a satisfying whole number value for X or Y if you did the problem right. But honestly, that’s not how it works in the real world. And in the real world, you’re going to decimalize.

It’s amazing what a package deal this really is. If you decimalize everything — metric, monetary system, cooking measurements by weight instead of volume and grams for units, yeah, okay, the time keeping system is still a problem, but whatever — then fractions basically go away. We don’t need them. We could spend our time teaching things that are _actually_ _useful_, and which we don’t currently have time for.

Like, using keyboards well. Like, boolean algebra and discrete math.

A little addendum — like cursive, fractions and learning how to use them well, and, honestly, all those 60s in our time keeping system, existed to make _calculation easier_ in a world that (1) did not have a zero and (2) did not have a decimal. Keeping them around is hoarding. We really need to stop. We know better. We should do better.

Our district is still pursuing the hybrid and remote options and had presentations about them this evening. I watched the elementary one but was unable to get into the secondary one and never could make the youtube live thing work. *shrug* Tomorrow is the special ed one; I am not sure I will bother, but maybe.

Meanwhile, Fairfax, which was going to go down the same path, has abruptly switched to the California option. I was surprised! They were running almost exactly 50/50 parents wanting hybrid vs remote only. The staff was running more like 40/60 and that was after a lot of detailed leveraging being applied by administration to staff. This happened more or less hours — less than a full day — after the largest union in Florida filed a lawsuit to stop the fall school reopening.

I had not paid a ton of attention to the vote in LA by the teachers union in Los Angeles Unified School District a week or so ago, but I went back and took another look at that timeline. I had also been seeing headlines go by in Education Week speculating about whether there would be teacher strikes. Those are rare, so I tend to not believe they will happen until they actually do. I may or may not link fu this post later, but the short form for now is that schools are not going to be reopening anywhere in the fall. They may spend a bunch of money redoing their HVAC and buying hand sanitizer, but it ain’t happening. The staff will ensure that — and a big push to reopen may give us the First Ever National Teachers Strike.

I was trying to piece together why I did not pay more attention to that union vote in LA. I think fundamentally, it was my skepticism about teachers striking. They really only do that when parents will back them up, and parents have not shown readiness to do so. We are in very new territory here.

Back when Trump and DeVos were running out the length of rope allotted to them, I was sitting there in disbelief thinking wow, am I gonna have to confront a truancy officer? Is my country really so batshit that they will open the schools? Are we going to do a full Sweden, and deploy truancy measures to make kids attend in person? Really?

Turns out no. Thank goodness for teachers. The youngest do not have jobs or seniority or kids. The middle aged have jobs and kids but no seniority. And the ones whose kids are out and grown are in the high risk group. None of them have, at the same time, the power and the desire to reopen schools. They are our Last Best Hope against diving off that cliff into everyone needing an ICU bed at the same time.

ETA: Also had great phone convos with J. and with K. The sitter took T. to swim lessons and then over to her place to swim in the aboveground pool, then dinner and ice cream. Good times.

I took A. out for a walk when it cooled down a litle.

I walked with M.

ETAYA: I had a pleasant conversation with a real estate agent.

As long as I am feeling incredibly annoyed anyway, I might as well get this idea out here.

My kids both have IEPs. Until last year, one was in an out-of-district placement (special ed consortium class); he came back in district last year, but was still in a substantially separate classroom, for those of you who have had occasion to view IEP forms and are familiar with the standard language. The other one was in a resource room program with an aide (we will call that mainstreamed for the peanut gallery, with the understanding that this is not a situation covered by a list of accommodations to be made by the classroom teacher).

Obviously, once things went to remote learning in the middle of March, IEP services ... sorta went on hold. Which I had no problem with. T.’s remote learning went spectacularly well. He enjoyed it and was almost entirely independent. I think I helped him with some math one time. And he asked me to help him find some supplies for an art project once. And I think he wanted me to play catch with him as a PE assignment at one point. I checked in with his teacher occasionally to make sure that things were not going horribly awry invisibly to me; she kept telling me how great he was doing. I was super happy about this, and very grateful. I was not hugely surprised; he is quite independent and he is in 8th grade. Was, anyway.

With A., however, things were very different. She was in fifth grade. She is NOT super independent. And she is struggling with a lot of emotional regulation right now; frustration is very difficult for her to manage. (That’s my girl!) That was true while school was still in person; there were a couple of really bad weeks where the team was emailing me trying to figure out how to help her, and they try very hard not to have to do that.

Oh, while I am here! I reallllllly hope that they laid off the math specialist. And I hope that she finds some sweet pod setup with people who love math puzzles, and that she decides to do that forever and never ever ever inflict her fucking math puzzles on a school system ever again. Lucky for her, I do not know her name. If I ever run across her in person, she is going to hear in detail what I think of her life choices as they impacted on my family. What I do know, is she nixed using Khan Academy. *eye roll*

Anyway. Once the special ed team figured out what they were going to do, they offered some zoom services. One of the things they offered was a one-day-per-week session where they helped A. with her school work. I was _super skeptical_. And yet, they were both helpful with the specific item they helped her with, and they helped A. a lot with her frustration level in general.

Because that was so helpful, I got to thinking about ways to make zoom schooling work better for kids whose parents are unable (because they are not there, because they do not know the material, because they do not know the language, whatever) to provide additional support on site. And what I concluded was that a LOT of what I did to help A. could have been done via a zoom session. Basically set up a few kids (a half dozen, plus or minus) with a helper in a zoom that stays open whenever the kids are doing schoolwork (6 kids per helper, I mean). Kids can type questions in the chat, or raise their hand or just speak up or whatever. The share screen is available to the helper can see what the kid is working on. If the kids are working on the same material, you could allow whatever level of socializing / helping each other among the kids that was deemed appropriate for the task / topic / group.

A. has been doing Camp Empow for a few weeks each summer. I do that in lieu of ESY (extended school year — that is summer school paid for by the district, for kids deemed to need it to avoid regressing) for A., because .. let’s just say that the ESY program was run by the people out of Conant and they are expletive deleted. Or at least they used to be. I would say, hey, maybe it is just me and my kids, except I’ve been here for long enough that I could name people who _want_ their kids in Conant, and still have to get advocates and threaten litigation to get Conant’s people to Do Their Fucking Jobs Already. I do not think it is just me. Anyway. This year, Camp Empow started out all virtual, and A. really hates wearing a mask (you would not even believe how many socks we went through trying to get socks she would tolerate. And the underwear. Jesus, the number of underwear we went through trying to find something that did not lead to meltdowns. You can say all you like about training kids to wear masks, but when you are still fighting to find socks and underwear that an 11 year old can tolerate, I hope you recognize that the mask thing is not going to be easy).

A little side comment here. Yes, we flew in June. Twice. And we went other places that required A. to wear a mask. I try to have three different mask options with me, because whatever she is wearing, after about an hour, she will get really upset with it. So you are gonna need choices.

Where was I? Oh, right. Camp Empow was basically 9-4 Zoom. Yikes. But a lot of that time was project time, and it was set up in exactly the kind of helper way I describe above. It is not perfect — A. still can get really frustrated and have meltdowns, but it works really well generally, and if it was not so very many hours in a row, I suspect the meltdowns would have been less frequent. They were also able to work through a lot of technical issues using zoom and the technical issues they struggled with were not necessarily ones that were solvable (one of them was solvable but they did not come up with it, but after a bit I figured out a temporary solution and later R. came up with a better solution and ultimately I bought a different monitor).

For younger children, and for kids who really do poorly with screens (not my kids!), in person support in some kind of pod context (whether that is in homes arranged by the parents or by a district, or in schools in a socially distanced way) is likely going to be necessary to meet FAPE requirements. As individuals and collectively, we should think long and hard before interfering with families who want to set this sort of solution up and fund it themselves, and we should learn from their experience and use it to inform whatever districts wind up needing to do.

But before we go jumping to that, I hope we do more along the lines of remote support for remote learning. It would enable us to benefit from the wisdom and experience of a lot of educators who have at least some technical chops, and who really do not want to do anything in person yet.