Devour The Finger Lakes

We’re a team of wine tasting associates guiding you to some amazing eats, sites, and beverages in the FLX Region. Bicentennial of The Erie Canal?

[John Rich🇺🇸 @johnrich]

A fight for the ages is brewing over the destruction of Upstate New York’s farmland. I’ll put my boots on the ground there soon. @GovKathyHochul is allowing foreign entities to overrun American farmers with 50 square miles of Chinese solar panels. “Love Thy Neighbor” is now the official battle cry.

[EveryLibrary @EveryLibrary]

Our children deserve the opportunity to learn, explore, and succeed. School libraries help make that possible.

Yet, nearly 60 percent of schools don't have fully funded school libraries!

It's no surprise that reading scores are dropping nationwide.

via @everylibrary https://t.co/hH9LdJS5Mz

[Lee Zeldin @epaleezeldin]

Overriding local control, Albany politicians have massively ramped up their railroading of upstate communities, forcing them to take on the burden of far more solar farms on farmland. While in the southern tier this morning, I spoke out on behalf of the many upstate residents who are having their voices and opinions ignored and rejected by Governor Hochul and her henchmen of power hungry, out of touch Albany bureaucrats.

[Daniel Buck, “Youngest Old Man in Ed Reform” @MrDanielBuck]

A college professor:

"Our average graduate literally could not read a serious adult novel cover-to-cover and understand what they read"

[Ken | The Real Marvel Teacher 🍎 @MarvelTeacher2]

Things #Teachers don’t talk about:

Practicing active shooter drills with your students and then having to act normal for the rest of the day like it didn’t rattle you.

[The White House @WhiteHouse]

Andre Douglas
Luca Parmitano
Randy Bresnik
Frank Rubio

ARTEMIS III. 2027. 🚀🌙

[ThinkingWest @thinkingwest]

In 1942, C.S. Lewis predicted a future dystopia where:

-Education is leveled to a mediocre state to avoid hurt feelings
-The middle class is hollowed out, removing the primary champions of private excellence
-"Avoiding trauma" becomes the excuse to stop pushing students to their full potential

The obsession with perfect equality ends up destroying human greatness — and it’s fueled by state education, where schools become more like nurseries than academic institutions.

Seems like Lewis’s dystopia is already here.

[Steve Cortes @CortesSteve]

Good morning!

Today in 1973, Secretariat secured the Triple Crown by winning the Belmont Stakes by 31 lengths, perhaps the most dominant racing performance ever.

[The Modest Teacher @ModestTeacher]

Summer school credit recovery is a scam.

Sure, learn an entire semesters worth of curriculum in 19 days.

[Eric Daugherty @EricLDaugh]

🚨 WOW! Dr. ALVEDA KING just said it PERFECTLY on Capitol Hill

"I still have a dream. I dream that one day we will move beyond black power and white power and embrace GOD'S power and human dignity!"

"I reject the notion that Americans who hold traditional Christian beliefs should be treated as THREATS or TERRORISTS simply because we disagree with a prevailing political thought!" 🙏🏻

"I dream that Americans will one day see each other, not as enemies, but as neighbors. I dream that we will hear each other, see each other, and recognize that every human life has value from the womb to the tomb and beyond."

"We are as scripture teaches, one blood, one human race. And if we remember that truth, we can build a future worthy of the sacrifices made by those who came before us."

"We must speak out for truth and against the forces that would manufacture hate, fear, division, and violence simply to line their pockets and further their political ambitions."

"God bless America, God bless you!"

🇺🇸🇺🇸👏🏻

[Devour The Finger Lakes @DevourTheLakes]

Ryan Williams Vineyard (Burdett NY). Mussels with house made chorizo

[Devour The Finger Lakes @DevourTheLakes]

Backyard bonfire

[Devour The Finger Lakes @DevourTheLakes]

Huge slices of hand tossed pizza at Del Lago Casino and Resort

[Devour The Finger Lakes @DevourTheLakes]

Waterloo’s Memorial Day Parade

[Andrew Kolvet @AndrewKolvet]

NEW: @JDVance just responded to Pete Davidson's "joke" about the assassination of Charlie.

"Charlie was a father of two beautiful kids. And he did not deserve to have all of those moments with his kids, all of those moments with his beautiful wife taken from him in the way that that happened."

"I would expect everybody, everybody with a heart or a conscience would say whatever we agreed or disagreed with about his particular viewpoints."

"What I do find a little distressing... there were a lot of people who were celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk, and I think one way that we can bridge the divide is just have a very simple principle in this country."

"Number one, we don't want the government throwing people in prison because they have bad politics, however you define bad politics."

"Number two, and way more importantly, political violence, wherever it comes from, is unacceptable in the United States of America."

"Let's talk with one another, not shoot each other when we disagree. I think that's the principle that everybody in this room agrees with."

[Wall Street Apes @WallStreetApes]

This American needs to lead the Department of Education

“This is my audition to become the head of the US Department of Education

- My first act of office will be immediately abolishing the No Child Left Behind Act. Yes, we will be leaving children behind. If they fail a class, they will have to repeat it

- My second act is one that I'm very passionate about. We will be bringing zeros back. If you don't know, in many schools in the US right now, students receive 40% or 50% if they do zero work, if they do not complete an assignment. And my school included, and many other schools, are not going to be allowed to give a student a 50% if they do not turn in any work. They will have to receive a zero.

Likewise, there will be no completion grades, If you just attempt an assignment, that doesn't mean you get a 55%. Like, if you get a 1 out of 10, you earned a 10% on that assignment, and that's okay. Sometimes failing happens, and we don't need to just inflate the grades just for fun. Grades will reflect students' actual performance and understanding of the content

- The third one I'm very excited for as well. Teacher evaluations will take place once a year and teachers will be observed by another current teacher from a different school. Teachers would volunteer to be evaluators. They would get a sub for the day, no questions asked, and then they would evaluate objectively. That way the person evaluating you does not know you and does not have any personal bias towards you. Hopefully.

- The fourth one, I think this should be common sense, but I hear that it happens all the time at some schools. Never at mine. But teachers shouldn't be expected to work for free. I hear elementary teachers are doing these before and after work things that they aren't getting paid for, like lunch duty or recess duty or pickup duty, whatever it is. The school needs those things covered.

People can volunteer for it, and then they have to get paid for it. They can't force you to cover other people's classes for free. They have to pay you extra if they're gonna take away your lunch or your prep or whatever time that is supposed to be yours and then force you to do something without getting paid. There will be no more voluntelling.

Hire this woman. The most important thing we need to do is hold students back and force them to learn the work. No more dumbing down out standards

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.

Her name is Audrey van der Meer.

She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.

The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.

Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.

Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.

When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.

The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.

When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.

Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.

Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.

The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.

Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.

Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.

Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.

Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.

Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.

A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.

The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.

The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.

The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.

That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.

Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.

Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.

Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.

You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.

The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.

Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

[Jen @jenteach13]

You want to fix education?

Make attendance mean something again. A child cannot learn in a building he doesn't enter.

[Wendy @teachthemx3]

I have a senior on my roster who hasn’t attended my class a single day this semester. She showed up today for the first time.

We have 7 days left before grades are finalized for seniors.

My administrator just asked me to see what I can do to help her graduate.

In case anyone here is a new follower, this is why I’m leaving public education.

[Vice President JD Vance @VP]

WATCH: Vice President JD Vance's Rededicate 250 message:

“I always ask people to pray for wisdom and for courage for their leadership. Pray for wisdom that we know the path God wants us to walk. Pray for courage that we have the ability to walk that path.”