2022-2023 school year
I teach ELA 6 and will be working to invite my students to engage in understanding the importance of good communication skills and honing these skills as a cooperative learning community. In that spirit, I will be posting resources here as I create them.
“Late Tuesday afternoon….Trump administration announced the most devastating attack on the U.S. Forest Service in the agency’s 121-year history. Not a budget cut. Not a policy shift. Not a “reorganization.” An execution.
They’re ripping the headquarters out of Washington and shipping it to Salt Lake City, Utah — the beating heart of the anti-public-lands movement in America.
They’re shuttering every single one of the ten regional offices that have governed this agency since Gifford Pinchot built the system over a century ago — and with them, the career professionals who spent entire lifetimes earning the expertise and the authority to push back when politicians came calling with bad ideas and worse motives.
They’re destroying more than fifty research facilities across thirty-one states, labs that house decades of irreplaceable long-term science, the kind you literally cannot restart once it’s gone.
And they’re replacing all of it — the offices, the scientists, the institutional knowledge, the professional independence — with fifteen political appointees called “state directors,” embedded in state capitals alongside the very governors, legislators, and industry lobbyists who have spent their careers demanding that the Forest Service log more, protect less, and get out of the way.
One hundred and ninety-three million acres of your national forests. An area larger than Texas. The largest public land agency in the country. Just handed, on a silver platter, to the people who’ve spent their entire careers trying to destroy it.”
https://t.co/9pNE0d3fvQ
We don’t have a classroom management problem.
We have an emotional regulation crisis that teachers are being asked to handle.
Somehow, “classroom management” has turned into:
• de-escalating trauma
• supporting anxiety and depression
• calming panic attacks
• breaking up fights
• being cursed at, threatened, and even assaulted
• being the counselor, social worker, and crisis team
And at the same time…
we remove the very things that actually help:
• recess
• movement
• art
• play
• connection
Teachers aren’t trained for this.
And they shouldn’t have to be.
Classroom management was never meant to do all of this.
It’s about:
relationships
rules
routines
responsibility
That’s it.
It was never designed to replace what families, communities, and systems failed to provide.
And until we stop offloading every societal failure onto schools,
teachers will keep drowning under expectations no human can meet.
UnitedHealth, the biggest health insurer in the country, ran an algorithm that flagged patients for “too much” therapy. If they had more than 30 sessions in 8 months or twice a week, they denied coverage to save money.
Regulators in California, New York, and Massachusetts called it illegal under federal mental health parity laws because they don’t do this to physical health claims. They settled, paid fines, and kept right on doing it in Medicaid plans across dozens of states.
Insurance companies deciding your care, not your doctor. That’s the policy failure. Read it.
Annie Farmer was 16 when she reported being sexually abused by Epstein at Zorro Ranch in 1996. The U.S. Attorney who should have investigated never opened a case.
Newly unearthed federal documents reveal why: he was Epstein’s own Power of Attorney for the ranch purchase.
https://t.co/Lr8xi7FMjI
I just conducted an unprompted, late night oversight visit at an ICE holding facility at the Mesa Gateway Airport with @RepGregStanton and @Rep_Grijalva. What we saw was shocking and sick.
Well over 240 detainees stacked like sardines in cells. People were sick and ICE was refusing medical care.
Here’s what happened.
@upholdreality Here’s Palestinian activist Ghassan Kanafani (assassinated by Israel with a car bomb in 1972) responding to a question framed in the same way. Asking the oppressed why they don’t just lay down for their oppressor, as if their refusal is the problem https://t.co/AFLbp0EFSt
Current state of the teaching profession. Uhm I wonder why we can't retain teachers???
I wonder if teacher burnout has anything to do with low results from students???
#EpsteinFiles: New FBI report indicates 13-year-old accuser was truthful in allegations against Trump, corroborating most of her testimony
https://t.co/RoKOGqE6KX
Back in the 1980s, Haiti was actually the third largest producer of rice in South America.
In 1991, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was overthrown in a US backed coup. The US then promised to restore Aristide to power if agreed to eliminate tariffs on food imports & cut government subsidies for Haitian farmers.
In 1994, food tariffs were cut from 35% to 3%. The USA then flooded Haiti with heavily subsidised rice.
Haiti’s food imports went from 5% in 1985 to 85% in 2000.
This lead to the collapse of the Haitian rice industry.
How about leaving Haiti the fuck alone, because it was doing quite well when countries like America did.
To teach something well, a teacher has to internalize it.
When new acronyms and methods are constantly thrown at teachers, there’s no time to truly understand them. Teaching soon becomes forced, clumsy, and inauthentic.
But when a teacher works with something over time, it becomes natural. It becomes part of how they think.
This is why constantly adding new methods can actually hurt teaching and learning.
Give teachers time.
Let them stick with something, refine it, and make it their own.
That’s when their teaching starts to shine.
I saw some idiot claiming that America “has never experienced Nazism like Europe” and it amazes me how little people know about this place. The Nazis learned from the US. It had a century and a half head start on genocide. They studied the anti-miscegenation, Jim Crow and exclusionary laws. Concentration camps were based on reservations. They corresponded and exchanged notes and “research” with American eugenicists. America was involuntarily sterilizing Black, Puerto Rican, Chicana, and poor white women long after WWII. North Carolina had a eugenics board until 1977. Both of my parents were alive in 1977. If you were Black and disabled to the point where you couldn’t work, they’d put you in an asylum, where they’d give you a hot shot and bury you in an unmarked grave, or send you up a chimney, just like the Nazis. Or they’d experiment on you. Wasn’t nobody spending money to take care of disabled Blacks. We were brought here to work, not sit in asylums and hospitals. Y’all don’t know shit.
Baltimore security guards strike for respect, healthcare, and a union
Nearly a year after workers voted to authorize a strike, non-union city and commercially contracted security officers in Baltimore, MD, will walk off the job on April 9 in an Unfair L
https://t.co/qvVQnDU3lw
"One hundred and ninety-three million acres of your national forests. An area larger than Texas. The largest public land agency in the country. Just handed, on a silver platter, to the people who’ve spent their entire careers trying to destroy it.
And they did it with a press release on a Tuesday."
https://t.co/9Hi2v9md4X
Same here in VA. And the amount of learning time lost to "data" collection (over-testing during the year) and weeks of prep for these tests hurts my soul as a teacher.
This week, classrooms across Texas will go quiet as our kids take flawed, high-stakes tests that fail to reliably measure student achievement while hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars flow to out-of-state, testing corporations. That's not accountability. That's a corrupt system that serves corporate interests not kids.
If Bernie’s Social Security bill was enacted in 2021, Musk would’ve paid $2.9 billion more in taxes, Social Security would’ve been solvent for 75 years, benefits would’ve gone up by $2,400 & 93% would’ve paid $0 more in taxes.
Instead, they want you to work till you drop dead.