Look, not the point at all, but I had totally forgotten that Wayfair was ever a thing. I haven't seen junk email from them in months! (This is the most marginal of positives, and I don't have to hand anything to anybody as a result.)

Used to have a place called Jax's about half a mile from my house. I'd stop in a few times a week after work, so they kept craft beer around for me. Fantastic bar food, great service, paint held on the walls with tar and nicotine. Fun crowd. I miss it.

Gabe out here basing a lot of assumptions on the "Born in the USA" album cover that are not, in fact, supported by the song, or the rest of Springsteen's career for that matter.

Major crises of the day, Bsky edition: ·Minneapolis ·Greenland ·Greenland 2 ·Holly Hunter's "Ake" tucks her legs under when sitting in the captain's chair

That wasn't tripping. That was slide tackling.

Learning is a human process, which must be undertaken by humans.

Things are terrible, but my first class of the day took what was supposed to be 25 minutes on Langston Hughes and kept interrogating the poem (usefully!) for the entire hour. Teaching runs on hope, but it repays that hope as well.

The Onion does a deep dive into my discovery 20+ years ago that the bartenders had a "Skip" button somewhere near the tip jar.

I just need to start keeping a sledgehammer behind my desk, don't I?

If there's a theme for my teaching career, it's this: the kids are all right.

I'm most always interested in writing advise from the folks who have done the work. Sharing this for future reference.

I don't have the time to listen to you whine, Green Day. Please advise.

My man bounces on his heels like he's demanding to speak to the chef about his wedge salad.

I remember an Avalon Hill game from the late '80s called FORTRESS AMERICA which seems, unfortunately, like an increasingly likely scenario.

Well, it sure was nice to sleep in on a Saturday morning so let's just check the news and WHAT THE OVERHEATED HELL

I mean, fine?

One more apology we owe to George Lucas.

Delightful.

"Live from State Line Fireworks in Rocky Top, Tenn, um... *checks notes* That is, um, I'm told this is the Washington Monument in our nation's capital... Jane, can we confirm that? Jane? Jane? "I'm sorry, Jane had to step away from the mic to laugh convulsively. We'll be back after this."

New Year's resolution just dropped.

Merry Christmas, everyone. Let's take good care of each other, today and every day.

I had an intro-level anthropology course where the final was: "Define 'civilization.'" We were given a week and expected to deliver four to six handwritten pages. My cramped, spidery writing comes in around an 8-point font, which had me pretty anxious about the whole thing.

I did an intensive Batman-themed course at Kentucky Governor's Scholars Program a couple of years ago and asked the kids to use data to support where such a vigilante might need to appear in the 21st C. They were shocked to learn how violent crime is declining in major cities across the country.

Please believe me when I tell you that I, a humble public school teacher, had to sink actually brainpower into figuring out just what he meant by "OOO."

I laughed six days this week. Should I be concerned?

Also consider how this framing has been around for centuries, regarding any exercise of the mind: theatre, philosophy, novels, any form of visual arts. If you don't have the local duke or maybe a pope as a patron, how do you have time for such idle pursuits? "A.i." exists to devalue art and labor.

A student recently accused me of introducing a whole new course specifically to make a class focus on my own hyperfixations, and I understand, because this kid obviously hasn't been around for seventeen years of my practice to know that this is my default state.

This is from a thread about how happy former "leading man" actors seem to be now that they're getting increasingly weird roles... ...but damn, if I didn't just feel this in my not-quite-50yo soul.

I love every single thing about this story.

"Good" and "poor" are, of course, matters of opinion, immediately begging the question of what in the text provoked the respondent's reaction. The resulting discussion might then lead to new understandings of just how a text works. *Jon Lovitz pose* EDUCATION!

youtu.be/LUDntpV_HdQ Robin Hood - Call Off Christmas

✨ is the emoji because so-called "A.I." is driven entirely by magical thinking.

I watched the season premiere of FALLOUT last night, and it's not that I'm tired of "ripped from the headlines" TV, it's that I'm tired of the headlines that TV is ripped from. And if you don't see today's headlines in FALLOUT, that's on you.

It's oddly comforting to see Linux discourse in exactly the same place it was twenty years ago.

I was so impressed by this sympathetic presentation of an empathetic Christianity. The sort of thing that my experience of the church aspired to in its best moments. The flip side, unfortunately, was all too recognizable.

Every now and then I think I really ought to renew my NCTE membership. Glad to know that won't be necessary.

YESSIR!

I, a simple HS literature teacher, have just successfully helped my daughter with her third grade math homework, and I believe this entitles me to the FIFA Prize for Excellence in Parenting. I don't make the rules.

My entire district, pre-K through 12, has fewer than 5,000 students. I live in a county of fewer than 30K. Florida is just losing the population of a small Kentucky county, but it's all students. Anyway, free enterprise in education or something, right? What could go wrong?

Well, Bengals, that was a season, wasn't it? (sarcastic af) Pitchers and catchers report in just over two months, Reds fans.

I'm at a middle school academic team match, and there was just a question about Disney's Song of the South, which went out of its way to make reference to the "tar baby" scene, and I'm actually horrified.

what.

Today, as my sophomores were reading MACBETH Act 2, a kid looked at me and said IN VERY WORRIED TONES, "Lady Macbeth is more evil than the witches, isn't she?" To think that two weeks ago these kids believed they could never understand Shakespeare. #PostYourWs #edusky

Okay, I might finally need to go back to grad school.

That was my impulse. "Who has the time?" But on a pretty easy 2nd thought, how much more time are this TA and her department losing now? I'm trying to anticipate how this behavior will trickle down to K-12 schools and prepare myself to intercede for colleagues. I just want to teach, you know?

I'll make my standard offer: I will gladly not coach Kentucky football for A TENTH of what you're paying Stoops to not coach. THINK OF THE SAVINGS, MITCH BARNHART!

So traveling with a more easily forged ID now comes with a convenience fee. See John Rogers on fines.

I'm listening.

Back in the D&D 3.5 days, they had a setting called Eberron, with a playable race called the warforged. Think magical robots, and you've got it. The warforged had a religion where they tried to collect artifacts with which to build their god. Apropos of nothing...

I named my fists Strunk and White because if we're doing this, there will be elements of style.