Erin Vanderhoof

I’m sorry but touting 1.5 million readers and 170k subscribers is so funny. That is not that many!!!!

It is morally wrong to want a computer to be sentient. If you owned a sentient thing, you would be a slaver. If you want sentient computers to exist, you just want to create a new kind of slavery. The ethics are as simple as that. Sorry if this offends

somebody needed to just reach out to me through my benadryl haze and say "iconic synth bass" and i would have been able to do it

lmao update, i'm listening, it's great, fuckin taylor swift has done it again

i am generally a big swiftie, but i haven't yet listened to life of a showgirl, partially because i was sick yesterday and also partially because the advance lyrics of "actually romantic" i saw made me realize this is the taylor mode i don't like (vindictive, complaining about being rich)

Big gap between “you need to be exposed to views you disagree with” and “the loathsome liberals in my audience need a steady stream of bad faith reactionary slop”

Nicole Kidman Retires Drag King Persona ‘Keith Urban’

Nicole Kidman Retires Drag King Persona ‘Keith Urban’

But like literally, good country music comes from people who have listened to Jason Molina and Eric Church, mid country music comes from those who have only heard Church

Tbh all modern country music is people who have never heard Farewell Transmission trying to recreate it from first principles! And I love that for them! And yet

Again tonight!!!! Listen!!!!

I’ve literally already written an essay about how I constantly rediscover that Farewell Transmission is the best song of all time, and yet! I keep on discovering that it’s the best song ever all over again!!!

yeah, I think that is great and I would imagine that if I stay in NYC, i might send my kids to a school that has a mandarin program because it's a heritage/extremely used language for the people I'm around. But that's different than the normative "teaching mandarin for the future" idea

What do you mean? I'm just saying that the fact that I got to go on incredibly cool field trips and my classmates who learned to read later did not was ridiculous, not talking about accomodation/differentiation

I mean, yeah, I definitely don't think kids necessarily need to learn a language in elementary school for us to consider them well-educated

I 100 percent agree with you here. Latin is AMAZING and Greek especially for Bible nerds, I just think it's a nice to have, especially in an era where there are very few latin teachers on offer

Yes, exactly! I will be saving this post to refer to in the future because I think people just don't understand how counterproductive so much of the conventional wisdom about education is!

lol yes, language teachers are hella expensive. Especially at the k–12 level

In places where the resources exist, totally. I just don't think it's true to say that kids who don't have that option are necessarily getting a worse education. I have seen kids with many language options getting a shitty education and also the obverse

see i don't particularly care about diplomatic and economic competitiveness, i care about kids and getting a high-quality education to as many of them as possible

i agree, but I do think that it's really important to also acknowledge that kids deserve to have culturally relevant education! They need to be emerging into a world they can recognize through their education, so it makes sense to teach them the language they might hear walking down the street

I agree with that to a certain extent, but go to, say, Tulsa and try and hire a k-5 mandarin language teacher and see how much it costs you. Language teachers are insanely expensive, and I've watched an arms race between private schools around the country trying to lure new teachers to their school

It got to be very expensive for a while because demand wayyyyyy outstripped teacher supply! Haven't checked in on that in about a decade though, I imagine it has gotten more normal now

The corollary to this is that if you love to code, teach your kid to code and code with them. If you love current events, talk about them. If you love TV and technology, find ways to share it. If you love world history, teach it to them. It's about giving them a lineage and a culture

If an adult is doing the project for them, they are not learning. Any circumstances that could possibly lead to the adult doing the project should be stamped out IMMEDIATELY

No, your kids don't need to stay abreast of current events. They don't need to learn to code in middle school. They don't need to do their schooling on a tablet. They don't need to have a comprehensive knowledge of world history by 13. Make it simple, make it relevant, make it fun

This comes from my obsession with colonial literacy, but I think right now really is the moment for those of us in the know to remind the world that Basic Education Is Good, Actually

And like I might wind up putting my kids in a language immersion school someday, but I think it’s okay for us all to say that it’s a cultural choice that is slightly orthogonal to the purpose of quality public education.

I know that! And in some communities it makes sense to teach it! I just think the idea that kids should be educated for “the future” at unlimited expense without attempts to actually immerse them in the world around them is deeply wrong

I don’t think any are superfluous in the right situation! I just am skeptical of the “competitiveness” argument for learning mandarin (or Russian before it) or the idea that bilingualism gives kids some leg up even when they are not actually using both languages

last weekend my sunday school kids were praying for stress relief because they are concerned about bad grades. and these are third through fifth graders!!!!