I think it’s because you can find supports to help you learn.
I’ve been teaching math for almost 18 years at this point, and only a couple years ago learned that I lean towards aphantasia. Back in high school, geometry was HARD. Calc 3 was HARD. It was presented as visualize and imagine, and I tried my best.
It just turns out other people could do that, and the fuzzy thing thing (or, more commonly, the ‘bulleted list of information’ that make up my imagination) was not “normal.”
If I’d known this (and my teachers were in a position to also know this), then maybe we’d spend more time with external visual models (what Geogebra now does for us, for example) to help me out.
Now that I teach future high school math teachers, it’s definitely something I talk about to normalize “not everyone can see in their mind.”
Do you have any advice for an experienced engineer who is considering changing careers to teaching high school math? I hear horror stories about teaching kids nowadays, with most having smartphones in class and AI use being rampant. Do you think there’s truth to that, or is it overblown?
I have a trans kid at 15. Living their best life. Knew the kid from day one (today’s their 15th birthday).
Guess what? It’s all their choice, suggestion, etc. While I’d prefer their original name (I mean, I chose that for a reason), everything else is obvious and right in retrospect.
Instead of just /watching/ a neighbor, you could /be/ a neighbor and get to know them. You might feel differently about your preconceptions when you actually know the human.
I do actually know them. I'm nice as can be and help the family with their cars. But what's being done to that kid is terrible and most likely permanent. I don't think a kid is old enough to know if this stuff should be done to them.
See, this is what I was going at above. You are not really concerned about wellbeing of the children. You are just obsessed about this single (manufactured) issue.
I use the insane, gross, evil thing they approve of to remind them that while they throw around the bigot word at normal people, they are the true gross evil in the world, but regardless of that, just their non approval of healthy sane normal people makes them the bigots.
Oh for sure, I'm the mad Men because I think children shouldn't be given surgery and life-altering hormones based on thoughts they have as children. Your position is so terrible that there's nothing you can say that will make it ever make any kind of sense.
I don't think you'll get anywhere arguing with these people, especially the ones who've bought into this cult to the extent that they've transed their own children.
They have to convince themselves they've done the right thing, because the alternative is horrifying.
> For example, in grad school I worked with lots of undergrads who thought they wanted to be professors. Then I’d send ‘em to my advisor Dan, and he would unpack them in 10 seconds flat. “I do this,” he would say, miming typing on a keyboard, “And I do this,” he would add, gesturing to the student and himself. “I write research papers and I talk to students. Would you like to do those things?”
I’m a professor, and I’d only add gesturing to represent teaching and banging head on a table to represent committee meetings.
The water safety is what nudged me off fountain pens and back to ballpoints. I use a bullet journal and don’t want water to wash it all away.
I know you can get fountain inks that are more resistant, but at that level of finickiness, I’d rather just carry a lower maintenance ballpoint, and the Jetstream is good enough that I don’t miss my other lovely pens.
PS: One time a reporter asked me what I thought of a particular food, and I described it as snacking on the wings of angels sent to earth for our dining pleasure, and they quoted me. My wife reminds me of this often.
You probably have an adblocker running. I also did this test with ‘Canada eta’ and got the expected result on top. But when I reloaded the page without my content blockers, the official Canadian website was more than 1.5 iPad screen scrolls down.
Yeah, of course. Anyone with a brain does. But "Kagi doesn't have ads" is a different statement than "Kagi's results are better than Google's." I've never seen anyone actually give a search term that Kagi does better at.
Isn’t a lack of adverts a prime reasons ‘Kagi’s results are better than Google’s’?
I hear the odd person say that they like the adverts but it’s hard to believe that’s a plus for the bulk of users.
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