It's so hot.

[conuly]

And I feel stupid whining, because I know the high 80s to low 90s isn't really that hot for July, not for everywhere... but I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.

In conclusion: It is too hot and I hate it.

**************

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Her missing wallet from the 1940s was found in a high school bathroom wall

Cute little fic about alien tourists

Yes, astronauts are baking cookies in space. No, they can’t eat them.

Eight Charts on How Americans Use Air Conditioning

Air conditioning brought buildings to new heights, but did it also make architects lazy?

Elementary Education Has Gone Terribly Wrong

The Strange Political Silence On Elder Care

Can America Fix Its Housing Crisis?

When a city of canals floods, what happens to waterway shantytowns?

How Norway turns criminals into good neighbours

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Touring the Israeli Occupation: Young U.S. Jews Get an Unflinching View (The NYTimes also posted what seems to be a related article perhaps a month ago: link)

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The Young Hands That Feed Us

For 30 years, we’ve trusted human-resources departments to prevent and address workplace sexual harassment. How’s that working out?

Schools still struggling with how to teach about slavery

U.S. dream pulls African migrants in record numbers across Latin America

Immigration Officials Use Secretive Gang Databases to Deny Migrant Asylum Claims

I Was One of 36 Jews Arrested Protesting ICE. Never Again Is Now.

From Libya to Texas, tragedies illustrate plight of migrants

Comments

[readerjane]

I hate it too. I know it's nothing like Texas or Arizona, but 80's temps just feel gross. Makes me want to stand in front of an open fridge all day (which of course would be irresponsible). I like 50's and 60's.

[conuly]

At least in Arizona it's a dry heat, isn't it? Here it's so muggy. Even when it cools down I want my A/C on or I can't breathe in my room.

[larryhammer]

It WAS dry, but starting today the monsoon moisture is pushing north. Today, and for the next several days, we're looking at 105+ with enough muggy to yutch things up but only 20% chance of thunderstorms.

[conuly]

:(

[alexseanchai]

"they have it worse" does not invalidate "you have it bad"

[alexseanchai]

ooooo asperimental cookie!

…you know what the approach to elementary education that the "has gone terribly wrong" article describes does do very well, though? it teaches kids to do work they don't understand, at the instruction of people they don't choose, for purposes they don't question, without getting anything out of the effort except a score or ranking they know damn well is meaningless, and possibly the approval of whoever told them to do it, maybe.

my, I wonder how the tippy-top of the capitalist kyriarchy could benefit from having citizens like those.

[siderea]

Ironically, and tragically, that method of education was introduced precisely to resist capitalist kyriarchy by teaching kids to be more critical, independent thinkers and to make school less a feeder system to factory grunt work. (O HAI ASK ME ABOUT THE HISTORY OF SCHOOL REFORM IN THE US!)

This would seem to be evidence in favor of the hypothesis "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house".

Also, as a side note, domesticating the American populace to capitalism - what you describe - was the aim of the education system only to about 1970 at the latest. Since then, as it's become clear that the US doesn't need factory workers any more, industrial interests stopped bothering with educational policy; my impression is that the subjugatory agenda of modern schooling fell over into a political aim, of neutralizing resistance to political authority everywhere and of promoting theocracy where they can get away with it. Where once the purpose of schooling was to make obedient workers, now it is to make easily lead voters.

[alexseanchai]

the thing I describe does pretty well at making easily led voters too, so

[siderea]

Yeah, it didn't need much retooling. Versatile that way.

[dewline]

And the reverse is also true. "I have it bad" does not invalidate "They have it worse", either. I need to remember this.

[siderea]

Elementary Education Has Gone Terribly Wrong

I was super prepared to hate this, but think it might have some points.

I'm still mistrustful of it, because it fits within a vast history of rhetoric around public education in the US that presents arguments of the form, "OH NO TEACHING POOR (BLACK) CHILDREN TO REASON IS TERRIBLE FOR THEM. THEY AREN'T CUT OUT FOR IT AND IT WILL ONLY CONFUSE THEM." And let me be clear, these are arguments aimed at specific educational methods or even curricula, to disqualify them.

Since this exact argument was made in against constructivist math ("New Math") curricula which taught math for comprehension instead of "drill-and-kill" memorization, I have a certain skepticism. That skepticism was not at all mollified by the really specious example it opens with.

But the evidence the article presents is interesting - and it also fits with some of the things I know and believe about the psychology of education.

And also has some resonances with criticisms I have of the "skill based" movement in psychotherapy.

Interestingly thought-provoking.

ETA: Further thought: this isn't actually an argument against teaching reading comprehension, it's an argument that teaching reading comprehension in the absence of cognizance of knowledge level - and of knowledge level differences between students - is a bad way to teach reading comprehension. Appreciating the role of knowledge in comprehension has to be vital in teaching reading comprehension. I'm entirely willing to grant the article's contention that reading comprehension is a function of knowledge.

But it is also a function of certain reading comprehension skills. Those skills are very worth learning. But they can't possibly be taught in ignorance of the students' knowledge levels. Consider the baseball example: for one of the kids unfamiliar with the rules of baseball, extracting the meaning from the text is not impossible, if one has certain skills and can get certain vocab defined. But if you try to teach a class those skills when half of them experience no challenge comprehending the text because being versed in baseball it's all effortlessly transparent to them, and the other half find it impenetrable, that class isn't going to work out so hot: for half the kids, the task is below their Vygotskian Zone of Proximal Develop, for the other half it's above. Nobody wins.

To teach those skills, you need a text that is "wugs" based, or reasonably equally unintelligible to all the students - but not completely beyond them.

[conuly]

I was super prepared to hate this, but think it might have some points.

Yeah, me too, and yet....

[thewayne]

When I left the library yesterday afternoon, my brain said 'Huh, feels hotter out today than yesterday', but I didn't look at my car's thermometer. Had to do some errands in town, when I finished my last errand and began heading home I finally looked.

100 degrees.

That's a good +5 or more over what it had been running, so definitely a bit warmer. Not unusual, it's just that the temperature had been running low to mid 90s, I was wondering when it was going to hit the century mark.

[zesty_pinto]

You're just prepping yourself for the horror that is August. August is when we all suffer.

[conuly]

Honestly, summers aren't that bad in NYC if you don't have to take the train. I think it's because of geography, but we never get that hot for very long.

Climate change will fuck that, I'm sure.

[zesty_pinto]

Really? I remember the days when I'd get haze and ozone warnings in the late parts of summer. Those were the hardest days, especially with the humidity at full force.

I agree it's going to get worse. I don't miss being there, especially since triple digits are getting more common.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

My sympathies; I hate the heat too. Fortunately we haven't had much of it yet; Summer doesn't really start here till late July. What I'm dreading way more than the heat is the wildfire smoke.

I love the Braxian tourists!

[conuly]

The Braxians were just so charmingly adorable.