Bibliotectress

Well, I had been happy with YouTube music for years, but I’m frustrated by this at the moment:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/songs-blocked-youtube-legal-dispute-sesac-1236017120/

Ugh. We caught a kid doing that in my high school library last May. We radioed for help. The campus supervisor walked him outside, talked to him about it, and sent him back to us to finish the test he was working on. I couldn’t believe it. Later, we told admin about it and had to write witness statements. He was a freshman and said it’s what he does at home when he’s sitting around, and didn’t realize he was doing it. None of the students know, as far as I’m aware. We all kept it very quiet.

Fun fact! Erin Hunter is a pseudonym for a collective of authors including Tui Sutherland! She wrote Wings of Fire after she stopped writing/editing Erin Hunter books. I found out while I was working in an elementary school library.

Not my favorite, but I recently finished the A Court of Thorns and Roses series by Sarah J. Maas. Nothing in them is original, and she heavily borrows from folk tales and mythology, but she makes it very satisfying. She’s REALLY good at knowing what her audience wants, imo, so it was fun to read.

I’d you enjoyed Breath of the Wild, you’ll probably love Tears of the Kingdom. Some people felt it wasn’t different enough from Breath of the Wild, but there’s so much more to explore. And there was a part in the story that was so emotional, it made me ugly cry.

Honestly, I’m at a loss. It’s so hard to get a single school of teachers to stick to one policy, let alone at a district or state level. When I send an all-staff email at my school (and they’re occasionally important with scheduling details), Outlook often tells me that only 67% of them even opened it.

I feel like you’d either have to: a) incorporate cellphones as a tool in class and have standard repercussions (e.g. 1st/2nd time earn a detention, 3rd time earn a Saturday school) for kids texting/on social media, or b) do something like a box on the desk so it’s visible but they can’t touch it.

I just don’t think it’s possible to ban them at school. Too many parents don’t respect any school authority figures after COVID with all the culture war stuff (fight to return to full day school, fight to not wear masks, fight to censor bipoc and lgbtq+ books/lessons/celebrations, etc.). I think either way, it’ll just end up being another shitty part of a teacher’s job.

I work in a high school in a California school district where they’re discussing banning cell phones.

Most teachers I’ve talked to about it think it’s really fucking stupid because you’re not going to be able to ban them, partly because a TON of parents showed up at the school board meeting to say they would send them with their kid anyway for a variety of reasons. The board also talked about different things they could buy to take phones and lock them up during class or as students come in. Most of the solutions were pretty expensive, and some of the schools are literally falling apart, so that also pissed people off.

A great start would be to have a campus-wide rule that is CONSISTENT. Some teachers give out a detention if they even see the phone. Some do activities with QR codes and use them as tools. Some have boxes on the corner of their desk and students are required to keep their phone in the box so the teacher can see if they reach for it. We have students with free periods, and if they don’t go home, they hang out outside around campus or in the library. Should phones be banned then too? Or just during class?

There are so many ways to try to deal with it, and at least in my school (not even the district as a whole), every teacher deals with it differently. I doubt the state of New York is all that different.

Anywhere not on the coast or high in mountains, yes. I’m in a large valley, and summers can be pretty rough. Not Phoenix rough, but still rough.

Wow that’s a huge hail ball! I get excited when they’re marble-sized.

This is really making me miss home. Maybe I’ll move back in a few years.

Thank you for the detailed explanation! I remember seeing it on reddit, but never knew why.

Was it difficult to emigrate from the US to Taiwan? Are there stringent requirements?

I realized that was adults deliberately making the holidays special. And the shitty thing about being an adult (unless your SO is like, from the Clause family) is that you kind of have to do that for yourself, and you’re probably going to have to do boring adult shit to make that happen. Like, you might literally be putting something like “Bake cookies/Watch ‘The Grinch’” into your calendar. There is a lot of little things you can do as well - play some music, get some scented candles, stick a bowl of decorative pinecones out, etc.

This is the most real advice I’ve seen on Lemmy. It really fucking sucked realizing that no one was going to make things special for me (mostly because I hated the realization that I was expecting someone/something else to make my life more fun). Celebrating holidays and doing seasonal things that are special for the time of year REALLY help break up the monotony of the grind of everyday life (work, kids, bills, house work, ad nauseum). It would be nice to have someone else create that magic for me, but… that doesn’t really happen as an adult. You have to make things fun for yourself, and for others if you can.

You’re right; he didn’t specifically say that. He called a Twitter post that said Jewish people hate white people was “so right.” And that’s a big Neonazi thing.

So… he didn’t say Hitler was right, just that a major Nazi tenet is.

My desperate hope to someday meet Australian pirates has been horribly crushed.

I thought it sounded more like “Yeah narr”