So, I know it's the weekend but if I don't say all this I may burst.

A thread for those who think school days should be extended and holidays shortened to make up for 'lost learning'.

SCOOP: San Diego Unified School District tells white teachers they are guilty of “spirit murdering” black children and should undergo “antiracist therapy for White educators.”

I've obtained explosive whistleblower documents from the training session. Let's dig in. 🧵

This summer, San Diego Unified hired critical race theorist Bettina Love for a district-wide training on "[challenging] the oppressive practices that live within ... school organizations." The district forbade recordings, but my whistleblower took screenshots and detailed notes.

According to the whistleblower notes, Love began by saying that "racism runs deep" in America and that blacks alone "know who America really is." Love claimed that public schools "don't see [blacks] as human," perpetuate “anti-Blackness,” and "spirit murder babies."

The concept of “spirit murder” is at the heart of Love’s teachings. Love writes that public schools are guilty of “the spirit murdering of Black and Brown children,” defines as “a death that is built on racism and intended to reduce, humiliate, and destroy people of color.”

During the presentation, Love argued that “Whiteness reproduces poverty, failing schools, high unemployment, school closings, and trauma for people of color.” She insisted that “white educators must take responsibility” because they uphold “white supremacy culture.”

I often say to grad students: a reasonable thing to aim for in grad school is ~2-3 essentially complete and posted papers, alongside your JMP. This often looks like your JMP, plus your 2nd-yr paper, a paper from RA'ing for a faculty, or from working with classmates

Of course, some people get top jobs with only one very, very good paper. This is very risky though - you don't know ex-ante whether your paper will be very good! Most schools care about productivity, so having a couple of completed papers helps

Even if the papers are not change-the-world papers. Also, it exercises your paper-writing muscle. Not everyone comes into grad school ready to write ECMA's!

One "mistake" I sometimes see is some students don't take the 2nd year paper seriously enough. That's basically your only big milestone other than your JMP, so if all the time you put into the 2nd year paper doesn't produce a draft, that's a pretty big time sink

Another mistake, ironically, is taking field class paper requirements too seriously. If you take 3 field classes a quarter, 3 quarters, that's 12 papers! There's no way you can write a different one for each class

On teaching without grades.
A long-ish (20-tweet) 🧵. Here goes.

So, you know how you write lots of comments on an essay/exam, and the student looks at the grade and never reads the comments? That's because when grades enter the picture, the learning stops. /1

Instead of focusing on learning, there is a lot of negotiation: can we find one or two points on the midterm as the student is just on the verge of A-?

Everyone is just on the verge of the next grade.

And all the evals are not about the class but about the grading. Really? /2

Is the grade at all informative? If you are just below the A- or just above that, is that giving the student any information about how to improve their knowledge or skills? No. t is just a useless, demoralizing & stressful smoke screen /3

Students' abilities, challenges, and learning are multidimensional. Providing feedback on these many dimensions is much more useful for promoting growth and learning than are quantized unidimensional grades. /3.5

There is an alternative: do away with grades. Keep the feedback -- lots of it (this is not less work for us teachers) but never summarize it in a unidimensional uninformative number (unless you absolutely have to). /4

Unexpected #Etymology

Words you wouldn't guess are etymologically linked.

An ongoing, continually updated thread 👇🏻

Medicine and remedy both come from the Latin verb medeor, meaning to heal.

Medicine comes from the Old French medecine, from the Latin medicina meaning medicine.

Remedy comes from the Old French remede, from the Latin

Feminism, fawn and fetus both come from the PIE root *dʰeh₁(y)-, meaning to nurse or

Pine (tree) & Piñata (papier-mâché container) both come from the Latin pinus—meaning pine.

Piñata (Spanish), came from piña meaning pineapple, as the paper-covered box resembles one. Piña comes from the Latin pinea meaning pinecone (derived from

Whiskey and wash both come from the Proto-Indo-Euro root meaning "water; wet."

Whiskey (Irish uisce beatha & Scottish uisge-beatha) literally means "water of life."

Wash cames from the Middle English weschen, meaning "to