Happy Monday!

We combined a list of helpful resources from @TundeTASH and @myfreelancehq

This thread entails TOP TEN (10)

🤝 Sites to learn Excel for free

🤝 Sites for online education

🤝 Sites for your career

🤝 Sites for interview preparation

SCOOP: Seattle Public Schools tells teachers that the education system is guilty of “spirit murder” against black children and that white teachers must “bankrupt [their] privilege in acknowledgement of [their] thieved inheritance.”

Let's review the whistleblower documents.👇

The trainers begin by claiming that teachers are colonizers of Native American "ancestral lands" and that “the United States was built off the stolen labor of kidnapped and enslaved Black people’s work, which created the profits that created our nation.”

The participants identify themselves by both gender pronouns and race labels. While it has become commonplace in academia to use gender pronoun identifiers, this is perhaps the first example of an institution creating the expectation for explicit race-labeling in the workplace.

The trainers tell white teachers that they "must commit to the journey" of anti-whiteness, even if their "lizard-brain" makes them "afraid that [they] will have to talk about sensitive issues such as race, racism, classism, sexism, or any kind of ‘ism.’"

The central message is that white teachers must recognize that they “are assigned considerable power and privilege” because of their “possession of white skin.” To atone for this guilt, they must “bankrupt [their] privilege in acknowledgement of [their] thieved inheritance.”

Starting PhD student pro tips:

- Keep a backlog of “small ideas” that you don’t find the time to work on. Soon enough you will be asked to supervise undergrad students in some capacity, and these ideas will be exactly what they need to get started.

- In the first two years worry about learning and getting settled in your research field. In year 3+ you can worry about churning out papers (but that’s much easier of you have a good understanding of the field and its methods).

- Believe your advisor on strategy matters, believe in yourself when it comes to details and results (we have good intuition about what’s interesting and important, but only you know what you have actually done and what it means).

- Talk to other students as often as you can. No, they likely won’t know how to solve the specific issue you are currently having, but over time you will learn more from your colleagues than from your advisor.

- Relatedly, other people (your advisor, other profs, other students, reviewers) are neither idiots nor almighty gods of knowledge. They will have insights, but some of the things they tell you will turn out to be garbage.

a higher and higher % of DMs, emails, etc. to me are from indians asking about their genetics. since there are 700 million indians on the internet. makes sense

i'll be publishing my 6K-word essay in indian genetics https://t.co/ycMGoZh13z

but some general points 1/n

- there's a lot of structure. which means you can look at an indian's genome and get an immediate sense of things and a little digging get's granularity very quickly

eg i guessed @suryasays family's jati after about 15 minutes (he was vague about this and had to ask mom)

- a lot of the variation is not partitioned geographically. very different from europe & china where geography is the dominant predictive variable.

indians have lots of structure which means non-geographical (jati) matter a lot. tamil brahmins more like UPites than other tamils

- the 'india-cline' pioneered by reich patterson is pretty explanatory. on one end you have west eurasian adjacent groups. jatts ppl in the NW and upper caste. and other end something away from them (more toward andamese). dalits, southerners etc.

- some groups are off the cline. that means they are not well modeled by the distribution. e.g.,

* parsies (75% iranian)
* bengalis (5-20% east asian)

School is an astonishing failure of modern society.

We're taught about dinosaurs before learning how to function as people.

Thread: Life lessons I wish school taught all of us.

Schools don't teach us to:

• Think critically
• Nurture curiosity
• Save and prep taxes
• Sustain relationships
• Have difficult convos
• Navigate mental health

Yet they teach how to:

• Differentiate dinosaurs
• Memorize the periodic table
• Make paper snowflakes

Why is school curriculum so broken?

1. Awareness: Those in power don't realize how bad it is.

2. Priorities: It's not a pressing issue. Voters care about the cost of education—not enough about WHAT is taught.

3. What to do: Shout to the politicians and educators in power.

Onto the lessons I wish I was taught.

These are the ones on my mind lately. This list could be 1,000 items long. Add yours to the thread.

Here we go.

Many relationship troubles emerge from one root cause:

Assuming bad intent.

One of the highest ROI things we can teach our children:

Start by assuming good intent: Train your reflex to ask questions before making assumptions.

Always lead with curiosity—never critique.

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'.

The narrative of 'lost learning' is based on the myth that in-school learning is the be-all-and-end-all for all pupils at all times. It isn't. Not all pupils engage all day in school. Not all pupils complete every task set every day, in school or as part of home learning

Part of a teacher's job, and one that we do hourly, is to assess where pupils are along a progression of learning. When they reach a milestone we challenge and extend, where we think revision and consolidation of previous learning is needed we plan and deliver that.

What we don't do when there is revision and consolidation required is declare that any child's life chances are lost. We seek support in school, at home and when necessary from our colleagues in education and third-sector partners.

When a child misses schooling through illness, family circumstance, war, refugee status, any non-attendance, we don't write off their life chances, we don't make them work longer hours and shorten holidays. We take a holistic approach to the support needed and work to meet that.