1/9 - “In the second wave we acquired much more evidence that schoolchildren are almost equally, if not more infected by SARS-CoV-2 than others.”

THREAD on the Ofqual consultation.

The exams situation is a fiasco on top of a debacle. Yes - loads of kids have missed out on schooling. That is bad. Yes - the provision across the system is the most unequal it has been in living memory. That is bad.

The solution proposed by the DfE and Ofqual is to get teachers to submit a grade that they think their students are “performing at”. Here there are a number of problems:

Problem 1: what does “performing at” a grade even mean? An exam grade is comparative - if someone has any particular grade all it tells you is where they are compared to their peers. There is NO SUCH THING as “grade 6 content” or “working at grade 6”.

This is as true in maths, where content is cumulative, as it is in something like English, where examination is much more subjective. If you ask teachers all across the country to grade, you will get substantial variability because objective criteria simply do not exist.

That’s not our fault, it’s not a training need, its not that we don’t know what we’re doing. It’s literally the way the system has been designed. You can’t train someone in a concept that does not exist.

Hi teachers and parents 👋 I have complied a short list of useful online maths tools and virtual manipulatives to assist you with distance learning. I have included the curriculum area and suggested what class group they would be most suitable for. See below! #mathschat #edchatie

This website allows you to create a graph. Useful for 5th/6th class. Children can create pie charts, bar charts, etc. adding in their own data and designing and labelling the X and Y axis themselves. Charts are easily

Online protractor. Useful for 5th/6th class. The teacher can use screen sharing to how to use a protractor. Children who do not have a protractor at home can use this to measure angles.

Exploring area and perimeter. Useful for 4th - 6th class. Tasks can be set to create shapes of a specific area/perimeter. There is also a game that can be used for formative

Interactive geo-board. Useful for 1st - 6th class for exploring perimeter and area and the characteristics of shapes. Images can be saved easily to be shared with the teacher via email, screen share etc.

1/ THREAD. MFA in Creative Writing at Chapman University. Application deadline: February 1. That's MONDAY! Let me say a few things about our program first, and then I'll provide a CODE for an application FEE WAIVER at the end of this thread. #MFA #gradschool #creativewriting

2/ While some of our MFA students focus on one genre, many write across genres. @tryphena_yeboah published her first poetry chapbook last year with @AkashicBooks, has published stories @NarrativeMag, and is writing a thesis in fiction with thesis director Richard Bausch.

3/ Likewise, @lizharmer published her first novel with @penguinrandom while she was an MFA student here, her second novel is forthcoming in 2022, and she drafted a memoir as her thesis, with me as the thesis director. Lots of our students take a workshop in a second genre.

4/ MFA faculty work across genres too. Jim Blaylock is a steampunk fiction writers (see Homunculus), and now he writes essays (see a couple in @poetswritersinc). @TheMil10 writes plays & poems & I write poems & essays. Together, our expertise covers a broad range of aesthetics.

5/ All incoming MFA students begin with Aspects of a Writer in their first fall semester. This course focuses on sustaining a writing life, publishing, and fostering literary culture. When I teach the course, each student forms a Writing Life Plan based on their own goals.

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)

You know what I don’t miss? Parent teacher conferences.

Most of Rocketkid’s teachers were lovely, but we had two that still stick out in my mind as sad/hilarious.

The first one, he was in elementary school. The teacher said it was ‘important’ for us to come in.

1/

So we worried about that for two days until the meeting. What could be wrong? It’s scary for parents to be left hanging like that.

So we meet his teacher, goatee and sunglasses...we live in the boonies and yet there’s something here like he’s trying to be a player.

2/

Not like a lady-player, like he’s got an image of himself in his head. We like teachers, but this guy’s manner is just weirdly kind of pushy a little bit.

Anyway, we sit does in the kid chairs, he’s behind his desk, again, weirdly focused on ‘power,’ somehow.

No idea why,

3/

We ask about our son, he acts as if he forgot that’s why we’re there, says some random stuff, all normal, nothing at all worthy of a conference. I mean, contact and communication is important, but thus just feels off-the cuff entirely.

4/

So then suddenly he gets really intense, but pretends being casual. Like it just occurred to him.

And he says to me, ‘So, I hear you’re a writer.’

What?

I tell him yes, I write comics and some animation and stuff.

He says. ‘I looked you up.’

5/