I got the feedback today that my views on schools were too confident

I will die on this hill; hold to me to it

School closure will be the absolute worst public policy decision for the generation to come

The most discriminatory, net neg & cruel

It will be found to have made nearly no dent in the spread of the virus

The risks to teachers and staff will be found to be modest & modifiable

But the damage to kids and the very institution of public schools will be cataclysmic

The stories of undetected child abuse will be so powerful that every person who thinks it is reasonable to close schools, in this irrational way we have done in the US, will change their tune overnight

The damage to upward mobility will fall along class and racial lines, and this country will be more feudal

The fate of the nation itself-- democracy and those who participate in it-- will be made vulnerable.

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)

50 Common Mistakes most developers make while starting out

A thread🧵👇

⚡️1. Focusing on completing courses instead of coding (or completing projects) .

⚡️2. Skipping the fundamentals.

⚡️3. Not joining a developer community.

⚡️4. Not creating projects from scratch.

⚡️5. Skipping Data Structures.

⚡️6. Not reading the documentation.

⚡️7. Trying to learn everything in one day.

⚡️8. Blindly following the tutorial and not extending the code or making their own version of code.

⚡️9. Not asking for help when needed.

⚡️10. Never commenting the code (In required places).

⚡️11. Endlessly Planning instead of Building.

⚡️12. Learning different technologies instead of mastering one.

⚡️13. Not reading stuff (books/articles/documentation).

⚡️14. Not maintaining a balance between programming and not programming.

⚡️15. Not finishing what they started

⚡️16. Not building stuff they care about.

⚡️17. Getting overwhelmed by others' progress/headstart

⚡️18. Not knowing when to quite and start over.

⚡️19. Not practising enough.

⚡️20. Endlessly buying Udemy courses.

1/ 🚨BREAKING: Lawsuit filed today against educational agencies, teachers, principal, & CEO responsible for hosting workshops requiring children to make public professions about their racial, sexual, gender & religious identities, some of which were singled out for interrogation.

2/ Educators directed the plaintiff "to reveal his identities in a controlled, yet non-private setting, to scrutiny and official labeling," and are "coercing him to accept and affirm politicized and discriminatory principles and statements that he cannot in conscience affirm."

3/ The educators "repeatedly threatened William Clark with material harm including a failing grade and non-graduation if he failed to comply with their requirements."

4/ Plaintiffs claim that the educators' "coercive and intrusive behavior compelled William Clark’s protected speech and invaded his privacy, violating his constitutional rights under the First Amendment and his due process rights under the Fourteenth Amendment."

5/ The new curriculum, based on Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality, was done stealthily: "The generic name and syllabi provided to parents remained the same," and "parents were not made aware of the ideological turn in the curriculum."

I’ve compiled 6 tips for the move online based on @AccessTCD & @SchoolofEdTCD research. During #schoolclosures last year we surveyed 1000+ students and 700+ teachers about their experience of #onlinelearning. Although it's difficult to be back here, we have learned so much. (1/N)

1. Prioritise student & staff wellbeing. Connection before content. Everyone is dealing with different circumstances at home often unbeknownst to others. Check-in with students and colleagues. (2/N)

2. A whole-school approach is needed when moving teaching and learning online. Our research suggests that schools who used a whole school approach had higher engagement from students and higher collaboration among teachers. (3/N)

3. Research suggests providing live or recorded lessons for students is important for high student engagement. Connect with each other, students don’t want double the amount of homework, they want to learn from their enthusiastic teachers and see the face behind the screen. (4/N)

4. Teacher feedback means the world to students. It helps them to improve, motivates them to keep up engagement and strengthens student/ teacher relationships. Assign a meaningful amount of work to students that you have the time to respond to. (5/N)

What is the Quincy Institute?
What was the purpose of its establishment?
Who is the Mastermind behind it ?
I’ll explain in the following that Quincy institute was founded by the most powerful and famous Islamic regime lobbyist @tparsi based in the United States of America .

1. @QuincyInst for Responsible Statecraft
An American think tank founded in 2019
Location: Washington DC, USA
The initial budget of this institution; Includes half a million dollars from the Soros Foundation (George Soros)
And the Cook Foundation (Charles J. Cook).

2- George Soros,Hungarian-American businessman and a Billionaire, investor, political activist, and an author.Soros is the Chairman of the Board of the Open Society Foundation and Soros Capital Management and is the founder and Chairman of the Board of Directors of Soros Capital.

3- Charles J.Koch, a businessman, entrepreneur and philanthropist. He is the Chairman and CEO of Cook Industries.
He is the eldest child of Fr. Cook, the founder of Cook Industries, member of the Cook family and one of the main inventors of the new gasoline refining technology.

4- As described by the founders of Quincy; The purpose of the Quincy Institute (Research Institute and Office of Studies and Research) is to promote ideas to redirect the American foreign policy from endless wars around the world .

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.

Most Helpful GitHub Repositories for JavaScript Developers

A Thread🧵👇

⚡️30-Days-Of-JavaScript

As the name suggests learn JavaScript in 30

⚡️ es6-cheatsheet

A cheatsheet containing ES2015 [ES6] tips, tricks, best practices and code snippet examples for your day to day

⚡️ The Algorithms - JavaScript

All algorithms implemented in

⚡️ 33-js-concepts

33 Concepts Every JavaScript Developer Should

Today is the International Day of Education, & an urgent question to ask is;
Are our universities becoming better?
Will technology disrupt their existence? And
Will they become obsolete very soon?

Here are some reasons why I believe they will, if we fail to redesign them.

>>>

1. Many universities are wasting the time of young people. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is here & it is demand specific. The world needs specializations & universities aren't providing that which is why more companies like Google, IBM, Apple don't prioritize a college degree.

Why do we import foreign medicines & even vaccines produced by other countries when we have hundreds of universities? Why do over 70% of our microbiologists or biochemists never practice upon graduation but choose to become fashion designer, bankers or makeup artists ?

Why will a roadside mechanic be better at fixing a knocked engine than a mechanical engineering graduate? Why can't computer science graduates build apps or diagnose computer languages? This is because our education curriculum is outdated & irrelevant to today's world.

2. Vocational & technical workers can earn more from a non-degree education than a four-year degree.
With the fast growing economy which requires more “technicians, artisans & vocational professionals”. These professions should also be given equal respect and dignity.

On October 16 2020, a secondary school teacher named Samuel Paty was beheaded with a meat cleaver in the street of a small town 20 miles down the Seine from Paris. 1/x

Paty's murderer, a young Chechen refugee, had never met the teacher. The killer was incited to the crime by a multi-day campaign of defamation and disinformation on French social media. 2/x

For 5 years, Paty had taught his classes a unit on free speech and its limits in a democratic society. As part of the discussion, he showed his students some of the famous Charlie Hebdo cartoons - after inviting those who might be offended to leave and then rejoin the class. 3/x

One parent of one student - not the student herself - then set in motion a campaign of denunciation against Paty. And the result was a crime that shocked France and pulled tens of thousands to vigils and protests. 4/x

France has suffered terrible crimes in the name of religion before the Paty killing. We're only 5 years from the horrifying nightclub attacks that killed 130 in November 2015. But past attacks caught France by surprise. This murder announced itself in advance. 5/x

1. It is as if Pastors do not know the vocation of herding. The evil they continually spew against herdsmen really show them off as having poor Bible knowledge. Herdsmen is a common vocation throughout biblical times or do you now deny the scriptures? Let us go on a lesson/

2. Gen 4: 20 "Adah bore Jabal; he was the father of the nomadic herdsmen."

Do you know that Shepherds are same as Herdsmen?
Abraham and Jacob, Moses and King David were all Herdsmen.

Do you know also that Herdsmen have always quarrelled over pasture for grazing? More lessons:

Gen 13:7 "and there was quarreling between the herdsmen of Abram’s livestock and the herdsmen of Lot’s livestock. At that time the Canaanites and the Perizzites were living in the land.

Mediation was also the tool for resolution of conflicts:
Gen 13: 8-"Then Abram said to Lot, “Please, let’s not have quarreling between you and me, or between your herdsmen and my herdsmen, since we are relatives."

Gen 26: 20 "But the herdsmen of Gerar quarreled with Isaac’s herdsmen and said, “The water is ours!” So he named the well Quarrel because they quarreled with him."
Gen 26:21 "When his workers started digging another well, those herdsmen quarreled about that one, too."

In Europe, schools are closing as studies show schoolchildren can play a significant role in spreading infections

1/



As U.S. authorities debate whether to keep schools open, a consensus is emerging in Europe that children are a considerable factor in the spread of Covid-19—and more countries are shutting schools for the first time since the spring.

2/

Closures have been announced recently in the U.K., Germany, Ireland, Austria, Denmark and the Netherlands on concerns about a more infectious variant of the virus first detected in the U.K. and rising case counts despite lockdowns.

3/

While the debate continues, recent studies and outbreaks show that schoolchildren, even younger ones, can play a significant role in spreading infections.

4/

"The recent shutdown of schools was especially dramatic in England. U.K. PM Boris Johnson initially planned to keep elementary schools there open after the Christmas break, but changed course amid soaring infections. After one day, schools were closed until further notice

5/

New Report: Funding students instead of institutions in Georgia

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.