Press conference starting shortly calling on @DonHarmonIL to let the elected school board bill have a floor vote in the Senate like he promised. We'll live tweet it here.

Labor leaders standing with elected, parents, community orgs and teachers @AFTunion, @J1Ramann, @SigchoFor25, SEIUHC,

of @KOCOmmunity & @J4J_USA: Mayor Lightfoot who said she would be different and support an elected board wants a hybrid that she controls

Brown: The senate president @DonHarmonIL who said he would be different and would stand with labor is refusing to call a bill

Next up Bob Reiter, @chicagolabor: the appointed board just represents the mayor's office. There is no reason why this school district should be different than any other district in IL. Parents need to elect their representatives

Front-end developer roadmap for 2021 🧵👇🏼

I started my web development journey exactly one year ago i,e. January 2020 and it's been a year since I'm in learning phase

In this thread I'll be covering

- All you need to learn about front-end development
- Tools and technologies
- Skills you need to learn
- Resources

First things first, you need an editor to write code. There are plethora of editors out there like atom, VS code, sublime etc

I recommend you to start with VS code. Why?👇🏼

🔹Many built-in features
🔹It's fast
🔹Large community
🔹IntelliSense code completion and debugging

Don't want to download an editor due to memory issue or something else?

Don't worry we have lots of online editors

Now you're all set to write code and create beautiful websites

A typical website can be divide into three phases

- HTML 🧱
- CSS 🎨
- JavaScript ⚙️

This is the 4th instalment of #deanehistory. Back to the Second World War today, but whilst in the 2nd instalment we looked at the very end, this is the very beginning.
Captain Sigismund Payne Best was a monocle sporting British intelligence officer in both world wars.

Based in the Netherlands between the wars, he ran our spy network in Holland & was drawn into a trap by the Nazis who dangled officers supposedly representing those interested in removing / assassinating Hitler. But were really, er, Nazis.

A series of meetings took place between Best & his team & the fake plotters.

The aim was to humiliate the Brits, paint us as manipulating / abusing Dutch neutrality, & provide a pretext for saying Dutch were violating their own neutrality (claims not without some merit).

As with much good subterfuge, the Nazis played hard to get, making Best & co fret that they didn’t believe that he was really an intelligence agent. We obligingly played some agreed codewords over the BBC to assure them he was.

A series of meetings took place, the location nudging closer to the German border – until finally at a café outside Venlo, right on the Dutch / German border.

Just a few thoughts for home-schooling parents as a parent who has had a 12-13 year old daughter out of mainstream school for most of the last 18 months. I appreciate that this won't help everyone (maybe just one person) but hope it brings comfort.

Our daughter has been in and out of mainstream school since October 2018 due to an ongoing medical condition she’s being treated for. The first few months were hard as she completely fell between the cracks of education and health care. She had no education for about 3-4 months

Her condition is not aided by extra anxiety and therefore we have had to take a soft approach to her education. Since sorting things out through various services, she was back at school part time for the last semester. Things were taken day by day

Although she is only studying certain subjects, she soon made up ground in those areas, and though she may not be top of her class, she is doing OK. Her mental well being remains most important to us.

Remember that the school system was very anxiety inducing for some of our kids. Some have thrived more under lockdown without peer pressure, constant testing and anxiety/expectations. As adults we can better coping skills to deal with anxiety and we can share them with our kids

How many people know they're autistic, so far.
These are the studies from various countries and teams.
England & Scotland data taken from the official school records.
The problem is, not everyone knows they're autistic.
The tests & assessments tend to find white males/

/because that's what they were expecting to find, many decades ago.
It simply never occurred to people that autism might 'look' different in e.g. females, BAME communities, older people, males who don't present in typically male ways, etc./

I suspect we are nowhere near finding most of the females.
Why do I suspect this? From conversation with diagnostic professionals who are updating their info and having 'oh heck!' moments.
From parents struggling to get their daughters diagnosed, whereas the son was easy/

/...from the number of autistic females I've encountered over the last decades who had gone 'under the radar' for so many years until someone finally had that 'aha!' moment.
And so many with identical presentations who are still struggling to get diagnosed/

Being clear that many diagnostic teams are fabulous.
It's simply a reality that the tools they were given were designed to pick white men.
Let's look at some examples:/

The Maoist struggle session is the only known end point for the traitors who will soon challenge us.

The time is coming when many of us will have to stand up to co-parents, school head teachers etc when they challenge us with what they know to be falsehoods.

The struggle👇

session is of course the same as the inquisition that was used in Europe in the Middle Ages. The technique was developed and used by the Jesuit Brotherhood, later in Mao’s China and now by the globalists. Nothing has changed.

The basics are that the enemy knows that he 👇

or she is telling lies. The object of the process is not truth but the victim’s throwing-away of the ability to decide. Domestic or workplace abusers of the more calculating kind use this method as a way of hobbling their victims, knowing that even if submission is not there, 👇

the fear of future assault will be.

The challenge that is coming, whether it is about vaccines being the only route to ‘herd immunity’ or how illness is spread by asymptomatic (healthy) people will one based on bogus scientific doctrine.

But do *not* focus on the untruths.👇

Their aim will not be to determine truth but to force us to submit to labels, whether ‘denier’, ‘anti-vaxxer’ or ‘conspiracy theorist’. This is the object of the struggle.

The traitors have also been trained to make you feel that you’re under observation. They will make 👇

A lot of people on Twitter have really strong opinions about grad degrees (MBA or MS). If you are a 25-year-old PM thinking about whether to do an MBA or not, just ask where you want to be by the time you are 40.

1/n

I did this exercise with someone a few months back, and his answer was Director at a FANG company in the US. He was thinking of doing a US MBA and then join a place like Amazon after graduation. I asked him to go to Linkedin, check profiles of Directors at Amazon.

2/n

Ignore outliers like someone selling their company to Amazon at 22 and then hacking the career ladder. Look at an average profile like yours. We all think we are exceptional/above average but we are probably not.

If you plot a graph, there will be people at the extremes.

And look at the middle.

Unless you are willing to take bets in your career with more risk than the average person, basically an alpha bet, mostly you will land there.

Also, remember that higher education is about optionality.

I was talking to a friend about why he chose to go for an MBA in spite of leading product at an early stage company. His answer was that if he ever wanted to move away from Product and take up a general management position at a non-tech company at 40, he should have that option.

Ugh... (*rolls eyes*)

One issue I haven't seen discussed widely in #education that has been a thorn in my career since day one is teacher certification...and I received something this morning to remind me how this thorn continues to persist.

A thread. 1/

I've seen it reported often over the past decade plus how there is suddenly a teacher shortage here and there, but what doesn't get reported is how little of an effort states put forth to try and recruit talented educators. In my experience, nearly the opposite has been true. 2/

Most recently, I had applied for a new cert in a state that shall remain nameless. I applied early in the school year knowing that paperwork takes time, hoping that by the time that paperwork was processed, I'd be able to look for a new job.

It's been 2 years now. Nothing. 3/

In 2011, I completed my MA in educational technology.
This master's degree program was so young at the time, no state had any sort of certification to go with it.

Seeing that State X now has an ed tech cert, I applied for that cert so I could apply for public school jobs. 4/

State X, however, told me that even though I had the master's degree that they were looking for AND the transcript to prove it, it still wouldn't be good enough for them.

Why?

They wanted to see the course descriptions for that program I took a decade ago now. 5/

Sex education is more than just putting condoms on bananas. Sex education is a foundation for our development as people. We know — it sounds totally awkward to talk about this with your fam. Don’t worry! We’ve got you ⤵️

Spark a convo by getting everyone involved ✨

Build a foundation to understand what everyone’s own experiences were and where they would like to see change.

Always helps to go over the basics: definitions, benefits, and what actually is problematic.

Hit ‘em with the overwhelming statistics in favor of sex education.

When you do media training for TV interviews, you learn some of the tactics for avoiding difficult questions. I'm speaking about
- deflection
- bridging
- deferring
These skills are key when you face high-level interviews on media.

Deflection is usually the easiest.

Q: Didn't you say Bitcoin was going to keep rising to $100k?
A: That's one thing I actually wanted to talk about. We are pretty rigorous with our research. In fact, recently, we upgraded our research platform with an AI System...

Bridging as the name implies means you connect from the question and move away to what you want to focus on. The emphasis on connecting the question to your answer is the key difference with deflection, which takes a sharp turn away from the question right from the beginning.

Q: Categorically, do you believe Nigeria can solve its power issue?
A: Categorically speaking, Nigeria's problem with power needs a proper definition. Is it Generation or transmission or tariffs? or Financing or a lack of political will? I think if we take the telecoms ndustry...

Deferring is the default practice for non-comms people when faced with a question about their company or a subject they don't want to talk about. This involves notifying the interviewer that there is someone better equipped to answer and that your response does not represent..

In the early 2010s, there was a lot of pushback from up-and-coming left media figures like Owen Jones and Laurie Penny to criticisms of their PMC and educational backgrounds.

"So what if we went to Oxford, or if our parents were solicitors?", the line of defence went. "Our hearts are in the right place. We fight for the many, not the few."

Ten years on, seeing where PMC domination of the left has taken the movement, we can revisit those criticisms and see the importance of the original pushback.

What a PMC parental background and a prep-school and Oxbridge education tend to provide their beneficiaries with is a high degree of entitlement, verbal polish and presentation, and an often unshakeable personal confidence.

Combined with the utopian and improvement- and uplift-focused aspects of left thought, this prior socialisation tends to produce a highly authoritarian form of left-managerialism, one in which the PMC left appoint themselves both moral spokespeople and moral technicians.

So I mean, what's stopping us from making it Medievalism Studies?

I mean, hell, even Greenblatt's beloved Poggio was just looking for something earlier to cosplay.
The fact that the humanists grabbed earlier medieval sources for art and script wasn't an oopsie. It was "earlier than Arthur."

If you have a young Edward III literally setting up a joust where everyone dresses as Arthurian characters in order to kick off what he hopes will be a genuine real-life chivalric order of the Round Table (we got the Garter instead. best laid plans, etc) you have cosplay.

And it keeps going. They're editing Chaucer and Langland, etc by the 16thc, and continuously if you consider scribal interventions. And they keep editing Chaucer.

The legal side invents a Middle Ages almost continuously, and pretty self-consciously, as they go, and it gets reinvented and enshrined in colonial law by the 18th (but the theorization begins as early as the 16th).

1/
I'm supposed to be preparing for a teaching conference but and I'm struggling with the impossible position teachers face in this perilous time.

Asymmetrical polarization is too kind a term for what we're experiencing.

"Fuckers" was also too kind, but pearls were clutched.

2/
The relationship between education and government of and by the people is self evident. Education- like roads and libraries, is a public good. But education is, as I've written before, incompatible with ideologies built on lies.

3/
Trumpism and education are incompatible. This isn't a partisan statement. There are Republicans, like @RepKinzinger , who reject the dishonesty at the very foundation of Trump's bid to reverse our election.

But where education concerns truth, Trumpism is built on lying.

4/
There's a vast, well-funded network of organizations dedicated to souring public support for higher education. They have been enormously successful.

5/
Education is popular and incompatible with the fossil fuel industry's goals. But trashing education itself isn't a winning message. Most parents want their kids to have access to the economic mobility that higher education has historically offered (before the debt crisis).

@erica_pandey @axios This article is so misleading. My thread:

@axios As a retired teacher with 30 years of experience in both private and public education, I challenge you to show me an average "private" religious-affiliated school that has tents or daily testing. You're comparing apples to oranges This is political propaganda, not journalism!

@axios Most "private" schools are Catholic/religious-affiliated schools, not elitist private schools popular with rich liberals that you're implying with misleading tweet. Religious-affiliated schools pay teachers much less and survive on bare-bones budgets.

@axios I don't know of any Catholic/religious-affiliated school that has money to build tents for outdoor instruction or pay for testing to stay open. This is awful reporting to lump all "private" schools together and not distinguish the difference. Propaganda! Journalism is DEAD!

@axios Using Poly Prep Country Day School and Boston Trinity Academy, a 6th-12th grade school, as your "examples" of most private schools is disingenuous, bordering on dishonest. These are the exceptions, not the rule for most private schools.

When schools (rightly) closed last week, we knew many working mums (& dads) would be plunged into the nightmare of trying to work AND look after their kids AND homeschool. So we @the_TUC asked them how they were managing. 55,630 parents replied (!), in four days, 7-10 Jan 1/

We knew the last lockdown hit mums hard. I say mums, cos it's still mums that do the majority of the childcare and who stepped back from paid work to look after their kids. Yes I know many dads do their fair share.

Here's what they told us. 9 in 10 said they were stressed and anxious. No wonder. Even with an understanding boss, it's hard. And for many mums, the kids at home all day meant they faced a catastrophic loss of income.

How are they managing? 65% are working from home and doing childcare. 25% are using annual leave (but that stores up problems for the long summer holidays later in the year). 18% have reduced their working hours. 14% are taking unpaid leave.

The government says furlough can be used if parents can't work cos childcare. But 40% didn't know this. 78% have not been offered furlough by their employer. And a totally unacceptable 68% who did ask for furlough were turned down for it by their boss.

ANOTHER ROUND OF 40 GENERAL KNOWLEDGE QUIZ QUESTIONS- 1. In Architecture, what is the purpose of a Gargoyle?

2. How many square inches in a square foot?

3. Which Singer-Songwriter formed the bands The Housemartins and The Beautiful South?

4. Whose notable works included writing The Ugly Duckling and The Emperor's New Clothes?

5. And whose notable works included writing Snow White and Hansel and Gretel?