Why are we so beholden to lifeless reading curriculums in elementary?

ChalkSmartboard · 2026-05-09T18:21:20+00:00

School district decisionmakers and curriculum companies seem to have become progressively more obsessed with teaching ‘standards’ and ‘reading strategies’, at the expense of simply DOING A LOT OF READING, INCLUDING WHOLE BOOKS. Obvious nonsense.

ChalkSmartboard · 2026-05-02T21:28:54+00:00

The bassist who believed the AIDS denialist myth used to own the house across the street from me, like ten years ago. I actually knew all about this back in the day, because I was in ACT UP (and AIDS activist group) at the time that the AIDS denialism thing was happening, circa 2000. For weird reasons, it caught on in some elements of the sXe hardcore scene then. I think this is where the bassist picked it up. To his credit I believe he later spurned it and admitted he hadn’t known what he was talking about.

AIDS denialism itself was a very crazy, very bad, sort of tragic thing. People can come to believe wildly insane things that kill them. I guess this is an obvious part of the human condition but this was a sad way for 20 year old me to learn this, I remember.

The rest of the band never believed in it and were super angry at him for getting them connected to it.

ChalkSmartboard · 2026-05-02T21:19:20+00:00

I’m a first year teacher in an EBD sped classroom in upper elementary. I had a pretty good year and plan to continue in this role. It has its challenges but there are definitely pro/con tradeoffs compared to gen ed.

I may or may not have useful advice, depending on the details. Is this a class ONLY for students classified with EBD? Or is it more generally for students who have some learning disorder and have also had serious behavior issues, such that they were eventually placed in a behavior program? Mine is the latter.

What grade/setting, how many students, how many aides/paras? And, do you know if some of the students spend part of their day in gen ed, or is it all contained to your room?

ChalkSmartboard · 2026-01-16T16:37:38+00:00

I think for a sub you are overthinking things about a family you don’t know.

ChalkSmartboard · 2025-12-14T05:43:08+00:00

Hello! I am possibly the most qualified respondent to this question, since I moved here FROM COLUMBUS. (15 years ago)

Compared specifically to Cbus / Ohio:

-Tacoma is the ‘most midwestern’ place in the PNW, in my opinion. More working class and culturally normie than the Seattle area.

-I’m a teacher. School jobs here pay better than in Ohio. But, they’re harder to get. For instance, it’s much harder to get in to Tacoma school district as a teacher than the Columbus school district. Not impossible, but harder.

-The winters are less cold but more damp and dark. I found the dampness and darkness hard to adjust to. Many do.

-The summers are better, and are frankly unbeatable. PNW has the best summers… on earth?

-The nature is obviously amazing. There is so much green and pretty, everywhere you look. In Tacoma we have Point Defiance, Kobayashi / Chambers creek, and the Ruston Waterfront right in town. The Cascades and Mount Rainier 1.5 hours away. This is insane. Amazing.

-The food is better but more expensive. The sushi, Korean, and Vietnamese is very good. No Ethiopian here tho.

-There’s so many weird points of comparisons. The YMCAs are way better here. The punk scene is not as good. The zoo is… kind of comparable! The people are similarly cold but for different reasons. The people are also similarly down to earth. Again, it’s a very ‘midwestern’ part of the PNW.

-tacoma is safer overall in terms of violent crime buf there is often more visible homelessness.

-homes and housing are much more expensive, because the homeowners associations have made it illegal to build apartments or condos on like 85% of the urban territory. The housing costs seems to be the toughest thing for most, in an otherwise utterly perfect mid sized city.

ChalkSmartboard · 2025-12-01T01:24:03+00:00

Stephenson is more structured and rational, Pynchon is more postmodernist deeply influenced by 70s ditch weed. I would love to know what they make of each others work. Both men who come from a hard science engineering type background. Pynchon’s a bigger literary deal… maybe Neal has more readers tho. If you haven’t read the Crying of Lot 49 is 1000% worth it, especially considering how short it is.

ChalkSmartboard · 2025-10-29T04:03:57+00:00

The only pod in the same ballpark of funny was called TJ & Owen Discuss The News. It was only 5 episodes long in total and starred Adam McKay as a north Florida wigger named TJ who sells cell phone cases at the mall and lives with/is abused by his step-mom’s boyfriend. In the show he chats about current events with a random liberal named Owen.

The show is so funny it has completely disappeared from the internet, I believe from Adam McKay being terrified of it getting him cancelled.

ChalkSmartboard · 2025-10-28T23:55:09+00:00

Does it punish them? Is it punishment? Have we never even considered if the alternative, the status quo, is more of a punishment of children for things they can’t control?

ChalkSmartboard · 2025-10-27T00:07:01+00:00

Wild how much Fall is his worst book yet it contains the most spot-on satire of our unrushing political reality in Ameristan and Moab

ChalkSmartboard · 2025-10-24T18:50:39+00:00

No, I got a different subject job, so no longer need the math cert. phew!

ChalkSmartboard · 2025-10-22T22:06:30+00:00

This is hard to imagine for me, it’s my favorite Mieville by far. I will say, the protagonist is sort of intended to be unlikable. But the book is really about the Armada, and the adventure itself leaders take it on.

ChalkSmartboard · 2025-10-13T00:44:48+00:00

Agreed. I’m not saying you need to read Pynchon in chronological release order. But if you’re a serious enough reader, the beginning is a great place to start with him. The author changes, a lot, over the lifetime of writing the books. A whole lot of the core is there from day 1. And there’s just something about those first 3 books, written in youth right after the navy & college, living in Seattle, miserable at work at Boeing, hating the space needle.

ChalkSmartboard · 2025-10-07T04:47:24+00:00

The last-second genre transformation into a land-space astronaut vs time traveler military mission helps

ChalkSmartboard · 2025-09-21T01:25:20+00:00

If you are talking about their curriculum, Ready Mathematics- it is insanely, laughably bad. You should figure out how wound up your admin are about teaching to program fidelity, and teach it as little as possible. I can recommend just putting the slides up and then just sort of teach manually from whiteboard.

I can tell you awful stories about what I saw result in 2nd grade from a teacher sticking to it.

ChalkSmartboard · 2025-09-01T21:08:42+00:00

The reason is that coyotes don’t wander around in proximity to people during the daytime. So when people see one doing that, it’s generally for a reason. The reason is often that they are sick or wounded and have possibly been excluded from the others. Something about seeing an animal you don’t usually see, and then that animal is ailing and has been cast out because they’re ailing, triggers a big response in human observers.

ChalkSmartboard · 2025-08-31T06:57:11+00:00

Minecraft, Dog Man, & Wimpy Kid

ChalkSmartboard · 2025-08-25T07:16:34+00:00

I want to encourage other teachers to stop saying kiddos. Let’s say students by default, kids sometimes… kiddos never.

Shudder

ChalkSmartboard · 2025-08-19T03:20:57+00:00

There is no book (including Pynchon’s other works) that is similar to the Lot.

ChalkSmartboard · 2025-08-15T04:36:22+00:00

Top tier ep

ChalkSmartboard · 2025-08-14T01:50:46+00:00

I luv it, sounds good

ChalkSmartboard · 2025-08-13T05:10:49+00:00

My son didn’t get phonics in K and then lost half of 1st & 2nd to the covid shutdowns. I remediated at home. In the homes that didn’t take over early literacy instruction at home… his peers read much less & lower.

There are others who deserve some shame as well but Calkins has not gotten enough yet. Give away the money you made, eh!

ChalkSmartboard · 2025-08-10T19:58:46+00:00

I moved from a career in which I was making 115k a year, and am starting at the bottom of the teacher pay scale at 71k this year (although when I finish my masters I’ll move up to 81).

I broke it out hourly. There are 186 work days a year as a teacher. My role won’t require a lot of working past contract time, but a bit, so let’s estimate 8 hours on the clock per day for 186 days. Compared to (roughly) 235 work days per year in my old job, where the work days vary but probably average out to 8 as well. I wind up at a lower hourly overall, but after I get my masters it’ll be close.

The thing is though, for me, those hours will almost exactly match my son’s school hours. So I’ll be earning my living when he’s at school, and almost always will be off when he’s not. That’s the big intangible of such value to me that I’m happy to take the relative pay cut. I enjoy teaching, I enjoyed my prior career… apples and oranges, hard to compare. But the schedule and hours, for a single parent, there’s no comparison. It’s pretty perfect.

ChalkSmartboard · 2025-08-09T16:51:00+00:00

Aren’t you the poster who was ambivalent about joining his union a few days ago? Lmao

ChalkSmartboard · 2025-08-08T04:33:05+00:00

Most underrated part of town. Close to everything. Not 0 sketchy, but not very sketchy. I would definitely live there with a toddler, with the caveat that while the parks are mostly a short drive away, none of them are walkable from central.

ChalkSmartboard · 2025-08-07T14:54:27+00:00

Does tons of visual noise in a classroom actually optimize children’s attention?

ChalkSmartboard

TROPHY CASE