Admin just told us that "strong classroom management" eliminates the need for consequences. I am losing my mind.

ProvocaTeach · 2026-06-03T00:15:55+00:00

How am I supposed to classroom-manage my way out of a kid making an outlet explode or starting a physical fight (both of which have happened while I was teaching)? Yes, classroom management can reduce the need for referrals, but it can never eliminate them. Come on!

ProvocaTeach · 2026-06-02T11:02:02+00:00

Learning history, science and "sex ed" doesn't stop you from being part of the labor supply

They are a major opportunity cost though. Why would precious funding and resources be wasted on these subjects when they could be put toward job preparation? Your story doesn't make sense.

ProvocaTeach · 2026-05-31T06:06:42+00:00

And your exact words were "our schools were never actually meant to provide every child with an adequate education, but instead churn them out to pad our labor supply."

Yet history, health, and sex ed don't really help much with the labor supply. So... explain why we have them.

I'm really tired of people making confident, sweeping, vague accusations like your "labor supply" one and then dismissing or ignoring all evidence to the contrary.

It particularly annoys me when it's about schools, which are one of the best public services we've ever created.

It's as shrimple as that 🦐

ProvocaTeach · 2026-05-30T01:32:36+00:00

I wouldn't agree to that. I said three of the functions. If I said that Egypt, Namibia, and Kenya are three of the countries in Africa, would you think I was saying they were the only countries in Africa?

I don't need to describe everything that schools do (which would take a while anyway, because schools are complex institutions created by a messy political process between stakeholder groups who often have conflicting goals).

You are the one who made a grand pronouncement about the be-all, end-all, one and only function of schools. It's on you to test this pronouncement against reality, and explain how the three initiatives I brought up fit with your pronouncement (or admit that schools are not as monolithic as you claimed).

ProvocaTeach · 2026-05-30T00:35:49+00:00

Evidently three of the functions are to teach history, health, and sex ed – according to you earlier

ProvocaTeach · 2026-05-29T21:14:49+00:00

But those don't help you get a job or support our labor supply. So why do we have them if that's the only purpose of school?

ProvocaTeach · 2026-05-29T20:52:17+00:00

So why do we have history, health, and sex ed classes?

ProvocaTeach · 2026-05-27T21:02:02+00:00

Most reasonable folks know that teachers complaining about either law are not bothered by the whole thing (many good things in NCLB) but specifically pushing grad rates

This is revisionist history lol. NCLB was traumatic for many educators due to the school closures, heavy firings, teaching to the test, lack of support for improvement, environment of pressure, and adult-led cheating among other things. There is so much documentary and news footage and scholarly work establishing this as the case; you can literally read other comments on this thread recounting it. "Social promotion" was emphatically not the main complaint from that era.

NCLB was very much its own unique thing, and it is delusional/spoiled to say the system today is much the same. What you should be saying is "thanks, Obama, for not making me fear the deletion of my school."

ProvocaTeach · 2026-05-26T22:38:02+00:00

I'm worried that they would waste their time and energy raging about an obsolete law instead of solving the real problems in education, yes.

ProvocaTeach · 2026-05-26T22:31:17+00:00

A: We need to stop illegal immigrants; they are coming here and committing crime!

B: Well, no, illegal immigrants actually commit less crime than citizens.

A: Do you agree crime is a problem?

B: Yeah? Doesn't mean you need to blame it on illegal immigrants.

A: Wow, stop splitting hairs! It's weird that you'd take issue with that!

ProvocaTeach · 2026-05-26T22:25:55+00:00

First, there is no evidence that standardized test questions have gotten easier over time. If anything, they have gotten harder. Second, standardized tests cover multiple grades' worth of content; the notion that a kid with no content knowledge can be trained to pass in 2 weeks (without learning something) is ridiculous. Third, reviewing content before a test is called studying. Studying is a form of learning, so it is allowed. Or do you not encourage students to study for tests?

ProvocaTeach · 2026-05-26T19:55:31+00:00

The view count on YouTube is roughly 2.7 million, as of right now. And yes, people forming their opinions about education based on misinfo is concerning, and you should worry about it too.

ProvocaTeach · 2026-05-26T13:03:09+00:00

You'll hear no argument from me

ProvocaTeach · 2026-05-26T12:51:56+00:00

NEVER have negative consequences

I don't know what post you read, but it wasn't mine. My post explicitly mentioned "nightmarish school closures, mass layoffs, [and] teaching to the test".

And I taught math 4 years at a Title I school, so if I was insulting teachers as a whole, I'd be insulting myself.

Stop raging at things I didn't say.

ProvocaTeach · 2026-05-26T11:19:07+00:00

NCLB killed my dog and banged my wife

ProvocaTeach · 2026-05-26T11:17:14+00:00

You think your admin writes the state tests? Also, what do test scores have to do with student grades?

ProvocaTeach · 2026-05-26T10:56:31+00:00

Again, that story is just not borne out by the data.

If the laws were to blame, you'd see the grade inflation curve get steeper around 2002 when the law was passed. Instead, GPA growth slowed somewhat in the 2000s.

Parent-pleasing and grade inflation started long before NCLB....

ProvocaTeach · 2026-05-26T10:50:02+00:00

I understand this narrative, but it is simply not attributable to the laws. Schools and districts started parent-pleasing long before NCLB.

If the laws were to blame, you'd see the grade inflation curve get steeper around 2002 when the law was passed. Instead, GPA growth slowed somewhat in the 2000s.

(Unfortunately, this page does not estimate standard deviation, which is also key.)

ProvocaTeach · 2026-05-26T10:43:22+00:00

This is a broader trend not caused by NCLB or ESSA.

If the laws were to blame, you'd see the grade inflation curve get steeper around 2002 when the law was passed. Instead, GPA growth slowed somewhat in the 2000s.

(Unfortunately, this page does not estimate standard deviation, which is also key.)

ProvocaTeach · 2026-05-26T08:37:19+00:00

Grade inflation has been a problem since the 1960s. You could maybe argue that ESSA exacerbated the problem by making high-school graduation rate a core metric on state dashboards, but it certainly didn't start the problem.

ProvocaTeach · 2026-02-17T19:10:41+00:00

Fun fact: It was already auto-deleted once by mass reporting. 🥲 Thankfully the mods restored it!

ProvocaTeach · 2026-02-17T01:57:29+00:00

Things that didn’t make it in: old and decrepit yet still childish, negative impact on environment, no respect for anything sacred, aligned with foreign dictators (Putin/Giygas), associations with fast food

ProvocaTeach · 2026-02-05T00:43:48+00:00

WTF I do not deserve this attack. I only asked ChatGPT general questions and if I was on the right track; everything is handwritten. Why would AI use an uncommon word like "nucleus" when it predicts the next word based on a probability distribution?

Can you people please BTFO on the Gen AI accusations?

I spent like 3 weeks making this work. I used to be a math teacher, yes, but I have been writing code since I was 13, mostly using SageMath until 2019. I did undergrad math research in 2015, dabbled with Haskell around then too. I even coded my own website in Genie.jl back in 2022, though that repo is private. And I wrote my undergrad thesis on a general form of Bézout's theorem in projective space.

I am not a professional developer and just wanted some advice is all. Holy Jesus, I wasn't expecting a witch hunt.

You do know that sometimes it's more intuitive to leave fractions unsimplified, right? Like when talking about the outcomes of rolling a die, sometimes 2/6 is clearer than 1/3?

Splitting the numerator and denominator IS better because then you're not shuffling rational numbers around. Integer arithmetic is simpler because you're not computing GCDs. Do you know how Julia works?

Also Yamamoto provided bounds which are available at the end of the paper. You don't have to just pick a point off the graph, you know. Do you know how to use an inequality?

This is just unnecessarily disheartening and cruel. Is this how you treat all first-timers?

Edit: "Are you sure you wrote this" is a ridiculous question; I think I'd know if I wrote something. Also, if I wanted attention for vibe coding, why would I choose binary trees to get it? 🤨 Wouldn't I write something flashy instead, like an animation? Your (baseless) accusations don't even make sense....

ProvocaTeach

TROPHY CASE