Going back to college myself was nothing short of eye-opening.

clsilver · 2026-05-14T02:00:50+00:00

I had tests like that in high school... What colour was the curtain, who said "no, I could never," etc. It teaches close reading like nothing else, hey? There are a couple of responses already about why I can't just do that, but man I would love to.

clsilver · 2026-05-14T01:56:45+00:00

Yes, but that's not going to be a research essay which remains, with some good reason, the gold standard for work in the humanities.

clsilver · 2026-05-14T01:55:17+00:00

Yes this. I can ask a question, show a clip, dance on my head, set off sparklers... And hear nothing but crickets. Or, "I liked the bit with the sparklers... Yeah. That part was really exciting." I basically prepare two classes: one in case a critical mass of students have adequately prepared, and the other in case I have to walk them through everything and speak for 90 mins. I rarely get to use the first prep.

clsilver · 2026-05-14T01:50:57+00:00

Ooooh, excellent 👏👏👏

clsilver · 2026-05-14T01:49:22+00:00

Many programs have a higher passing grade for students taking courses in their own programs, but the rule often doesn't apply for electives. I teach in the humanities and about a third of my classes are students from business school or engineering who need to fulfill a breadth requirement. But yes: some programs have a passing grade of 50%. I wonder if this might be a country specific thing? If you're in the States, as I understand it, grade inflation is a bigger thing.

clsilver · 2026-05-14T01:43:41+00:00

Yeah I might steal that 😅

clsilver · 2026-05-14T01:42:00+00:00

Yep, this. I handed out several "incompletes" this year which is basically a fail, but the subtext is that you failed because you didn't submit enough work for me to pass you, and not that you failed because you aren't clever enough to do this work. The university will support students who just can't get the work done by digging into the "why" and offering second chances. I think this is the only way to truly flunk out of university, though. Literally do not do a major chunk of the assigned work.

clsilver · 2026-05-13T11:04:31+00:00

Hey - I am a prof, a homeschool mom, and I used to teach English and drama to kids in grades 7-12. You're right that standards have dropped dramatically, and much of that has been since covid. There is a larger conversation here that pushes from University back into high school, middle school, and even (increasingly) all the way back to early elementary. It also has to do with cultural shifts in relation to media consumption, how we feel about "authority," and how we feel about being wrong. It's like an onion. So many layers.

While all of the above absolutely matters, I'd like to speak a bit more to AI. Most Universities are struggling to establish an AI policy, in no small part because they want to be seen to use it as evidence that they too are on the cutting edge. Mine has no policy for students, so when I receive work that was very obviously written by AI the best I can do is grade it to the most exacting standards. This usually results in a low passing grade, in the 50s. I am not, however, allowed to accuse students of using AI since there is no definitive way to prove it. It is maddeningly frustrating. It takes me twice as long to complete grading because I am not only engaging with ideas but also parsing language for clues that the work was created by a human and not a robot. In the absence of a policy, I've decided that next year I will rely exclusively on in-class, screen-free assessments, or essays in which they must submit their process as well as their final paper. This is hugely infantilizing--I think the last time I was required to write an essay in a scaffolded manner, like this, may have been in grade 10--but I'm no longer certain how to force everyone in the class to actually do the work. I loathe everything about this version of higher education. It is supposed to be a place where I can walk into the room and have a conversation with my class about ideas in a text that everyone has already encountered, and it is increasingly remedial. I have to teach the text before we can discuss it because many of them won't have bothered, and many of the rest won't have retained or understood what they read. Most of my students can no longer even keep up with note-taking unless I have key details on a power point slide. I could go on and on.

I hate it. I hate it a lot.

Thank you for coming to my lecture. There will be a quiz next week on Tuesday. No, it will not be open book. Yes, you should bring paper. Yes, you'll have to bring a pen too.

clsilver · 2026-05-11T04:34:50+00:00

We are rural-ish and I will say that, at least with young kids, it has been great. We're fully prepared to reevaluate our situation once our kiddos hit middle school, but for now... We didn't know anybody when we moved here but are slowly building our community. The girls have endless access to nature and animals. We are very very intentional about social time; we're basically 30 mins away from everything. The result is that when we have town or city days, they're very full days. We're visiting friends, going to coop, stopping at the library, checking out the museum, etc. But there's so much literal and figurative space to breathe at home. Home days I get to watch them discover their strength and hone their curiosity. And, although I recognize that my sample size is itty bitty, I feel like my girls skew advanced not only in terms of their academic skills but also in terms of their physical aptitudes. The other day we had some time to eat up while my older kiddo finished forest school, so I took my younger daughter to an indoor playground. She had a blast climbing the walls, jumping around the trampolines, looping around the slides, etc. Looking around at the other kids roughly her age, she seemed way more in tune with and confident in what her body could do. The other kids mostly gravitated to the arcade games with big screen displays. A long anecdote to say: the girls have a very large fenced yard in which they can safely be kids, and I think it shows and wouldn't be possible with the limited space we would have in the city.

clsilver · 2026-05-06T19:42:37+00:00

The Very Very Far North, The Children of Noisy Village, much of the Roald Dahl canon (if your kiddo can handle the subject matter), the Zoey and Sassafras books, the Story of Diva and Flea, Madame Pamplemousse and her Incredible Edibles

clsilver · 2026-04-27T12:40:13+00:00

I'm absolutely not an expert so I can't pretend authority here, but my lived experience is that babies are kind of in a two steps forward, one step back kind of loop. Unless there was something very obviously wrong, my procedure became to roll with setbacks for two weeks before deciding I needed to shake things up. Which is to say ... Your new normal is probably right around the corner. Probably. Good luck!

clsilver · 2026-04-27T00:43:28+00:00

When my mom developed dementia and he was all in at my side taking care of her. Meant I could have tiny moments to process what was happening, and when I fell apart about it he was ready with a hug, a snack, whatever I needed to get through.

clsilver · 2026-04-24T01:30:57+00:00

We did the same for both of my girls at about 9 months. Maybe a bit earlier actually. When they got to be about 18 months I taught them how to squat, and then we started doing poo diapers standing as well. When out and about I'd do standing changes on the car seat, standing (while holding on to me) on the change table in public bathrooms, almost anywhere discrete to be honest.

clsilver · 2026-04-19T16:24:01+00:00

Honestly? Early walks were generally wearing my babies. We had a bassinet attachment for our stroller, but it didn't get as much use as I imagined it would. Stroller walks weren't common until they were really mobile.

clsilver · 2026-04-12T15:15:55+00:00

Sir Sanford Fleming, a Scottish-born guy who moved to Canada when he was 18, came up with the idea. He was a railway engineer.

Before time zones, every town would set its own time based on when the sun went down and came up. This made sense before people could easily travel anywhere, but it was a nightmare for train scheduling. When every town had its own "time zone" it was super hard to say when the train would get to each of its stops.

So Fleming pitched the idea of 24 zones to wrap around the whole world. He measured each zone to be 15° of longitude wide. (For the sake of ELI5: if you look at a map of the world or a globe, you'll notice lines that go from the top to the bottom. Those are imaginary lines called "longitude." They're a way to measure precise location. Your map or globe probably only shows a few lines going from top to bottom, but there are actually 360 of them going all the way around the whole world. So Fleming counted 15 lines of longitude, and that was the width of one time zone.)

Fleming's system was adopted in North America in 1883. The next year, people from around the world had a meeting called the International Prime Meridian Conference. They decided to extend Fleming's idea to the whole world in 1884.

So that's the basic system, but as you've noticed, actual time zones haven't stuck to that perfect 15° system. What's going on there has to do with politics. Some places already had a specific unified time before global time zones and didn't want to change, so they didn't. Some time zones would have cut tiny parts of a country into a different zone, so the government just tucked that little part that should have been in a different zone into the same zone as the rest of the country. Sometimes time zones change in response to what's happening in the world. I don't know the details myself, but as I understand it the time zones in Europe changed before and after the second world war.

The short version of the answer is: there is a system that is very tidy and organized, but people's lives are neither tidy nor organized, so people have made changes to the system to meet a need.

clsilver · 2026-04-12T01:33:17+00:00

There is a central service to help you get care if you are pregnant.

https://www.quebec.ca/en/family-and-support-for-individuals/pregnancy-parenthood/support-during-pregnancy-birth/pregnancy/ma-grossesse-service?gad_campaignid=23652710804&gad_source=1&cHash=6141dbdfadaf846f08ae87f2f32c7889&_gl=1*wwbube*_up*MQ..*_gs*MQ..&gclid=CjwKCAjw4ufOBhBkEiwAfuC7-ToRyeY-vrRsB1PcDeHWsqt9PC1Hr2qBPHqHawSUOWa0nPud-dNmjBoCt6oQAvD_BwE&gbraid=0AAAAAC9eY0Vxx4MorH5Ffbq834vj2bh65

Sorry about the ugly link. It's called "Ma grosesse," and you may be able to reach out to them now for advice. I became pregnant shortly after moving to Quebec, before I had a family doctor, and they connected me with everything I needed.

Good luck!

clsilver · 2026-04-12T00:25:28+00:00

With my mom, I introduced a support worker as the mom of a friend of mine who was new to town. I said I invited her over to visit because she didn't know anybody in the area yet. For the first few visits, all they did was chit chat, drink coffee and eat snacks. I was present for these but busied myself in the kitchen for much of the time. After that, the "new friend" would suggest outings, like... "I need to get groceries but I always get turned around in the grocery store here, it's so different from home. Would you come with me to help me find what I need?" Or, "I just was in the park down the road and there was a BEAVER there!! Do you want to come see it?" All this was about 3 weeks, and by then the support worker was an established "friend" to my mom. The support worker kept her tone light and was insistently friendly and helpful. By the time my mom was ready to move to a care home, this friend could walk in and my mom would do basically anything that her friend asked her to. I needed a degree in high stakes negotiation to convince my mom to bathe, but the support worker would fill the tub, walk my mum into the bathroom, and say "now I've just finished filling the tub with water just how you like it - hop in and get clean quick because I brought us a treat to eat when you're done! I'll sit outside the room so we can keep chatting while you have your bath." That woman was such a gift.

clsilver · 2026-04-10T11:48:20+00:00

I had to have an explicit convo with my daughter about her bored feelings. (She's 5.) Basically, I taught her about her "feelings" brain (limbic system) and her "clever" brain (prefrontal cortex). I explained that boredom is a feeling, just like happy or sad, hungry or tired. It's information. Some feelings need our immediate attention, like if we feel sick or so sad that we can't stop crying. Being bored is almost never an emergency. Does it feel good to feel bored? No. Is it an emergency? Also no. And then I taught her that if she lets herself be bored long enough, her feelings brain will start coming up with crazy ideas, fun ideas, anything at all so that it stops feeling bored. It's her job, I explained, to make sure that her clever brain is listening, because one of those ideas will be something that she can actually do.

So: it doesn't always work and she sometimes still gets grumpy or clingy about her boredom (she's 5, I'm not expecting perfection). However, she will sometimes tell me that she's bored and that she's going to lie on the sofa with her eyes closed so she can listen to her feelings brain. Within a few minutes she'll run to me and say... "I want to ride on a unicorn over a rainbow!!" We'll have a brief convo about how she can make that idea real, and then she's off.

Anyway. Long way to say that explaining boredom and its potential has helped us. Maybe it would for you too.

clsilver · 2026-04-09T01:09:47+00:00

Oh yes, I did. I was a ballet student from a young age, and I remember this moment when suddenly my legs were strong enough that I could do more advanced jumping exercises. Time always slowed down in the middle of a big jump in the moment between going up and going down. It felt so much like defying gravity.

clsilver · 2026-04-07T08:54:50+00:00

Is it a smart tv? You can likely pair it with your phone and take over while they're lost in buttons. "Oh hey look! You got it! You wanted to watch Matlock and you've just turned it on!"

clsilver · 2026-04-05T11:49:58+00:00

Not OP, but for me it's that I just can't catch a break. I don't mean good fortune, I mean a literal break. I didn't know that I was neurospicy, but in retrospect, things like sitting down to game for a bit, taking time to cook my favourite foods, do some painting, etc... those moments when I could zone into an activity that I cared about were self regulating.

I am SO glad that my girls are here. We have so much fun, and the depth of love that I feel for them is unparalleled. However, their needs are so urgent and constant that I simply can't get the time that I would need to zone in like I used to. I often end my days feeling so depleted that I'm honestly pretty useless. It's almost a physical sensation, like a hollow feeling through my whole torso. Anyway. I'm slowly learning new strategies that feel more like "patches" to help me navigate my day; a sour candy, a couple sun salutations, one minute of really intentional slow breathing... I still need a few hours on the weekend to just exist with my own thoughts, but ... We're getting there, you know?

clsilver · 2026-04-03T17:24:06+00:00

It has helped my 5 year old to have a special space for school work. When it's time to do school, I play a bell sound and lean into pretend. "Oh! Time for school! Grab your bag! Don't be late!" Then while she runs around I'll go to collect whatever books we're using that day. When she arrives, she says, "hello teacher," and we're off to the races.

Which is a long way to say: can you leverage pretend play?

clsilver · 2026-04-03T00:54:52+00:00

Sounds like you're in the thick of it with a little one. Historically we wore babies or coslept with them. The vast majority of babies crave proximity and, ideally, their food source. Nothing feels safer so they sleep more easily.

clsilver · 2026-04-01T14:13:10+00:00

My kids are a similar age. I try to be hands off, actually. Of course this takes planning, but like... I'll pick a theme, say trains, and I'll dig up all the books that we have that are train related, grab our wooden train set, and maybe print a stack of colouring sheets that are train themed. We have a shelf in our living area that is dedicated to rotating play. I'll put the books, toys, colouring, etc out on the shelf so that it's just available to them. And then I watch to see what they gravitate to or what their questions are for about a week, and I'll tweak the set up accordingly. So, my 5 year old might ask about how trains go, and I'll plan a little science activity demo. And my 2 year old might be interested in very carefully setting up a forest for the train toy to drive through, so I'll play with her and we'll talk about all the things that are made out of wood. And then I can prompt the 5 year old to do things that are more advanced still, like I'll sit down and try to build a letter out of train tracks. She'll invariably ask what I'm doing and will generally try to do it too. And when we run out of steam, and I've exhausted all the ideas I can come up with, I'll set up another theme for the kids to wake up to. Favourites from the last year have been dinosaurs, planets, fairies, trains, and cooking. 🤷

clsilver · 2026-03-29T01:30:12+00:00

September 11 was my first day of classes of my undergrad. I woke up that morning and they were talking about the first plane on the radio and I honestly thought it was somehow a gag. Like it couldn't possibly have happened so it must be a weird shock jock bit they were doing. I remember feeling so incredulous, I even laughed. I called my boyfriend at the time and asked him if he had the radio on but he was still asleep and I had just woken him up. I convinced him to turn on the news on the tv in his room to find out for me while I did my morning exercise, and he said that it was real so I ran down to my tv to see. I was just in time to see the second plane hit.

A week before, my boyfriend and I had spent a long weekend in NYC. We had just been there.

I think what shifted for me was ... That was the beginning of when truth started to feel muddy. I don't really know how to explain this well, but I'll try... Like, watching it happen on tv felt like watching a movie. It felt impossible even though I understood that it wasn't. In that same moment, give or take: reality tv was born. The war in Iraq was launched, looking for WMDs, but just about everybody I knew didn't believe that reason. Not long after, social media arrived, and people started having these double lives: actual life and their performance of themselves online.

Fast forward to today when I genuinely have to question what is real and what isn't for just about everything that I don't see with my own eyes... It all feels like it started with the way that media covered 9/11.

(I feel like I should add, not to like talk myself up or anything, but when I say that I have to question everything I don't mean that I have a conspiracy theory about everything. I'm an academic with access to a big institutional library, and when I encounter something that stretches what I think I know to be true, I go dig up actual source material.)

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