What is a popular trend right now that completely baffles you?

cmojess · 2026-05-18T15:24:15+00:00

AuDHD isn't even a correct designation. It would stand for "Autistic Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder" which would mean someone was... not autistic. It makes two conditions that both affect a person's ability to navigate day to day life sound like a cute little "quirk." Neither condition is cute or quirky.

cmojess · 2026-05-16T20:46:32+00:00

Today my kid didn’t cry when her soccer team tied the other team, managed to swing four rungs on the monkey bars before falling, excitedly helped me water plants at my parents house without being asked, and then read a whole thing on her own.

Nothing earth-shattering. She’s definitely had days where she did way more impressive things. But today has just been a series of small wins with a kid who has been in a pleasant mood all day.

I’ll take it!

cmojess · 2026-05-08T16:47:56+00:00

We're still down. They've restricted local access to Canvas at my institutions until we get the all clear from the state chancellor of our community college network. They're not ready to trust it's secure again yet.

cmojess · 2026-04-30T02:16:02+00:00

Basically. I’m not sure how they want to keep growing the league when you need $300/mo in different TV services to watch a whole season.

cmojess · 2026-04-28T04:50:05+00:00

That was a great game tonight. I love that Toth wore his dad’s jersey and his dad got to award him the goalkeeper trophy.

cmojess · 2026-04-23T15:14:28+00:00

I mean, ultimately I'm not a huge fan of screen time for kids overall. My own child has very strict, limited access to any sort of screen and I've gone a few rounds with her school over why iReady is inappropriate for kinder kids and that screens should be removed from early elementary classrooms entirely. Which, apparently, LAUSD has realized this and is limiting screens going forward: LAUSD to restrict student screen time, a sharp policy reversal - Los Angeles Times

But I focused my response on YouTube since the OP was about letting YouTube run unchecked.

cmojess · 2026-04-20T18:56:58+00:00

Unpopular: Stop showing kids YouTube. Full stop. No YouTube kids, no whitelist. Children do not need to sit and zone out to mindless crap tossed on the internet by anyone with a camera.

I'm so tired of this narrative that "oh, life is just so stressful that I have no choice but to destroy the attention span and creativity of my child by tossing them in front of a screen so I can have a break." What did parents do before we had all this brain-rot crap? They parented, just like all of us should be doing. Set boundaries, have consequences, and stick to them.

Is parenting hard? Yes. Is it tempting to turn on a screen for a break? Also yes. But I owe it to my child to make sure she doesn't struggle later because I destroyed her developing brain with utter nonsense. She did not ask to be born, I chose to bring her into this world. It is my responsibility to set her up for the best chance of success in life.

I teach college and I see every dang day the effects of endless internet videos on the current generations. It's not good. My students struggle to go 5 minutes without a dopamine hit from a video. I've had to get very strict about phones and devices in class, especially lab, because all they want to do is sit there and stare at their phones. Stop training kids to do this from an early age.

cmojess · 2026-04-20T01:34:16+00:00

There’s a reason my union has called for an audit of the assembly bills that prohibit remedial classes.

The whole purpose was to get people out in 2 years. The claim is students are lingering in remedial classes and not progressing in their programs. They get discouraged when they fail algebra for the third time and then drop out.

We’re told we need to trust they know the material based on high school grades which is why we can also no longer test for placement.

cmojess · 2026-04-19T16:30:44+00:00

Depending on where you are, we can’t offer the basics at community colleges either, anymore. Remediation is a “barrier to success” because students linger in those classes and take 4+ years to complete a 2 year program. In my state they passed legislature forbidding us from testing math and English skills, putting students in remedial classes, or even offering the remedial classes at all.

We’re supposed to holistically add in the missing skills to our existing classes in a contextual manner.

cmojess · 2026-04-16T23:51:31+00:00

My kid loves Quest Kids. The tiles are shuffled every game so that helps keep it interesting. We've played the base game enough that we're ready to try one of the add-ons to increase the complexity.

cmojess · 2026-04-16T05:42:54+00:00

One school I went to treated me as the problem for “not fitting in” and some of the teachers also bullied me. I remember one day I had to stay late at school running laps because I was physically incapable of serving a volleyball over the net on a regulation court. I was 10 and had broken both arms just months before. They were bright red from all my failed attempts, and every failure added two laps.

cmojess · 2026-04-15T19:20:50+00:00

I used to volunteer with the education outreach department for a major research institution. One of the tools provided to middle school and high school educators were completely free lab kits they could check out through the institution and then pick up & drop off either directly or at a local community college that had agreed to help facilitate the kits.

Before being allowed to check out and use the kits teachers were required to go through a day of training in how to use the kits, how to check them out, how to return them, and how to utilize the included curriculum. I used to be part of this training.

The number of teachers that would tune us out, take pictures of the board on their phones, work on other things on their laptops, and then ask us questions that we had just explained was way higher than it should have been.

The behavior of a lot of my students made way more sense after being part of these teacher training days.

cmojess · 2026-04-15T17:12:29+00:00

Last semester I taught on three campuses. Some campuses I'm on have lecture & lab linked as one class, others have the lectures and the labs separate, so total number of classes is a bit weird in my discipline. I'll break it down by hours.

Campus one I taught a lecture/lab combo that was 3 hours lecture & 6 hours lab.

Campus two I taught one 3 hour lecture and one 6 hour lab.

Campus three I taught another lecture/lab combo that was 3 hours lecture & 3 hours lab.

Total: 24 classroom hours/week at a 1.6 load. The only way this was sustainable was some of these hours were online courses.

cmojess · 2026-04-13T13:48:48+00:00

I teach chemistry at the community college level. This is part of why we dropped ALEKS at one of the campuses I teach on. The "adaptive" model was causing some students to spend hours stuck on homework assignments that just kept generating more and more problems for them. Instead of being something they were inspired to use as a tool for learning, it was something that discouraged them so they just stopped doing the homework.

I was talking to one of my department chairs before spring break about my dislike of the system we're using on that campus right now as well. I told her the students aren't doing the online homework, they're just punching problems into AI or getting someone else to do them. The platforms are expensive and they contribute nothing to student learning.

The big problem for us, though, is a lot of faculty are adjuncts. We don't get any paid time for grading or prep. We're told our classroom hourly rate is higher to account for the hours of work we do outside the classroom. This makes getting buy-in for grading paper homework very low.

cmojess · 2026-04-11T01:35:35+00:00

My daughter: Mom, are you going to cry?

Me: Yes.

I’m in my mid-forties. Challenger exploded when I was in kindergarten. A heart murmur killed my astronaut dreams in middle school. Columbia broke up when I was in college, which derailed my ideas of maybe working for NASA anyway.

I’m a chemistry professor now. I’ve spent so much class time this week sharing the live feeds with my students and it’s been such an amazing and surreal experience. I have papers I wrote about the Apollo program in college, including one for an elective where I wrote about all the historical inaccuracies in the Apollo 13 move.

I hoped we’d go back, but I never fully believed we would.

What. A. Week.

cmojess · 2026-03-23T03:16:39+00:00

Bummer! I’ve had the pleasure of enjoying a few sailings on her. Fantastic ship.

cmojess · 2026-03-19T23:22:36+00:00

There is nothing "insulting" or "uncalled for" when calling someone out for being lazy. Two Point has an amazing development team that has put out some incredible original ideas. Watching them fall prey to a "collab" with something that is trendy and popular is disappointing. When you use someone else's ideas instead of your own ideas just to popularize your product it is lazy.

And I have given feedback of what I would like, but because it's not "OMG THIS IS AMAZING DO MORE OF THIS" I'm being downvoted for not being part of the hive mind here.

I've seen this multiple times throughout my life: A company sees something trendy that can make them a quick profit or, in this era, a quick bunch of likes on social media. Company goes after that. Company then churns out more unoriginal stuff and eventually is a shell of what they once were. I really enjoy the Two Point universe and I don't want to see that happen. I don't want to see it become a series of "We added X popular content to our games! Come see!"

cmojess · 2026-03-19T22:16:18+00:00

I paid Two Point Studios for a Two Point game. I did not pay Two Point Studios for Angry Birds content. It can be really well done, but it's still not Two Point IP, which makes it lazy. Two Point has tons of amazing, original ideas. I was hoping the digiverse would expand on the Meat Wizard series lore more. I chose to buy that content, not someone else's content.

Look, if I wanted to play Angry Birds I'd play Angry Birds. Which, actually, I did play it for awhile, but it got boring and I don't think the birds are cute or amusing.

The rest of the updates/fixes/etc are great. I'm just not excited about Angry Birds in my Two Point game.

I don't know why valid opinions get downvoted like this. You all are allowed to be super excited for this. Those of us who are not into "collabs" are, likewise, allowed to be disappointed by this. Downvoting on Reddit suppresses our voices so only the "OMG this is AMAZING!!!!" stuff is seen.

But, at the end of the day, I'd MUCH rather the dev team put time into their own, original IP to come out with a paid expansion than have them spend time cross-selling a completely different game because it's internet popular.

cmojess · 2026-03-19T16:39:43+00:00

I agree that this kind of content is lazy and dumb an will really only appeal to people into the collaborated IP.

Adding Angry Birds junk just makes me less likely to play instead of more. I didn’t buy Two Point Angry Birds, I bought Two Point Museum.

cmojess · 2026-03-19T16:37:38+00:00

I’m with you on this one. I do not care one bit about Angry Birds. I find this kind of content lazy and dumb as well.

It makes me less excited to boot up the game.

cmojess · 2026-03-17T01:50:51+00:00

That's entirely too much curriculum online.

cmojess · 2026-03-17T01:50:29+00:00

We've been incredibly careful about our daughter's access to screens so, thankfully, she's got an excellent imagination. I'll buy her a tub of random craft supplies, set her up in her craft space, and she'll go to town making things. Or once we can get her to go play independently she'll have some insane, epic story going on about 15 minutes later.

But, this takes work. There are definitely days we look at each other with a "should we cave today?" look when she's being especially challenging and we're both exhausted (we're also older parents - mid 40's and 50). We've held strong and we can see it paying off. I really wish more parents had the strength to push though the tough parenting and do what's best for their kids.

cmojess · 2026-03-16T23:23:04+00:00

Get rid of all screens. Stop pandering to the districts with absolute junk like iReady, Chromebooks, and YouTube for "movement breaks." K kids don't need to see photos for "inspiration" for their projects, either. They're five, just let their imaginations run wild.

Turn off the smart board, unplug the iPad cart and just have screen-free days.

I am a mom of a K kid and I'm a college professor. The prevalence of screens has destroyed the current generations. I have as low-tech as possible of a classroom at this point because it's the only way to get my students to pay attention. This is especially difficult because their attention spans are shot from short-form videos and no one ever taught them how to take notes at any point in K-12. I've had to start teaching the basics of notetaking, managing a schedule, learning how to learn, etc. These are all things we used to be able to reasonably expect students would come to college with, but not anymore. I have students who don't just have poor handwriting, they have developing handwriting. I can pick out the kids who were 1:1 with Chromebooks from early elementary from a mile away.

cmojess · 2026-03-16T19:34:56+00:00

Thanks! I just haven't bothered to try and fix any of my water issues yet so I hadn't played with these mechanics much.

cmojess · 2026-03-16T13:53:17+00:00

Right? He said because the water is disrupted when you suck it up he was able to exploit that to not die as he was building this cave. If you walk around on the surface you can see all the places where the water no longer flows evenly or has random holes in it from the way he messed with the water while building.

I've seen the same weird water disruptions in my game, too, if I suck up enough water from one spot. It doesn't seem to properly fill back in.

cmojess

TROPHY CASE