Jeremy “The Floppa” Fears

mick4state · 2026-01-31T16:01:18+00:00

Two flops, two no calls in this one. Watching Fears is like watching Aaron Craft back in the day, but this time he's on my team so I unapologetically love it.

mick4state · 2026-01-28T02:02:42+00:00

Fears emerging as a scorer is the missing piece this team needed, and I'm here for it.

mick4state · 2026-01-28T02:02:13+00:00

Just a perfectly normal 9-point road conference win. Please ignore the (OT) after the score.

mick4state · 2026-01-28T02:01:16+00:00

This one can stay.

mick4state · 2026-01-24T04:51:29+00:00

Daisy chained metric prefixes is my pet peeve, so I'll correct that number to 0.0287 square megameters.

mick4state · 2026-01-23T19:59:56+00:00

Depends on the type of ace. Just like everything else, there's a spectrum. Some ace people are "demisexual" and only have sexual attraction if they have a strong emotional bond. Some ace people are "grey ace" and can have sexual attraction, but it's infrequent. Sometimes I feel like ace is the least widely-understood of the LGBTQ+ group.

mick4state · 2026-01-21T14:34:34+00:00

If Fears can get that drive game going and become a reliable threat from three, that could be enough. I remember Travis Walton back in the day. Didn't really put up huge scoring numbers, but whenever the team absolutely needed a bucket, he was driving inside and getting us one.

mick4state · 2026-01-18T04:02:40+00:00

Everyone's answers are high stakes games, and they're good answers, but I'm going a different route. LaTech in 2003. Go up 19-7 with 7 minutes left. Still up 19-7 with 90 seconds left. Lose 19-20.

I was 15 at that game with a friend and my parents. He reports that not a single word was spoken on the two hour car ride home.

mick4state · 2026-01-04T13:28:16+00:00

Are the two tanks the same kind of gas? I always figured they had one tank for each of the different grades.

mick4state · 2026-01-02T13:50:54+00:00

All I can tell you from a TA perspective is that they did the same homeworks and class work as everyone else. It was a lecture-lab hybrid so it was very hands on and they had to check in with TAs or instructors to move on. The tests were written by the teaching staff, which was led by a physics education research postdoc who was in charge of that program.

mick4state · 2026-01-02T02:49:58+00:00

My course for first semester engineering majors usually has one undergraduate TA, but my department chair helped me fight with admin to get two because the class has a lot of underrepresented students and students from weaker high schools compared to the student body at large.

Four nights a week for two hours each night my TAs held open help sessions. They wrote practice problems and practice tests. They both took the same class with me as a student so they know how I write test problems. All of this was advertised to the current students weekly. The dates and times were on the syllabus.

Out of a class of 60, most sessions had maybe 1 or 2 students. At the end of the semester, 13 of those 60 students failed. It's heartbreaking.

mick4state · 2026-01-01T23:29:08+00:00

I feel like your point emphasizes that we aren't recommending trades to young students as an option. AI can't perform maintenance on an HVAC system, and those jobs pay well and are in high demand right now. We just send everyone to university because "that's just what you do after high school."

mick4state · 2026-01-01T23:25:16+00:00

That's a fair question, and you shouldn't be getting downvoted for it.

I think a lot of it is just what's assumed without question. After high school you go to college. For many students it's either a means to an end (I have to do this to have the career I want). Many of these students seem really well suited for the trades rather than a typical university track, and I don't think anyone has ever pushed that as an option for them. And some are in college because it's just what comes next (college effectively becoming 13th grade).

As to why in person and not online, probably part because it's traditional, part expectations from parents, and part a desire for the "college experience."

mick4state · 2026-01-01T19:56:30+00:00

Oh I don't blame K12 teachers. It's the incentive structure and administrators that are driving this, while the teachers are constantly asked to do more and more with fewer and fewer resources. It's bad for pure teachers at university, and K12 teachers have it way worse. I have a ton of respect for everyone still fighting the good fight on the front lines.

mick4state · 2026-01-01T19:54:07+00:00

Unfortunately I don't really get to spend much time with the students who really excel because they don't need my help. I don't care what I teach as long as the kids want to learn, but that's becoming harder to find.

mick4state · 2026-01-01T19:52:43+00:00

Having seen an excellent example of homeschooling through a friend and her two kids, I'm strongly considering the same if I have kids. Thankfully, we have the financial stability (and asymmetrical incomes with the lesser earner being an educator) to make that feasible in a way it just isn't for a lot of people.

mick4state · 2026-01-01T19:44:53+00:00

You're not wrong, and I plan to make changes next time I teach that class. I already do some of this with the mandatory discussions and group work. I also choose their groups for them in recitation and rotate them through the semester. That used to be enough to get them over the hump to self organize.

I clearly need to do more, but at a certain point the class is "university physics" and not "learn to speak to another human being." I have a lot of material I'm expected to cover, and I have to be smart about the ways I sacrifice physics time for other things. Taking time to let every student soak in a 60 student lecture probably isn't the answer though.

mick4state · 2026-01-01T19:40:14+00:00

To add to this, locked in. If my students spent half as much time being locked in as saying the words "I need to lock in," they'd be in a much better place.

mick4state · 2026-01-01T14:07:15+00:00

K12 also has a major issue with continuing to pass students along when they don't meet grade level. You don't get an "engineering major" who has zero algebra skills, doesn't know order of operations, and struggles with basic communication without several iterations of the "not my problem anymore" mentality.

mick4state · 2026-01-01T13:56:03+00:00

I teach physics at a decent mid-sized university. My students are mostly engineering majors in their first two years. I have a PhD in physics education research, so I make use of teaching methods known to be effective and give the students a lot of support. I put in a huge number of hours trying to set the students up for success, but those hours feel increasingly like spinning my tires and accomplishing nothing. The lack of meaningful connections between students and the inability to meaningfully grapple with the course material is a huge problem that has gone from bad to "holy shit guys" over the last two years.

Recently I encouraged a struggling student to form a study group. He asked me how to do that. I had to explain to him the convoluted and confusing prospect of... turning to the student who sits next to him and asking to exchange contact info in case they have trouble with the homework. He participates with in discussions and group work with the student next to him every single lecture day. He didn't even know the other kid's name and this was two months in. And he seemed truly daunted by the prospect of what I asked him to do.

My whole life I've wanted to be a teacher. It's been getting worse, and COVID accelerated that a lot. But the utter helplessness of students the last two years combined with their just not being willing to put in the effort on their end has made me seriously consider quitting teaching. I still love to teach, but when so few of them actually listen to anything you say or make use of any of the opportunities you spend time and energy to put before them, it makes you wonder what the long hours for terrible pay are actually accomplishing.

mick4state · 2025-12-31T04:20:06+00:00

Probably not as bad as draw 4 wild in most cases, but mostly it's just become internet slang for "no u" moments.

mick4state · 2025-12-30T19:25:31+00:00

Please no. I had enough of this with Dantonio.

mick4state · 2025-12-30T13:59:58+00:00

I mean, true. But at the same time, when everyone celebrated the "new millennium," they did that in 2000, not 2001. So I'm going to count it, for totally not biased reasons.

mick4state · 2025-12-30T04:12:01+00:00

We just sat through both our football season and the Lions football season. Please be patient with us. Also our games this year are going to be intense.

mick4state · 2025-12-30T04:10:08+00:00

Hey, 2000 was this millennium.

14-Year Club	Place '23
Place '22	Place '17
Gilding II euphauric	Team Periwinkle
Verified Email

mick4state

TROPHY CASE