I might end up studying to get a math/physics endorsement when I start teaching in Oregon next year. The district I’ll be teaching for has in their collective bargaining agreement that each teacher can request funds for certification exams, and they offer $1000 each year for postgraduate work, so why not? No district I’ve taught for in Texas offers anything like that.
I have been trying since January to get a teaching job in Portland (I live in Dallas) for the next academic year, and this week I was offered positions by two different school districts. This weekend, I have been working out which job to go with, I think I’mma go with the one that pays a little more, might be able to offer funds to offset relocation costs, and has less trafficky access to downtown and Vancouver (I have friends in North Portland and Vancouver.
So yeah…got that figured out; tomorrow I’ll be looking for an apartment, taking my kids to Terry Black’s for some world-class barbecue before Texas is forever in my rear-view mirror, doing some packing, and playing some THPS 1+2.
As someone with ASD, GAD, and MDD (all diagnosed if it matters), smart home devices are an essential service to me. I can quickly set redundant reminders to help me with personal routines, add stuff to my shopping and to-do lists, and quickly get my lights and music set to what I need them to be when I am experiencing an anxiety episode. I definitely understand that my data is good and harvested at this point, and I don’t trust them to have done anything good with it. But these dots have made my life work since I bought my first one, and they’ve significantly reduced the anxiety I used to be riddled with.
That’s a rock solid way to endanger your financial livelihood. I’d take a hard pass on that idea, my human.
I’m autistic and flub things up like that sometimes. I tell people that I have a photogenic memory. They’ll often ask, “Don’t you mean a photographic memory?” to which I reply “No, a photogenic memory. Yeah, I have a beautiful mind.”
I have a core memory of getting into my mom’s car on a rare day (which happened to be my birthday) that she picked me up instead of me taking the bus home. Sitting there on the passenger seat was a copy of Nintendo Power Issue #11 that my mom had grabbed out of the mailbox (she had just signed me and my brother up for a subscription, and this was the first issue to arrive). I didn’t have Super Mario Bros. 3 and wouldn’t get it for another year maybe, but to be able to read all about this game was just so thrilling for my 13-year-old self.
Yeah, that’s not a great plot; one might even go as far as to say that it’s so bad.
I remember when the N64 came out. I was an assistant manager, so when we got a couple of N64 rental units, I commandeered one of them that first day and played the fuck out of Mario and Wave Race.
I remember working at Blockbuster when they pulled that. It was the called “No More Late Fees”. No late fees ever, return your video whenever you’d like1!
1 If not returned after two weeks, we assume you wanted to buy it for the current full retail price and charge your credit card on file accordingly.
You don’t want to play this game with me, son. Whatever you hurl at me about Oregon, I’ll lob back at you something twice as bad about Texas.
I get that Oregon has its hard right people. Hell, most states do. But at least my trans kids gender identity is protected by state law, and my having a trans kid won’t result in me being on the governor’s fucking hit list.
You think that’s bad, get this. In most US states (47), public school students are required by law to recite the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of the United States once per school day, though…for most of those states…students may opt themselves out.
However, in four states (Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Utah), students may not opt themselves out. The school must receive a written statement from a parent or guardian in order to be exempt.
I have taught in Texas public schools since 2005, and I brought this up with an attorney for the teacher organization I joined (not a union as Texas bans collective bargaining for state employees, so our dues are really not much more than lawsuit insurance). He told me that, in the eyes of the state courts, children under the age of eighteen not being yet adults do not enjoy the same right to freedom of speech that adults do. Hence, in the eyes of the courts, a school district would be within their rights to fire a teacher who does not do their part to ensure all students under their purview recite the Pledge during the time it is spoken over the school’s PA system (and the Pledge to the Texas state flag, also mandatory), 1st Amendment be damned.
Thankfully, I got a gig teaching in Oregon next year, so I am heading northwest (through the also miserable states of Utah and Idaho unfortunately) and never looking back.
‘Grandmother of Juneteenth’ handed keys to new Texas home 85 years after racist mob burned it down
This implies that 85 years ago a racist mob burned down the new Texas home that she was just handed the keys to, which makes no sense.
A better way to word it would be “‘Grandmother of Juneteenth’ handed keys to new Texas home 85 years after racist mob burned her childhood house down”. I get that it’s at the same site, but the home she’s moving into isn’t the same one that was burned down.
Whether it’s obvious or not has no bearing on the fact that it’s an awkwardly-worded title.
What an awkwardly-worded title.
new Texas home…after racist mob burned it down
Burned what down? New house?
"In 2040, I’ll reminisce about the 20th century,
When we still wrote on pads of paper, humans still did all the cleaning." - 2040, Spymob
I will never downvote a non-downvoter of upvotes, fellow fellow.
Yep, those are Jum Legs.
Ah, Big Stupid enabling the Scammer Class: a tale as old as time.
Man, I had a nickel for every time my mom told me “When a member of the Vermont House of Representatives picks on you, that means she likes you”, I’d have, like, all these nickels.
Photogenic: Looks good in photographs; attractive
Memory: A construct of one’s mind that allows them to recall information
a photogenic memory = a beautiful mind.
It is humorous because the assumption is that I mean to say “photographic memory”. One with a photographic memory can recall visual information to which they’ve been exposed with great accuracy.
But when I tell this joke to friends or colleagues, I say “No no, a photogenic memory…I have a beautiful mind”. There was a film with actor Russell Crowe called A Beautiful Mind in which he plays a brilliant professor who we discover late in the film has schizophrenia which has caused him no small amount of embarrassment and challenges in his life. According to diagnostic testing I had done, I have a high intelligence quotient along with autism, and it, too, has caused me embarrassment and challenges in my life.
So when I say I have a “beautiful mind”, people remember that film and it occurs to them that I am saying I am intelligent (something friends and colleagues already know about me) but that my autism (something they also know about me) makes me a little weird and is a burden to me sometimes. It’s just a bit of self-deprecating humor.