Welcome to Thursday, November 13, 2025: we missed Friday the 13th by one day. It’s National Indian Pudding Day, celebrating America’s best indigenous dessert. You either love it or hate it, and I love it, but you’ll find it only in New England. If you’re in Boston, try the Union Oyster House. It’s best served warm with a dollop of ice cream on top, comme ça (it’s made with cornmeal, molasses, butter, egs, and spices, and baked a long time). I suggest you make one, and if you don’t like it, send the leftovers to me.
It’s also International Tempranillo Day (an underrated red), , National Bread Pudding Day,(also great), and Sadie Hawkins Day (if you’re of a certain age, you’ll remember that day from the cartoon Li’l Abner.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the November 13 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*The House of Representatives is back in session, prepared to clear the bill that will end the government shutdown. If it passes, Trump will sign it and we’ll be back to the usual fractious business.
The House of Representatives will finally return to session on Wednesday after a hiatus that stretched on for 54 days, as lawmakers take up legislation that would end the longest government shutdown in American history.
The bill, which passed the Senate on Monday and has President Trump’s support, has sizable momentum on Day 43 of the shutdown, and its approval by the House would clear it for Mr. Trump’s signature. But Republicans’ narrow margin of control and strong opposition from most Democrats are likely to make for an uncomfortably close vote.
It comes as the House crawls back to life with an agenda that is much the same as it was when the chamber last convened on Sept. 19, and Republicans passed a plan to temporarily fund the government. Then, Speaker Mike Johnson called an indefinite recess, arguing that there was no reason for the House to meet until Senate Democrats accepted his party’s proposal.
For weeks, the House lay mostly dormant, with no legislation considered, no hearings held and no debate on the floor. While the representatives went on break — one they have been quick to frame as working from home rather than a nearly two-month vacation — hundreds of thousands of federal workers went without pay, millions of low-income Americans wondered whether they would receive food assistance and exasperated air travelers dealt with disruptions.
Mr. Johnson, who has held near-daily news conferences at the Capitol during the shutdown, is hoping that the House will quickly take up and pass the Senate’s measure to reopen the government.
That legislation, passed on Monday, would fund the government through Jan. 30 and includes spending bills that cover programs related to agriculture, military construction, veterans and legislative agencies for most of next year. The measure also includes a provision that would restore the jobs of federal workers who were laid off during the shutdown and guarantee back pay for those who were furloughed.
But several challenges may lie in store. Mr. Johnson presides over a very slim majority. He must keep Republicans largely united around the spending package, given the nearly solid opposition of Democrats who are livid that it fails to meet their chief demand of extending federal health care subsidies set to expire at the end of the year.
The last paragraph is where the twain won’t meet, even when the government reopens. The Democrats want the healthcare subsidies extended; the Republicans don’t. The failure to agree on that is, of course, the reason for the shutdown in the first place. And I can’t imagine the Republicans caving into the Democratic demand about this. Perhaps there’s a compromise, but I worry that the fracas will begin once again when the government starts up, and that could lead to yet another government shutdown.
*The U.S. has sent our largest aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford, to the Caribbean, along with several destroyers and lots of planes and drones. Does this portend a war with Venezuela, whose president Trump considers a narco-terrorist? Or is it an expensive bluff? The Venezuelans can’t take a chance and are thus preparing for war.
When Donald Trump started sending warships, marines and reaper drones to the Caribbean in August to torment Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s president, the US’s former ambassador in Caracas, James Story, suspected the deployment was largely for show: a spectacular flexing of military muscle supposed to force the authoritarian leader from power.
But in recent days, as the world’s largest aircraft carrier and its strike group powered towards the region and the US president continued to order deadly airstrikes on alleged narco-boats, the diplomat’s thinking has shifted.
“Facts on the ground have changed tremendously,” Story said as the USS Gerald R Ford headed west amid the US’ largest military buildup in Latin America in decades.
Two months ago Story, who was Washington’s top diplomat for Venezuela from 2018 to 2023, saw only a 10% chance of some kind of US attack on Venezuelan soil and an 80% chance that Trump’s gambit would come to nothing. Now, he said he is 80% sure things would evolve into some kind of military action and sees only a 20% chance the status quo would hold.
“I’d say [something is] imminent, without a doubt,” Story predicted as observers in Venezuela and around the world battled to forecast what the unpredictable US president’s next move might be.
Maduro, a strongman political survivor who has overcome a torrent of dramatic crises and challenges since being elected in 2013, has tried to put a brave face on Trump’s maneuver, which has rekindled memories of the 1989 US invasion of Panama to topple its dictator, Manuel Noriega.
. . . and from Reuters:
Venezuela is deploying weapons, including decades-old Russian-made equipment, and is planning to mount a guerrilla-style resistance or sow chaos in the event of a U.S. air or ground attack, according to sources with knowledge of the efforts and planning documents seen by Reuters.The approach is a tacit admission of the South American country’s shortage of personnel and equipment.
Well, Venezuela would lose, of course, but who gave Trump the power to start a war (he’ll claim it isn’t one). Only the Congress as a whole can declare war, a stipulation in the Constitution that is regularly and unfortunately ignored. If Trump wants to be the great peacemaker, and get the Nobel Prize he so ardently desires, he can’t go attacking countries willy-nilly. Do maybe this is a bluff. Who knows with that man?
*As the Free Press reports, a recent study shows that many students entering good colleges are unable to do simple math, sometimes on the elementary-school level, and have to take remedial courses.
Sarah had 9 pennies and 9 dimes. How many coins did she have in all?
Solve (10 − 2)(4 − 6x) = 0
California officials expect math students in public school to know the first answer by the end of second grade—and the second answer by the end of eighth grade. But when some incoming college students were asked these questions, about 20 percent could not correctly count the number of coins, and over 80 percent were unable to solve the equation. [JAC: EIGHTY PERCENT? OY!]
A report released last week by the University of California San Diego, which has about 45,000 students and is one of America’s highest-ranked public universities, said that the number of entering first-year students whose math skills fall below middle-school level “increased nearly thirtyfold” from 2020 to 2025—to roughly one out of every eight new students.
The deterioration of basic academic preparation has left incoming students “increasingly unprepared for the quantitative and analytical rigor expected at UC San Diego.”
To help them catch up, UC San Diego offers a remedial math course that focuses on concepts that are supposed to be learned between the first and eighth grades. Enrollment is skyrocketing.
Students who are not ready for UC San Diego’s regular math classes are placed in a remedial class that was created in 2016 and meant to serve about 1 percent of the incoming class. This fall, about 8.5 percent of incoming students wound up in the remedial math class, which focuses on elementary- and middle-school math subjects, according to the report. Another 3.3 percent of the incoming students were placed in a class that covers high-school math topics such as algebra and geometry.
UC San Diego isn’t the only major university that is scrambling to help more students catch up. Last fall, Harvard University began offering Mathematics MA5 to review “foundational skills in algebra, geometry, and quantitative reasoning.” President Donald Trump saw the class as fodder to criticize Harvard for admitting foreign students who he claimed could not do basic addition. Harvard said that the class was “college-level.”
Here’s a graph from the FP on the growth of students having to take remedial math at UCSD. This trend started in 2020, which is about the year that colleges stopped requiring the SAT or making it optional (it’s largely not even asked for in many schools). And of course the SAT is half mathematics. SAT scores were dropped as requirements because of the view (partly wrong) that it would help minority students, who scored lower on average, gain admission when race-based admissions per se were prohibited. But this takes away a valuable predictor of success in both college and later life, so more remedial education is needed. An alternative hypotheses is that perhaps the schools themselvs, because of online or remote learning, became unable to teach math very well, so everyone was losing their skills. Regardless, math is important, and we don’t want a whole generation of students who are not only functionally illiterate but also inn
*About three weeks ago philosopher Maarten Boudry, one of those sensible people who aren’t Jewish but still support Israel against Hamas, put a piece on his substack called “They don’t believe it either,” with the subtitle “The Gaza genocide as ideological performance.” His point was made in the tweet below, but I’ll give a few quotes.
These facts about the history and meaning of the Amalek verse are easily verifiable, and they were pointed out early on in the Gaza War (by (by Yair Rosenberg) when accusations about Netanyahu’s use of allegedly genocidal language first surfaced. And yet, newspapers and NGOs have kept repeating this inflammatory canard without ever issuing a correction.
There are countless examples of similar distortions. In an impromptu speech delivered days after 7 October, former defense minister Yoav Gallant told his soldiers that “Gaza will not return to what it was before. There will be no Hamas. We will eliminate it all.” A widely circulated clip of this speech—which appeared on the BBC, and in the New York Times,the Guardian,and South Africa’s ICJ case—dishonestly omitted the middle sentence, making it look as if Gallant had pledged to eliminate “all of Gaza.” Gallant was also accused of calling Palestinians “human animals.” He didn’t—he was referring to Hamas, the “ISIS of Gaza.”
And Netanyahu never said that “Gazans would pay a huge price,” as even once-reputable scholars have claimed; he said Israel would “exact a huge price from the enemy,” meaning Hamas. Nor did he threaten to turn Gaza into a “desert island”—a complete fabrication born of a mistranslation by Al Jazeera, which is funded by the same regime that bankrolls Hamas.
And then there is Israeli president Isaac Herzog’s assertion that “it’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved. It’s absolutely untrue. They could’ve risen up, they could have fought against that evil regime.” Herzog’s phrasing was unfortunate and liable to be misunderstood, although it should be noted that historians such as Daniel Goldhagen have made identical claims of collective responsibility about the German people under Nazi Germany.
. . . . Leaving aside rhetoric and incitement, is there any evidence on the ground that the IDF acts with the intent to annihilate the entire Palestinian population, women and children included? I’m not a military expert, but as far as I can tell, there is none whatsoever. If the Gaza War was a genocide, it was the most incompetent genocide in recorded history. Time and again, the IDF has warned the civilian population about impending attacks and offered them time to evacuate, by distributing millions of flyers, text messages, voice mails and QR codes with military maps—thereby suffering a clear military disadvantage (because Hamas fighters can also read a map). If your goal is to kill everyone, warning people beforehand where you will strike and giving them a chance to escape is about the stupidest thing you can do.
. . . Had Israel wished to use the 7 October massacre as a pretext for genocide, it could have carpet-bombed the entire Strip without endangering the life of a single IDF soldier. Or they could do what Hamas did on Oct 7, methodically going from house to house and massacring every living soul. Instead, Israel lost more than 900 soldiers during the Gaza campaign (and thousands more were wounded) precisely because it entered the enclave on foot and refrained from indiscriminate killing. Even according to Hamas’s own statistics, which do not distinguish between combatants and civilians and include many natural deaths, casualties are predominantly male and of fighting age, which is inconsistent with a policy of indiscriminate killing (Hamas initially tried to fool global opinion that the casualties of the Gaza war were “70 percent women and children,” but that claim collapsed under scrutiny and was then quietly retracted).
By the way, I have heard that claim about the 70% casualities, and lost a friend when I contested it. Maarten does mention the IDF’s “infuriating mistakes,” including the deeply misguided 11-week food blockade. A bit more:
Why then did this war have such a terrible toll on civilians, despite Israel’s efforts? There are two major reasons, both consistently ignored by all the genocide reports: Hamas’ cult of martyrdom, and the perverse incentives created by its unwitting enablers. Hamas is not just indifferent to civilian casualties; it actively solicits them as part of its military strategy. It has constructed hundreds of kilometers of tunnels for its fighters, while failing to build a single shelter for its own women and children. It deliberately fires rockets from hospitals, schools, UN buildings, mosques, and in the vicinity of humanitarian zones. Fully aware that it is no match for the Israeli army on the battlefield, it possesses one secret weapon to bring Israel to its knees: the moral conscience of the international community. If they sacrifice enough innocent women and children and then broadcast the harrowing images and casualty figures all across the international media, they can push Western nations to ostracize, delegitimize, and boycott Israel.
. . . .The many fabrications and distortions in the genocide case against Israel are evidence of something different from rational inquiry and truth-seeking. What explains the frantic search, from almost the first day of the war, for statements by Israeli officials that can be twisted into proof of genocidal intent? What accounts for the willful blindness to Hamas’s cruelty, to the point of erasing Hamas altogether, as if the war had only one combatant? And why is the definition of genocide gerrymandered by NGOs to implicate and condemn Israel—through inventions like “slow-motion genocide” or “incremental genocide”—even though the Palestinian population grew from 1.1 million to 5.1 million between 1960 and 2020?
The answer is that the “Gaza genocide” calumny has become the Left’s equivalent of the “stolen election” hoax on the American Right—a baseless accusation that signals ideological allegiance precisely because it defies logic and evidence. That is why nonsense like the Amalek verse keeps being recycled, impervious to correction—the point is not to offer evidence, but to hammer down a pre-established conclusion.
Like the stolen-election lie, there are reasons to suspect that many of the people who repeat the Gaza genocide lie don’t actually believe it. The more informed critics of Israel—those who understand the definition of genocide—should recognize that an army issuing evacuation warnings and facilitating humanitarian aid is pursuing a different project altogether. And anyone seriously interested in the ethics of warfare should be able to acknowledge a moral distinction between civilians who die as the unintended consequence of military action—and in spite of imperfect attempts to protect them—and those who are deliberately and systematically murdered.
I’ve put in more quotes than usual because I think this is an important article, one that definitively debunks the “genocide” claim against Israel. The real perpetrators of genocide are, of course, Hamas, which has explicitly sworn to destroy Israel and Jews, and tried to do so. But ideologues won’t pay attention to the arguments above; all one can hope is that they reach rational and open-minded people. BTW, Maarten may soon be out of a job at Ghent because of his sympathies for Israel, so do subscribe to his website. There’s no fluff there; he writes good stuff.
*OMG they’re not making pennies any more, and that means eventually they’ll disappear. All price will be rounded up 5 cents! What will we put in penny loafers?
The U.S. Mint in Philadelphia is set to strike its last circulating penny on Wednesday as the president has canceled the 1-cent coin.
President Donald Trump has ordered its demise as costs climb to nearly 4 cents per penny and the 1-cent valuation becomes somewhat obsolete.
The U.S. Mint has been making pennies in Philadelphia, the nation’s birthplace, since 1793, a year after Congress passed the Coinage Act. Today, there are billions of them in circulation, but they are rarely essential for financial transactions in the modern economy or the digital age.
“For far too long the United States has minted pennies which literally cost us more than 2 cents,” Trump wrote in an online post in February, as costs continued to climb. “This is so wasteful!”
Still, many people have a nostalgia for them, seeing them as lucky or fun to collect. And some retailers have voiced concerns in recent weeks as supplies ran low and the last production neared. They said the phase-out was abrupt and came with no guidance from the federal government on how to handle customer transactions.
“We have been advocating abolition of the penny for 30 years. But this is not the way we wanted it to go,” Jeff Lenard of the National Association of Convenience Stores said last month.
Some banks, meanwhile, began rationing supplies, a somewhat paradoxical result of the effort to address what many see as a glut of the coins. Over the last century, about half of the coins made at U.S. Mints in Philadelphia and Denver have been pennies.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Treasurer Brandon Beach were expected to be in Philadelphia on Wednesday afternoon for the final production run. The Treasury Department expects to save $56 million per year on materials by ceasing to make them.
I bet the last penny made will be worth a pile—if you can prove it. But if this story depresses you, consider this: a nickel costs 14 cents to make! Fortunately, as the article says, “The diminutive dime, by comparison, costs less than 6 cents to produce and the quarter nearly 15 cents.” Does that mean they’re gonna get rid of nickels, too?
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the mammals are joking around:
Hili: What day is it today?
Andrzej: The tomorrow of yesterday.
In Polish:
Hili: Jaki mamy dziś dzień tygodnia?
Ja: Wczorajsze jutro.
*******************
From CinEmma:
From Fairy Witch Cottagecore Vibes:
From Meow Incorporated:
Masih’s still in Berlin touting the World Liberty Congress, and J. K. Rowling remains quiescent, like a frozen Popsicle. However, Emma Hilton retweeted this:
This is a movement that provides cover for predators, example 1,456,789: https://t.co/u2yTbZOxfQ
— Amy Eileen Hamm (@preta_6) November 11, 2025
From Maarten. Belgium and the Netherlands are perhaps the two most antisemitic countries in Europe. And Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories is totally biased and bigoted towards Israel and Jews. If you don’t believe me, see this article about her.
Multiple sources tell me the Flemish universities plan to award an honorary doctorate to @FranceskAlbs. This would be an utter disgrace—erasing any last pretense of institutional neutrality and accelerating the reckless politicization of academia that brought disaster in the US. pic.twitter.com/1vvAmWt0ha
— Maarten Boudry (@mboudry) November 11, 2025
From Bryan, a lovely theramin solo. I wonder how you learn to play this thing.
KATICA ILLÉNYI playing the Thermin.
This organic analog electronic instrument can evoke deep emotions in the hands of a master musician.
I have been to shows where everyone is in tears.
I mean everyone.
— Brian Roemmele (@BrianRoemmele) November 11, 2025
One from Malcolm; a beautiful crystal collection (sound up):
This man collects incredible-looking gems and has a room completely dedicated to the collectionpic.twitter.com/cvP8CQ662g
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) November 5, 2025
One from my feed:
Hearing a raven speak Russian is one of the most terifying things I’ve ever heard 😭 😂 pic.twitter.com/YVpP3XSC9W
— internet hall of fame (@InternetH0F) November 12, 2025
. . . and one I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:
A Dutch Jewish girl (age 5) and her older sister were gassed as soon as they arrived in Auschwitz. Had Liane lived, she would have been 87 yesterday. https://t.co/a1AE2Ytbnq
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) November 13, 2025
Two posts from Matthew. First, a cat takes the lift:
Like a boss😅👍
— 𝒑𝒔𝒚𝒄𝒐𝒉𝒐𝒖𝒔𝒆𝒄𝒂𝒕 (@psycohousecat.bsky.social) 2025-11-08T15:42:40.365Z
And an amazing image made with a typewriter:
Holy shit, just learned about the typewriter art of Montserrat Alberich Escardívol, a Catalan typist. Using an extra wide typewriter and 180 color ribbons, she built up elaborate images from simple characters like 'm' and '.' and ';'. Here is her typewritten painting of the Cathedral of Barcelona.
— Whitney Trettien (@whitneytrettien.bsky.social) 2025-11-12T16:19:36.341Z
I don’t see the crystals – theremin link instead.
I looked up Katica Illényi – she has a lot of violin recordings – looks like one recording of theremin… check it out! 🎶
We heard a theramin a couple of years ago, eitheratthe Canadian Opera Company or MetOpera Livein HD. Reallyhaunting music.
The original Theramin was first marketed by RCA in 1929: https://www.rcatheremin.com/. I played one at the SPARK Museum of Electrical Invention in Bellingham, Washington. It’s very difficult to play, as it depends on hand capacitance, not touch. There are no “stops.” The tones are produced through subtle hand gestures. The original 1929 Theramin was a pretty simple device and used early vacuum tubes for amplification. A number of them still exist, either in museums or with collectors. Modern Theramins are available that use solid state components in place of tubes, but work on the same original principle. (You can buy them on Amazon.) There’s a direct line from Leon Theramin’s Theramin to Robert Moog’s Moog synthesizers. Lydia Kavina is probably today’s most accomplished Theraminist. Her recordings are fantastic!
Cool – yeah, you can see the “MOOG” brand name in the video clip above.
So at some point is there an imaginary chromatic scale line in space as a guide? – as might be useful say for violin (or bass, etc.) – which just now occurs to me as a connection because Illényi’s forté is apparently violin…
Kind of. You can read more about the technique online, but the Theramin has two antennas. One of them, aimed vertically, is used to change pitch. The other, a horizontally oriented loop, controls volume. One moves one’s hands up or down along the vertical antenna to control pitch. One moves one’s hands closer or further from the horizontal loop in order to control volume. You don’t actually touch the antennae. Your hand movements disturb the electromagnetic fields surrounding the antennas. These disturbances produce the variations in sound.
Here’s a great video to give you the idea: https://youtu.be/njnzgmnzLCU?si=PnQzuqqSPd1suPqU
Excellent pick! I want to try it so bad now
I put the crystal one up; its omission was a mistake.
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences. -Robert Louis Stevenson, novelist, essayist, and poet (13 Nov 1850-1894)
There are three reasons commonly given to get rid of the penny, two of which make sense (or should that be “make cents”?). First, the metal in a penny is worth more than a penny. So there is temptation to melt them down and sell them (which is illegal). Two, due to inflation nothing can be bought for a penny anymore and they are needed only so that those stupid x.99 prices can be paid in cash. Yes, that means rounding if such prices are kept. That’s been happening with gasoline for decades. Prices can be multiples of 5 cents or whatever, or one could keep penny (or tenth-of-a-penny) prices and round (not necessarily up). That is common in some countries (where even bigger-denomination coins have been abolished, though not necessarily all worth more than a U.S. penny).
The third reason is the mistaken belief that a coin which costs more than it is worth to make is somehow a bad idea. Snopes explains why that idea is wrong: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/making-cents/
The demise of the penny, though sad, is probably not a big deal. First, many transactions are done electronically. where the odd cent isn’t an issue. Second, many stores will likely modify their prices to that, with tax, the total for an item comes to a multiple of five. Lastly, there are a lot of pennies out there. I am sure I have enough in jars to last me the rest of my life.
In Australia and NZ (and Japan) they deleted the one and two cents/yen from circulation decades ago. And those countries seem to have survived OK. I love cash (our last bastion of privacy) but pennies are ANNOYING.
Excellent piece by Maartin B. again. He’s 100% right about the “Gaza Genocide” = stolen election, except the fraudulence of Gaza myth is more facially obvious.
D.A.
NYC
Canada stopped making pennies in 2012. No one seems to care.
I read that the US continued with them because a company involved in their production lobbied for them. Apparently they no longer have lobbying power. Chalk it up as a good thing Trump has done.
A price of 99 cents isn’t stupid if it encourages impulse buyers to think it costs less than a dollar, or less than 10 dollars, or whatever. The customer might be stupid for thinking that but that’s not our problem as the retail seller who posted the price. If the customer has a ten-dollar bill to spend, we’re going to take as much of that ten dollars as we can. We’d happily give him one cent back in change if it avoided the psychological price resistance barrier. When Canadian one-cent pieces were discontinued, we still posted the $9.99 price. We just stopped giving change from a ten, which is a courtesy retailers extend to encourage trade. It’s not a legal obligation.
In practice, sales taxes and the national VAT applied at the till push the price of most items other than basic groceries to $11.2887 in Ontario, so the customer has for many years had to dig into his pocket beyond $10. The price ending in 9 is now more traditional as an eye-catcher. Prices look funny if posted as $9.73 and there’s usually no reason for the retailer to cut into his margin just to make the till price come out to $11 even, unless for some promotional reason. Merchants now round 3 cents up to 5 and 2 cents down to 0 for cash sales. Cards and cheques are charged to the nearest cent as before.
No one misses pennies. I suspect all coins below a dollar will be gone soon.
Where this has happened elsewhere, the price is rounded to the nearest .05. Now let’s quit printing $1 bills and replace them with $1 coins. Now the cash drawers will have spaces for $2’s and the change spots for nickels etc will just move over one.
If it is really true that 20% can’t count coins and 80% can’t do the simple algebra question, that is amazing and pathetic. We simply have to go back to the oldfashioned way of evaluating students in elementary school and high school. Not everyone passes and some students get left back a year. If that has disparate impact on minorities, so be it.
The biggest problem is that this is the University of California. The data imply that the cause is a change in admission standards – not using the SAT. I’m fairly sure you wouldn’t achieve an acceptable SAT score if you can’t count coins.
It may be time for a rethink about compulsory education. As in, why do we require children to be in school until a certain age? I know, I know…”we need an educated populace in order to have a functioning democracy”….but how educated really is our populace? Isn’t compulsory education more of a solution to the problem of where to put your kids while you work all day? Basically, modern societies’ solution to the industrial revolution and moving everyone off the farm into the factory/office?
Whatever the reasons for compulsory education, there are clearly large swathes of people that a) don’t benefit from this education and b) are a disruption and detract from the experience of those that do.
A societal shift has happened such that very poorly socialized children, due mainly to deteriorating family structures, are thrust into an environment that they cannot handle. Hapless teachers, who should be there only as subject matter experts, are now forced to be a social worker and parent as well. It is impossible to do, especially when faced with large class sizes. And teachers are often powerless to enforce discipline, as parents now rarely side with teachers, and school administrators seem eager to placate parents.
The solution would be to have completely alternative structures to formal schooling. Children who demonstrate the ability to handle formal school can stay there, and children who cannot can be moved into these alternative structures. I don’t know what these programs are, but they could incorporate practical skills with some rudimentary education. Certainly by 8th grade, we need to look into expanding trade school options and making it much easier for public schools to send children there.
I’m sorry if this sounds elitist, but I have done a complete 180 on this from many years ago. Years of helping out as a tutor, and even coaching youth sports, have convinced me of this epidemic of under-socialized kids (which has only been made worse by smart phones).
Wow. With the beautiful exception of the theremin video, this has been an incredibly depressing start to the day. Just a recognition, not a complaint. You write the news that is, not what you would like it to be.
There are countless examples of similar distortions. In an impromptu speech delivered days after 7 October, former defense minister Yoav Gallant told his soldiers that “Gaza will not return to what it was before. There will be no Hamas. We will eliminate it all.” A widely circulated clip of this speech—which appeared on the BBC, and in the New York Times,the Guardian,and South Africa’s ICJ case—dishonestly omitted the middle sentence, making it look as if Gallant had pledged to eliminate “all of Gaza.” Gallant was also accused of calling Palestinians “human animals.” He didn’t—he was referring to Hamas, the “ISIS of Gaza.”
Interesting. The BBC has recently lost two of their bosses because of a similar omission involving Donald Trump’s speeches on January 6th. They spliced together two clips from 50-55 minutes apart, and it was broadcast on the BBC’s flagship Panorama programme. Thing is, they really didn’t need to edit Trump’s words to demonstrate him pouring fuel on the flames on that day.
I don’t expect the Guardian to apologise for using edited clips.
The UC San Diego “math” problem is both worse and better than what The Free Press reports. I recommend looking at the report appendix on pages 48-50 for a sample of the skills assessment test. While it is true that 9% of tested students could not add 66+44, and it is also true that 61% when given the number 374518 could not round it to the nearest hundred, these are results not from the student body at large but from a sample of those 1 in 8 who were already identified for remedial math. Feel better? I thought not!
Of those remedial math students, 13% could not do 1st grade math; 81% could not do 8th grade math. Sure, we can blame pandemic-related policy, but the problem is deeper. Of those students in remedial math, 20% of them had “passed” AP Calculus; 25% had a high school math GPA of 4.0; and nearly all had taken calculus, precalculus, or statistics after taking Algebra I & II and geometry. UCSD doesn’t make it clear how one “remediates” at the college level not gaps in Grades 9-11 math but foundational insufficiency.
For those who want to blame potential Arts and Humanities majors for the dismal performance above, slow down. It appears that enrollment in remedial math is geared toward students who will need math for their major rather than simply for those who don’t know math. Biology is the most enrolled major, but you will see that nearly all the “Top 20 majors” of enrollees are STEM and other quant fields (econ, psych). Perhaps I overlooked something in the report, but I saw nothing to suggest that liberal arts types were even tested for math competency. (They have a “writing” and language comprehension problem—future report pending.)
While much of this can be placed at the feet of the K-12 system and the University of California Board of Regents, who banned even voluntary submission of SAT/ACT scores for admissions, UC San Diego also shot itself in the foot. They understandably wanted to help the underprivileged so, after the summer of George Floyd (or the pandemic—you pick), they dropped their admissions rate from high caliber schools and sharply increased it from schools with more challenged populations (schools with low income, high foster youth rates, etc.) They quickly found out that it appears many teachers and administrators from those schools had been long “helping” their students earn the necessary credentials for success.
The road to diversity, equity, and inclusion rarely runs through the mountains of rigor, let alone reaches the peaks of merit. I have sympathy for trying to increase enrollment of ethnic minorities and poor children of any color, but as Jerry has repeatedly said: We have a pipeline problem. It can’t be fixed at the collegiate level.
This reminds of a story I read in the The Times-Picayune from New Orleans, when I lived down there (circa 2003): it was about a girl who was the valedictorian of her class but was not college-ready (she found out about this when she showed up for college). She had been cheated by her teachers who had not honestly evaluated her academic competencies.
Though it’s hard to blame the teachers too much when society judges teachers and schools according to their students’ nominal attainment.
More evidence America’s best days are behind us. BTW white educators, you don’t help us minorities by lowering standards. I owe my successful career to a white teacher who would not lower her standards for me. Thank you Mrs. Preston.
Ooo wow I see the crystals now – if that is interesting I highly recommend if anyone hasn’t yet a visit to the Harvard Museum of Natural History – must be seen to be believed. A quiet kind of out-of-the-way museum that … dare I write it … refreshes my soul… been lookin’ for an opportunity…
“The U.S. has sent our largest aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford, to the Caribbean…”
Gerald Ford eh? It keeps bumping into stuff on the way, hope it makes it there in one piece.
Today in History:
“On November 13th, Felix Unger was asked to remove himself from his place of residence. That request came from his wife.”
The opening of the classic sitcom “The Odd Couple,” 1969
Unless I missed it, no one has offered solutions to the two math questions 😊
I’m still stuck on the first: Sarah had 9 pennies and 9 dimes. How many coins did she have in all?
Did Sarah only have 9 pennies and 9 dimes? If for example she had a quarter, 10 pennies and 11 dimes, wouldn’t the statement that ‘Sarah had 9 pennies and 9 dimes’ still be true?
Very good. If one of the multiple choice answers was “not enough information to conclude”, I would have chosen that!
Yup.
Tell me you usually had the highest score on the grade school test while simultaneously getting wrong the question that EVERY OTHER KID GOT RIGHT!
Sarah has 18 and only 18 coins. In your counterfactual she has 22 coins. That they also add to 99 cents isn’t relevant to counting the coins. If Sarah had 90 cents in one pile of coins and 9 more cents in another pile, then the question about number of coins doesn’t have a unique answer, as you say.
At the Grade 2 level, the children are expected to see that the task is to sum the coins as physical objects without getting distracted by their different colour or what they know about their value.
As a high school teacher in Canada, I can’t comment on the U.S. education system, but I have definitely seen a decline in math ability in high school students. A few possible reasons:
1. Elementary (Kindergarten to grade 7 or 8) students are forwarded to the next grade whether they have passed all their classes or not. So even if a student is doing abysmal in math, they are moved forward to “keep them with their peer group for their self-esteem”. Another danger is that bright students might recognize that they don’t have to work hard, or do the work, as they’ll get promoted anyway, and consequently not learn their basic skills. Unfortunately the buck stops in high school (grade 8 or 9). I’ve met parents who wanted their kids held back as they knew their math skills were lacking, but were overruled by the school.
2. Each time the curriculum is changed/updated, it is also dumbed down. Students today don’t even cover many of the math concepts I learned in high school, despite technology that would allow them to cover concepts faster (eg. graphing calculators). One could make arguments that some of those concepts aren’t relevant for the majority of students as they won’t be studying math in university, but it goes farther than that. For example, when we cover powers and exponents, we used to include scientific notation, but that has now been removed. So now when I teach grade 10 physics that involves scientific notation, I also have to teach them scientific notation, but due to time constraints, relatively little time is given to it.
It is relatively rare for me to see students that remind me of my friends and I when I was in high school. We were always challenging ourselves, eg. I had an early calculator watch (only could + – x /), but I noticed square roots came up a lot, so I started memorizing common square roots. Another friend taught himself to multiple 3 digit numbers in his head. Others memorized pi to 20 or more decimal places. In contrast I occasionally run into grade 10 students (16 year olds) who can’t multiply 2 x 7 without a calculator!
Re. Venezuela
Russia, China, Iran, Cuba and even our NATO ally Turkey says it will support Maduro against American intervention. What could go wrong?
It might fail to distract US voters from the Epstein files/situation.
That pudding looks awesome.