@junipersky Absolutely.
There’s a lot I could say about industrialization as an epistemological framework and how it doesn’t always do education and human welfare justice. But this is not the place for it!
Just, I absolutely understand your frustration and share it.
You just NAILED what ticked me off hard at our training yesterday when I couldn’t pin it down.
The cohort I work with is dramatically different from what the rest of the schools have. We don’t have any physical boundries, so right away all of our students have directly chosen to attend at my building. We have maybe three families out of an average class size of 27 that doesn’t regularly communicate or has socio-economic issues that prevents them communicate being as active as they want in their child’s life. Even then, they all provide transport to and from our building daily which means most times we have SOME point of contact with the adults in the child’s life. The other schools don’t have that. We have 95% attendance at PT confrences. They are lucky with 30%.*
Asking us and them to do the same things and expecting to measure outcomes is a complete disservice to them and drags us down also because it prevents us from reaching upwards for what our kids can do. They can’t come and ask “what are you doing different” because 9/10 times we aren’t doing anything- our parents are.
*I want to be clear there is NO BLAME from me for these parents. They are doing their best to simply survive. Their kids are doing the same. The schools are doing as much as they can to support them where they are.
So… like everything in education, it’s not really possible to repeat the “Mississippi miracle” because no one can agree on what led to the gains.
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/12/01/how-much-of-mississippis-education-miracle-is-an-artifact-of-selection-bias/ <-- Article breaking down the statistics used and how different sides choose to read and interpret the data to draw different conclusions.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/04/mississippi-education-miracle/686731/ <-- More on the X factor that can’t just be copy-pasted
https://educationwars.substack.com/p/overselling-the-mississippi-miracle <-- It is just complicated! And we will see if Mississippi can keep it up.
Yeah. I’ve worked in educational research and it turns out that successful implementation of programs across cohorts is incredibly difficult. Even if it’s being implemented the same way as a successful iteration (and this hardly ever happens for another whole host of reasons), you often don’t see the same results because there are real human factors involved. Relationships between teachers and students, neighborhood trust, neighborhood/family risk factors (turns out kids have trouble concentrating on ANY education when they’re starving or afraid for their safety), and just…so many other things.
RP about me, not about you. Tell me how great I am. Don’t tell me how great your character is.
HR circles back to let me know the photo has been deleted. However, the male co-worker said he’s reaching out to his therapist about it and my female HR thinks that’s really good enough. As the photo was deleted and there was no harm.
Why are they centring his feelings. Wtf is this pickme ass logic. I assume he’s a grown adult?? Oh wow so sad he’s still working through his issues to not take an inappropriate picture of a colleague without consent. Poor him, hope he can make it through this tough time???
Because that’s the path of least amount of work for HR and probably exposes to the company the least amount of risk to a successful lawsuit.
Absolutely not. They should be firing him. They are exposing the company to wild amounts of risk if he does anything in the future.
im in hr
So… like everything in education, it’s not really possible to repeat the “Mississippi miracle” because no one can agree on what led to the gains.
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/12/01/how-much-of-mississippis-education-miracle-is-an-artifact-of-selection-bias/ <-- Article breaking down the statistics used and how different sides choose to read and interpret the data to draw different conclusions.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/04/mississippi-education-miracle/686731/ <-- More on the X factor that can’t just be copy-pasted
https://educationwars.substack.com/p/overselling-the-mississippi-miracle <-- It is just complicated! And we will see if Mississippi can keep it up.
My basic steps:
Try to think about what other PCs in the scene are into, based on their character pages/previous conversations. Try to engage at least one of those areas where possible, in the set, conversation, or whatever.
Read the other PCs’ poses. Try to make sure I am reacting to what they give me. In larger scenes, I’ll usually pick one person to primarily react to, because otherwise the poses get real long and real busy. But always try to react to something.
Leave something in the pose that takes the scene further and gives other people something to react to. Don’t just answer a question, ask one of your own. Do some action that requires a reaction. (And seriously, in a talk-heavy scene, never just flatly answer someone’s question without lobbing the conversational ball back with some sort of comment or question that can also be responded to. Don’t make someone have to interview you.)
I teach at a middle to high upper class public magnet school. No millionaires, but 70% of my student population doesn’t have issues paying for basic needs and many wants and can take a vacation yearly. The other 30% qualify for free and reduced lunches. Even for a majority of our parents in poverty they are highly engaged in their child’s life and that makes up a ton of the difference in wealth. Our students are academically and socially advanced in general. We have fewer behavior issues on the whole. Our parents generally want to work with us.
I say all of that to check my privilege. I fully understand this is not true of a majority of our district. We are excelling as a school because of all that privilege.
That said, I need to underline the part where generally our kids are above the medium for our district scores. Last year no one on our staff used any curriculum to fidelity. We picked the best and left the rest. My same level teacher and I abandoned our Math curriculum mid year and our okay data became exceptionally good. We both had non-readers break the literacy barrier. Kids who were always at the bottom in math either grew more than a year or finally met benchmark at the end of the year for the first time.
So tell me why we were handed a SCRIPTED (Literally, it says “say this”) curriculum and told we would be audited on our fidelity.
Our upper literacy teacher almost lost her mind. She read Romeo and Juliet last year with her kids. This year they recommend “The Brave Little Toaster” as required and “longer reads” as “suggestions for kids outside of class.”
I am offended for myself, and my students. They can achieve a shit ton more if I can keep delivering higher tier instruction that I know all meet my kids needs because *they are different. *
https://brandmu.day/topic/678/forum-upgrade-8-4
Let me know what broke.
Sorry for the downtime. Did an appalling number of upgrades while fixing the gif button. We’ve upgraded a few so let me know if you see anything broken.
