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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Fun semi-related story. I used to work in an open kitchen where a lot of the cooking staff would interact with the customers pretty regularly. Quite often me and two other men in the kitchen would get confused with one another. I gave a guy some marinating tips one week. He comes back in a few days later and waves me over to tell me how well it went. Except he didn’t wave me over, it was a coworker he thought was me. I’d have people bring up previous conversations when I’ve never seen them before. After the 3rd time that kind of thing happened, it clicked. The 3 of us who got confused with each other were just very generic young white guys. One of them wore glasses and I sometimes wore them, sometimes wore contacts. Who I got confused with changed on whether I wore glasses or not, but it happened constantly in the years I worked there. And it was always other white people getting us confused. Looking like a generic white guy is 100% a thing.


  • That’s where the discussion comes in. With an instructor to moderate and a class working together who will overall have grasped it. Those who didn’t pick it up reading learn by doing.

    But personally, I don’t like the idea of kids doing schoolwork outside school hours. I went to a trade-school college and we would do trimesters with 9 weeks for a single class. Spent the whole day just in that class, six hours. First half learning theory then putting it into practice in the second half. By nine weeks, you’d know that subject pretty well. But that was complicated stuff, and honestly, probably didn’t even require 9 weeks. But it’s a good starting model. Fully immerse kids in a subject for weeks where they don’t have to mix in other subjects to muddy their forming brains. Homework won’t be needed and they’ll have a much better grasp on the subject at the end. You could do 6 classes for 6 weeks each a school year.

    And I feel like early education kind of already does this. They typically will focus on a subject for weeks instead of trying to fit in 5 a day. It’s just the upper levels we’ve decided to shuffle kids around multiple times a day.


  • And working a job typically isn’t the same as school. School is for learning. That 6 hours where you need to be actively aware and absorbing information. Learning new things. Figuring out how those things fit into the real world. Recalling that information in stressful environments for tests. It’s mentally taxing for a lot of kids as is. When I was in school, most days I was mostly checked out by the end of that 6 hours. I can’t imagine adding a couple more hours in there. And then have to ride the bus home in rush hour traffic!

    But now that I have that baseline education I can check out all day at work and still be more productive than a lot of those around me who stay engaged the full day. Give me eight hours. The most mentally taxing thing I have to do now is pretend to like some of my coworkers during meetings.