I remember how it was -- JR
Sunday, May 22, 2022
School Board Member to Host ‘Queer Youth’ Event at Sex Shop for ‘All Ages’
A Washington state school board member is set to host a “Queer Youth Open Mic Night” at a sex store for children aged “0-18” on June 1.
Jenn Mason, who sits on the board of directors of Bellingham Public Schools, owns the sex shop WinkWink Boutique, according to the store’s website, which is set to host the event. The Queer Youth Open Mic Night Facebook page invites “queer youth” of all ages to share poetry, music, or a story, according to the event’s Facebook page.
“WinkWink offers a space for people—including queer folks—to ask questions and learn about sexuality in an accepting, safe, and shame-free environment. We receive extensive sexual health training and are a knowledgeable, inclusive community resource—something severely lacking around sexuality in our culture,” Mason told KTTH radio host Jason Rantz on Tuesday.
Mason added that the children would be “physically separated” from the store’s adult products.
The WinkWink Boutique describes itself as “woman-owned, inclusive not creepy,” and for “all ages” on its website. Alongside a variety of sex toys, the WinkWink Boutique offers “private sex coaching” with Mason, who states that she is a “certified sex coach and educator” on the site.
Mason was elected to the Bellingham Public School Board in November 2017, according to the district’s website. Mason has worked as a community educator and trauma counselor in schools across Whatcom County, Washington, the website states.
The WinkWink Boutique, Mason, and Bellingham Public Schools did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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Why Google Doesn’t Hire Top Graduates
According to Laszlo Bock, a former Google executive, top students from the best schools often lack the intellectual humility that comes with failure.
As a result, they develop a highly egocentric worldview.
“If something good happens, it’s because I’m a genius. If something bad happens, it’s because someone’s an idiot or I didn’t get the resources,” Bock explained.
This sort of thinking, of course, is highly incompatible with Google’s constant-learning, soft-skill dominated value system. But it’s not the only reason why Google doesn’t really care about your grades.
A while ago, Google ran a study that found there was no correlation between employee performance and their school GPA.
Apparently, Google really took that study to heart. While it used to be proud of trophy Harvard and MIT graduates, it since loosened its hiring policy. In 2018, they even stopped requiring a degree altogether.
“Good grades certainly don’t hurt,” Bock added. “[But] for every job, though, the №1 thing we look for is general cognitive ability, and it’s not I.Q. It’s learning ability. It’s the ability to process on the fly.”
So far, so good. In the interview, Laszlo Bock named several buzzword-y attributes that make a good Googler. Leadership skills, soft skills, general cognitive abilities, rigorous analytical skills. None of these are necessarily tied to your GPA. Everything seemed to make sense.
Until Bock said something very disturbing.
Apparently, it’s not all degrees Google considers worthless. Just the humanities ones.
One of the applicants Bock personally worked with was considering switching from a computer science degree to an economics one. According to Bock, this move showed the student’s lack of resilience.
“I told that student they are much better off being a B student in computer science than an A+ student in English because it signals a rigor in your thinking and a more challenging course load.”
That’s one funny conversion chart. But it seems to be reflective of how Google think about college degrees.
Bock made a comment on another case, where a student switched from electrical engineering to psychology.
“I think this student was making a mistake,” said Bock. “She was moving out of a major where she would have been differentiated in the labor force.”
This sort of thinking is by no means new. Ever since the industrial revolution, studying art and humanities has been increasingly portrayed as second-tier.
This has been especially obvious in the last 30 years, where degrees with a focus on computer science and engineering have been ones that offered a clear roadmap into a career.
But the entire lineup between STEM degrees and the IT industry is more accidental than it is designed. University degrees were never meant to train the labour force — they were meant to give broad, conceptual knowledge. (Exactly what Google claims it’s looking for.)
Universities were always supposed to be a place where you come to grow as a person, instead of training to be a part of the workforce. It used to be a place where intellectuals come together to do research, discuss ideas, and pass on their knowledge to future generations.
Humanities are an absolutely inseparable part of that. Think programming is hard? Try reading Dostoyevsky.
I was absolutely infuriated when Naval Ravikant, a Silicon Valley investor, called humanities “not a real science” on Joe Rogan’s podcast.
He said that social sciences essentially rode the wave of credibility that “real sciences” like math and physics have built. Humanities, in his view, are little more but a political puppet show.
As someone who writes both articles and apps, this sort of radical one-sidedness always sounds borderline dangerous to me. A book is equal parts engineering and art. The iPhone is equal parts engineering and art. You cannot separate one from the other and expect something good to happen.
Unfortunately, at the moment Silicon Valley seems to be determinedly biased towards STEM fields, even if your grade isn’t A+. So, yes, go ahead and send that resume. Unless, of course, you’re an English major.
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NYC's Black Mayor Bucks Progressives on the Racial Chessboard of 'Gifted' Education
Mayor Eric Adams’ plan to save accelerated education in New York City from progressive critics begins with students like Cassy Thime’s daughter: a black second-grader who would thrive in a gifted classroom that today includes few kids of color.
“She’s a top student and a gifted program will give her a more rigorous education and push her to excel,” said Thime, who has a doctorate in education and lives in Queens. “Now she has classmates who can’t even read.”
Adams, who took office in January, is diving headfirst into a controversy over academically selective schools that’s dividing communities from San Francisco to Fairfax County, Va.
New York’s second black mayor rejects the criticism that accelerated learning is racist and must be dismantled because of the low number of students of color who qualify. He believes they should strive for an elite education, too. To help them, Adams and his new schools chancellor, David Banks, are staking a middle ground that embraces both competitive academics and diversity. If this longshot strategy works, New York could influence districts across the country.
As Banks sees it, the problem with selective schools boils down to scarcity – there are too few seats for advanced students in elementary, middle, and high schools for all who merit one. So the solution is pretty obvious: Create more elite schools and programs.
New York is starting with the addition of 1,100 seats to the gifted and talented (G&T) program for elementary students this fall. Identifying more advanced black and Latino students from the get-go means they will be bettered prepared to qualify for New York’s elite middle and high schools like Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech – schools that are under constant attack from progressives for admitting just a handful of blacks and Latinos.
To ensure that blacks and Latinos fill more of the seats in the expanding G&T program, Adams also has to change the admissions process. Citywide testing, in which all students across New York compete against each other for admission, has been an obstacle. Minority students (not including Asians) took only 16% of the gifted seats prior to the pandemic while making up about 63% of all elementary students, with whites and Asians occupying about 75% of the gifted slots, according to city data.
For this reason, Banks is dropping the citywide written test, which was taken mostly by white and Asian students whose parents signed them up. Now all preschool students will be evaluated by teachers for admission, and the top performing second-graders in each elementary school will also be invited to apply. This approach, employing what academics call “local norms,” means that students will compete against others in similar socioeconomic groups, reducing any academic advantage that growing up in wealthier school districts may provide.
The likely upshot is that a higher percentage of blacks and Latinos and a lower percentage of whites and Asians will be admitted into the gifted program, a racial rebalancing that has set off a backlash in other school districts. Asian parents in Fairfax County, Virginia, sued over a racial rebalancing at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology and lost at the Supreme Court in April.
But G&T advocates in New York are open to the rebalancing, as long as the pie is expanding for everyone and the admissions process is standardized and transparent. Chien Kwok of the Parent Leaders for Accelerated Curriculum and Education, an advocacy group of mainly Asian Americans, hailed Adams’ plan for embracing the concept that gifted kids in all communities are entitled to a rigorous education.
“In the past we were leaving gifted children behind,” Kwok said. “Now the program is expanding, it’s no longer a zero-sum game, so I’m supportive.”
A Win for High Academic Standards
Banks is also promising to bring a similar expansion to the city’s selective middle and high schools in the future. If that happens, it would benefit tens of thousands of students in the nation’s largest school system and send a message nationwide that high academic standards and racial equity don’t have to be at loggerheads.
“A lot of people are going to watch carefully to see how well this works,” said Jonathan Plucker, a professor at the Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins University. “And I'm very confident that it will eventually evolve into something that's going to be a huge plus for the country and a big win for excellence in education.”
That may be a bullish view considering the obstacles ahead. Banks has been scathing in his criticism of the Department of Education he now leads, calling it a broken, top-heavy bureaucracy that has struggled to make progress over the years in its most basic tasks, such as teaching students to read at grade level.
To improve the gifted program, teachers – most of whom are not certified to teach gifted students – need to be trained. Nor does the city have anything like a well-designed and up-to-date curriculum to challenge gifted students. Currently, gifted instruction varies greatly from school to school, and often doesn’t go much beyond the general education curriculum mandated by the state.
The chancellor will also have to contend with a dozen advocacy groups and parents in several of New York’s 32 districts that are ideologically opposed to competitive academic programs that separate students by abilities. These groups, such as New York Appleseed, have lobbied for years to abolish accelerated schools and place students of wide-ranging abilities – as much as six grade levels apart – in the same general education classroom to reduce racial segregation. The advanced students will help those who are academically behind, the theory goes, and everyone wins.
Progressives came close to achieving their goal, called Brilliant NYC, at the end of Bill de Blasio’s run as mayor last year. They are “appalled” that Adams rejected it in favor of a G&T redesign that they consider inherently elitist and without value to any students.
“The gifted and talented program is very contentious and this new administration is going backwards by expanding it,” said Allison Roda, a professor of education at Molloy College who helped develop Brilliant NYC. “Gifted and talented has always been used as a tool to segregate students and avoid integration.”
Flight From NYC Schools
The mayor’s buildout of gifted education, announced in April, was one of his first major policy decisions, reflecting an urgency to reverse the flight of wealthier families from the school system.
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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