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● 06.03.23

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● Gemini Links 03/06/2023: Hidden Communities and Exam Prep is Not Education

Posted in News Roundup at 8:37 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

=> ↺ Greetings, humans!

• A pink light shines through the sky, flying like a shooting star…

• Through the door walks in a strange creature, walking on tentacles, eyestalks twisting as it looks around.

• Greetings! I’ve watched and studied you humans from afar, and I must join in.

• You may call me Okato. I’m a big fan of sci-fi along with weird and gross monsters. I’ve had my own website on Neocities for a while now, and I recently found out about this place via Melonland Forum.

=> ↺ Emanations

• When we create an ideal image of the world and are aware of it as “something” – that is, directly identifiable – we also understand a reality that is made conscious beyond what is essential for the understanding itself to be true and valid. However, this is of no real importance, because an experience can only be fixed on its own course of events.

=> ↺ the thing about criticism

• When I look around me and the people directly in my life, I can see that for as long as I can think, I have been receiving a lot more, and more in-depth, criticism than many people around me. It used to make me sad and feel like I can never be good enough, especially when the wishes for improvement were contradicting; why me, while the others get so little in comparison? How can I become great for everybody at the same time? It felt like people were always harder on me than on the others; parents, teachers, friends, coworkers, strangers. That feeling is still something I have to actively disarm. I think this is normal for children who did not have understanding, maybe even very perfectionist parents who could always find a fault in anything and were not tactful, or not keeping a good balance between criticism and positive feedback.

=> ↺ Calls

• Do you have a cell phone? Do you remember when that was a reasonable question to ask people? In case you’re not old enough to remember, life was in fact better without cell phones. Don’t make me explain it, if you don’t know then you probably wouldn’t agree anyway.

• I have a cell phone. Perhaps one day I won’t again, but for now, I do. That said, I only answer calls/texts/emails that come in on the device when it suits me. And I never install apps that I don’t absolutely need, plus a few I want. But this post is about calls, specifically.

=> ↺ The Hospital

• Here in middle-America, folks never were that big on masking. We had very little in the way of Covid deaths in my city, in spite of this and other interesting (to me) factors. We had a hospital about 3min from my house (which recently was closed due to mis-management of funding), where they had setup a special parking lot for Covid testing, with flags and lines painted about to guide the massive traffic through. But the traffic never came, and the parking lot literally grew over with weeds, even before the hospital closed, and before they bothered taking down all the markers. That parking lot was an interesting symbol, in my eyes at least.

Politics

=> ↺ War

• Russians go home. Long live Ukraine.

Technical

=> ↺ Hidden Communities

• Browsing cohost, looking for something else, I stumbled across andi (@mcc)’s New Year’s Eve post on trying to spend time in a private space in VRChat. It’s worth reading the whole post, or at least I think so, because it articulates a lot of what I’ve been feeling about online communities since the collapse or consolidation of the last, say, fifteen years: that the potential search area is vast, that commercial interests seek to keep us where we currently are, but that communities, good ones, are still out there, in a variety of different forms.

• I admit, I’m only a little interested in VRChat, and right now only in principle. From talking with friends who jumped into VR headsets early, it’s interesting, but not compelling. That said, from everything I’ve read online, VRChat is kind of like the wild west web I experienced in the mid to late 90s, with a lot of the same properties: lots of good weirdos, the possibility to build all kinds of interesting things, with discovery of interesting user-created things a big problem (feature).

Science

=> ↺ Rochelimit’s Gemlog

• A year ago I came to the conclusion that I was never going to reform the standards of education in a school that was lead by a team that emphasised long hours and presenteeism over work-life balance, grades over quality of education and compliance over evidence based practice. I had many wonderful colleagues, but the culture of the school was damaging my health. I had to decide whether to stick it out for the remainder of my career or to jump and try something outside school education. So I jumped, and I started a new role as a trainer for a high tech international company. It was a leap into the dark, after several decades in one role over several employers, but after five months I can recommend the benefits of change. No more evening marking, stressed out and under-skilled managers and oppressive workloads. I deeply miss the children, but I have taken with my a great deal of wonderful memories and the knowledge that I have made a difference. Time to look after me.

=> ↺ Exam Prep is Not Education

• Students and I very often have different conceptions of what study is about.

• In my mind it is about getting to grips with a subject at a conceptual level, understanding the links and implications, and learning enough facts and skills to be able to be able to demonstrate that understanding.

• The bulk of my students naturally see the lessons and exams as tasks to complete with as little effort as possible. I say naturally, because that is how they have been trained for years to see their education: bite-sized chunks to reproduce in modularised exams since primary school, ideas that are so simple that a bright pupil can learn without any effort and a less bright one by rote memorisation. These students who have made it onto my Physics course have been successful in that environment, and it is often hard for them to adapt to the holistic demands of A level that are more suited to their abilities as clever sixteen-year-olds.

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