This Looks Very Important And Hopeful.

This looks very important and hopeful.

And yet, all I can think about is “canvas bladders full of sand.”

The Extraordinary Way We’ll Rebuild Our Shrinking Islands

Physical barriers won’t stop rising sea levels. But this resourceful method just might.

Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Self Assembly Lab are working on creating structures that work with the existing energy of waves to build mounds of sand.

The idea is that these strategically created sandbars could rebuild and protect coastlines in a way that is far more practical and adaptable than building static walls around flooding coastlines.

This method is still a long way from being used at a large scale, but so far field tests have been promising. Also promising is the fact that the structures used to create these sandbars can apparently be as simple as strategically placed canvas bladders full of sand.

*in voice of Cliff from film Cabaret after Liza Minnelli Sally says “oh, screw Maximilian!”* So have I.

TED LASSO (2020—) → 1.05: Tan Lines // 1.07: Make Rebecca Great Again

This fucking breaks my heart, and I am sending some especial love to your mom. And to all her fourth-grade students over the years, because I bet they still remember her class.

My mom was a fourth grade teacher, which meant that she did multi-subject education. And she used to do what she called the NFL Project. The NFL Project was when students were randomly assigned NFL teams.

They had to write a letter to the NFL team they were assigned to, they had to do a research project to find out where the teams practiced, they had to write a letter to the mayor of the city the teams practiced in, they had to keep track of their team's statistics, they had to do research about the state history of the team they'd been assigned to, and they had to do a presentation.

It was a big project. She provided all the materials, she made sure there were copies of the newspaper sports section in her classroom so the kids could stay on top of stats. The students got this project in their first week at school and it wrapped up right around winter break, so it wasn't like it was an all-day "today we are doing statistics" thing or "today we do research, today we write a letter, today we make a presentation" one-week project, it was five to ten minutes a day in various subjects that got organized into a presentation at the end of the semester. The kids could work together, they could work independently, they could ask my mom or the librarian or their parents or their older siblings for help. They just had to end the semester with a report on the team's history, the stats for the season organized into a chart, copies of the letters they'd sent (and copies of any of the responses they'd gotten), a two-page social studies report on the state where the team played, and a presentation to the class about their favorite thing they had learned while doing the NFL project.

The kids fucking loved it. And for years I spent my winter break going to the classroom and organizing the bulletin board with a huge map of the US and materials from each student's report, showing the work that the students had done that semester. It was a way of getting kids engaged with classwork, because who cares about statistics at 10, probably nobody, but if you get a set of pencils from the Jets NOW you want to learn about the team. The Jaguars sent one kid a jersey one year. The city in Minnesota where the Vikings practice sent postcards for every student. Part of this was happening when Schwarzenegger was governor in California so one kid got the Terminator's autograph for part of his project.

I think maybe the thing that I admire the most about it in retrospect was the way that it taught actual project management to young students. I don't actually know of that many schools that have projects more than a month long for 10-year-olds, and I think it's a great concept. I didn't get something like that until I was a senior in college, and it would have been a great skill to learn younger.

Anyway, in 2006 my mom had to stop doing the NFL project because the district wanted to focus on raising their test scores. She was specifically told that if she kept doing the NFL project she would not be rehired at her school.

She even wrote up what standards each part of the project worked toward - the kids had to make graphs because "organizing information into a bar graph" was a specific standard for students that age. "Writing multiple paragraphs on the same subject" was a standard, which is why the letters to the cities and states were multi-paragraph. The project WAS standards based.

But the administrators wanted to make sure that the students had more practice with reading the kinds of questions that would be on the tests because most of the student body spoke Spanish at home.

My mom taught at that school for another ten years; the school's test scores never showed any marked improvement with test-based lesson plans.

My mom's project wasn't the only thing like that that got cancelled. There was another teacher who had a craft-based thing that was similar, and a 7th-grade teacher who did a kind of history/social studies Magic Schoolbus LARP thing who was told not to do that anymore. Eventually my mom was told to stop having her students write journals for ten minutes a day because it wasn't being taught from the textbook and wasn't being taught to the test.

People joke (haha, it's funny, it's a joke, right?) about American education being used to prepare students to be good employees instead of to be critical thinkers or independent people, but legitimately it seems like NCLB directly incentivized "students sit quietly in a box filling out bubble sheets and have no unsupervised or creative work time."

I am losing my fucking MIND you can see him realising what’s on the card in real time and picking it up. I love baseball what an incredible little sport

okay i really wanted to like the new trump-clinton movie because !!! period dramas!! but the costumes are so bad if you know anything about the era like—

• i get that they gave melania trump an older look to emphasize her seriousness but her dresses are way too fifties and not twenty tens enough, corsets had actually pretty much fallen out of favor a few decades before the twenty tens

• hillary clinton was a politican so her makeup shouldn’t have been that neon. that wouldn’t be a thing for like three more decades.

• donald AND bill literally look like they could be from the modern day. people had sleeves back then, guys. even MEN wore clothes with sleeves and no one thought it made them look less manly (also side note if anyone knows anything about history they know that trump and clinton were both like seventy years old when he ran for president. but the actors they used were hot so i don’t really care l o l)

• seriously this upsets me so much when is a costumer gonna be brave enough to put a man in sleeves in a period drama?????? it was a weird time for fashion but that’s just how it was

• (and in the same way, men wore very little makeup until like a hundred years ago WHY do all movies insist on putting all the men in full makeup when that’s not how they looked back then? like yes it looks weird but that’s the past!)

• ugghhh apparently no one told the costume department that strapless floor length gowns were only a formal thing for women. so many background characters are just wearing them all the time. look in the scene in the coffee shop and the barista is wearing a floor length strapless gown. they were actually called "evening gowns" back then because they were only worn in the evening!

• by the way midriff tops were a peasant thing you wouldn’t see anyone in the upper class wearing them of either gender so idk what all of those were doing there

• hillary's gown at the inauguration ball scene was LITERALLY copied from the wedding dress of an english princess from the eighties. i read somewhere it was because they wanted it to look regal and it was beautiful but like......if you know the era that’s actually a couple decades off, and stuff like big sleeves (at least the women had sleeves in this movie lol) had actually not been fashionable for a while when the movie is set

anyway the acting was good and Donald/Hillary are my historical OTP so that was cute but the costumes really took me out of it :/