Well, for me it’s an easier way to get a caloric deficit or at least to avoid caloric excess. It keeps my body more attuned to its food needs.

I can see that this is the wrong thing to hear about if someone has an eating disorder 😞 . But the website seems really, really negative: ”Avoid intermittent fasting if you don’t want to feel hungry, overeat, become dehydrated, feel tired or become irritable.” Like... the whole point is that I don’t overeat while fasting. I do get quite hungry if I’m actually trying to lose weight, but I don’t if I’m just trying to maintain. And I don’t get irritable or dehydrated or tired. I have trouble controlling my weight and this has been the only thing I’ve tried I can probably maintain indefinitely. So I kinda don’t want to feel guilty about it...

Exactly. Because frankly, there isn't a precise translation for most words, anyway, and you can only really figure out what they mean from a ton of exposure. I remember trying to actually use a dictionary when reading English when we moved to Canada, and soon giving up, because there were SO MANY unknown words. I did much better when I stopped even trying and just started figuring out words from context as best I could.

I'd agree with that. That's why my kids watch Russian cartoons as part of their education...

This is quite the makeover thread!

I just read that whole transcript. Man, this issue makes me SO ANGRY. People don't fix this shit because they can't bear to let go of even a teeny bit of their damn privilege. And we're here wasting time talking about how colleges becoming test-optional will fix something. That's not the point. That has never been the point. The point is to not screw up the kids' college readiness in the first place!!

You're right. We don't yell loudly enough. And of course, at this point I'm not yelling at all, because I pulled my kid out of school to homeschool her. Sometimes, I still feel like I gave up on a system I care about to do that, although I was never the sort who was willing to sacrifice my kid to my politics... We cared enough to attend a genuinely diverse school for kindergarten, but that's about all. And it didn't work for DD8, anyway 😕 .

I think you're right there, because they'll find classes that are geared towards them. At competitive schools, if you aren't ready for calculus, you're shunted off into classes that no one thinks about enough. There's TONS of work on how to improve calculus pass rates at competitive colleges, but there's barely a program for precalculus and algebra, I think, because the expectation is that kids can do that stuff already if they are going into a STEM major. And that seems great and like the right thing. As opposed to being haphazardly being taught trig by my former officemate at UT, lol, who felt like she got stuck with a pretty bad job 😉 . I think there's simply no way to tell if a kid has what it takes if they went to failing schools. Even my students from affluent families that went to "good schools" and got into fancy school largely couldn't reason about math. And it only went downhill from there. Exactly. And my problem with the focus on tests is that the time we spending talking about tests we don't spend talking about this. All kids deserve a good, evidence-based education. All kids deserve teachers who understand what they are teaching. We don't have anything like that. That's where the energy should go. (And I'll say that you probably need to do it from preschool on, in fact.)

That does seem to be true. What are they interested in? 🙂

No, but it's predictive. Let's take a look at the data linked upthread: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.3102/0013189X20902110 According to their data, the probability of getting through college with a 16-17 ACT score is 33 percent. The average ACT score of a Black kid in the US is 16: https://www.ednc.org/eraceing-inequities-how-does-race-influence-act-scores/ That's BEFORE we actually even think about what it would take to get through a selective college, since I'm pretty sure the kids with the lower ACT scores in this study went to less selective colleges (that's what makes this study deeply flawed.)

Yep, that's the one. Thank you!

And that's the kind of stuff that just makes me mad. Bussing isn't even HARD.

DH said he went to school with some bussed kids and he felt it was a good program.

I think we should invest massive amounts of energy and money into actually fixing their schools using evidence-based interventions. But that takes a heck of a lot more work than removing tests from college admissions, so here we are.

I'm pretty sure if you focus on race, you'll get disproportionately middle-class kids as well as kids from Africa (instead of African American kids.)

But apparently we can't worry about the fact that a more diverse group might mean a less prepared group. Which, frankly, does the minority students a disservice. I've been watching this very issue play out in DH's department! They accepted some math graduate students with less traditional backgrounds, put them in the standard courses, then watched them flounder without any support. This was not a positive experience for them!! But if you accept kids from unusual backgrounds and pretend that their level of preparation will be the same, that's just what happens.

Look, I taught at UT Austin, which has a bona fide affirmative action program that isn't labeled as such. UT takes the top 8% of every school. That is a genuinely equalizing measure. And yes, you could tell what kind of school kids came from when you taught them calculus. You just could. Some kids weren't ready. It wasn't in any way their fault, and I was angry FOR those kids, not AT those kids. But me being angry didn't make it possible for them to pass calculus.

How many selective schools have been test-optional for a long time? It's not Black kids. It's kids from failing schools. And the fact that those schools are disproportionately in minority communities is in fact due to racism, but pretending it's not true isn't going to fix the problem. Realistically, the proportion of Black kids ready by college by the end of high school is far lower than the proportion of white kids ready for college. You can look at just about any measure and you'll see that it's true.

But there's literally no reason to assume this year's data will generalize. This year was very odd. And we also don't know what's going to happen to all those diverse kids who got into the fancy schools. I'd like the data on that before celebrating. For all I know, they'll mostly drop out feeling like they couldn't hack it.

Right. You're not getting any bang for your buck in those classes. That's a really silly way to rack up debt.

Right. If colleges want to honestly invest in kids from less prepared backgrounds, they are going to need to actually prepare a different path for them. It's just not fair to take a kid who didn't understand algebra and ask him to compete in calculus at Stanford. It just isn't. I remember seeing an article about this issue, by the way, but I can't find it right now. I know that DH has seen this issue firsthand with math graduate students, though.

Either way, report back! I'll hope for medium symptoms for you -- enough to reassure you that your immune system did stuff, not so many that you'll feel awful!

I overall agree with you, but I think a LOT more people will feel like college is an option if they aren't deeply disengaged by high school due to poor teaching and chaotic classrooms 😕 .

Sounds like my DH, except I overruled him. "I'll be fine to drive myself back from NY to Boston!!" "Uh-huh. Riiight. We're not doing that. I'm driving you." (He fell asleep on the drive back, for the record.)

Exactly. People weren't gaming the other measures because they mattered less than the SAT. If the other measures become the way to get into Harvard, rest assured, rich people will do the work/pay the money to game the other measures. And then they will no longer promote equity... and moreover, rich people's advantages will be much higher for other measures. I believe that making things test-optional will result in more diversity temporarily. I do. But ultimately, what you want to do to provide access to underserved populations is to invest in their schooling. You could probably just invest in pulling out the top 10% of the kids in those neighborhoods if you wanted to save money, and that would still do an excellent job of increasing diversity, because some kids would actually be ready for the top schools. And then they may very well invest in their old neighborhoods themselves later on...