In this school case, I would love to know how much direction(?) or procedures the assistant principal was given from above. Yes, he made mistakes, but how much of that was because the district had no other place for the child, or was worried about statistics, or was pressuring school administrators to fully mainstream and socially promote all students, no matter what.

Can I just say I'm impressed by how much y'all remember about your daily activities when you were 11? I have vague memories of gym class and lunch, but I could not tell you for the life of me if gym was daily or once a week or something in-between. I'm sure lunch was daily 🙂 , but I have no idea how much time we had for it, or really any other details.

We'll need more constraints to narrow it down. The world, as they say, is a big place. Does it have to be tropical, or is this where you have always gone in the past? What time of year? What are you interested in doing? Beaches? "Culture"? Food? Shows/Entertainment? Prefer a fancy hotel / all-inclusive, or DIY hotel? Or AirBnB/VRBO type place? Have you been to the great cities of Europe -- any one of those has more than a weeks worth of interest for just about anyone -- London, Paris, Vienna, etc. If it must be next summer, I'd probably avoid France next Summer anytime before the Olympic games end, as there's likely to be no end of congestion. Or, the often overlooked areas outside the big cities of Europe -- Wales, Scotland, the South of France, Cinque Terre, etc. On the other end of the world, I suspect your budget, with careful planning, could get you to Australia or New Zealand, perhaps with a shorter stay.

Will the TSA let you carry on more than 2.5 ounces?

You'll only be allowed to post on zombie threads here...

I know there's a lot of silliness in this thread, but I have to put in a word for my dog, and perhaps many other dogs like him. He is just a farm-dog mutt with no fancy heritage or anything. But, if I'm sick, he's right with me, quiet, attentive and supportive. If I have a friend over, he's happy to see her, even if they've never met. If there's someone odd at the door, he's protective. Of all the living creatures in this house, human, canine or otherwise, my dog is the most empathetic. He surely is non-verbal and can be destructive at times, but if one symptom of Autism is inability to read the emotional state of others, well, that's one symptom my dog surely does not have.

Be careful -- they might think it means your home...

It would be wrong to cut and paste the editorial, and it is so well written that I can't just paraphrase it. But, if I had to boil down the WTM to one sentence, it would be something like -- there can be such beauty and power in language that we do our kids a disservice by not sharing with them the great works of the past, that have inspired so many, and shaped our civilizations. The subject of the editorial memorized these great poems almost 100 years ago now, and the poetry stayed with her for her entire life. It gave this grandmother a richness of vocabulary and expression, and, as bookbard said above, surely supported her in tough times. Yes, it is important to teach facts and math and science, but what are these, without the eloquence to share and learn the deepest truths with others?

This 20 year old editorial about the value of memorizing poetry, and the poetry a 85 year old woman could recite from her public school education made a huge impact on my teaching decisions: https://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/29/opinion/a-lost-eloquence.html

As I said in my first post, I'm outside the public school system. But what I see, and what others on this thread say, is that many (most ?) teachers seem free to create their own custom curricular materials, or grab any from the millions of web sites, paid or free, or show any youtube videos they can find. So, teachers seem to have a tremendous amount of autonomy in this regard. Is this what you see in your new role? It easy to get upset about Shakespeare and other materials being removed from the classroom, but I'm more interested in who decides which books are read in a classroom. I don't think that should be the state legislature or governor, but I'm not sure it should be down to the individual classroom teachers, either. If a school has four English 10 classes, should each be reading completely different texts? And I think it is particularly cruel to teachers to threaten them with loss of employment (or worse) if they select the "wrong" material, without giving them any serious guidance on what is "wrong" or "right".

I'm not suggesting mandating how to teach, but consider how math is usually taught in High School -- the teacher mainly uses one textbook, which has been reused for years, and teaches from that book, in order, using problems in that book. I've never heard a complaint from math teachers about lack of autonomy even though they've been working this way forever.

I'm outside the public school system, so there's mountains I don't understand, and I certainly sympathize with these teachers. But I am shocked that we ask each of these individual teachers to do so much work to come up with assignments, reading lists etc., on their own, when it could be shared between all the teachers of the same subject across the district or state or even AP. It reminds me of the scandals we hear, seemingly yearly, about classes holding a "slave auction" or writing essays with questionable prompts that came from a "teachers pay teachers" web site. Why are the teachers creating this material on their own? Why can't the district/State/whatever provide a set of, say, 30 books for 10th grade English teachers could choose from, and a bunch of essay prompts for each of those? It reminds me of our situation with the IRS, where the IRS knows how much tax we should owe, but never tells us outright -- they ask us to compute our tax, and if we compute too low a number, we get in trouble.

Just to emphasize this point, as there is persistent misinformation around it, there is, I believe just one college in the United States that doesn't accept Latin for their entrance requirements for foreign language: The Air Force Academy, which is a rather specialized case.

The article also said that there were 159 new cases of leprosy in the whole US in 2020, and 20% of those where in Florida. So, while I sure would not want to contract leprosy, apparently "endemic" doesn't necessarily mean "common", and I'm not going to put this on the large list of things I worry about.

Placed inside Bruce Springsteen's back pocket.