Did my Ed support placement here last year and it’s not so great in the classroom

I don’t know that the system as it stands has room or resources for that though. Absolutely not denying that it’s an issue.

where I live farmers are more receptive to vaccination than others, because they understand herd immunity through experience. I know when I started question vaccination, we had something go through the sheep and were losing all our 3-4 month lambs then vaccinated the rest and it stopped instantly.

I can’t answer this from understanding but I know with autism it’s common for kids to fall apart when they get home from school. Basically it takes a superhuman effort for them to fit in and they can’t do it all day, so they exhaust themselves coping at school and fall apart at home. I wonder if it’s similar?

I think you have to order online unfortunately. I almost find Target/BigW have a bigger range than our bookstore. I agree when buying baby presents etc what’s available in store is quite limited.

I love the read aloud revival podcast recommendations. Some do have a Christian bent if that worries you but many are just really nice books.

But lab grown meat is grown from biopsied cells from live animals so if they’re virus infected then the cells will be also? The current medium is from foetal calf blood sourced from abattoirs. There is another medium that has been been developed but it isn’t great either. Mostly I’m anti fake food though. Baby formula wasn’t better, most stuff we’ve done to food has made us sicker. And this process is even further from the original so much riskier for health. Plus, I’ve been to plenty of farms and the number of native animals culled to make wheat farms work etc etc is crazy. You can’t really opt out of that. And a lot of ag land is not viable for plant based farming. Too steep, wrong soil type etc.

My concern with lab grown meat might be totally unfounded but is there extra risk to having cells that replicate without an associated immune system? I also believe there’s significant environmental issues related to the stuff they grow it in. I think it’s better to reduce or eliminate meat consumption than replace it with a fake version.

Are you definitely going to be Grandma? Sometimes the grandkids come up with a cutesie name of their own. I think the labels will be super cute!

Charlotte Mason had so much good stuff to say about securing attention and will power early. Short lessons. Varied material. High quality resources. It’s not surprising that kids get lazy about paying close attention to tasks when they’re fed a steady stream of excessive but poor quality worksheets etc. kind of like how you don’t savour each bite of cheap junk food. Physical exercise is pretty important for mental clarity and focus. Good air flow - high CO2 low oxygen levels aren’t great for the brain working well. Screens is the obvious one with the reliance on dopamine rewards. Also there are so many areas where it’s impossible to read or focus on every word. You can’t read that whole terms and conditions document. You can’t actually read every email that comes in. You have to shut down those pop ups and dismiss those notifications. I see this problem becoming even worse with the increase in AI generated texts - we’re likely to be flooded with an ever increasing quantity of poor quality documents that haven’t even been edited by a human. The other thing I think Maria Montessori talks about is trying never to interrupt a child who is deeply focused if possible. I feel that is very important- even as an adult if I’m deeply engaged and get interrupted I find it quite hard to go back to my task. Not everything is worth giving full attention to. My recent course was full of grammatical and spelling errors, outdated and irrelevant information and went back over the same topics over and over again while padding things out to 200 pages that could have been covered in 50. We would probably all be better at concentrating if we didn’t have so many useless words we have to wade through.

The kids still do have an attention span. They can focus on Minecraft or Fortnite for hours. What they don’t have is the ability or willingness to direct it. For myself, one part of managing attention is actually stopping an activity when I’m not focusing instead of pushing through.

Yeah. A lot of teaching and intervention in lower grades seems to focus on tricks to identify key words or solve the problem without actually reading the problem… so I can see why kids do stuff like that. DS is having trouble with one of his teachers’ reading comprehension. She’s not from an English speaking background so for example when he said a technology was not in active military service she interpreted that to mean there was no working prototype and told him he must be wrong and to research it again. She also seems to misinterpret the marking rubrics from the SACE board. I’m not really sure how to deal with it. (DS has some issues but the common denominator over 3 years has always been her subjects). I also find I have a lot of trouble now with people only reading first sentences of texts etc. I tend to be wordy so I’m trying to break stuff up smaller.

Are students reading on screen or from a physical textbook? I know personally my concentration lower when reading on screen.

That makes perfect sense! I also struggle with that. It’s a pity you can’t do like portrait lock but completely lock the phone screen orientation so you could turn it around!

I used to be like this but then the new Apple Maps has a kind of torch like icon so you can see which direction you’re facing. It made a bit difference for me.

Are you shorter than your DH? I was a bit stressed about how quickly my learner driver was able to park and kept worrying he’d hit something. Eventually we had a chat and I realised he can clearly see the front end of the car - I can’t so I have to kind of figure out how to line things up to make it work. ( I could probably height adjust the seat but that involves some other skills I’m also not great at!)

Most things 😞 if it’s word nerd stuff or purely theoretical I’m there… anything requiring motor skills - forget it.

Yeah, that’s a very rural thing and even in our semi rural space it’s rare now. It was much more common growing up. The others are all true.

The other piece to this puzzle is aside from aging, what percentage of the population is healthy and well enough to keep things running. I know percentage of long term sick has increased a lot in UK since Covid, I think we’ve been somewhat shielded from those effects in Australia. But we still have an increase in disability etc over the last few years from various factors

Burt’s bees or anything bees wax based is best for me, although I doubt it would last for hours. If you’re having significant cracking it could be worth check your vitamin b levels.

DH and I have a conversation sometimes around this. He is fairly anti-immigration, but also only wanted two kids. So my comment is pretty much always - well you either have babies or you need immigration. We have less than two babies per woman so we need immigrants. In Australia, I do think that has the potential to lead to significant culture change. Probably not an issue in the US where the population is much larger but definitely an issue here. What that culture change is matters to me, because I want my DD to grow up in a culture where women are respected. (Which may be better or worse than the status quo depending on what direction we go). I also think there’s likely to be a decline in “fuzzy” jobs. If the population is smaller we need people doing the tangible stuff. At the moment in Australia, we seem to use immigration to fill many of those jobs seen as undesirable - aged care, truck driving etc. The other aspect of immigration that gets overlooked a lot is what it does to the countries we get people from. I remember an interview with an occupational therapist from an African country - I think possibly Tanzania. He was quite upset because he’d worked hard to get some local training happening, to finally get trained occupational therapists in the country and then they all moved to the UK for better opportunities. Countries like Australia often target more highly qualified or trained immigrants and get them from other countries rather than training enough of our own. Then once here, we sometimes under employ them in our own country where they aren’t even working in the capacity they’re trained for.

Oh no! I hope you get needed relief soon.

I don’t have any advice but really hope you’re able to find what you need. Sunshine helps me some. It won’t fix things but if you’re not getting any and you can it can’t hurt while you’re working on the other more critical stuff.

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/avian-influenza-bird-flu/1-5-us-retail-milk-samples-test-positive-h5n1-avian-flu-fragments 1 in 5 US milk samples is testing positive for h5n1 fragments. I feel like this is not a huge issue and won’t be infectious, but it does indicate how widespread the disease is. If I had someone in my life who was super dependent on a milk based product (e.g. baby formula) I think I would try to have some extra stock in hand in case of supply disruptions, after seeing how Covid impacted things.

Wow that’s not so good!