free reed enthusiast

Thank you 🙏

tbh the main incentive for doing a phd at this point would be to have a nongendered honorific. Wouldn’t quite justify all the loans I’d have to take out to do it in middle age, but I’ve def considered it

I’m in a job where being called “mister” is just a fact of life, a few colleagues use they/them pronouns but most don’t. My friends and partner are great about using correct pronouns, and feeling seen by the people closest to me has become the most important thing in a world where most don’t

Happened to me too 👎

a combination urgent care and taco bell

I'm at the combination

This is gorgeous! Super proud of you ❤️

I don’t expect this to sway my terrible CM, but will absolutely include it in the next email I send to her. Thanks for everything you do.

I can confirm that whole language was a part of reading curriculum in LAUSD (2nd largest district in nation) c. 2009, and my understanding is that it was also used in NYC (largest district) due to the influence of Calkins at Columbia U Teachers College

(I’ll also note that this is a blog post and not a peer-reviewed article, but the author does a decent job footnoting some sources with more detailed info)

Anecdotal but based on a 30-year career: whole language and “three cueing” were v. influential for decades, and it’s only in the past several years where we’ve seen a widespread return to phonics, mainly based on research discrediting three cueing. Not the best article, but I don’t think it’s wrong

Thanks for saying this. Every time people say “but the Democrats had a supermajority in 2009,” forgetting that it only lasted for a few weeks bc of Franken’s delayed swearing-in and Kennedy’s subsequent death, I feel like I’m gonna turn into the Joker. Like, we all lived through this history?!?

Ooh, I know someone who’ll like this a lot

me at the end of grad school last summer

me at the end of grad school

I haven’t played RPGs since the early 2000s and miss it so much. I grew up playing D&D, and did a ton of GMing in HS (mainly Call of Cthulhu and Shadowrun, and a ton of Vampire after it came out; I bought the 1st ed. with graduation money)

Oh man, I ran V:tM for years (and helped run a huge V:tM LARP in San Diego in the late ‘90s). I loved the mechanics and the setting

Stat block for the flumph, the only lawful good creature in the Fiend Folio.

From the Fiend Folio:

Oakland public safety committee is voting on this bullshit tonight, in case you were free and wanted to hop on the zoom. I emailed my council member and the at-large CM last night

Haha omg perfect. Please post results somewhere? Not being a great keyboardist (but being ok at vocal arranging?) I think I prefer the granular control of doing it all in the DAW, but I’m inadvisedly looking at hardware vocoders on Reverb…

Yeah it would be perfect even if it had originated as a Lauridsen-esque choral work, but the solo conception/performance is just fucking beyond. I’m already scratching out some lyrics to set this weekend w/vocoder

I’m going to play around with Logic’s janky vocoder this weekend, it’s giving me ideas

I’d never heard this before it popped up on your feed recently and I am obSESSED

I’m really glad I read this ❤️

IME, they do just fine. 1st grade is when kids are learning to read *everything* after all, and just as we don’t expect kids who are still developing phonemic awareness to understand 5th grade texts, throwing the entire scale at a six year old with no context is setting them up for failure

My kids still perform some songs with those intervals, and it’s not, like, I take the “fa” and “ti” hand sign posters off the wall when 2nd graders come to class. But as I mentioned there’s plenty of research to back up this sequencing, too

This doesn’t mean that “fa” etc. is never covered, but because intonation for the 1/2 step relationships is harder to dial in, mastering the pentatonic scale results in much better intonation at younger ages IME (and that of lots of other ppl; this is well-researched)

I start with 1st in my district, and do a bunch of LSM songs and games as a result. By the end of the year, not only can they read the notation, I can also perform the hand signs silently while they audiate and dead-ass accurately sing what I showed right after

By starting with the SM tone set, you can just draw a line, draw circles above and below representing those pitches, and kids can read it right away if they’ve been prepared with some songs containing that interval. I usually present S-M notation in Jan after lots of preparation