@JDfromscrubslol Had a dream there was an emoji like 💯 except it was only 60. Some post said "popeyes fries be tasting so good (60)" and I laughed so hard I woke myself up
Thinking about the 60 emoji again
I don’t want to assume your level of knowledge here, so hopefully you don’t read condescension into the following question:
Are you aware that a significant portion of what a student reads in, say, HMH was created by HMH and does not exist in any bookstore or for any other reason?
No. I do not care about the publication date, at least exclusively. I care about whether the story or article existed outside of an educational k-12 context and then was bought by the company, versus being commissioned by the company to fill a quota or meet an academic standard
Phrased cutely, there’s a difference between a tomato and the little plastic tomato that we buy for kids when we’re teaching them how a grocery store works; you have one side that wants to ban all vegetables from the classroom because of fruit, supremacy, and another side clutching plastic tomatoes
I’d add to this that if you want a specific prescription – speaking only for myself – it’s “ regardless of the size, funding, or political valence of the company, curriculum should be composed entirely out of whole works that existed in the world prior to a company creating them for school”
I’d ask you to take on a small amount of faith that many of us are speaking about very specific experiences at specific companies in specific school districts, but do not want to impact our jobs in doing so.
Sure. I’m identifying a major current that we are often afraid to acknowledge, but I’m not under an illusion that I can classify the entire ocean.
Can you please - I’m not trying to be snarky, tone is super hard over text and I wish we had some tea - translate this into “ on a practical level, what is it that you want me/us think about or do differently?”
I think I agree with the thrust of your statement, but what are the marching orders?
You are not going to catch me hippie punching. The goals of creating and inviting children into a literary universe where all voices are represented have life or death stakes.
But we can and must accomplish this through works that are tricky, multifaceted, effort-soaking, even abrasive.
As a progressive, I think it’s important to openly and without shame acknowledge the moments where the call is coming from inside the house. We may not intend to contribute to some of these dynamics, but we do, and ultimately we do so willingly.
I want to speak respectfully to you because we’re strangers, but in my experience inside a curriculum company, this attitude is in fact, coming from the outlooks and goals of self identified progressives, even if the market fears they create or respond to are conservative
Imagine if Harold Bloom wasn’t a total asshole and it was so much easier to have a conversation about diverse excellence that didn’t make you sound like you were palling around with racists and book burners
The only reason these things are opposed: the ego driven antics of a small handful of people
(Also like, if the gay guy in a wheelchair is saying this, you have a problem.
Mirrors and windows, yes. But beautiful mirrors and stained-glass windows that someone lovingly brought into being, not plastic K-mart compacts and trash bags to keep out the rain.)
Diversity is a real thing and a good. And also, there are writers from all sorts of backgrounds, some of whom are living and some of whom are dead, writing real literature at length that addresses what it means to be alive, and progressive and conservatives alike strain them out of k-12
It brings me no joy to say this is the case – and I don’t think it has to be – but the progressive answer to this question at the moment is “two page story about a kid being bullied at Chinese New Year parade that was written within in the past two years, explicitly for this program”
Jack dissociating on a plane
Jack getting sucked into a plane-crash vortex
Pure white light
Jack’s eye opening
Her: Come over
Me: I can’t, I’ve left the island and returned to my life as a prestigious spinal surgeon
Her: My parents aren’t home
Me:
the best detail in here is that he fucked up Marco's shoe size, because of course he did and of course Marco wore it anyway
we are weeks away from 'Trump attempts to make horse a Senator' and the only thing stopping him is that he is too much of a sociopath to form an attachment to animals
please enjoy the actual photo of Marco with shoes that are too big for his feet
For the same $6 trillion cost, you could crush child poverty with a child allowance and free childcare, fix unemployment insurance, do paid family, sick & medical leave, massively boost ACA subsidies, and eliminate child uninsurance with Medicare for Kids.
One bike? Like a tandem?
A Maslow hierarchy only it’s been labeled from bottom to top curious, confused, anxious, afeared, and mysterium tremendum et fascinans
Fortunately weird fiction genreologists have been hard at work on a hierarchy of affects for exactly this situation
Airdrop 50,000 copies of Middlemarch with parachutes attached over every campus in America and then over the western half of Brooklyn
“You know, this is never going to happen again quite this way. You should try to allow yourself to enjoy this more. Take a minute a day, and then add a minute the next day, and another minute. Pretty soon, you’ll have hours of happiness.”
holding @dboyfajardo.bsky.social Movie Hostage (i will watch what he wants this week if he watches what i want)
Pixar used to have really strong brand equity as the yuppy’s Disney, sort of like Target was the yuppy’s Wally World. seeing them consciously and deliberately torch whatever remainder of that ancient branding remained intact after years of sequels and declining prestige should be studied in schools.
this is obviously influenced by me being queer and horny but if they put tom holland in a 2D 'jack in the beanstalk' disney musical and made it juuuuuuust queer and swoony enough it'd be four-quadrant as hell and make 12 billion dollars and resuscitate his shitty career/revive the Disney musical
my big thing w/ moana -- and maybe i'm a traditionalist - but a disney musical needs a big cackly villain.
regardless of tone - serious like Maleficent, gonzo like Yzma - you gotta go there.
which is weird I feel that way given, as you know, my Big Two ideal pivots away from antagonists.
wait how the fuck is avenger Moss and that whole line is this bad. Moss and Wacker and Chiarello were - across the big two - THE big "oh, phew, this is gonna slap" for a while.
Are they just getting overruled a bunch?
like there's an almost obvious sense of relief you can feel among the crew as you watch Frozen/Tangled/especially Moana of "oh, we've cracked the code again".
I think they're safe movies and I'm kind of a hater of all of them but...you found your fastball. Throw it.
