David GerardFeb 3, 2025

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 9th February 2025

https://awful.systems/post/3436005

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 9th February 2025 - awful.systems

Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret. Any awful.systems [https://awful.systems/] sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no. If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high. > The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be) > > Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them. last week’s thread [https://awful.systems/post/3382551]

Show threadDavid GerardFeb 7, 2025

one of the most annoying things about writing for a US audience is they’re fucking illiterate and alluding to books confuses them

wanna grab editors by the throat and go “JUST WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU PEOPLE EVEN DOING IN HIGH SCHOOL”

actual example from today: “who the hell is Fagin never heard of him”

Show threadkhalid_saladFeb 9, 2025

Some highlights from my high school AP (Advanced Placement) English class:

  • teacher insisting that you can’t split an infinitive in English, but can’t explain why this bullshit rule was made up in the first place
    • also something about “up with which I will not put” because god forbid you know what you’re talking about
  • some inappropriate discussions about abortion
  • we watched the 1931 frankenstein movie after “reading” shelley’s novel, but didn’t relate it to the book in any way^1^
  • we read some shitty short story, which turned into a shitty movie, and then the teacher kept relating back to the film when discussing the themes of the book
  • at some point they were like “choose your own novel to read and analyze” and we didn’t really do analysis, and the novel selection was
    • dan brown’s shitty novels about the dude who deciphers symbols or whatever (it was the one with anti-matter)
    • one of ayn rand piece’s of shit
    • i don’t remember what else, but there were definitely no classics
  • at one point we had to write college entry essays for the teacher to “critique.” i wrote mine about how math fucking rules. the teacher decided it was too technical (despite there being no actual math in it), so they gave it to their partner (an engineer) to read — I doubt this was legal — and came back to tell me how well-written it was^2^

    • my high school education was probably considered decent. don’t even get me started on “whole language learning” and “new math” and the insipid pseudoscience plaguing our certification programs while our populace treats our teachers like shit

    1: Also, this movie was nearly a century old when we watched it and my class got mad at me for spoiling it.
    2: it wasn’t written well

    Show threadV0ldekFeb 9, 2025

    don’t even get me started on “whole language learning” and “new math”

    I don’t know what “whole language learning” is, and I’m way too young to have experience it, but wasn’t the curriculum before “new math” like arithmetic and nothing else? In other words, not math at all?

    I didn’t read much into it but from what I did it seems like they started teaching children actual math like algebra and logic and parents got frustrated because they were too stupid to help with homework anymore. Brings into my mind the whole “math was cool before they involved letters” thing that makes me want to throw a book at someone.

    Show threadkhalid_salad

    I was referring to a specific movement to fuck up the math curriculum:

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Math

    As far as parent frustration, I have heard of Common Core taking a simple concept (“what is 7 * 8”) and making it confusing in some myopic but well-meaning attempt to generate intuition:

    evaluate 7 * 8 using perfect squares

    with the expectation that the student do something ludicrous like:

    7 * 8 = 7 * (7 + 1) = 49 + 7 = 56 7 * 8 = (8 - 1) * 8 = 64 - 8 = 56

    and I have heard parents complain about that. I have also heard individual people complain that they personally liked math until they got to algebra (the “it was fun until they introduced letters”). However, I am not familiar with any backlash against students being asked to learn more than just arithmetic.

    As an aside, I want to state that arithmetic is mathematics and is important for students to learn. When we trivialize it, we end up with students who don’t have numeracy, and it is very hard to teach them more advanced concepts (for example, explaining the formal definition of a limit is impossible if a student struggles with “whenever x is within ẟ of a, then f(x) is within ε of L”) . Lockhart’s Lament is fine and all, but even he responds that the pendulum not belonging all the way on one end doesn’t mean we should swing it all the way to the other.

    New Math - Wikipedia

    Feb 9, 2025 at 2:38pmWeb