- This is
genius.
Immortal Hulk writer Al Ewing shares his research: panels
from the foundational issues of the original Hulk comic, tagged to
highlight running themes and comment on individual moments.
No bonus points for guessing what I will be having my students do when
they start in on a graphic novel after the break.
- Speaking of which, once again, the reason I have disappeared from
these internets is that my teacher credentialing program takes up every
last moment of my time—the only reason I’m able to
bang this out is that it’s finally spring break and I’m
putting off starting in on my edTPA.
This program has been a grueling experience that I will be very glad to
see come to an end; the encouraging thing is that the parts I actually
like are the ones that constitute the actual job.
While I don’t like the fact that I generally end up doing it at
two in the morning while my alarm is set to go off at six, I do like
lesson planning and putting together worksheets—for
instance, a few weeks ago I collected the core directives of several
religious traditions for students to look over, then had them come up
with and write out justifications for their own sets of
commandments.
And while there are good days and bad, on balance the teaching is fun as
well.
I mean, I bet that at your job you don’t often find yourself saying
things like, “Yes,
Kassidy,
you can accept the tenets of Satanism as your own, but you have to explain
why a Satanic society is the ideal fit for you.”
- One nice thing about going to high school in a different district from
the one where I went to elementary school and junior high was that my high
school classmates didn’t remember me as a small child.
(It was bad enough that they remembered me at age twelve.)
I always thought it was weird that so many of my classmates had grown up
together and remembered each other from when they were all tiny.
But it turns out that things are an order of magnitude weirder
today, because my students have more than just memories—they
all have pictures and video of each other’s childhoods in
their pockets.
Facebook has been around long enough that all those baby pictures I saw
when I actually kept up with Facebook now belong to teenagers who taunt
each other by showing them to each other.
“Hey, remember how you wore this shirt every day back in first
grade?”
“Shut up!”
- Of course, these days I spend a lot of time with someone whose
students won’t be in first grade for a couple of years.
A while back she mentioned that for Black History Month her class
would be doing a unit on African-American inventors, and mentioned a
few of the inventors her lesson plans would feature.
I wondered why George Washington Carver wasn’t on the list.
She patiently explained that George Washington Carver was a
non‑starter because these days if you bring a peanut into a
preschool half the kids will instantly drop dead.
- Gah, it just occurred to me that all of my students are younger than
Crango.
- My school email is provided by Google, meaning that for the first time
I am encountering Gmail gimmicks such as suggested replies.
A student wrote in to ask for an extension on an assignment; when I
pointed out that the assignment wasn’t due for another week, the
student wrote back, “Phew! I was really nervous.”
Here are Google’s suggested replies:
What do you think—bad programming, or socially inept programmers?
- On that topic: for a piece of technology that costs more than some
cars, you would think the least the manufacturer could do would be to
add a single line of code to prevent this:
- Most trash disposal areas around here now require you to divide what
you’re about to throw away into compost (food scraps and paper
products), recycling (glass, metal, plastics), and actual trash.
But what does that leave as examples of garbage?
Here’s what the sign on the Ferry Building suggested:
Because apparently we live in a world in which an artist tasked with making a sign like this thought, “What would be something that, were you to find it in your possession, you would automatically toss into the trash?”, and decided that the natural answer was “a compact disc”.
- At least the trash can people put some thought into their graphic
rather than sticking up the first stock photo they could find.
Would that the web designers for the specialist I had to see about my
damaged
front tooth could say the same—here’s one of the
graphical links they posted on the “Treatments” page:
- For years the Republicans have been trying to win votes with the
promise that if they were in control they’d reduce tax forms to
the size of a postcard, and it looks like they’ve finally followed
through, sort of.
The new 1040 is indeed shorter—but
only because the parts that made it longer have been separated out into
Schedules 1, 2,
3, 4,
5, and 6, joining the
pre-existing lettered schedules and numbered forms.
I guess the idea is that you can skip the schedules that don’t
apply to you… but you still have to pull them up to see
whether they apply to you, and chances are good that a lot of them
will.
My taxes are pretty straightforward but I still had to file
Schedules 1, 2,
3, 4, C, and SE, as
well as Forms 8863 and
8962.
Meaning that instead of filing a few full pages I had to print out a
bunch of pages that had a few lines at the top but were otherwise
blank.
And what was at the bottom of all these wasted pages?
Why, a cheerful note about compliance with “Paperwork Reduction
Act”, of course!
- Also, someone at the IRS has been slipping fan fiction into the instructions. Like, did you see the explanation for line 9 of the 8962? “Henry enrolled himself, his spouse Cara, and their two dependent children, Heidi and Matt, in a policy for 2018 purchased through a Marketplace. APTC was paid on behalf of each. The couple divorced on June 30.” It gets weirder from there, as the IRS goes on to detail how Henry gets custody of Heidi while Cara takes care of Matt. Will this damage the kids’ sibling bond? Had Heidi been feuding with her mother? Do they have any pets, and if so, were they divvied up as well? Were Henry and Cara at least married for longer than Keith and Stephanie from page 16, who marry at the beginning of 2018 but divorce in July of the same year? When Nancy from page 17 flees her abusive husband Kevin but is then expected to enter his Social Security number on line 30(b), is she just supposed to have it memorized, or does the IRS expect her to go back to ask about it and risk another beating?
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