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Larry T. Spider

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Everything posted by Larry T. Spider

  1. If schools literally have only one measure that determines their performance, you can’t blame them for emphasizing it. Their jobs rides on those scores. If my school doesn’t perform, I will be replaced with a quickness (by someone who will get scores). I highly recommend getting involved and advocating for change. I’m not anti standardized testing - just that it’s the only measure that is used to judge us. Passing the test is no longer enough. Students must make progress from one year to the next, meaning that you often have the most pressure for your highest kids to do well. AND the school is placed in a group of schools with similar demographics to compete for “distinctions”. That means my aisd school has to beat out the westlake, south lake, and any other fancy lake schools. More pressure for high scores. Another sad reality is that we have learned that staar prep helps scores. Teaching the content and having it understood by students is not enough at the elementary level. They need to see it in the same format that they will see it on a standardized test. It sucks because we are talking about 8 year olds. Poor schools bitched forever about staar but we only saw TEA change anything when rich white parents got involved. They walked back a lot of the end of course testing requirement. If that’s your demographic and you aren’t happy you have an obligation to say something. TEA will listen.
  2. Yes, read the document later and it seems better than I initially thought.
  3. You are certainly not alone in that. We are planning a lot of surveys where parents indicate their plans so that we know how to allocate staff. The "get everybody back to normal" crowd vastly underestimates the number of people who don't want to send their kids back. It creates a ton of impossibilities as far as what to do with staff.
  4. Exactly. The talk has very quickly gone from 2 days in person with the ability to scale that up to full time to all virtual being back in the mix. Almost all of my staff was willing to return as of two weeks ago. Going to have to send out another survey because I have a feeling I would get different answers now.
  5. After my calls today, I will just say to not expect an answer as soon as we hoped. The cases spiking right now are complicating things. Im at my school figuring out temp check locations and potential quarantine rooms. Also, which staff members will be sent to the front to actually do the screenings. Fun.
  6. They tried that once and he told people to go to joe 30330.com
  7. If you truly care about Chicago gun violence victims, then I commend you. I care as well. Chicago is my favorite city, I go there often and have many friends in the city. Sadly, I usually hear about Chicago shootings as a way to score cheap political points. It’s not to honor their memory or search for solutions. This was the first mention of Chicago in this thread and it didn’t exactly radiate compassion:
  8. I remember reading about that during the last drought. It was a crazy amount. In some of the other threads I’ve said that traffic/mobility is the critical issue of the next 10 years for Austin. It will make or break us in terms of ever having a functional system. If you are looking 20+ years, water will be the major issue. Austin metro will have over 4 million people so droughts will strain the supply much more than currently.
  9. I will also say that saying wildly mean things about HRC worked because people saw her as corrupt and untrustworthy. When trump tries it with biden it will backfire, other than with his worthless base. Biden is going to pick Kamala and set her loose on Trump. Then joe can be positive and optimistic with feel good stories.
  10. That story has happened 1,000 times in Joe’s life. He has his issues but he’s a good and decent man. How many people can say dotard has gone out of his way to help somebody on a personal level with no cameras or fanfare? No expectation of repayment? Voters will connect with Joe on this level. We are a broken country in many ways and the Republican Party has been masterful at tapping into that hate. Voters didn’t see HRC as a good person so there was no difference to choose from. I still think decency will win out in the end this time. If not, flush this country down the toilet.
  11. He’s got to get the right leaning folks that have left him back on board. War on abortion is the fastest, most direct route.
  12. Good nomination. He’s on the list.
  13. Pretty much every list of safest cities in the US has Austin on it somewhere. If you’re scared of Austin, you’re probably going to be scared anywhere.
  14. Waiting for July 14th run offs. Taking nominations in the thread if you want to suggest somebody. Wendy has already been nominated and seems to fit the parameters well.
  15. They have to have cameras, right?
  16. It’s sad when we can’t even look at a local shooting without national political talking points that are completely irrelevant dominating the conversation. People get so programmed by politics that they can’t have a conversation about anything. I feel like this happens to me all the time now: “Weather seems nice today.” “See, global warming is a hoax!”
  17. A 3000 sqft house in Tomball where they park their f350 before their 80 mile round trip commute to an office building.
  18. Correct. We are planning on having the teachers rotate instead of the kids in some cases though.
  19. Don’t take my opinion on who undecideds are as me predicting trump will win. I think a good amount of those people will go back to him but he’s going to need more than that to make up what is possibly a 10 point deficit nationwide right now.
  20. In aisd, staff that can complete their job remotely must be given the option to do so if they have serious risk factors. There is a special “covid leave” for people that can’t complete their job duties remotely. Need to reread the doc but it’s 66% pay I think. For teachers, they can be matched with students that are doing virtual learning only. About 90% of my staff wants to be back on campus.
  21. That depends on the campus and teacher. I had UT professors asking to use some of our material in their lessons because they liked it so much. I have other teachers that can’t figure out how to plug their computer in.
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