Have I truly become a monster?
Being vegan (like arguing in defense of any minority) is a crash course in what suspender-slapping, exclusively crowd playing, bad faith, debate nerd, and fake arguments look like. Once you genuinely pick up one cause on even one axis of oppression, you quickly learn to see through a lot of bullshit. I believe veganism to be the most effective of all for exposing this.
It’s definitely gotten more wasteful lately in particularly. You could run 8.1 on any computer that supported Vista, and IME it was even a little snappier, but 10 and 11 have each been significantly worse.
i3wm on a 32bit IBM thinkpad is still instantaneous-response-fast
That’s why in ny opinion it’s criminal that for most high school math stops before calculus. Calculus wraps up so many loose ends and replaces rote memorization techniques with understanding. Why exactly is the area of a ___ = (formula)? Calculus answers that.
The quadratic formula too, calc replaces it. In fact if I had my way with the curriculum we would skip that one entirety in algebra. I’d also throw in a statistics class, which would directly impact just about everyone’s lives, but that’s another matter.
I never learned my times tables either. We don’t teach them anymore anyway.
Sometimes what they’re teaching you isn’t what they’re teaching you.
Maybe you don’t need to know how to find the exact surface area of a cone ever again, but the idea of unwrapping a cone to measure the surface area leaves an impression of a technique for deconstructing a problem, or that problems can be deconstructed into simpler parts at all. It also leaves you with a feel for roughly what the surface area of different shapes would be.
Using a protractor teaches you how to measure accurately and use tools.
Cursive and recorder teaches hand eye coordination, and music is just fundamental to human beings.
Then again maybe you do need to find the surface area of a cone one day, and you could probably go ahead and work out how that would be done even if you don’t remember exactly.
What’s the counterproposal for a curriculum? I’m genuinely curious here, not trying to jump down anyone’s throat. What would school look like without these things?
Everything is like… connected, man.
I explain it roughly as “Veganism is when you believe that the combined values of non-human animals’ freedom, rights, freedom from pain and suffering, ecological impact of factory farming of animals, social impact of slaughterhouses, societal impact of allowing a class of “lesser” commodified sentient beings propping up and holding space for other axes of oppression, public health impact, and personal feelings of guilt at very least might be any amount greater than their value when made into a burger, or shoes, or glue. Everything you associate with vegans (diet) is a logical consequence thereof”
It doesn’t seem to help anyway because they still keep asking a bunch of seemingly obvious questions that verge on sealioning, but it at least seems to keep the conversation on track.