Christopher Candy

Sometimes, even in the darkest of moments, you find out that your students learned your lessons well. Have faith in your students, and they will have faith in you. #edusky

You can arguably teach the required cases for AP Gov in a single day, if your kids are good at memorizing two-paragraph summaries. Learning something actually useful about it takes more time, but that doesn't come up on the test.

So much for dignity. Not that I am surprised, mind.

May seriously consider baking cookies or something. 'Brownies' would probably be more appropriate, but I have neither the ingredients or the interest in adding additional felonies.

I'm really going to get arrested for child abuse by requiring watching this for my AP Government class, aren't I?

The media decided to portray all of that as happening under Biden - most people forget the first year of the pandemic was under Trump. This is the problem with November elections - people remember voting in a year, and assume dumbly that means the year is owned by who was elected that year.

Gee, let’s just go back to Napoleonic-era purchasing your commissions.

My social life as a postgrad at Durham was very lively thanks to being decent at chili and enchiladas.

This just sets my hair on fire.

This. Between lack of skill and asthma, thought I hated sports. Then picked up archery while at uni on a lark and discovered there were sports I was actually pretty darned good at and enjoyed.

And out west, I mean... the LAPD and LA County Sheriffs exist, you know? And I saw plenty of confederate flags in Vermont of all places when I lived there.

The Trump Administration's foreign policy boys skipped everything in their history classes from 1890 to 1945, didn't they?

This is the reality the ‘just do it legally!’ people blind themselves to avoid seeing..

a man in a suit and tie is standing in front of a window with his eyes closed ALT: a man in a suit and tie is standing in front of a window with his eyes closed

Oh, the cognitive dissonance. "Lectures suck! Have your students watch this TED Talk instead!"

One of these is not like the others.

Fighting that stupid urge to post about workplace related pettiness yet again.

I call it the 80% rule. Students will do 80% of what you ask of them. If you reduce your expectations to that 80%, they’ll do 80% of that.

Because

Comey has not been in public service since 2017.

Andrew Wakefield was a physician too. As was Josef Mengele. Physicians are no more immune to idiocy and evil than any other occupation. And the senators who are physicians are obviously politicians first and physicians second.

The biggest risk in this moment is something sociologists call “symbolic compliance.”

That’s when an institution that is violating civil rights gives the public just enough symbolic victories that accountability efforts lose steam before there has been any meaningful change.

Or a historian, or a government/civics teacher... I teach US Government to high schoolers. Imagine how that class is going to be once we're back from the winter storm closures.

Huh. My facebook feed had been relentless for months about throwing right-wing politics at me, and now suddenly it's wall-to-wall opposition to what happened in Minneapolis this week. That seems like something worth noticing.

#1 in Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension v. Noem (D. Minnesota, 0:26-cv-00628) – CourtListener.com COMPLAINT against All Defendants (filing fee $ 405, receipt number AMNDC-12575332) filed by Hennepin County Attorney's Office, Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Filer requests summons issued....

Minnesota's state FBI-like bureau is suing Noem. It says before pre-emptively declaring the killing righteous and abandoning the crime scene, feds took exclusive custody of evidence, including "apparently seized cellphones."

MN asserts a sovereign right to investigate crimes within its borders.

When the budget vote for ICE would have failed except for seven Democrats crossing the line - you can't ignore their existence. Or did you think I meant Dems like AOC and even Seth Moulton thundering their condemnation of ICE and backing it up with their votes?

You know the ‘reasonable Republican’ unicorns you keep looking for won’t show up to fight on their own, right, Senator? They won’t risk anything unless they see you there already? Not to mention you have what you need to prevent cloture already.

Again, when Bill effin' Kristol gets this and Congresscritters don't...

The 'duh, of course not!' answer doesn't occur to all too many people in our hyper-individualistic, abstract-challenged society. They do ask 'did they deserve it'. But now an awful lot of them can answer that question as 'no'. That is the necessity! Because otherwise you, I, we are all on our own.

Folks, holding up Pretti as a martyr is not about diminishing prior victims of ICE. It's not 'hey, brown people brutalized don't count' - anything but! It's not appealing to white supremacists either. What it is about is removing the 'but did they deserve it?' question from the table.

The only likely benefit of this winter storm is that I probably will get an extra day or two before having to explain this weekend to the high schoolers in my Democracy classes.