“I can’t get anyone to buy from me!”
“Did you ask anyone to buy from you? Did you offer them something to buy?”
“…No.”
I might chuckle about people missing these basics, except I know I’ve missed them, too. For example, I would always fall behind on my bookkeeping—like doing an entire year’s worth two weeks before the tax deadline—and I wondered why. The reason was incredibly simple: I wasn’t making any room on my schedule to do this work.
Read MoreEver so briefly, I’m back in the land of Uber after many months on the outskirts of civilization.
In fact, I built my itinerary around the gig economy—or tried to. I’ve been declined by two Airbnb hosts for the upcoming weekend (“Oops, I thought I changed our availability. We’re having painting done,”) and I was utterly dependent on ride-sharing to get to and from The Little Middle School’s annual Recognition Ceremony (In person this year! In a park!). If I hadn’t been able to find a ride, I would have been in trouble.
Americans in urban areas have, during the pandemic, heavily relied upon Instacart to DoorDash and all the other vaguely problematic on-demand services. it feels a bit fragile to count on something that is based around individual decisions.
Read MoreThis week, a student at North Paulding High School in Dallas, Georgia, about an hour outside of Atlanta, was suspended for five days. Her crime was posting pictures and video on social media in violation of school policy.
These pictures and video just happened to show packed hallways at North Paulding High School. The superintendent of Paulding County School District, Brian Otott, defended the school’s reopening efforts in response to widespread attention to, and criticism of, NPHS students’ apparent lack of social distancing and mask use as shown in the photos. In a letter to parents, Otott sought to provide additional “context” for the photos, saying, “Under the COVID-19 protocols we have adopted, class changes like this may happen, especially at a high school with more than 2,000 students.”
Read MoreIf you watch several episodes of the BBC’s Planet Earth in quick succession (I have, many times, in my role as science teacher), you will notice a couple of themes emerge.
The first is the tight balance of power in predator-prey relationships. If the prey are easy to catch, there are a zillion individuals to make up for it; if the prey is scarce, you can expect that the predator is going to have to work for its meal and may go hungry sometimes. You can clearly see the way these pairs of species have evolved together so that both can survive.
Read MoreThanks to our free pro Zoom account (thanks, Eric Yuan!), we now have some new features to manage the video conferences we run for our middle schoolers. Disabling chat, for instance, is a must-have.
Another useful feature is the ability to mute the mics of all participants with one click. However, we don’t use that unless we have to. Until the meeting officially begins, we let the students socialize; when it’s time for us to start, we politely ask them to mute their own microphones. One by one, we see the “mute” icons appear.
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