After hearing the umpteenth perfectly functioning Harvard student tell me she's "autistic," and also teenagers who shriek uncontrollably, self-mutilate, and never look at another person, I've seen firsthand how the ever-expanding "autism spectrum" diagnosis is worse than

This is good advice.

AI chatbots begin every email with "I hope this finds you well." Boilerplate language perfunctorily appended to every message wastes the reader's time. Busy professionals already get too much email. How much time is AI wasting collectively by doing this?

Postmodernism kills art. Schoenberg: "“The emancipation of the dissonance is a consequence of the emancipation of the human mind.” (1926) The only thing Arnold "emancipated" was classical music from its beauty, relevance, or usefulness. All notes are not equal.

Despite dire warnings that mRNA shots would kill everyone who got them, President Donald Trump got his COVID-19 booster shot earlier this month. reason.com/2025/10/24/vac…

The world has devolved into a generation of second-handers: "'bottom 60 percent of the population' is 'almost becoming useless or unproductive' thanks to deepening educational inequalities, which have resulted in an 'extreme dependency.'” Ironically, the corporate model has

New study finds education research is out of touch w/the needs of teachers: Equity, social justice, & identity appeared 2x the frequency of any other area in American Educational Research Association meetings But teachers’ top concerns were far more practical, like student

While students may have learning style *preferences* (e.g., visual vs. verbal), they do not actually learn better when receiving information via their preferred learning style. This has been empirically tested over and over again. The most common confusion: Q: "But topic XYZ

When middle-class children fail through discovery learning, their parents hire tutors who teach them explicitly. Working-class children just fail.

I love when people write a tweet saying you don’t have to memorize anything. Says the person who just recalled phonemes, morphemes, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, spelling, tone, audience expectations, and the rhythm of Twitter itself—just to write that tweet.

It's difficult to eliminate bad pedagogical theories from education—such as constructivism, learning styles, and discovery learning—because of the affordances those minimally-guided strategies offer low-information teachers to obfuscate their own lack of expertise. The classroom

Communication between first- and second-language speakers is not just about the fluency of the second-language learner. The native speaker's experience communicating with non-native speakers also affects the outcome. People who only communicate with native speakers develop a

As Orwell wrote: "It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy."

Much of the training occurs with model classrooms in mind. The educational community will not develop strategies for bad classrooms (which are the only ones that need interventions; good students learn regardless of teachers or classrooms) because postmodernists refuse to

Even when shown the shortcomings (by their own professed pedagogues no less) of minimal guidance techniques and fallacious educational myths like learning styles, educators choose the woo-woo. (Spoiler Alert: The woo-woo masks a lack of expertise. Well-worn and cherished fig

This is the on-/off-record strategy from Brown and Levinson's Politeness Theory (1987), a book on linguistic pragmatics. #linguistics #Psychology

Why do modern audiences expect (or even want) fiction to adhere to reality? Stop looking for education in entertainment. "... so it was a disappointment to discover that this is almost entirely made-up.😆 Real Salieri and real Mozart apparently didn't hate each other ..."

This drives much of the resistance to the broader adoption of knowledge-rich curricula in #education. The mainstream community of educators ridicules the teaching of any skill that will foster excellence, whether that be learning to write in cursive, memorizing poetry, typing, or

Along with Toshiro Mifune, Nakadai was one of the greats from Japan's classic age of cinema. He was fantastic in Kobayashi's Harakiri (1962), but his most memorable scene for me was in the Yuki Onna segment of Kwaidan (1964), based on the tales of Lafcadio Hearn. RIP.