Posts by Larry Walker24

David Vaughn75 said:Nobody in that Small town in rural USA is out there celebrating communism; they're celebrating Antifascist Struggle Day, and yeah, the state definitely should be paying for that.

But they don't.

Karen Doyle72 said:I still remember when some old lady actually paid for a Mass just so Christ and Eden could be together again, and so she’d get healthy and finally hit it big.
That was the big news. 🤣

🙏🙏🙏🙏

I’m really hoping that this year we finally put an end to all the World War II drama here in the States and that Wounded Knee just becomes a thing of the past

T'Pau - Bridge of Spies

Top picks for books kids actually want to read:

People are losing their minds over the new reading list, even the news is picking up on it:

Susan James said:Honestly, does it even matter where they got married when it's obvious they're splitting up anyway?😕

Look, if the guy is that much of an atheist, it’s pretty obvious they didn't have a church wedding, so I'm just wondering how much he actually gives a damn about his own principles.

Because if he did go through with a religious ceremony, then this whole thing about teaching religion is basically a slap in the face to his ex-wife.

If more students actually stuck with religion class instead of ditching it:

a) they wouldn't be graded on it

or

b) it wouldn't be used just to boost GPAs

At the high school where I teach, kids are dropping religion class in droves after freshman year. The max grade you can get is a C, and since you actually have to study for religion—unlike ethics class, which, let me tell you, is 100 times easier

Peter Harris80 said:Basically, you're right. I don't want her to stand out, and I don't want to cause a scene during enrollment. Not to mention the logistical headache of dropping her off when religion class is first thing in the morning, since there’s no organized childcare at that hour.
I’m not a devout practitioner, but faith is part of my life. My daughter knows the basic prayers, she’s been baptized, and I’d like her to receive the other sacraments. We’ve been to church a few times, but she’s too young to sit through a full Mass, so we don't go often. She’s heard of the concepts mentioned; we read Bible picture books together. She won't be deprived of the basics, but I truly would prefer she attends.
Her father is dead set against signing the consent form because, in his view, agreeing means he’s endorsing having religious instruction in public schools, which he thinks doesn't belong there. I get where he's coming from, though I don't think it's right to let his political stance dictate our child's experience. He isn't fundamentally against religious upbringing, but he opposes the way the Church interacts with the state and religious classes in schools. For him, putting his name on that form would be inconsistent with his principles. He insists that the school I chose requires both parents to sign if they are divorced, and he’s sticking to his guns.

I haven't asked the child anything yet. I thought it was smarter for us to reach a consensus first. Sometimes I think about just giving in to his stubbornness, but then there are still permissions needed for things like holiday programs or community events, and he won't sign those either because he refuses to support the chaplaincy. That's a bigger headache, because that's exactly when you end up standing out if the kid isn't participating.
I want to avoid going through family mediation.

Thanks for the input.

So, did you guys have your weddings in a church?

...

So basically, we're looking at a world where names like Ivan Aralica, Miljenko Jergović, or Ante Tomić—people who actually meant something to us—just don't exist anymore. Gone are the classics like Smogovac, Harry Potter, or those Agatha Christie detective novels everyone grew up on. Even the heavy hitters of modern global lit, like Alice Munro, J. M. Coetzee, Imre Kertész, Hanif Kureishi, or Orhan Pamuk, are totally wiped out. Looking back at the reading lists from the early '90s, they even tossed out Milan Kundera, J. D. Salinger and his 'The Catcher in the Rye', Ivan Goran Kovačić, and a whole bunch of others. Kundera and Salinger? Dead and gone. There's zero room left for someone like Goran Tribuson and his 'History of Pornography', let alone Olja Savičević Ivančević with her 'Radio Cowboy' or Ivan Simić Bodrožić and 'Hotel Zagorje'. To make matters worse, there’s barely any space for women at all; if high schoolers are going to encounter any female authors, it'll only be through the likes of Vesna Parun, Sylvia Plath, and Virginia Woolf, according to some obituary in the New York Times.

2nd Grade Elementary School:

'The woman screams, throwing her hands up in pure desperation, while the little piglet—scared out of its mind—bolts straight into a stick of butter, then dives headfirst into a pile of flour. You can just picture the chaos! She’s yelling her head off, grabbing a coal shovel to chase him down, and all the kids are running right after him, shrieking and laughing, trying to corner the little guy.'

wanderingbadger44 said:Oh, please... they’re absolutely shocked, can you believe it? It’s almost as if they should have been the ones in charge in the first place. 🙄

And honestly, you guys are becoming quite a nuisance with this constant obsession over the required reading list. How on earth are we supposed to trim down the list of mandatory books without someone feeling left out or offended?

Maybe try actually reading something before you start acting like it's a grand tragedy.

The modern, relevant heavyweights aren't even on the list of works that are considered required. Those that remain are usually just things picked by professors or students as electives.

Are you some kind of biologist now, Manchildad? Please, enlighten us—how is a high school kid ever going to benefit from memorizing the cryptogams or the digestive system of a hydra?

There isn't a single thread here about those tedious historical conferences or pointless declarations, nor about the sheer madness of forcing kids to learn the respiratory systems of arthropods. Yet, somehow, this specific topic always stays pinned to the top of the feed. Everyone acts like an expert on literature and who deserves a spot in the curriculum. You really ought to focus on cleaning up your own backyard first.

That stuff is gone, they cut out a ton of it from chemistry too 😉

Look, I didn't write the letter from those writers in the article—clearly, you didn't even click on it.

Does the average person really need Antigone? Where else are people writing essays like that outside of school? Future perfect? Passive state? We could go on forever like this.

AMERICAN WRITERS FREAKING OUT OVER NEW SCHOOL READING LIST: 'Who designed this Kafkaesque nightmare?! Stop using our kids as lab rats'

wanderinghawk30 said:In my son's class, nearly everyone—we're talking 28 kids—wanted to drop religion class the second they realized what they were missing. They saw the kids who didn't attend getting to hang out or just head home early. It was an absolute nightmare for us parents, trying to convince them they actually had to show up.

Wait, why would they HAVE to go?

Anthony Ward6 said:😲

The Department mentioned that it wasn't actually removed, but they just left it up to the teachers' discretion, I guess. 😁

It's not the shirt, it's the neck😉

ANOTHER TOTAL RIP-OFF
'AFTER THIS, OUR SCHOOLS ARE BECOMING A SOCIETY OF DEAD POETS' They’ve officially purged all the living, modern writers from the reading lists, leaving nothing but the old classics. Experts are absolutely losing it.

No more "Hunter in the corn"

Maria Gray3 said:I don't really get why you wouldn't ask a six-year-old if they want to attend religious classes. It’s like asking if they want to do ballet or learn Italian; you're probably going to push them into it or tell them no regardless. My own parents—mom was religious, dad was an atheist—asked me about twenty years ago, so it seems strange to me that people today would rather fight it out through the Coast Guard than just see what the kid actually thinks or feels about it.

Go ahead, ask a six-year-old what religion class even is—not whether they want to go, but what it *is*—and then tell me how that goes.

Check out this news clip:

Students are reading less and less, plus they aren't getting nearly enough English lit classes.

https://www.cnn.com/video/example-news-story-about-education-hours

Chris Grant3 said:Reading aloud to a kid who’s already figured out how to read themselves? Honestly, you’ve got to be kidding me, right?

You sure about that? Back when I was teaching freshman year, I had kids walking in who were still struggling to sound out basic words!!

lonebadger6 said:During flu season, these viruses are just everywhere, and honestly, you can't really dodge them if you try... Maybe some guy sneezed on the subway or in a pub, or maybe you grabbed a door handle someone else just touched, and suddenly you're rubbing your nose and wondering what happened. There isn't some grand mystery to it, really 😁

As for why some people stay healthy, I'm telling you, some folks are just naturally immune for reasons we don't quite get. Take my brother, for example—imagine two kids stuck in the same tiny, heated room, one of them coughing, sneezing, sweating, basically just radiating illness, and yet he never catches a single thing

I was reading about this study recently, though it was pretty limited—maybe around 70 people—where they exposed healthy, unvaccinated individuals to the flu virus. The whole point was to see how different immune systems react, and it turned out to be about fifty-fifty: half got sick, half didn't, even with a direct and clear dose of the virus being introduced to their systems

It’s nothing strange when you think about it; the flu has massive epidemic potential, but most people tend to hold their own. The virus spreads incredibly easily, but hardly anyone can actually stay isolated at home for two months straight, so objectively, almost everyone comes into contact with it, yet the vast majority still doesn't get sick. A ton of people fall ill, sure, but most of us just breeze through it... Hygiene tips are important for plenty of reasons, obviously, but during the peak of the season, if you have to move around among other people, your chances of avoiding the virus are slim to none

People are so prone to panic that they don't truly grasp the scale of an epidemic, so everything always seems way worse than it is. Take the Spanish Flu, for instance; even by the darkest estimates, it infected about half of the population back then. That means half the people were left completely untouched (not because they were all sitting in quarantine 😉 ). And of those who did get hit, about 80% recovered perfectly fine without any issues

It makes sense, really—viruses are just a part of nature. Any virus that actually managed to wipe out the entire human race would essentially be working against its own survival

The Spanish Flu popped up right at the end of WWI when hygiene was trash and everyone was malnourished because of the war. Everything was just at its absolute worst.

By the way, scientists recently isolated the DNA from that specific flu strain from a deceased patient, and yeah, it definitely showed the virus was dangerous.