ScrewdriverFactoryFactoryProvider

That way, it’ll be deprecated after a year and we can move on

I can hear the music in my head and now when I play it it just no longer lines up in my DAW and it sounds like trash. Why did I do this?

I originally wrote a 1k-word response to a maybe 50-word comment on another post and decided to edit it down and make it its own post.

We all know that picking a single thing to be is ridiculous and that you don’t have to commodify your interests for them to be valuable and valid. It’s capitalist bullshit that we drill into kids from such a young age. Commodify the parts of you which make you unique. Make yourself easily digestible by employers. You are a brand. Perform a simplification of your own existence. Etc.

My favorite band of all time worked full time in factories for a decade while gigging nearly every night before finally disbanding. While I believe they should have been able to make a living doing what they did, there’s nothing saying that they were required to allow their labor to be exploited to do so. But I think there’s another more subtle aspect of why this question sucks: it prioritizes lifestylist fantasy over practical skill building.

Imagine someone said they want to be a fashion designer. That brings a lot of cultural imagery to mind. What it does not do is make kids imagine the decade of skill-building that comes prior to being good enough to work independently. There are so many skills involved with that, each of which involves a lot of rote practice. You want to be able to draw your designs? Draw A Box has exercises to get the basics inside the muscle memory of your hands. You want to be able to sew together samples? Here’s a guide on how to make a pillowcase, which is a decent first project. You want to be able to get your designs manufactured and sold? You need to be able to make a tech pack.

I think that when kids enjoy learning the basics of these skills is when they can decide whether it’s worth pursuing as a career. “I want to be a ___” should almost always be taken as “I’d like to try learning how ___s do their job so I can see if I enjoy it”.

There’s a flip side to the idea that you don’t have to live your job, too. For me personally, I can work a job that’s unrelated to my special interests for about 2 years before my body will just start shutting down from the stress and I will be physically unable to get myself to go to work. But of course, I can’t get disability because, “You can clearly work. You just keep getting fired on purpose.” So having a job that allows my autistic ass some flexibility has been a lifesaver, possibly literally. If I hadn’t had nearly a decade of amateur practice at the thing I’m currently doing, I wouldn’t have been able to get hired. Maybe that’s a little extreme, but it’s hard to tell someone who hasn’t been alive for 18 years, “if you wanna do that job and haven’t already started learning, you’ve got about 10 years left before someone will hire you.” Of course, the reality is that a lot of careers have expectations of coming in green and learning on the job. But not all of them do. It’s complicated.

Just got off the phone with the utility company who said I “wrote a bad check” and therefore couldn’t get an extension. What actually happened is that I had more than enough money in my account on the 9th and it took them 6 whole days to withdraw the money, at which point I was $20 short and the whole thing got returned. In the meantime, I spent the remainder of the money because it showed it as processing for nearly a week before disappearing and I got no indication that it hadn’t gone through for another 3 days. I needed groceries so I got groceries. So I’m now $270 short and it’s looking like I’m just gonna be without electric and water from Monday-Thursday. Gotta love it. When we called we made a point of staying calm and explaining what happened and the person just kept saying, “You wrote a bad check” over and over. We don’t even have a check book. And when my partner started crying the rep just hung up.

So that’s how my day’s going.

Requiring homework on a consistent basis is not an evidence-based practice and actually introduces worse outcomes for kids whose parents/guardians are less present, which disproportionately affects poor kids and kids of color.

Why do we do it? Because there are some parents (you know the ones) who will pester the school and lobby for dropping their funding if they don’t see consistent tangible output from their students. If the kids aren’t coming home with half a dozen papers each day and a bag of books, how can we verify that the teachers aren’t just sitting around on their phones all day not doing shit and collecting a paycheck WITH OUR TAX DOLLARSSSSS?!!!?!?!

So, homework largely serves as busy work to signal to parents that teachers are doing things. And the system is designed for parents to actively encourage and participate in the development of the skills required to regularly complete homework independently by high school. Kids whose parents have less free time are inherently disadvantaged, often labeled as bad kids or lazy early on, and can have a seat on the prison train before they’ve entered middle school. It also harms kids’ self esteem and sets an unhealthy precedent for expectations around work-life balance.

There isn’t a single thing that homework accomplishes by accident which couldn’t be accomplished better on purpose via other methods. Fuck homework.

I will gladly explain TCP as long you don’t want me to go into much detail