AwesomeScience

Science! Where the rubber meets the road—at the intersection of literacy and numeracy. 💪🏆

Agreed. We just need to do something with the one-size-fits-all model. Student A: I did it! Aren't you proud of me? I worked it out and got it! Student B: “But but but I don’t get it, you are not helping me, you are supposed to be the teacher, what kind of teacher doesn’t help…” (The latter is usually preceded and/or followed by a parent calling.)

THEM: Rigor takes all the fun out of learning ME: What if rigor IS what makes something fun? It's not fun to flail & fail It's fun to build, create, & work on something significant & of value Rigor + Joy belong together

@DanaPalubiak Hear, hear!

On point 1: teachers didn’t lose interest in teaching. They lost interest in being told their thirty years don’t count as evidence, in scripted curriculum, in fidelity monitoring, in being managed by people who’ve never stood in front of a classroom.

@DeputyGrocott 5-20 of those decisions overlap simultaneously at any given time 🥴

Teachers make around 1,500 decisions a day. In a 10 hour day thats 150 decisions an hour. That’s a decision to make every 24 seconds. Nearly 300,000 decisions in 39 weeks of teaching. Such a mentally demanding job. Too many holidays, yeah right!

@ModestTeacher Kids are tired as well. The change of pace and deceleration is welcomed by all.

With six days of school left my middle school daughter watched Ratatouille today. Some teachers continue to cash it in earlier and earlier every year.

@NielsHoven Right?! It was an adventure into the great big world, filled with wonder and inspiration, without leaving our backyard. We looked outward and beyond, eagerly and boldly, into the unknown. Sadly, the fences have grown taller and contracted inwards, and it shows.

When I was a kid, libraries looked for books to get kids excited about reading It feels like priorities have shifted

The final act of genius is simplifying the complex.

got a framed copy to hang by the ai team

“No matter what happens , get up.”

When I was a child our teacher taught us about risk, money and economics in the most interesting way possible: She made us run a pretend farm, as a competition. It was genius, because I still remember it three decades later, which I wouldn't have otherwise. It went like this: Every student had a ‘farm’ on a little piece of paper, with four fields. Every year you had to decide what crops to plant in what fields, and buy them with any available money. Some crops were like wheat; cheap, boring and low-yielding, but dependable. Others were like peas; expensive, super high-yielding if things went right, but unreliable. Get the wrong mix of sunshine and moisture for peas and you'd make a huge loss instead of making bank. We all competed for the most money over a series of ‘years’ and on each year the teacher would roll dice to determine if the weather was hot or cold, rainy or sunny. There were four combinations of weather for your four fields and up to four crops. There was all to play for, and you'd be built-up or broken by the roll of the dice. Some kids played it safe with lots of wheat and no risk. Others bet the farm on peas, peas, peas! Others hedged between sunny crops and rainy crops. With each round, a few of us exited the game and went bankrupt. The eventual winner had taken a lot of risk, but had hedged just a little bit and rode out the bad years. He got lucky, but that's what the game was all about. The teacher could have taught us by lecturing us. She could have gassed on about risk management and economics and market economics and blah, blah, blah… and been ignored by a bunch of teenagers. Instead she made it fun, she made it a competition! And after that short period, a classroom of kids walked out with heads full of strategy, debating how they'd run the farm, who got the most money and how they'd play differently if they did it again. In a little classroom in a Northern English secondary school, a bunch of adolescents had been introduced to capitalism and loved every minute of it! I forgot almost everything else from those years, but that lesson sticks with me. Good teachers really matter. And a little competition goes a long way.

@NikoMcCarty Biology... The second you think you've pinned it down, it wiggles out and maneuvers around you.

Why isn't there a 3Blue1Brown for biology? For context, 3Blue1Brown is a YouTube channel, founded by Grant Sanderson, that publishes videos about math. Sanderson built an "animation engine," called manim, to help create these videos; it's a Python library that uses code to render smooth animations. So why is nobody making highly visual, explanatory videos for biology in the same way that 3Blue1Brown is for mathematics, where each video explains a concept using a consistent visual aesthetic? I think there are at least three plausible explanations: 1. Biology demands a larger visual palette than math. Whereas many different ideas in math can be explained using a small number of symbols (charts, equations, shapes), maybe biology just requires a larger array of symbols. Showing a kinesin protein walk on a microtubule demands a completely different set of elements compared to, say, the evolution of a species. Perhaps this makes it harder to create visuals for biology. I'm not sure this holds up to scrutiny. Math is arguably as broad as biology. 3Blue1Brown has made videos on everything from Bayes' theorem to Hilbert's curve and how Bitcoin works, and all of them have the same visual aesthetic. 2. Biology doesn't have a rich history of visual ideas, so maybe it's harder to align on an aesthetic. Graphs and geometric shapes are many centuries old, and mathematicians consciously draw on these historical norms and conventions. A line chart looks like a line chart regardless of how it's styled. Biology, though, has no such "fixed" visual language, so it takes more effort to create each new visual. Maybe there's merit to this idea? Everyone draws a chromosome differently, for example; some people might show all 23 pairs at once, or zoom into a single locus, or abstract the entire chromosome down to a few letters. Biology operates across so many orders of magnitude that choosing the scale at which to convey an idea is itself part of the creative act, and there's no inherited convention telling anybody which scale to pick. 3. Maybe it takes too long to build visuals in biology, or the technical bar is too high? If you want to show how an enzyme works at the molecular level, for example, you'd need to understand PyMOL, Blender, etc. Iteration speeds are low, and the skill set needed to build one type of visual — like how molecules bind — won't necessarily apply to higher-order ideas, like evolution. This bottleneck is collapsing with AI tools, though. Claude now works directly in Blender and Adobe products, for example, so iterations will be much faster. Maybe we'll see a 3Blue1Brown-esque creator emerge for biology? I'm not sure. I'm hoping to write about these ideas, so if you have feedback (or reject my claims entirely) please let me know! I'd be keen to hear from you. > Painting by David Goodsell, whose visual aesthetic has been extremely transformative in terms of how people think about molecular biology.

Gaman: A Japanese concept of enduring hardship with patience and dignity.

@econcallum @DKThomp can confirm

Forcing kids to lock their phones away during the school day at first makes them sadder, then quite a bit happier

@asonflower Mary, Queen of Scots

Multiple Meanings to the Bloody Mary: 1. “Bloody” Queen Mary I : The drink’s name nods to the English queen infamous for burning Protestants at the stake. Kinda like vengeance in a glass. 2. The Virgin Mary: Skip the vodka and it becomes a “virgin” version: pure, restrained and non-alcoholic. Seems to echo the divine feminine, the blood of Christ and sacred feminine energy. Sacrifice transformed into grace. Ivanka has posted twin tomato juices after SOTU. Bloody Mary also make me think of hangover👀 drinks. 2 drinks in the Mar 2025 pic 3 drinks in the May 2026 pic Gatorade is in Ivanka's pic. A gator is a reptile 🦎

Cuando eres arquitecto y de verdad te gusta tu trabajo

@WallStreetMav many such cases

I stopped adding cream and sugar to my coffee for 2 weeks and here's what I noticed ... I don't actually like coffee, I like the cream and sugar.

W O W science.org/content/articl…

@R18sok Banana clips!

@Undoomed You are using logic and reason. They are using feelings. We are not the same.

You have two choices. Either you back in or you back out. If you back in you're reversing into a spot that is empty of cars and pedestrians. If you back out you're potentially reversing into traffic and people. The choice is clear. Also makes for a more graceful exit.

Lmao WHAT?! HOW?!