Ms. Messineo

The best approach I ever found for dealing with behavioral issues was at a Montessori school that had a garden out back. Certain boys would get wound up and out of hand. Instead of detention or discipline, I would say: go dig a hole in the garden. Just go dig for a while. After an hour of getting hot and sweaty and moving dirt around, they would come back inside calm and relaxed and ready to engage. The energy had somewhere to go. Instead, most schools force that physical energy into a desk and then punish kids when it comes out sideways. The approach creates the problem it claims to solve.

Games marketing is broken. After raising over $50M to support and work with hundreds of studios over the last 6 years, I find that the biggest problem is studios’ lack of direct connection with their players. Over the last six years, I’ve watched talented teams struggle because they never had a clear way to reach, learn from, and grow with players over time. Without that connection, everything becomes harder - validation, iteration, community growth, and retention all turn into guesswork. For most of the games industry’s history, platforms have controlled identity, communication, and distribution, which are invaluable to a game’s success. Apple limited how studios could collect and use player contact information outside the App Store, and Steam still doesn’t give studios access to the contact details of players who wishlist or sign up for playtests. Studios are left without a direct relationship with the audience they’re trying to serve. As a result, studios rely on fragmented tools and spreadsheets to manage players across different stages of development and live operations, with no continuity from first contact through long-term engagement. Today, that changes with the launch of FirstLook 1.0. FirstLook is the first Player Relationship Platform built specifically for games. It gives studios everything they need to connect with players across the full lifecycle, including playtests and feedback, community and communications, analytics, rewards, and creator programs, all in one place. We’ve been building under the radar, but FirstLook already powers hundreds of studios, from indies to publishers like Krafton, @ArenaNet, and @Skybound, connecting millions of players with the developers who make the games they love. As part of the launch, we’re introducing a brand new limited time free plan, with access to all our features for up to 500 players. You can set this up now in under 10 minutes. If you want to learn more, book a demo and we guarantee that you will save you time and money and help you grow. Links in comments!

@MarketPalmer_ The job is actually just creating fake Go Fund Me’s in various cities.

A girl I went to high school with posts about how she only works a few hours a week from her phone and makes $10k+ per month. She's referred to 9-5ers as "slaves." Anyway, she just set up a GoFundMe for a $6k medical procedure for her dog.

An 18-year-old female presents to the emergency department with abdominal pain and shortness of breath after drinking a fancy cocktail. Her x-ray is below. What do you think is going on?

Finally built the calculus quiz app of my dreams! 🚀 Just started simple for now, but I'm happy with it and will likely add in more complexity later This was built with React, Inertia, and Laravel using Laravel Boost, Gemini, and Claude to speed up the development process 🔥

There’s a white girl on TikTok rn telling folk that they can buy water/gatorades and give them to homeless people since it’s so hot. But I’m LOVING *HOW* she is talking about homeless folk

@LeahTCodes Ooh nice setup!

Desk setup is coming together 👌

@heymrsbond Partly from my teacher prep program and partly bc I have always seeked to understand things deeply in math. But anyway, I’m always so happy when kids question me and give me an opportunity to explain something in different ways. Someone else usually has the same question.

@heymrsbond I remember teachers, including veteran teachers, being like this A LOT from my own education. I graduated hs in 2015 for reference. I hated it and it made me not wanna ask questions. I have a very solid understanding of my content to be able to explain things in tons of ways.

@sage_stage Okay that’s pretty cool. Especially if they’re actually meaningful things not like “you always wear blue” 😂

@MsMessineo Looks like about 5-6 per person

For teacher appreciation day we all got a personalized, but likely AI written, declaration of appreciation. Cool or no?

@missumpatty @mrs_g_rider Agree if they don’t need conferencing and support. Definitely do the same project or a more advanced version.

@mrs_g_rider Not a hs teacher, but I don't think so. Do your own project along with them, maybe?

Question for high school teachers: You give your students a project and they will have 2-3 work days in class of just working on the project. Is it okay for the teacher to read their own personal book while the students are working? This is a convo we're having in my hallway.

@MmeHarding @mrs_g_rider Yeah same I’d be checking in with students and/or monitoring and helping but that’s partly bc I taught 6th grade. I had to limit how many questions they could ask me so I had enough time to talk to everyone 😅

@mrs_g_rider I would probably design the project to include a teacher interview or check in and use some of the time for that. If not, I'd likely prep or mark rather than personal reading, balanced with checking in on students.

For real. I and my whole class called a kid waffles one year bc that’s what she said she wanted to be called in our class. Who cares it’s fun to have inside jokes like that.

Seasonal depression “isn’t real” until you get a warm day in February and realize you’ve been dead inside for months

@ipodmacbook @xkcd

if an ant hits you going 100000000 mph would you die or would it not matter

@Steinerwoodwork @JamesAFurey It’s definitely not but ok.

@MsMessineo @JamesAFurey You imagine most people have jobs where it’s easier to take off. Yes that is imaginary.

Every Christmas break I’m reminded how distasteful it must be for people in other professions to hear teachers whine about how hard their job is. Weekends, holidays, spring break, and summers off, guaranteed, all while making a decent wage. So many other people don’t get a fraction of what we do; the proper response to this is gratitude, not bitterness.

@Steinerwoodwork @JamesAFurey Yeah and I left like a lot of other teachers bc I couldn’t be a good teacher under those conditions. I tried so hard to make it work for 5 years. Hope you enjoy when there’s barely any teachers left to teach bc that’s what we’re approaching.

@MsMessineo @JamesAFurey You are trotting out the victimhood trope to try and win an argument. You chose this job. Even if all those things were true, it is still incredibly insensitive to parents that have to find childcare or lose wages.

@Steinerwoodwork @JamesAFurey I imagine most people have jobs where it’s easier to take off in an emergency. Many of us go to school sick bc it’s sometimes impossible to make sub plans and stay on schedule since there’s so much to cover by certain dates.

@Steinerwoodwork @JamesAFurey Yeah how dare we get excited to have a surprise day to catch up on all the grading and emails that we don’t have time to do during our usual work day. If we had enough time to do all the parts of our job during contract hours, we probably would need breaks as much.