Daina Bloom

And a day ahead of April fool’s day!

Will learning the times tables make a comeback in California and New York? Math facts are to math as phonics is to reading.” tinyurl.com/mpt2dvmn #teachmath @DrJenniferWeber @mikesully97 @AsraNomani @0Beanie05923291 @MrDanielBuck @Dale_Chu @amandavande1 @karenvaites

@LLGnine @ValerieAnne1970 @MelissaInTexas Those who had chicken pox have a higher rate of shingles. Not the vaccine

@ValerieAnne1970 @MelissaInTexas I had actual chickenpox when I was 8, 50 yrs ago, before the vaccine. I got shingles when I turned 40 and still get breakouts a couple times per year. How exactly is it due to the vaccine?

"Many don’t realize, the Chickenpox Vaccine Causes Shingles Epidemics." ~RFK Jr "When the CDC was thinking about mandating the chickenpox vaccine for your children...they hired a scientist named Gary Goldman, who did a long-term study in California." "What he found is that if you give the chickenpox vaccine, mass vaccinate, it stops chickenpox, but causes shingles epidemics later on; which is 20X deadlier." "Despite those studies, we mandated it for American children in this country, but in Europe they don’t." "If you go to the British National Health Service website right now, you can read that it will say, 'We do not recommend chickenpox vaccines because it causes shingles epidemics later on'… and that’s the problem."

@whotown @MargaretAtwood This just came to my attention as I’m reading her new biography- too bad- I thought she had more nuanced opinions about Israel. That one hurts!

Goodbye @MargaretAtwood we had a longstanding relationship with me as a young girl (and future writer ) gifted a copy of “Cat’s Eye” by a boy she loved. I’m so disappointed to read this…..

There is a genre of October 7 commentary that works by constructing a historical arc so compressed and so selective that the conclusion becomes inevitable. A people wronged, hemmed in, their world dismantled across generations. Rage follows. What else would you expect? The history offered in support of this arc is not really history. It begins where it needs to begin, omits what complicates it, and arrives at a destination that was chosen before the argument started. The Arab population of Mandatory Palestine never held sovereignty that was taken from them. There was no state. A significant portion immigrated to the land only in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The land passed from Ottoman to British control, and two national movements competed within that framework. One of them, the Jewish national movement, was not a colonial project arriving from outside. Jewish communities had existed without interruption in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, Gaza, Tiberias, the Galilee and elsewhere, through centuries of pre-modern colonial empires, Roman, Byzantine, several Arab Caliphates, the Crusaders, and Ottoman, and long before any of them emerged. The Zionist movement was a national liberation movement of a people with three thousand years of documented connection to that land, rejecting the exile that was imposed on many of them, and building upon a presence that had never left. The other national movement, the Arab Palestinian one, crystallised largely in reaction to Zionism rather than predating it, which is why the sovereign state being projected backwards into history as ancient and continuous is itself part of the inversion, not a foundation for it. Arab leaders, who rarely called themselves Palestinians then and most of whom saw themselves as part of greater Syria, rejected partition in 1937 and again in 1947. That rejection, and the violence that accompanied it across the three decades of the Mandate period, is precisely what this genre of argument leaves out. What does the enforcing are films like "Palestine 36," marketed as historical drama about the bloody Arab Revolt, but functioning as something closer to historical replacement. They strip Jewish indigeneity and continuity from the record, recast a people with millennia of connection to that land as recent colonial arrivals, and present the conflict as a simple story of indigenous resistance to foreign imposition. The purpose is not to inform Western audiences about a complex national conflict. It is to recruit them to a conclusion: that Jews and Israel are an illegitimate implant in the region, that the appropriate remedy is dismantlement, and that what would follow, the imagined state from the river to the sea, would be a tolerant, secular, democratic alternative, where Jews can live in peace under their Arab Palestinian Muslim rulers, not as a national group but as a religious minority. That last part is perhaps the most dishonest element of the entire narrative. The movements driving that agenda in the Middle East are neither democratic nor secular, and whatever secular veneer some of them maintain is precisely that, a veneer. The model being implicitly promised has no precedent among Muslim-majority states in the region, and sits in direct and unacknowledged tension with the political and religious character of the organisations whose cause these films are made to serve, like Hamas. Without all of this, October 7 cannot be made to look like the inevitable product of accumulated injustice. It looks instead like what it was: a brutal, sadistic rampage by Arab Palestinian Islamist terrorist organisations, and the civilians who joined them, to murder, rape, and kidnap Israeli citizens, residents, and foreign nationals. No historical narrative, however artfully constructed, changes what happened that morning. It only changes who the audience is willing to hold responsible for it. This is the genre James represents, and he is far from alone in it. It is not engagement with history. It is the use of a selective version of it to launder a conclusion that was held before the argument began.

@hylandforsbisd @MmeLockhartLDS Thanks. Open to sending me a sample lesson or spelling list?

@dainabloom @MmeLockhartLDS AVKO spelling

@hylandforsbisd @MmeLockhartLDS What was the program? I have a 4th grader in my classroom that is struggling

The thing that helped my dyslexic learn to read more than anything else was spelling. Her specialty private school used a homeschool spelling curriculum and after not being able to read through 3rd grade she learned in 5 months at this amazing school - mainly due to the spelling curriculum.

@JimMcMurtry01 The sad part is the money is often used for causes the union members do not support. Unions dues for over and above the interest their members doing their job should be optional .

👏 👏 👏

@koshadillz Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame..

OY!! I made a rap song about 1 of the 37 Palestinian paratroopers in Hannah Senesh. She was eventually caught and executed by firing squad. I don't think there is a stronger Jewish Woman to date. Do you agree? RT RT RT RT!!! Based on the book "Crash of the Heavens." Y📺T youtu.be/7w4CRE2rYq4?si… 🔗 soulspazm.ffm.to/hannahszenes 📕 simonandschuster.com/books/Crash-of…

@aziz0nomics The brain rot is everywhere. I’m a teacher and our union has been a victim of this for a long time!

Rational people in Arab countries: "please, stop the jihadism, we had to live with this nightmare for many years, we just want to live normal lives" Fashionable diaspora Arabs and radical Western leftists: "Shut up you racist. Jihad just means struggle for decolonisation!"

@HistoryBoomer …and promote antisemitic conspiracy theories to young, impressionable kids.

The manosphere is depressingly shallow. They sell a fantasy of eating steaks, driving fast cars (with a woman in a bikini), having big houses with stereos and a sauna (filled with women in bikinis), eating more steaks, and dying. No art, no life of the mind, just animal grunts.

@mileslunn @SelinaMRobinson @bctf I’m not in BC, but Alberta has it right! I don’t need my union dues doing anything but advocating for teaching issues.

@dainabloom @SelinaMRobinson @bctf None unfortunately. However if this was Alberta it would have to be an opt in as dues there only mandatory for core functions (collective bargaining, grievances, pensions etc.) not non-core like this.

It’s wrong and it’s divisive … but this isn’t a new course for @bctf … they’ve been at this for years. Their hatred of Jews is well known and disgusting. And let’s not forget the $ they are sending to UNWRA …. Because they believe they collect union dues for that purpose.

Schools should go back to pen-and-paper only (and everyone knows it).

Dear Khaled Shawwash of British Columbia's Teachers union, You justify the unions 40,000 teacher BDS resolution against Israel hoping this will lead to "Muslim Christian and Jewish children playing along the shore of Gaza". I remember being able to play on the shores of Gaza alongside Christian and Muslim children when I was a child. That was before the IDF and Israel handed the Gaza strip to Palestinian control. Since then, the only Jews to ever enter Gaza are Jews who were kidnapped from their homes and taken into captivity in the most horrific conditions. While Canadian teachers passing this anti-semitic resolution will not change anything for Palestinians, it will surely make Jewish Canadian students even less safe than they are already and educating a generation of Canadians to hate an antisemitism. I very much hope this decision is rescinded.

@FNAuntieBoujee @JohnRustad4BC Forcing teachers to pay these union dues to be certified and then donating $$$ to UNWRA? What recourse will teachers have if they refuse to pay dues?

@JohnRustad4BC Unions are known for supporting humanitarian and political causes, this is not new and you shouldn't pretend like it is. They support anywhere that teachers are impacted. You should try empathy.

This is completely out of control The BC Teachers’ Federation is supposed to represent teachers and support education in British Columbia, not pass motions on foreign political movements and push activist campaigns that have nothing to do with our kids’ success in the classroom. Parents are watching this and asking: who exactly is running our schools? Because it’s clearly not families anymore #cdnpoli #bcpoli

Zionism and racism jns.org/opinion/elie-w…

@druidess157 @HarshaWalia There needs to be a way for members to opt out of paying dues

Labour unions should not have political talking points on geopolitical matters. Stick to working conditions in the classrooms. Stick to collective bargaining issues, like class composition, funding inadequacies, issues of children’s learning. Any union taking dues should stick to their lane. Why? Because you may have other members who politically disagree with you. It’s a waste of money. Do we need to change what unions can and should do with the money and advocacy? Because it’s obvious to me this is a metapolitical points, and they are not a collective for this.

The BC Teachers Federation, the province wide labour union representing over 40,000 teachers, has just passed a resolution in support of BDS! The first province-wide motion to support BDS in solidarity with Palestine!!

"Through the infamous Durban conference, History is giving us Jews a signal. And we had better learn to decode it." - Elie Wiesel ### Today, Mayor Mamdani celebrated St. Patrick's Day by spreading the vicious blood libel against the Jews, claiming that we had perpetrated a genocide in Gaza. He platformed and praised Mary Robinson, the previous President of Ireland, whose leadership of UNHCR was forever marked by the stain of the antisemitic Durban conference, from which the American delegation resigned in protest. Read here what my father wrote in September 2001, days before 9/11, expressing his profound disappointment in Mary Robinson and the hatred against Jews she had allowed to foment at Durban through the United Nations. Elisha Wiesel - March 17th, 2026 ### FROM ELIE WIESEL'S PRIVATE ARCHIVES: The Durban Conference will go down in History as an enterprise of shame. Instead of being an important international gathering of goodwill, it became a circus of slander. Conceived as a world gathering against hatred, it turned into a mean spirited meeting of hatred. I was supposed to be there. Both Kofi Annan and Mary Robinson tried their best to persuade me, especially since I was a member of the small "Committee of Eminent Persons", created by the UN High Commissioner, to help with the proceedings. But when I read the working documents I resigned. Antisemitism, which is the oldest group prejudice in History, didn't even figure in the program. What did figure was something about "holocausts such as the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by the Israelis". Mrs Robinson called me several times. I had lunch with the UN Secretary General, whom I had known for years. I explained to both why I simply cannot be part of an event that is so outrageously anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish. They claimed that the language would be changed. But the trouble was the content. I warned the UN Secretary General that the Conference, the way it was being prepared, will remain a moral disaster in the annals of social and political conduct among nations. For the content was sheer vicious hatred whose reverberations must revolt all decent and civilized people. Secretary Powell and his colleagues were outraged. Their courageous stand deserves support and praise. The American and Israeli delegations left; others did not. I wish European and South-American delegations had followed their example. Their explanation is that they will work from the inside to work out another draft resolution. It's too late. The damage was done. Hatred is like cancer. It goes from cell to cell, from limb to limb, from person to person, from group to group. We have seen it at work in Durban. Even respected personalities such as Kofi Annan somehow lost his way and said things that are unworthy of him. With the Durban scandal in the background, how can the world expect Israel to trust the United Nations? And how can good people, idealistic people have faith in its mission to bring nations together in an atmosphere of dignity? The Durban conference will be remembered as a forum dominated not by anti-Israelis but by antisemites. That militant Palestinians hate Jews that is known. It is enough to hear the various Islamic leaders harangues and read schoolbooks printed by the Palestinian Authority: they preach hatred and violence not against Zionists but against Jews. Their slogan, naked and brutal, which is everywhere the same, has been felt and heard in Durban too: "Kill the Jews!" What hurts is not that Palestinians and Arabs voiced their hatred but that so few delegates had the courage to dissociate themselves from them. It is as if in a weird and frightening moment of collective catharsis, they all dropped their masks and showed their true faces. Through the infamous Durban conference, History is giving us Jews a signal. And we had better learn to decode it. Elie Wiesel - September 4th, 2001