Five for Friday, December 6, 2024
Education Funding, History Books, Neurodiversity, Robin Hood, Zooming
It’s been a crazy work week. I attended my education law class on Monday, sponsored a webinar for parents about college and autism on Wednesday night, and wrote a lot.
I woke up on Tuesday morning and realized that my book draft was too broad in scope. I cut out about 20,000 words from this current project. Now, the writing is flowing because my topic is more narrow. Yay. (I didn’t delete those 20,000 words. Never! They’ve been safely saved into a new file for a future project.)
Education Funding
When I was writing for mainstream papers about schools, I discovered that certain topics were kryptonite. Nobody read them. One unpopular topic was school buildings, which is sad because we need to throw out our crappy 100-year-old buildings and create new modern learning spaces. I love the topic, but nobody else does.
Anything to do with school finance is also a subject just for education nerds. If you want to lose even more readers, then you should talk about special education school finance. Snore-City! Except for me. I think it’s interesting.
And so does Bellwether, which did a great report on the fucked up system of funding special education in our country. The short story is that the federal government isn’t paying its share of the costs, so it’s up to localities to pick up the slack.
Why does this matter? Because it has created a toxic situation in our schools. Just last month, I wrote:
Parents must fight for every service, every hour of reading help, every hour of physical therapy. They must fight for a para to accompany their kid to the art club. They have to spend hours educating themselves about education law, so they phrase those requests with all the special keyword phrases. Because schools don’t want to pay for anything.
Parents even must fight other parents. I was in a PTA meeting where one mom stood up and asked how we could prevent special education parents from moving to our town and taking up all our resources. Awful woman. If that woman had made that same statement about any other subgroup, she would be on the evening news.
Steve’s History Books of the Year
Traditionally, my gift guides include my husband’s history books of the year. This year, his selection was heavily influenced by our trip to Spain. Here’s his selection:
Aristotle - Nicomachean Ethics
Rising Rates of Neurodiversity
In the past week, two friends have reached out to get help with getting an autism diagnosis for an adult relative. The demand for adult autism and ADHD diagnoses is through the roof. More on this another time.
Robin Hood With a Silencer
Yes, murder is a bad thing. And assisignations are terrible.
However, there are a lot of people rooting for the guy who killed the health insurance CEO in Manhattan this week. Just check out the comment section on the New York Times’s Instagram post about it.
And he has a cool backpack and is kinda cute, too. This is a movie plot.
Zoom Backgrounds
My office walls are covered by brown wood paneling. When we painted the room four years ago, I decided to keep them brown because I thought it gave the room a fun retro vibe. But now I am worried that they make my Zoom backgrounds too dark. I upgraded my camera, lighting, and microphone — that made a big difference.
