I went hunting for the appropriate Friday WTFuckery near to May 16th, 2017, but there wasn't one within proximity looking forwards or backwards. So you can just vent here about 2025 without comparison.

I did see this post on repetitive pop lyrics, which reminded me of a stray thought: The other day, Pokey declared a certain song* to be one of the earliest examples of modern pop music. Listen: this song is unbelievably conventional and breaks zero new ground. This is a great example of one of my favorite phenomenon, where you take landmarks in your personal experience and declare them to be universal. In this case, the song was released in 2012, and so was probably on the radio 2013-2014, when Pokey would have been 2-3 years old**. It's a new era!

*There is no fucking way you will guess it without clicking through, but put your guesses in the thread for my entertainment!

**My earliest concrete memory of a song is sitting in the front bench seat of my dad's proto-Suburban, with my feet up on the radio knobs, while Another One Bites the Dust played.***

***Confidential to Kymyz Mustache: we were in the 300 Club parking lot.

I don't really have anything to post, so I'll share an oddball thing I learned the other day:

Students at Heebieville High School are exempt from final exams in any class where:
1. they have an A and no more than 4 absences, or
2. they have a B and no more than 3 absences.

This is because the stinginess of the state funding formula means that admin prioritizes attendance over any other objective. (And yes! Attendance is super important for learning. Just that they have a throw-every-thing-against-the-wall attitude towards promoting attendance at the expense of everything else.

One thing I've learned, more generally, is that absolutely nothing in education matters if you don't have teacher buy-in. It sounds like teachers who teach accelerated or honors classes do have workarounds: namely, an AP test if that applies, or just making a big project be due at the end of the semester. (In Jammies' classes, roughly half the kids are failing, so that's a convenient workaround that makes the issue moot there.)

(One thing that they can't do is change the grade distribution, though. The breakdown of the grade according to percent exam/homework/participation etc is also locked down by admin.)