When it comes to "what should schools teach" it is sometimes hard for people to figure out the right criteria because of the list of things one "must" teach is actually very small. Teaching basic literacy and math I think are the not optional, but everything else? Prove to me that those highschool bio classes are making a grand difference to every student. I am not saying they aren't! What I am saying is that its not easy. Students forget the large majority of what they learn after all - does it exist to be "exposure sorting", getting the students to experience bio to see if they like it? Talent screening, to find the good ones and encourage them to go be doctors? Make sure students have core literacy about biological systems for science news & media so they aren't tricked?

The answer is probably "all and more" but you can see how with such nebulous, variable goals evaluating comparative efficacy is quite hard. Many other arbitrary constellation of subjects could probably work, right? And like, it *does*, art magnet schools exist, econ/business focused tracks are quite common at private schools, etc. It changes their median career tracks for obvious reasons but the students don't come out worse for the wear.

The other factor, of course, is that school is a giant babysitting facility & socialization network. So what you can't do is just go "look less classes then", you gotta fill the time. It was never designed to be like "yes these is the core skills you must know, the rest is gravy". So if you wanna teach English or Econ, one might be a better call than the other. But you likely won't ever be able to prove it.

you can extend inter-period and lunch times, though. 5 minutes between classes and a 30 minute lunch is not healthy for kids.

You can, but, to not get into it very much, parents & other institutions just don't want that too much - they want their kids to be "using that time wisely" and want them to be well supervised. Class is how that is done. And there are a bunch of other stuff (signaling for college, for example) that mitigates on this.

The general way people are adding more breaks is "free periods", which to be clear schools do. But there are limits due to above on that.

I really do resent foreign language classes, not because it isn't important (I think language learning is extremely important) but because the US half-asses it to the degree that like 90% of students don't achieve meaningful competence

Also stop offering people French as one of the options. Spanish and Mandarin make so much more sense

Side Effects of Canada

Mandarin would be more useful for sure but there's other reasons as to why it'd never fly

The Canada thing is weird though because it isn't Canadian French? Also my hs offered Mandarin, I think it's getting more common

I tend to be hot take "drop them" on this because the US "half assing" isn't some quirk one can fix - I have done comparative analysis of foreign language instruction in other countries and its either "not different" or "different by being a shit ton more work" - with dubious payoff, like in East Asia. Either way, Germans are not all fluent in English because of better pedagogy, they are fluent in English because they have strong cultural & economic reasons to be fluent in English and do the majority of their learning outside of the classroom.

In the US you just aren't going to get around the fact that most Americans are never going to use whatever secondary language they learn and will forget it very soon after leaving school. Because of this reality, you can't really get the money & time sink for more expansive learning on the table, people rightly realize their time is being demanded elsewhere. It is imo the easiest lowest hanging fruit available at schools - it should not be mandatory, drop that requirement immediately.

(This ofc does not mean it shouldn't be an option for students who do want to pursue it, its great if you want to go that route. It is just incredibly ineffective as a default)

A Historical Space Fuckup

Geostationary satellites. You know the ones, right? Hanging out 5.6 Earth radii above the Equator and sending us cat videos and premium TV channels? Let me tell you about their worst few years.

Background: GEO satellites are just big fat bent pipes. They take a weak signal from the ground, amplify the fuck out of it, and send it back. The amount of dollars you can make doing this is related to the total power of the amplifiers, so everyone making money like this wants more power. How do you get more power in space? Bigger solar arrays. What's the catch? Bigger solar arrays are more expensive: your 15kW solar array might cost you ten million dollars. Bigger solar arrays also mean a satellite that costs more fuel to control, and running out of fuel is the primary way these satellites die (and stop making you money). So everyone's looking for cheat codes here.

1999. Hughes Satellite Systems (just before it's bought by B̷̧͛o̶̹̕ẻ̴̙i̴̩̓n̴͎͆g̵͉̈) develops a really mass-/cost-efficient way to make the solar arrays bigger: trough concentrators. Instead of adding more solar panels, instead they'll add cheap, lightweight, super-reflective panels that redirect more sunlight onto the existing solar panels! This increases the amount of light hitting the solar panels (++power), while also increasing their temperature (-power), but they did the math, it's positive, let's launch some concentrators.

Let us digress for a second. Space is a vacuum (citation needed). In our Earthbound experience, a lot of matter stays where you put it because atmospheric pressure is keeping it there. In space, some materials start to escape much faster, but other materials stay in place. Spacecraft solar arrays are made of semiconductor (stable), glass (stable), copper (stable), aluminum (stable), and glue (INCREDIBLY VOLATILE). Oh also, the glue is selected to be really clear, but it stays that way only because it's usually hidden behind something. When direct sunlight hits it, it turns SUPER BROWN. Brown doesn't let sunlight through it.

What happens to a molecule when it starts to fly free? It picks a direction to go and flies that way until it hits something, where it maybe condenses and stays put. When the solar panels are flat, this is fine, because most directions have nothing to hit:

However, with trough concentrators, a large fraction of the glue hits one of the concentrator panels and stays there... and then some fraction of that glue evaporates, hits the solar panel, and stays there (but browner):

Oh, okay, yeah that's worse. Spacecraft that were supposed to lose 5% of their power over 15 years instead started looking like they were going to lose 20% of their power in that time period, meaning you can't keep the TV channels running, meaning you can't make any goddamn money! Very embarrassing for Hughes (/Boeing). They launched 6 satellites with this issue before they noticed the problem and started freaking out. "Freaking out" in this case means almost bankrupting the people they'd sold satellites to, and nearly exploding themselves.

My aunt started working at Hughes during this timeframe and was given a commemorative pin for the satellite she was working on. Six months later, they asked everyone to please give back the commemorative pins; the company urgently needed to fix a design issue with the satellite that would change how the pin looked. My aunt kept her old pin, which... still had the concentrators in place :)

Anyway, right around this same time, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO, whose existence was classified at the time), had exactly the same issue on some of its satellites, as far as I can tell. NRO also freaked out about it, and because they're the government, they started an annual conference with all of the country's high-clearance solar power experts to help them figure out what the fuck was going on. That conference slowly got less and less classified over the years, and my wife was invited to speak at it this year! There were a couple of graphs presented by government speakers that lampshaded the Late Nineties Concentrator Fuckup, but absolutely nobody mentioned it directly. (another win for "getting a bee in your bonnet at exactly the right time and then making your spouse listen to everything you've learned about the bee")

if you're what would also be described as a kinsey 1 or 5 and you want to call yourself bisexual you should at least have a bisexual vibe. is what I'm saying.

like, my friend Connor who has a moustchace, whose band plays wearing shibari sometimes, and who sucks dudes dicks when he's drunk but only dates girls can say he's bi. hank green cant

Yes, for any number of reasons:

Lizardman constant only explanation for the no votes on this one, no one truly thinks bottles don't have functions.

a "bottle for water" is not the same as a "bottle of water"!!!

Yes they are and its lizardman to debate otherwise! 100% of people entertaining such distinctions will, at some point while cleaning the kitchen, ask someone to hand them that empty bottle of water over there.

gotta agree with @centrally-unplanned here, especially since the distinction between dative-like and genitive-like meanings has always been super weak. "you cannot have an empty bottle of water" can only be true if in the sort of philosophical sense where we adopt a much more narrow meaning for the term "bottle of water" than normal usage would permit. and in normal usage "bottle for water" and "bottle of water" are not rigorously distinct concepts, because natural language doesn't operate on rigorous distinctions (and syntactical scaffolding like prepositions seem to me to be incredibly flexible in their usage)

(like. part of the problem here is that syntax actually conveys very little meaning--much less than we are really comfortable with, especially when we want to try to tease apart what a phrase "really" means. a construction like "X of Y" mostly serves to associate the concept of X with Y in your mind, and you then use the context of set phrases, experience, and factual knowledge about the world to infer what is actually meant. so if somebody says "an empty bottle of water" there may be an arcane sense on which the concept is contradictory, but only if we insist on a very narrow understanding of the meaning of the word "of," which--given that actual speech can be messy and the relationships indicated by prepositional phrases only approximate at the bet of times--requires us to consider language not as it is actually used the overwhelming majority of the time, but as a precise and consistent abstract machine.)

I’ll pitch in for “no” here.

In my dialect, a “bottle of water” is not a strict synonym for “water bottle”; the latter is ‘about’ the bottle, and the former is ‘about’ the water. I would use “bottle of water” to describe the present arrangement of some water, with ‘bottle’ being a modifier that presumes the presence of the liquid, in much the same way that I might say “slice of pizza.” On the other hand, I would use “water bottle” (or just “bottle”) if I was referring to the container itself rather than the thing it contained.

Hence, an empty water bottle makes perfect sense, while an ‘empty bottle of water’ scans oddly. Note what happens in the following example:

“On the field trip, I noticed that my classmate had filled her water bottle with vodka.”

versus

“On the field trip, I noticed that my classmate had filled her bottle of water with vodka.”

The first sentence clearly suggests to me that there was an empty bottle that was filled with vodka, and that the bottle had a form factor suggesting it was intended to be used for water. Whereas the second sentence would leave me genuinely confused about the meaning, and might imply to me that the classmate had adulterated an existing volume of water with vodka or something.

Yes, for any number of reasons:

Lizardman constant only explanation for the no votes on this one, no one truly thinks bottles don't have functions.

a "bottle for water" is not the same as a "bottle of water"!!!

@fragariavescana said:

exactly!!!

Yes, for any number of reasons:

Lizardman constant only explanation for the no votes on this one, no one truly thinks bottles don't have functions.

a "bottle for water" is not the same as a "bottle of water"!!!

Yes, for any number of reasons:

my feeling is that you can have "an empty water bottle" but not "an empty bottle of water"

Every single Manhattan DoorDasher is a nice young Haitian man who wouldn’t mind making small talk for ten seconds to practice his English and every single Massachusetts DoorDasher is a man with crazy eyes who does not blink once the entire interaction

Some of my friends have adopted this Zoomer rapper as a sort of bard. I’m not entirely clear on that situation but I’ve met him, he seems cool. He was telling me about DoorDashing. It sounds like it can be a dark and violent world. I told him he should write a song about a DoorDasher who is like, cracked out on Xanax and robbing people’s houses. But I don’t know that world like that.