tbh cables were like that and safety precautions weren’t hard set in yet
Oh wow this is horrifying
Holy shit
Why don’t we see this kind of stuff more in history books?! I’d be way more interested in history if I understood that people were afraid of electricity because they were afraid of power lines slicing them to peices like cheese-wire! History books make it sound like “oh those silly people thought electricity carried demons or something!” Rather than “those poor people opposed electricity because they were terrified that eventually there would be so many power lines they wouldn’t be able to see the sun anymore.”
Forbidden Zipline
Me, reading about people fearing electricity when it was invented: well, people always fear changes and the new, so-
*further reads about the madness that was the massive powerlines and its horrifying lack of safety”
-you know what. I would do the exact same: be terrified of the “giant electricity spider”.
also if any of those zillions of lines snapped–which im betting they did more than zero times!– you would have anything from a brief and scary lightshow to a deadly thrashing snake dropped down to street level to shoot lightning into anything iron or copper, which back then was cars, carriages, drainpipes, canes, buckles, umbrellas, signposts. how happy was a carthorse going to be with electricity grounding itself on its harness or bit? how safe was a kid with everyone running around and cars crashing and horses flipping their shit? what happens when a man uses a steel-framed umbrella to try and smack the cable away?
people in the past were the correct amount of scared of electricity! modern people just forgot all sense.
In addition to being pastors, my parents were both also professional teachers. My mom has a master’s in education.
I still wish I wasn’t homeschooled.
Like, I run into folks now who get super excited when I tell them I was homeschooled because they’re thinking about homeschooling if they ever have a kid and want intel, and they get super grumpy and dismissive and defensive when I tell them how absolutely debilitating it was socially, and that it really wasn’t worth it just to be a year ahead in math.
And part of that is this sense that homeschooling is an opportunity for you to customize your child. It’s usually an extension of a broader fantasy that that’s what parenthood is about. That you can minmax your child’s stats and construct the perfect build, and the only reason everyone’s all screwed up is just that nobody sat down and really micromanaged their child’s education enough. Other teachers (and peers, for that matter) might steer them in directions you don’t want.
Even when done well, homeschooling is about removing those outside influences so you can control their environment and prioritize your own goals for them. It’s a magnet for people with narcissism and control issues as a result, it’s a magnet for fundamentalists, but it’s also a magnet for idealists. Sometimes it even works out great, hell, there are people who for accessibility reasons will likely be taught far better at home. But that’s more a “lesser of two evils” situation.
One person cannot be smarter in every single subject than every single teacher that the kid would ever have. They can’t singlehandedly replace the socialization, the networking, the mentorship, and the life experiences. And to think that they can borders on megalomania.
So as someone who used to be an admin for my school district’s home ed office, yeah, it fucks up wayyyyyy more students that it helps.
The way my state’s education laws around home ed were painfully lax and pretty much only require that someone licensed as a teacher signs a form that says “yeah, they did some work”
Well, also in my state there’s no diploma/certificate of completion for students who finish school via home ed. We warned every parent of this when they filled out the paperwork to declare that they were home schooling their kid. We warned then that if they planned on having their kid attend college they would need immaculate records of everything done in 11th and 12th grade and that colleges will go through it with a fine tooth comb and that unless everything was perfect and every detail was recorded then their kid probably wouldn’t be accepted anywhere.
Parents would call us in a panic because colleges would ask for proof of completion of home ed and the most we were legally able to provide was a letter that stated “so-and-so started on this date and then their parents notified us on this date that they completed their education” because parents had to keep a detailed portfolio of all work done and they never did.
A lot of home ed kids had to go back and get a GED and most couldn’t pass the test without taking GED classes even though the parents swore that their child completed their home ed last month and passed everything.
Parents would homeschool their kids k-11th and then send their kid to public school for 12th grade to try to get a diploma and most parents pulled their kid out after the first 9 weeks because their kid was either failing from being so far behind or they had no friends and never integrated into school life with the other kids.
In the 1 year I worked in home ed I saw like 3-4 kids actually do well after completing home ed. Across k-12 we had like 6,000 students, several hundred “completed” their education a year. But only a handful actually got any education.
This honestly sounds like a very dark comedy skit.
*waves gun around wildly*
“BAN THOSE BOOKS FROM THIS BUILDING! YOU ARE DESTROYING AND INDOCTRINATING OUR KIDS.”
“Sir, we don’t even have those books in our catalogue.”
*awkward pause*
“Oh, We, uh, didn’t check for that.”
They don’t know how to check for it because they’ve never once interacted with a public library until they realized they could go to one with weapons drawn as an excuse to play out their weird toxic masculinity fantasy.
These people want books banned but haven’t read one since they were in elementary school.
But I’m big on pacing myself. Taking frequent rest breaks, etc.
Another benefit of switchbacks.
If you use switchbacks to ascend & descend, you don’t crash. As someone who once had the thought, ‘oh, I can just take this path directly down & avoid the switchback path’ that way lies falling down. And rolling. I was very lucky to avoid broken bones.
Instead of endless wastelands of mowed grass lawns, consider:
True! Unless you can find an economical way to irrigate, more appropriate lawn alternatives in hotter, more arid places might lean more to prairie meadows using local grasses and wildflowers:
Or, they might mean doing classic landscaping, but with rocks and xeriscape plants:
Or having a cactus garden:
There are lots of exciting possibilities once you throw the classic turf lawn out the window!
these are all so beautiful and all I can think is ‘that stone arc isn’t a stargate and I’m sad about it’
shout out to everybody who’s unlearning the old habits that won’t serve them in their next chapter of life. letting go is difficult, counterintuitive, and disorienting. it’s also worth it.
