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Yeah, that's fair. XD I like listening to things, and I end up with a good bit of time doing chores or commuting, so I binge-listen to podcasts.

Yeah, I don't know. History is hard to teach well; it felt like it just wasn't much of a priority in elementary and middle school, honestly. Some US History textbooks are very sketchy, but some are okay, I hear. Teachers help a lot.

(Sorry, I'm grouchy about school, if that wasn't obvious; it was not my cup of tea. I'll try to curb my grumpiness. >>; )

 

Yep, that's fair. Sorry about that!

I actually had fairly nasty formative experiences with school, but better later ones. The adults at my elementary school did cool stuff like 'dragging small children screaming through the halls to lock them in closets' and 'throwing desks'. So I am eternally and irrationally grouchy about school in general; I'll try not to be a pain. >>;

 

Yeah, I was thankfully never actually locked in the closet, but 'children dragged screaming through the halls' was more or less a daily occurrence. I think it was more emotionally abusive on my end, but I lost all memory of elementary school by about midway through middle school, so I'm kind of fuzzy on the details. I know I was angry and acting out physically for a while, and then very depressed and suicidal. Then I went to private school on the recommendation of a psychologist. :D

So uh, yeah. School. It's not for me. But I think my experiences were somewhat unusual, so it's not really helpful for me to grump loudly. It's all good now, I get to be an adult now and never be a student again.

 

I am so scared of US schools not even lying those (albedo's elementary school) are horror stories that around here would have had the entire thing locked up and probably annihilated with like twenty-thirty court cases to go around. The worst punishment I know of is one I use too when my kids misbehave which is the classic 'I will take stuff you could hurt yourself and others with away from you if you don't stop doing dangerous bullshit with it right now'. Which includes chairs. I had a kid stand for like 45 minutes because he wouldn't stop doing chair acrobatics that looked dangerous and I warned him like three times. Yay authority.
And I'm not even saying we are like a golden example of perfect school in Berlin, my mom works at an elementary school that does a lot of immigrant integration stuff and HOLY SHIT there is some stuff going on there. But that's usually the kids acting out like crazy. Like they have Knives in school. Knives in an elementary school. Those are five to eleven year olds I am very very upset by that. Also the eternal problem of weed at every single fucking middle/high school in the entire town.

While I'm thinking about it how did your schools handle mental health problems, like especially adhd? I am still trying to figure out ways to help my small tutoring kids who show some symptoms (might just be they are overwhelmed from whole school day + one and a half hours of tutoring, but still, might help to approach it similarly)

Also I kinda wish I could give you guys the history book I used 7th through 10th grade ugh it was SO GOOD.
Huge, contained way more topics than was even in our curriculum, very comprehensive, super nice illustrations, really great, skipped almost nothing.
I am pretty sure they don't translate school books directly though, for shame. Um. You could try learning German or something? (I am joking obviously, haha.)

 

Yeah, go figure, this stuff isn't illegal here. The US school system is pretty broken. Part of the problem is that "poor" schools are a lot worse off than "rich" schools, since they're funded mostly by local property taxes.

Duolingo, working on it. :D German is neat; I've wanted to learn it for ages.

 

I love/hate german a lot it's kinda weird in some places and makes very little sense in others. then there is the overt fondness of making everything inflect which is hard to learn and teach and I guess the whole problem with possessive being done wrong a whole lot (Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod) (that sentence hurts on purpose it's the wrong case) (jsyk) (i don't wanna confuse people who are learning)

 

Heh, at least there aren't kanji; Japanese was the most headache inducing. I'm actually okay with inflection; I took Latin for four years, which helps a lot. I think some of the cases/tenses are different in German, but at least I already know what dative and genitive are. >>;

 

latin has one more case than we have I think. idk what its for but they have it.
I think my favorite about any language is always weird nigh unusable tenses
Futur II is one of my favorites. Who needs a finite future tense? effin no one but here it is. TAKE IT.

 

*looks this up*

Yeah, Classical Latin actually has six cases. Ablative is a hideous catchall, mostly used for adverbs and some specific prepositional phrases, but also for random other stuff because they were crazy. It actually does not make any sense and is hard to translate. :P Technically there's also vocative, which is specifically for directly addressing people - e.g., if you call Brutus by name, you say "Hey, Brute", instead of "Brutus", because vocative case. Latin is weird.

Do you guys have future perfect? That always seemed like the most useless explicitly defined tense in Latin. (It's for "[x] will have [verb]ed", Latin conjugates the verbs differently for that.)

 

thaaaaaat is futur 2 actually. Favorite tense 5ever most useless weird one to have around
... okay i suppose sometimes it is a BIT useful for somethings. some weird roundabout things.
"Ich werde die Hausaufgaben morgen erledigt haben" instead of "Ich mach die Haufaufgaben bis morgen" is absolutely the best way to pose your grammar credentials in an optimal way to catch a potential mate's eye.

 

Pffffffft. I am dying of amusement here. I didn't put together the different wordings for that concept. I mean, you can express the meaning in English, but you don't have to conjugate differently.

Obviously I need to learn German, my rusty Latin skills will serve me well. XD