seth dubois says that he is a public school teacher in math and physics my hat is off to
you seth uh he says lots of systemic problems in education have been exposed and amplified by
the pandemic this past year i personally think the whole system needs an overhaul
what changes would you make to public education or just steam education if that's easier if you could
um i'm not going to frame this in terms of what changes i would make to education
because i am not an educator i've not been trained as an educator i've never worked as an
okay i have worked as an educator but like briefly for a coup for a few classes for the
academy of art that does not qualify me in any way to say how i would overhaul the american
education system but i do have some thoughts um
uh again before i get into those search i also want to say that
every teacher i've ever met is a true believer in teaching i know there are many that are not
and certainly the teachers that would seek me out are going to be the self-selected true believers
but teachers really want to do their job it is definitely in the teachers that i have met
a calling an avocation more than a vocation and teaching is really really hard and among
the things that teachers have been clamoring for forever is stuff that they should have
and that's things like smaller class sizes and more resources uh and these are simple policy
things everyone's always you know a phrase that gets thrown about when education gets talked as
well it's not a problem we could just throw money at and i kind of think that no one's ever tried
that just throwing money at the problem paying teachers more giving them more resources that's
that should be not controversial because if you want to know how to help your kids teachers out
give them 20 bucks i'm serious if every parent in a class gave their kids teacher 20 bucks a year
that would go a humongous way towards helping them with their and we shouldn't be doing that that
should be paid for by the schools but the school budgets get smaller and smaller and then there
becomes less interest in politicians to do capital infrastructure and stuff like that in schools
uh oh it makes me crazy your kids teachers are spending their own salary which they don't get
allowed to deduct from their taxes on your kids schooling and that's criminal um one of the
one of the big failures i've seen uh in the complaints that i've been reading from parents
and teachers and educators online in the past few months is the de facto adversarial relationship
between schools and students um and this i'm going to refer to some of the proctoring and
kid monitoring software that is being heavily pitched and lobbied for by
companies that build these kinds of software um
if you're not aware of this there is software being developed and being used by schools that
tracks kids eye movements around the room to give to say i think we should be suspicious
about this kid and let t this is ridiculous this is crazy you're literally subjecting and i know
that cheating is a problem but is it so much of a problem that we've got to treat all the students
like criminals and assume cheating is happening before we actually get to the education part
i mean i also think that we should get rid of standardized tests to the largest
degree because i don't think those do much in terms of actually imparting information
look i just don't think cop [ __ ] belongs in education software uh and i'm referring
by cop [ __ ] to a a long diatribe i read by an educator uh uh recently on reddit uh
that adversarial relationship it's really built right in i and it it makes me very sad um but i'm
gonna go back to the real basics that i think that any teacher would tell you is they'd like
smaller class sizes um and it's your teacher wants to reach you your teacher wants to reach your kid
here's a thought experiment think about a teacher that meant something to you okay
hold them in your head you're thinking about them they meant something to you and you're
thinking now about interactions that you had with that teacher and why they meant something to you
and i submit that as you think through those interactions the reason as a kid
or as a young adult that those teachers meant something to you is because they saw you and
when were kids grow up with our grown-up parents and we go out into the world we're mostly dealing
with peers not many grown-ups but many of the grown-ups we have our first interactions with our
teachers and when one of those grown-ups sees you and starts to give you a reflection of yourself
that's not the reflection from your family and not the reflection from your friends it feels like the
world is opening up and teachers love that as much as students love that and they seek that
connection with their students but when you have 30 or more students that becomes an impossibility
so i i still submit i'm completely unqualified to talk about overhauls to the education system
but when asked about problems that i see those are the problems the adversarial relationship between
schools and kids class size and teacher resources and also teacher salaries could we pay teachers a
bit more for crying out loud let's pay them a lot more they're doing one of the most important jobs
um thank you seth dubois oh my gosh you teach math and physics i can't even imagine it um let's see
uh david martin wants to know why no love for doctor who um is it bandwidth he says or are you
not interested it's i've just never gotten around to doctor who i i've never gotten around to it
there's a lot i haven't gotten around to i only saw casablanca 10 years ago for the first time
um there are big gaps in all of our education so doctor who is one of mine
i love the doctor who fandom i've met many of the doctor who's i've met many of the doctors
at comic-con and they've all been delightful human beings um i love the franchise i love the the the
joy uh in the franchise and i love the places that i see it going i've just never gotten around to
jumping in no it's i don't i don't dislike it i don't have any negative opinions about it i
just haven't gotten around to it it seems like this big thing to kind of open up to it's like
the same reason i haven't you know started watching a wire it's like it's a lot of time i
know i haven't watched the wire and i know that's a problem i will um let's see here uh brian lane
wants to know what about hard rubbers and stretchy fabrics that don't work well with scissors oh
that's an interesting question
hard rubbers you shouldn't be cutting with scissors really you should be
cutting those with blades um has anyone ever tried laser cutting rubber that
would probably be really awful ugh um i'm not sure i have expertise to answer that
um it is certainly more of a pain in the butt to cut four-way stretch spandex with scissors but
if you mark it out correctly it's not that difficult it just takes a little more focus oh it
also takes a nice big table surface uh it's funny as a model maker i tend to prioritize a like a
24 inch square that is like the my primary active active mode and i visited so many special effects
shops just like walls of desks of people working and everyone's working on a 18 inch square in
the middle of their bench that's a model makers workbench when you go and watch youtube videos
of of tailors and fabric artists it's these large expansive tables and it feels so luxurious
i have the pool table for that when i can clear it which is about every three months