"That was one of my beefs with the BCSTA when I was a trustee: too much cheerleading, self-congratulating, toeing the government line, and too little focus on being responsive to communities. That culture continues, and it could well lead to the end of school boards here in B.C."
"More recently, trustees tell me the BCSTA’s orientation for new trustees advises that they shouldn’t speak to the news media or engage with the public on social media. Good grief. What’s the point of having local government if you don’t talk to the locals?"
Tho "it’s true the chair speaks on behalf of the board, individual trustees are elected officials who can & should speak as well, making it clear they're not speaking for the board. They need to be accountable to the public & keep as many communication channels open as possible."
"We literally held the public’s ground in the face of relentless government pressure to close schools and sell valuable public land, and we successfully negotiated hundreds of millions of dollars to build new schools and seismically upgrade several more."
"We created a model to incorporate purpose-built childcare centres on the top floor of new and rebuilt schools and started a Mandarin bilingual program, an Indigenous-focused school, and expanded early literacy intervention programs."
"Many B.C. school boards are moving away from that model with increasingly restrictive codes of conduct that limit trustees from speaking out and engaging with those they’re elected to serve."
"Many have erected rigid barriers that discourage and restrict public participation. Too many take direction from their management teams, instead of the reverse. Far too much of the public’s business happens behind closed doors or in private emails instead of in public meetings."

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More from @Katja_Thieme

5 Dec
“Can we please have one area of intelligence where there is no thinking?”
The conversation is about this piece by the way. It discusses the draft paper that was part of Timnit Gebru’s exit from Google.

google.ca/amp/s/www.tech…
Read 6 tweets
3 Dec
"According to gender ideology . . . "

Citation fucking needed.
It's an older thread. Colin is the simpleton kind of retweeting his own, older tweets.
Read 6 tweets
29 Nov
Dear mathematician friends,

I have a question for you, if I may. My children and I have been playing with classic geometry problems. We’ve come across this technique of constructing a tangent to a point on a circle. It involves drawing a series of circles at intersecting points.
While I find it perfectly fun to draw beautiful circles to make a tangent, it has been gnawing on me for a whole day and night that I cannot seem to figure out why it results in a line that’s at the required right angle to the radius. Argh! This is what I’ve got.
No matter how much I move the angles around in various triangle-angle-sum equations, I don’t get anywhere illuminating.

Can anyone explain this to me? Please?
Read 10 tweets
28 Nov
A few contextual notes to help you make sense of this #JamesLindsay tweet.

1) US recorded 205,000 new cases on Friday. 89,800 people in hospital. 2,100 deaths on each of the two days before US American Thanksgiving.
2) Many of James' fans and followers are decidedly or far right-wing. Anti-maskers and anti-lockdown folks among them. #JamesLindsay collaborates, intellectually and financially, with a Covid-denying organization, Sovereign Nations.
3) In the recent past, James has attacked several researchers and epidemiologists who tweet knowledgeably about Covid-19 and about measures to handle the current pandemic. I'm not aware of him saying something about Covid-19 that's knowledgeable or useful for public health.
Read 4 tweets
28 Nov
It's Saturday morning. I've spent 2 hours on the computer, doing work. I have answered student emails. Set up the promised extra office hours for next week. Sent course announcements. Did a necessary update on a file I will not need until two months from now. 1/
Read up about the newest case in the debate on academic freedom & free speech policies on North American campuses. 2/
Have I done either one of the two truly looming, necessary, urgent tasks I came to this desk to do? 3/
Read 4 tweets
24 Nov
If you still think #JamesLindsay is a secret undercover feminist for sometime in the past having helped women with math, please observe.

Observation #1: The guy can't say sorry. He's incapable of it. Everything he says, he's compelled to present himself as the top dog. 1/
Observation #1 ctd.: Even when he makes a mistake and is forced to admit it, he'll immediately add his top dog spin. Listen, he's a big deal, he gets hundreds of messages like this and only ever makes a mistake with one of them once every month. That's how smart and big he is. 2/
Observation #2: To increase his own sense of being the top dog, he'll take the opportunity to touch his teeth to what he perceives to be one of your weak spots. Feel the slight touch of hurt. Know that he could do more of it.

Much easier for him than to argue. 3/
Read 9 tweets

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