Let this be the hour when we draw (curved) swords together.

Bold choice by Sam Reich. That mic is probably half as tall as he is!

We used to be a proper country.

The fact that we can even ask…

Looks like it originated from this 5 year old reddit post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/dndmemes/comments/lnmvge/weirdos_oc_revised_edition/

Yeah “You mean like my idol??”

Surely it’s happened. A lot of dudes with perfectly good hair are anxious about balding.

Make it so.

I’m thinking the other way: if it ever happens to me, I’ll just embrace the baldness. But I imagine it’s a lot easier to say that now than it would be at the time.

Very true. I think there definitely needs to be a framework for accepting late work in these cases, which is much better than calling it 50% out of thin air.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not talking about punishment for behavioral issues or expelling students. What I’m suggesting is that the logic of grades determining behavioral issues is flawed, and it’s far more likely that both the behavioral issues and poor grades are symptoms of something else.

I’m saying that throwing out the legitimacy of our metrics by fudging the numbers for these students is not the right approach and is in fact a disservice to them.

What would be a better way to check whether students have acquired the necessary knowledge other than a scored assessment of it?

That’s cruel!

It seems like there’s almost certainly a confounding variable here: the kids who are likely to engage in criminality are also the ones most likely to do poorly in school, skip classes, and be held back.

It’s more correlation than causal - for the same reason that we couldn’t just give every student straight A’s and expect them to have similar outcomes as students who would have otherwise earned straight A’s.

Working backwards like that is like trying to help someone lose weight by tweaking their scale to always show a healthy BMI.

I’m really sorry to hear that. I think a lot of parents are in the same boat, and we’re going to see the effects of it for years.

I thought the second one might be (unfamiliar with it, it was just in the search results), but NYT is definitely not right wing, and the NAEP and Wikipedia are fairly neutral.

It really should be more standardized, or else schools are just going to find reasons to cook their books.

Remember last year when San Francisco schools were going to adjust their grading scales so much that they could pass students with a D if they scored as low as a 21? Pure insanity. (They fortunately received a lot of backlash and reverted the change)

https://www.newsweek.com/san-francisco-public-schools-equity-homework-2078003

I thought about that too, but I would imagine a LOT of students would’ve had to be held back to make this kind of impact on the state average. I would bet that the pressure it applied to students, schools, and parents did most of the heavy lifting.

There were a bunch of articles when the data came out from the NAEP report card. Most I saw were mentioning phonics as the biggest factor.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/11/us/mississippi-schools-transformation

https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/09/mississippi-not-california-is-the-education-future/

It’s often being referred to as the “Mississippi Miracle” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_Miracle

Yes! MS went from 49th to 9th in like 10 years. Most people are crediting it to phonics and their willingness to hold students back if they don’t learn the material.