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That would be great!

I am with you. As a teacher, I have never been allowed to strike. They are public employees too. If enough quit, changes will have to be made.

Today I learned what FAFO means. I might have to sign up for a class on acronyms to keep up and understand what I’m hearing and reading lol

Nice , kind of a mix I take it ?! And that Old timer is actually a treasure to have and can be brought back to production . The take away I’m getting is that the trees have never been pruned annually correct? If so not a problem, they all can be pruned now while it’s still a bit cold and the trees are dormant. Even a drastic pruning would be beneficial but would leave you waiting till next season for any fruit . I could suggest some good books on pruning but by the time you got them it would kind of late for this years pruning . I have to add however , a young fella once asked an older farmer, “ when is the best time to prune trees ?”, the old farmer replied “ when your shears are sharp!” . So , it’s better to prune later than to not prune at all . At any rate I will be doing some late pruning today and will post some pics that may help … or not , lol , get you through this years pruning .

Americans are arguing right now. And believe me, I get it. There is a lot going on. Everyone has differences of opinion. But I wondered if we Americans couldn’t put aside our disagreements for a moment, and agree on a few things we love. I’ll start. I love quilting. Quilting bees, quilting circles, quilting parties. Americans didn’t invent quilting, but it’s an American artform nonetheless. I used to watch my mother quilt with dogged persistence. Day after day. Month after month. She used birch-wood quilting hoops, and pieced recycled fabric together. She could take seemingly unrelated scraps and make art. My mother always said, “When life gives you scraps, you make a quilt.” Also, I love jazz. American fiddle tunes. And the way New Orleans smells on a summer morning, after tourists have spent all night urinating in the streets. Stetson hats worn non-ironically. Case knives, butter yellow, dual blades. Moe Howard, Larry Fine, and Curly. Shemp is okay. The old men in cafes who still drink coffee in groups. And the young men who still idolize them. Boys who still ask Santa Claus for BB guns. And their little sisters, who steal their GI Joes because Barbie needs a viable love interest. Kids who still ride bikes. Children who play tag in their backyards, screaming and laughing, without ever once checking their phones. I love Waffle House. An American institution. Yes, I realize eggs are expensive right now, raising the cost of an ordinary omelette to about the same price as a Range Rover Autograph. But I will continue to eat Waffle House fare until my end. Namely, because I have eaten at Waffle House to benchmark the most important moments in my life. I ate at Waffle House the morning after my own wedding. After the funerals of friends and family. God willing, I will eat at Waffle House the day after my own funeral. I love baseball. Not just the game itself. I love the culture. I love how baseball terminology has crept into everyday vocabulary. “Just touching base.” “I’ll go to bat for you.” “He’s out in left field.” “You knocked it out of the park.” I miss the grungy AAA ballparks of youth. The smells of flat beer, cigar smoke, and meat-like rubber served on a hotdog bun. Back when the game was slow, and pitchers still batted. Davy Crockett. Louis Armstrong. Helen Keller. Dorothea Lange. Aretha Franklin. Andy Griffith. Groucho Marx. Lucille Ball. Laura Ingalls Wilder. Dolly Parton. Willie Hugh Nelson. And I love you. Whoever you are. In fact you’re what I like most about America. You’re a great person. No matter how different we might be. No matter how we might disagree. No matter how dissimilar our backgrounds. Maybe I am foolish enough to believe that, even though we appear differently, think differently, and believe differently, it is contrast that makes the scraps of a quilt truly beautiful. Sean Dietrich is a columnist, novelist, podcaster, and stand-up storyteller known for his commentary on life in the American South. His work has appeared in Newsweek, Southern Living, Reader's Digest, Garden and Gun, The Tallahassee Democrat, the Birmingham News, and his column is syndicated in newspapers throughout the U.S. He has authored fifteen books, and he makes appearances on the Grand Ole Opry. To learn more about Sean, visit his website at https://seandietrich.com

by Jeff Minick Actress, mother of two, and school activist Sophie Winkleman began her recent address on children at the 2025 Alliance for Responsible Citizenship Conference in London by describing a recent scene from a packed London bus. Standing over a young man and a young woman, both intent on their smartphones, Winkleman noticed that each was on a dating site, “reading profiles of men and women who presented as extremely similar to the two of them.” She concluded: "Our bus reached Piccadilly Circus and both happened to alight at this stop. I watched the two of them as they walked away from each other, one towards Shaftesbury Avenue and the other towards St. James’s. I don’t need to labour the point of what I witnessed with this couple never to be. They were side by side, both seeking companionship or love, but they didn’t even register each other’s existence." In the brilliant and passionate address that followed – I don’t use those adjectives lightly – Winkleman turned to the effects of smartphones and classroom technology on adolescents, which she called “the digital destruction of childhood.” She continued: "We left the doors to our children’s classrooms, their bedrooms and their minds wide open to the world. Perhaps we thought we were giving children the right to access everything which might be good out there, but instead we’ve given everyone else – the good and the bad, access to our children." Winkleman spends part of her talk examining data familiar to many parents: the horrifying rise in teen suicides and self-harm incidents, the massive increase of anxiety and depression among the young, the fact that 97% of Britain’s 12-year-olds now possess a smartphone, and that children ages eight to 18 now spend an average of over seven hours every day on one screen or another. She further notes, “Hospital admissions for children with eating disorders in the UK have risen sixfold in a decade, the ‘contagious influence’ of social media cited as a major factor.” Winkleman also cites mountains of evidence demonstrating that digital classrooms offer inferior education to those centered on teachers, books, paper, and pencils. “The Karolinska Institute in Sweden,” she told the audience, “recently published research concluding that, ‘there’s clear scientific evidence that tools impair rather than enhance learning.’ Sweden has taken note and been the first country to kick tech out of the classroom, reinvesting in books, paper and pens. They had the courage to admit that EdTech was a ‘failed experiment’.” So why, given this abundance of data and the visible harm screens bring to so many of the young – and to many adults as well – do parents and schools continue to pair the young with screens and smartphones? For parents, the social pressures felt by their children are a factor. “My friends all have iPhones, why can’t I?” Many parents also fail to understand that screens are addictive, electronic drugs in a plastic case designed to stimulate dopamine in the brain. As for classroom use, screens can reduce the duties of teachers while often better capturing the attention of students. Winkleman reminds her audience that childhood itself is at stake here. The playing fields of the imagination – books, backyard games, the engagement with others in face-to-face encounters, and so much more – are being rapidly replaced by digitalized games, social media, and the artifice of screens. Regarding education, she offers wise observations such as this one: "Reading books and handwriting work is a deeper, not to mention a calmer, way to learn. Screens manage to be both caffeinating and numbing – where books are decompressing and absorbing." Reading and handwriting are also harder in a good way. Friction and struggle are a necessary part of the learning process. Make everything too easy and it’s like feeding ten-year-olds puree when they need to chew. Jonathan Haidt is the author of the extraordinary bestseller, “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.” Haidt praises Winkleman’s address as “the best talk I’ve ever seen on what computers and tablets on the desktops of children do to the child’s education.” His article includes the full video of the talk and a transcript. At the end of her talk, Winkleman says: f we want to produce a generation of responsible citizens, we must flip the current argument on its head. "Rather than constantly having to prove that screen use is blighting childhood, we should ask simply: where is the evidence to prove that it’s safe?" I would up that question a notch and ask, “Where is the evidence to prove that it’s beneficial?” Jeff Minick lives in Front Royal, Virginia, and may be found online at jeffminick.com. He is the author of two novels, Amanda Bell and Dust on Their Wings, and two works of non-fiction, Learning as I Go and Movies Make the Man. This article appeared on IntellectualTakeout.org and is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

10 minute activities: Walking the dog, folding the laundry… capturing an image of an entire galaxy!? Webb’s new view of barred spiral galaxy NGC 2283 was captured in just 10 minutes of observing time, showcasing the light from clouds of hydrogen gas heated by young stars, as well as the stars themselves. Note that the large, bright stars are actually in the Milky Way, between Webb and galaxy NGC 2283. The spikes emanating from the star are called diffraction spikes - patterns produced by light bending around the sharp edges of a telescope. Webb’s have 6 major spikes and two short horizontal ones, due to the tripod that supports its secondary mirror and the overall hexagonal shape of its primary mirror. Hubble has four-point diffraction spikes, which is one way you can tell if an image was taken by Hubble or Webb! Here, the galaxy’s star formation is showcased, in part because the 55 galaxies chosen for this survey are close enough for individual star clusters and gas clouds to be visible. Young stars are actively forming in the dense knots of gas, illuminating them from within. Read more: esawebb.org/images/potm2502a/

Throwing away books is horrible