This week, I have been mostly reading:

• The Betrayal At The Heart of Sanders, AOC and Corbyn’s Refusal To Use Power — Ian Welsh: Here’s a rule: power everyone knows you won’t use, you don’t have. Left-wingers are not credible because they never use their power. We saw this with Corbyn in Britain when he repeatedly refused to throw out MPs who challenged him or allow MPs to be re-selected (primaried, in effect.) There was nothing they couldn’t do to his cause or him that would get him to retaliate. […] Voters don’t like wimps who won’t use their power and they are correct in this: if you won’t fight, it doesn’t matter what you believe. Corbyn was the man who could take any punch, but would never throw one, no matter what his opponents did.
• Vaccine Guidance — xkcd by Randall Munroe:
  
• Dewey, Piaget, and Frosted Mini Wheats — Alfie Kohn: John Dewey described how a curriculum that’s based on students’ questions and connects with their experiences has “an inherent attracting power.” But creating such a curriculum takes time and skill, and it also requires the adult to make the learners themselves the “center of gravity” in the classroom. It’s considerably easier, Dewey pointed out, just to take a prefabricated lesson, which may not be particularly relevant or meaningful to students, “and then by trick of method to arouse interest, to make it interesting; to cover it with sugar-coating; to conceal its barrenness by intermediate and unrelated material.” These days an awful lot of such sugarcoating is done digitally — for example, with apps that add points and levels to “gamify” a list of decontexualized facts or skills that students are required to master. When you get right down to it, much of ed tech is really an exercise in sugarcoating. But so are plenty of well-established analog schemes: desperately perky sidebars in textbooks to distract students from the dreariness of the main text; contrived word problems in math to create the appearance of relevance for what is still just an exercise in mechanically applying formulas and algorithms; classroom test-prep sessions restyled as TV game shows in which students are made to compete to see who has crammed more bits of useless knowledge into short-term memory.
• Bizarro — by Wayno & Piraro:
  
• 'I'm sorry, but it's too late' - unvaccinated patients beg for shot — USA Today pays John Bacon and Jorge L. Ortiz to read Facebook so we don't have to: Dr. Brytney Cobia, a hospitalist at Grandview Medical Center in Birmingham, wrote in a recent Facebook post she is treating a lot of young, otherwise healthy people for serious coronavirus infections. "One of the last things they do before they're intubated is beg me for the vaccine," she wrote. "I hold their hand and tell them that I'm sorry, but it's too late." In her post, Cobia wrote that when a patient dies, she hugs their family members and urges them to get vaccinated. She said they cry and tell her they thought the pandemic was a "hoax," or "political," or targeting some other age group or skin color.