Being a teacher isn't easy. Teaching middle school students is especially not easy. Teaching middle school students who spent several of their formative years going through a global pandemic in the age of smartphones, social media and a youth mental health crisis is downright heroic.If you haven't spent time in a middle school classroom, you may not fully grasp the intensity of it on every level, from the awkwardness to the body odor to the delightful hilarity that tweens bring to the table. When you connect with your students, it can be incredibly rewarding, and when you don't…well, we all read "Lord of the Flies," right? Skilled teachers bring out the best in young people, and that can be done in many different ways. For Amy Allen, it's by making her middle school classroom a fun, welcoming place to learn and by bonding with her students."I love teaching middle schoolers because they are awkward, and I’m awkward, so we get along," Allen tells Upworthy.She plays games with students, gets rambunctious with them and creates opportunities for them to expend some of that intense pre-and-early-teen energy in healthy ways. For instance, she shared a video of a game of "grudgeball," an active trivia game that makes reviewing for a quiz or test fun and competitive, and you can see how high-energy her classroom is: @_queenoftheclassroom If this looks like fun to you, pick up my grudgeball template (? in bio) #qotc #grudgeball #10outof10recommend @Amy Allen ☀️ @Amy Allen ☀️ @Amy Allen ☀️ "I think for teachers, we always want to create moments for our students that are beyond the standard reading, writing, memorizing, quiz, 'traditional learning,'" Allen says. "Games are a great way to incorporate fun in the classroom."Allen clearly enjoyed the game as much as her students—"I love the chaos!" she says— and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Fun keeps teachers sane, too. But one person took issue with her classroom behavior and commented, "your a teacher act like it." (Not my typo—that's exactly what the person wrote, only with no period.) Allen addressed the comment in another video in the most perfect way possible—by acting exactly like a teacher. Watch: @_queenoftheclassroom Replying to @كل الكلبات تريد مني Come see me if you have any further questions. #qotc #iteachmiddleschool #weDEFINITELYdonthavefuninhere @Amy Allen ☀️ @Amy Allen ☀️ @Amy Allen ☀️ #Inverted There are two solid ways to handle a rude comment without making things worse—you can ignore it or you can craft a response that makes the person look like a fool without being cruel or rude yourself. Allen's grammar lesson response was A+ work, right down to the "Come see me if you have any further questions" caption. In fact, the person apparently went back and deleted their comment after the comeback video went viral, which makes it all the more hilarious. The video currently has more than 4 million views on TikTok and over 18 million views on YouTube. "What’s funny is I left my correction on the board accidentally, and the next day, students asked me what that was all about," Allen says. "When I explained it, they thought it was cool because 'why would anyone go after Ms. Allen'? At that point, the video had maybe 10,000 views. I never imagined the video would go viral." Two days later, as the video was creeping toward a million views, she upped the stakes. "Some of my students are my ultimate hype people, and they were tracking it harder than I was," she says. "I made a 'deal' with my fifth period if it reached 1 million during their class, they could sit wherever they wanted the entire week. During lunch, I checked, and it reached 1 million. So when they came back from recess, I announced it, and it was like I was a rockstar. They screamed and cheered for me. It was an incredible moment for me."The irony, of course, is that Allen was acting like a teacher in her grudgeball video—an engaged teacher with engaged students who are actively participating in the learning process. Just because it doesn't look like serious study doesn't mean it's not learning, and for some kids, this kind of activity might be far more effective at helping them remember things they've learned (in this case, vocabulary words) than less energetic ways of reviewing. Allen has her thumb on the pulse of her students and goes out of her way to meet them where they are. Last year, for instance, she created a "mental health day" for her students. "I could tell they were getting burnt out from all the state tests, regular homework, and personal life extracurricular activities that many of my students participate in," she says. "We went to my school library for 'fireside reading,' solved a murder mystery, built blanket forts, watched the World Cup, colored, and completed sudokus. Is it part of the curriculum? No. Is it worth spending one class period doing something mentally rewarding for students? Absolutely."Teaching middle school requires a lot of different skills, but perhaps the most important one is to connect with students, partly because it's far easier to teach someone actually wants to be in your classroom and partly because effective teaching is about so much more than just academics. A teacher might be the most caring, stable, trustworthy adult in some students' lives. What looks like silly fun and games in a classroom can actually help students feel safe and welcomed and valued, knowing that a teacher cares enough to try to make learning as enjoyable as possible. Plus, shared laughter in a classroom helps build a community of engaged learners, which is exactly what a classroom should be.Keep up the awesome work, Ms. Allen, both in the classroom and in the comment section.You can follow Amy Allen on TikTok and YouTube.This article originally appeared in April.

"I can't hear the words!" The post “I rue it”: The Led Zeppelin song Robert Plant thinks could’ve been a masterpiece first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

"They encompassed everything that was missing from my world." The post The records that made Lou Reed love rock and roll: “They encompassed everything” first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

The Hollywood icon had a legendary career ... and a legendary love life.

The Hollywood icon had a legendary career ... and a legendary love life.

It turns out the assassination of the CEO of the largest health insurance company in America on the streets of Manhattan by a masked gunman using a silencer amounted to the least shocking aspect of this crime. Even revelations by law enforcement that the murderer had inscribed “deny,” “defend,” and “depose” on the shell casings — words similar, as the New York Post pointed out, to those in the book Delay, Defend, Deny: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It — did not come as the most shocking part of this shocking crime. The truly jaw-dropping part of this story involves the reaction. A methodical, cold-blooded killer murdered a husband and father in a bustling part of the most populous city in the United States, and segments of the public depict the assassin as a sort of folk hero. On the day of the shooting, cryptocurrency enthusiasts created a “memecoin” featuring the assailant’s image and the three words found on the shell casings. Less than 24 hours after the murder, 802 people had purchased the “Deny, Defend, Depose” memecoins. One grasps public opinion most accurately not in news coverage about a subject but from the anonymous reader reactions listed beneath online articles. Even Fox News articles on the murder, the comments include: “United Healthcare sells catastrophic coverage at Cadillac rates” and “When accountability to shareholders is the primary goal there may be unanticipated downsides.” One Redditor posted, “The gunman looks kinda hot,” while another predicted folk-hero status “on a tier between Bernard Goetz and Killdozer” for the murderer. The internet provides a window into public opinion that even pollsters cannot open because speech remains relatively free and anonymity (real and imagined) is protected. Large amounts of people passionately — evidently, not as passionately as the gunman who absconded into Central Park on a Citi Bike — feel profound contempt for the field (broadly speaking, healthcare) that traditionally enjoyed popularity along the lines of the uniformed professions. “Kill all the lawyers” has not quite morphed into “kill all the doctors,” but the related industries, such as health insurance and pharmaceuticals, that make them wealthy and enable them to charge exorbitant amounts earn the public’s disdain. What happened? Our quasi-socialist healthcare system combines all of the negatives of capitalism with those of socialism to allow for entrepreneurs to charge what the market can bear all the while distorting that market through compulsory insurance laws, blank-check subsidies, and quasi-monopolies. Healthcare insurers benefit from this capitalist-socialist Frankenstein gouging both the customer and the taxpayer. People generally do not articulate their frustrations in so many words (or in so few as used by the gunman). They just know that the medical profession, like the other capitalist-socialist Frankenstein of higher education, rips them off. Beyond this, small people increasingly blame their troubles on big institutions. Possibly this motivated the murderer to some degree. Villains do not murder presidents and royalty because of their association with the government. They murder them because of their power. Many, including, apparently, the assassin, regard ostensibly private-sector actors as obtaining and wielding power unjustly. A back-to-the-future quality colors this mindset. One thinks of Alexander Berkman’s attempted assassination of Carnegie Steel’s Henry Clay Frick or the plot to murder John D. Rockefeller Jr., in which the conspirators blew themselves up. Nutters and villains once targeted captains of industry because they imagined oppressive power unleashed there. Did the Manhattan Murderer come from the same mold as the anarcho-communist Berkman or might his grievance stem from more personal reasons? One guesses, given clearer images of the assassin’s face, a discovered cell phone, DNA on trash, and possibly a credit card used to ride the Citi Bike, that we know who did this and why very soon. The assassin shot a man from behind. Denizens of the Old West regarded that as the ultimate admission of cowardice. In the wild west of the internet, it elevates one to the plane of a folk hero. READ MORE from Daniel J. Flynn: Dems Click Off MSNBC and Discover There’s No Place Like Home A Gen X President (Four Years From) Now More Than Ever Campaign Grifters Ironically Killed Dems’ Government Grift The post The Most Shocking Part of the Shocking CEO Assassination appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

In this episode of The Spectacle Podcast, hosts Melissa Mackenzie and Scott McKay discuss the return of healthy, true masculinity in American society. Melissa and Scott dive deep into how young men have lost proper mentorship and guidance under the auspices of the woke Left. They also offer encouragement by highlighting the new cultural shift toward conservative, traditional values. (READ MORE: The Rightward Rebellion: Why Young Men Are Flocking to Conservatism) Tune in to hear their discussion!  Listen to The Spectacle with Melissa Mackenzie and Scott McKay on Spotify. Watch The Spectacle with Melissa Mackenzie and Scott McKay on Rumble.  The post <i>The Spectacle</i> Ep. 171: Masculinity is Back! appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Food waste is a major problem for restaurants, and major problems call for clever solutions. Here's how dining establishments deal with this unavoidable issue.

by Pam Martens and Russ Martens, Wall St On Parade: The semi-annual Financial Stability Report released recently by the Federal Reserve Board of Governors rang a loud warning bell about high levels of leverage at hedge funds and life insurers. Wall Street watchers will no doubt recall that in 2008, during the worst Wall Street collapse since […]