Host of Radical Personal Finance, Publisher of the Life of Fred math and science curriculum, Founder of the EchoLingo app for multilingual children.
In your ears.
Joined May 2008
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Joshua Sheats retweeted
Wow, a pretty damning article with diverse lines of evidence.
Most people do not realize just how easy the AP exams have gotten. They are not college level.
Why/how have they become so easy? What's going on?
This might shock you... A brutal new piece in Education Next just dropped, saying the decline in rigor of the AP in the last two decades is, in large part, because the content has been GUTTED. For example:
— AP Biology cut 40% of its material
— Required lines from the Aeneid in AP Latin halved
— Spanish Lit reading list cut from 56 works to 38
Then the questions themselves have become absurdly easier. Readability measures show English passages have fallen multiple grade levels, and some now include footnotes defining basic words...
A 2025 AP English prompt included footnote definitions for words like "optimism" and "pessimism."
At the same time, scoring was recalibrated so that more students pass: guessing penalties disappeared, rubrics grew more generous, readers were told to give students the benefit of the doubt, etc. — "no one at College Board had any incentive to maintain rigor."
College professors are now seeing students arrive with AP credit who lack basic content knowledge and writing ability. The College Board insists the exams have not become easier, but everybody familiar with them knows they've become an absolute joke.
Advanced Placement is no longer advanced. This is not college level.
It must be replaced.
Joshua Sheats retweeted
The rate at which individuals with IQs below 90 (the US average is around 98) completed college has increased approximately 6-fold in men and 10-fold in women relative to rates in the previous generation.
Today, the average college student isn't all that much smarter than the average American. A degree from most colleges signals little more than what a high school diploma signaled 100 years ago.
It's worth noting that the position of the Democratic Party has been that college enrollment should be expanded, and most of the progressive wing of the party believes that college education ought to be subsidized by the taxpayer. In fact, college enrollment should be reduced and hundreds of non-selective colleges should be shuttered.
Joshua Sheats retweeted
This will always be free. It runs on free open-source software. I am not trying to make money on it. I built it for my family. If it helps another kid learn math and actually like it, that is the whole point.
travisstoliker.com/timestabl…
Joshua Sheats retweeted
The divorce rate for white, ideologically conservative, Christian-attending-church-weekly, first-marriage couples who have multiple biological children is less than 1%.
We have the data; people looked at the data. Sociology isn’t a mystery.
The divorce rate for college educated people is nearly half as those without. For white people it’s about 30%. For Christians it’s about half of non-Christians, for non-boomers it’s a fraction.
If you’re a white christian college educated millennial, your divorce rate is about 15%. Don’t listen to doomers.
Joshua Sheats retweeted
People in safety inspection states are often buckbroken to the system, and imagine that ending it would result in widespread carnage.
Yet other similar states right next door have no inspections (NE vs KS) and nothing much happens.
Many things are like this.
Joshua Sheats retweeted
Did you know all of the ancient Greek and Hebrew books we publish you can download for free on our website?
Spread the word. We are trying to make biblical language education free for all people, especially those who could not otherwise afford it!
Joshua Sheats retweeted
I signed my boy up for soccer because team sports matter to me. At the end of the session the 4yos play a game against each other. Volunteer parent coaches. They don't keep score.
Skill levels, confidence, & interest vary wildly.
During one game, a mom coach held a kid's hand to try and encourage them to participate. All good!
My son gets the ball. He's a little apprehensive but I'm working with him to feel more comfortable trying hard at this kind of stuff around other kids. He's not the best, but he's maybe in the top third of the kids there. He hasn't scored once all season.
He dribbles towards the far goal-
-the coach holding the kid's hand steps up to him, tackles my son solidly, and then rolls the ball to the disinterested boy whose hand she's holding. He gives it a kick. She then kicks it again harder and it goes past our 4yo goalie into the goal.
She celebrates wildly with the kid, who cracks a confused smile after a brief pause.
My son is standing there, also confused. He hasn't moved. Eventually he sort of half-engages with the rest of the game, but never actually touches the ball again. The rest of his team is also confused.
Since nobody keeps score, perhaps it doesn't matter? The kids seem to feel that it does nonetheless. They can't all count, but they know they're losing even though nobody says it.
After, he says to me:
"Dad, I like dirt bike racing more than soccer."
Note: he loves practicing soccer in the yard with me. It's one of the few team sports he can play in America that I actually know how to play.
Also note: they give medals out at the kids dirt bike racing. They keep score. He cries when he loses and talks about his wins for days. He's been taken out and taken out other kids. People check on him and I make him go check on any kids who crash after the race.
The moms & dads there all create a great environment.
There's something about soccer in particular that feels especially bad. It's not a "real" sport to a lot of the parents. It's the "playing house" of sports. It's about the appearance of competitive team events without the substance.
It feels alien to me. It's not how I remember soccer being treated in England when I was little.
Ultimately, I explain to my boy that the soccer coach cheated, that they didn't respect the game, that they actually didn't even understand the value of the game, and that as soon as he grew up into the bigger leagues this sort of thing wouldn't happen but that ultimately games aren't always fair and it's on him to be so good that it doesn't matter if the other guys cheat.
Like how some kids have a faster dirt bike than him.
He seems to get it with that last point. He understands that he could get so good that even if "bad guys" cheat, he still wins.
After he goes to bed, with a heavy heart, I speak to my wife about signing him up for hockey.
Many have responded to this by pointing out that male sports still exist. Yes! But eg “sportsmanship” has flipped in meaning from “do your utmost to dominate your opponent” to “don’t win by too much bc we’re all here to have fun”; & sports have gone from practically the center of our elite liberal arts edu to an awkward ancillary hobby to be managed & feminized; & so forth.
Joshua Sheats retweeted
Here’s one of the most fascinating child development videos I’ve ever shared.
As your baby learns language, they begin by approximating the examples you set.
After a period of early experimentation with sound (including cries, coos and gurgles), infants begin babbling - making speech-like sounds (which often include components of conventional speech) that are - nonetheless - not yet conventionally meaningful.
This babbling phase is a precursor to the use of formal words. And it happens in all languages.
Including sign language.
This video shows an infant (who, by the way, is not hearing impaired) “babbling” to her deaf grandparents.
As they sign to her, she responds in kind, using her hands to approximate the signed communication that they are modeling.
It’s a whole serve and return conversation, just as if they were conversing verbally.
If you’ll watch carefully, you’ll note distinct turn taking.
And - interestingly - that with her grandparents she largely avoids vocalizations, in favor of gesture.
What a treat to see this rich example of bilingual language development.
This fascinating video was shared to TT by mara_mccullough.
I want God to be mean and hateful like I sometimes am. But I’m grateful that he is slow to wrath and desires all to come to repentance. The beauty in this story shines through; the tragedy is also plain to see. What a waste of a life that could have been salvaged and made useful here in this earth; what a blessing that god is not bound by my pressures of time and he can work over many generations. Don’t repeat the stupidity of this father. Be salvaged to God now that your life not be wasted.
I watched as my dad slip away for two years until his end, from dementia, he was 92.
Dad was a cruel and hateful "Atheist" of a man, who heaped some terrible things upon his family and my sisters, of which I vowed at 12 to ki-ll him.
He stayed with us those last two years of his life.
Wheeling around the house, making demands and leering at my wife, which I put a stop to.
It was exhausting.
I watched as he started forgetting names and even where he was at.
One time he thought my family was a different family masquerading as mine.
Those two years, I read the bible nightly, mostly Psalms
and explained God's love for us and His hatred of sin.
I talked to dad one night recounting what he had done to my one sister and some of the other terrible things he had done.
I did that, as he was never told he was a sinner and it needed to be told.
I did actually tell him the gospel message and the sin of mankind because he came to me one day and asked me what changed me after I got saved.
Dad was genuinely curious.
The last two weeks of his life he started seeing things that he would reach out for.
Strangely, dad was still coherent and we would talk, though his voice sounded like he was coming from a different dimension or was in a tunnel.
One night I came to make sure dad was comfortable and to add some glycerin to his dried lips as he was taking in little water, and had stopped eating.
When dad exclaimed loudly "I'm so sorry for the bad things I've done."
I barely breathed and thought what is this?
I decided after some brief silent prayer, to share the gospel yet again with a man who never apologized in his life.
I asked dad do you want Jesus to forgive you of your sin?
Do you believe now as you lay dying, Jesus is truly the Son of God.
He said yes.
I led him in prayer and we talked some more and I left the room.
The following day as I entered His room he spoke first telling me "Jesus was the truth, He spoke truth."
Two days later dad passed on into the hands of Jesus.
I remember I cried like never before at the salvation of my dad, and the wonder of the salvation process.
I remembered the story of King Nebuchadnezzar and how in his insanity gave praise to God and God restored him to his former place.
My point?
Never give up praying for anyone for any reason.
God's grace extends to everyone.
Titus 2:11 “For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people.
This is about how I feel.
“You can think of homeschool families like Ivan from The Brothers Karamazov returning his ticket: even if it is true that public school teachers are better educated and prepared to teach, we still return the ticket because of what that system has been doing to the children.
We reject the decline of the American intellect.”
I feel like an idiot for not cheating my neighbors. This is stunning.
Ram Chhetri came to the US as a refugee, but this might be worst day of his life: It's the moment he realizes the $80k-$160k/year salary he's bilked from Medicaid for no-show work is coming to an end because @realdailywire caught the truth on camera.
We conducted months of surveillance that shows why "home care aide" is now the *most common job* in states like NY, CA, MN, and PA: Because a large part of those jobs are unambiguous Medicaid fraud.
Thanks to home care, Bhutanese refugees now make more money than actual PA families. The state doesn't just look the other way, but helps them get away with it. Converting federal health dollars into a universal basic income for certain communities relieves the financial burden they place on the state.
The scammers easily deceive the feds' woefully broken monitoring system. You'll see Ram pull into a driveway for 2 minutes in the morning, then 2 minutes in the evening. He clocks in and out of his shift from the right place, and the GPS system doesn't notice that he goes home in between.
$20 an hour doesn't sound like much, but at 77 hours a week, it's $80k–and it's easy to bill huge hours when you don't actually have to work them. And that's just for the low-level guys in this scheme.
Check it out.
How do you choose a good children's book? Well, here's a whole directory of them.
These are excellent stories that will capture a child's imagination and help them learn what it means to live well .The illustrations are beautiful and the stories are worth turning to time and again.
Core Virtues features hundreds of books, organized by virtue, with tips for teachers and parents alike.
Check it out at the link below ⬇️
Joshua Sheats retweeted
your regular reminder that while the modern man thinks of memorization as "rote" and "uncreative," the ancient Greeks literally considered memory to be the mother of all the muses
Joshua Sheats retweeted
The SAT you took doesn't exist anymore.
We were concerned that the SAT has become a less reliable measure of student preparedness for a rigorous college curriculum.
So, we commissioned a study from Johns Hopkins University. What does this study tell us about the state of higher education?
The results are shocking. thaq.co/4iLThZ0
Incredible experiment!
Last night an AI agent performed brain surgery on a mouse.
We gave it 19 gene therapy vectors in a spreadsheet, a mouse model of epilepsy, access to a motorize surgery rig with cameras and one goal: reduce seizures.
It picked the drug. It picked the brain region. It derived the coordinates from three papers. Then it drove the stereotaxic arms into the brain and injected 250 nanolitres while watching the entry site through the rig camera for bleeding.
A licensed vet gated every irreversible step and held a physical kill switch to stop the AI agent.
Thread on what it decided, what it saw, and the moment it refused to let me override it.
[Writing this on the spot out of excitement, but I've been 18hrs in front of my laptop coding and coordinating this, so keeping it brief and descriptive, more cohesive thoughts on this soon...]
