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Hits and Misses

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Courtesy of Brittney Bell

“I always tell them, I teach you ELA, but if 10 years from now you don’t remember a single thing I taught you, but you remember that I love you and support you, I did my job,” said Brittney Bell, who often transforms her classroom into other worlds to reinforce lessons.

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Associated Press

Kandiss Taylor, Georgia Republican gubernatorial candidate participates in a republican primary debate on May 1, 2022, in Atlanta.

HIT: There’s been a lot of ink spilled in recent months about the high turnover rate among American teachers and the problems in replenishing their ranks. For that reason, any school would be wise to hang onto an educator as dedicated as Brittney Bell. The fifth-grade instructor at Carmichaels Elementary School in Greene County is one of 12 teachers across the state who are in the running to be the Pennsylvania Teacher of the Year for 2024. Justin Ward, a life skills teacher at Laurel Highlands High School in Fayette County, is also a finalist. As the Observer-Reporter reported this week, Bell has “wild ideas and a big heart,” doing things like transforming her room into a space station or surgical room to discuss career possibilities with students. Bell said she believes teaching needs to be “relationship-driven.” She explained, “It’s not just about them doing well on the state tests or scoring high. They need to know that no matter what they do educationally, you are in their corner.” And those students are lucky to have a teacher like Bell.

MISS: The argument about whether Earth is round or flat was seemingly settled somewhere around 1600. But for Kandiss Taylor, a former Republican gubernatorial candidate in Georgia and now a district chair in that state, the question of the planet’s roundness or flatness is apparently still up for grabs. In a recent podcast, she seemed to agree with two guests who earnestly believe the orb we inhabit is flat. Taylor then went on a diatribe about globes, suggesting that the presence of globes “everywhere” is part of some wider conspiracy. She exclaimed, “And that’s what they do to brainwash. For me, if it is not a conspiracy, if it is real, why are you pushing so hard everywhere I go?! Every store, you buy a globe, there’s globes everywhere. Every movie, every TV show, news media – why?” Given the penchant for book banning by Taylor’s ideological fellow travelers, let’s hope they don’t go after globes next.

MISS: Need something else to keep you awake in the middle of the night? Then how about the fact that more than 300 researchers, engineers and executives who are developing artificial intelligence have signed on to a letter stating that AI, in the words of The New York Times, “might one day pose an existential threat to humanity” and “should be considered a societal risk on a par with pandemics and nuclear war.” Anyone who has seen the classic movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” and its renegade HAL 9000 computer can easily imagine how artificial intelligence could turn against us. Moreover, artificial intelligence could eventually lead to the elimination of millions of jobs as it carries out tasks more efficiently than we could ever dream of. That will lead humans to do … what? It might be best to go slow when it comes to developing AI.

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