As a long time Draftkings user (for fantasy sports), I think their promotions are good enough to keep me. I'm not really the type to spend time hunting down promos...but they push enough free or discounted lines - many Boston specific - my way to keep me going. I've used it while visiting family in legal states and the UI is good enough.

On the other hand, I am interested in seeing if WynnBet provides any advantage seeing as how I can easily use their in-person services being right down the street from Encore. I've had a decent experience actually going into Encore and cashing at the windows and wagering at the kiosks (I did try placing wagers at the window only once...may be down to the employee I was dealing with, but it was a nightmare).

It'll be one of those two but I'll honestly try and keep it in-person and off app. My wife likes it because I can walk there (getting exercise!) and the temptation to chase losses down from my couch doesn't exist when I'm only dipping into my envelope of "fun cash".

I also admit that I enjoy gambling as entertainment (I know it's all going to be lost money over time) and even if I don't play them - and I never have - just walking past the tables and machines gives me a dopamine hit that I can't get via app. I don't care that my $10-30 tickets clearly label me as small-time when I go to the cashier's window, I definitely prefer to keep it in person as much as possible.

...of course the advantage to mobile wagering is that, with DraftKings at least, my minimum wager is literally ten cents as opposed to the ten dollars on site.

Ugh, I understand the reason we don't get it but this was the number one reason I switched from CR to driving.

In my case, it wasn't so much frequency as the first train not being able to get me to the office in time for a daily 6:00AM. I'd grab the first train of the morning, hit Porter at 5:47 and have no shot at getting to my desk in Kendall by 6:00 (thank you multi-team collaboration and time zones).

Before I had this meeting hit my calendar on the daily I had taken the CR every morning/afternoon. It had the occasional issue, but I didn't find the fare overly excessive, it was less stressful than sitting in traffic, and I got my yearly book count to unprecedented levels - I actually enjoyed the CR.

Of course then there was Covid, a move, and a job change so I wouldn't use it anymore...but an improvement in both frequency and hours would have been most appreciated by me a few years ago.

Anecdotally, when my school (not BPL, but Boston adjacent) dropped the mandate during the last school year I was fascinated by the fact that well over three-quarters of our students elected to remain masked - even as nearly all of the teachers and staff dropped theirs.

Since the last week of August, I'd say between 10-15% of my students have been masked daily and there was a sharp uptick in masking the two weeks leading up to Christmas break - surely helped by the influenza present in our population that resulted in the hospitalization of one of our students.

My district almost surely won't introduce a mandate next week...but we did send students off to break with masks and home test kits and I wouldn't be shocked to see somewhere around a third of our students masked up come Tuesday.

I, too, thought that kids would rip those things off as soon as they were able. Leaving aside any arguments on the effective of masking - whether it comes from parents, peer pressure, or something else - I've been surprised about how many of my students have remained with mask over the last year.

Anecdotes do not make data and I'm sure this experience differs by school (like I said, not Boston for me) and age (I work mainly with fifth through seventh graders) but I've been surprised at the lack of eagerness my students have shown to discard them.

Chances are that if you are in your late 30s then your school wasn't implementing an "inclusion" program - I'm similar in age and I know my school didn't.

Currently schools are instructed to place students in the "least restrictive" environment possible. What this means is that students with disabilities, that in my day would have received pull-out services, are now spending their days in mainstream academic classrooms. This has proven to be beneficial to those students (in my opinion, the literature hasn't yet proven that it doesn't impede "mainstream" students) but in practice it means that instructors are now scaffolding and modifying material to meet the needs of ESL students, learning disabled students, behaviorally challenged students, autistic students, and more all in the same classroom.

It's challenging for a single instructor to handle the multiple different needs, paces, and abilities in a classroom on their own - quite frankly it can be extraordinarily challenging for an instructor, a para, and the occasional special ed teacher to handle a classroom of twenty-five to thirty students even with three adults in the room.

This is only one small piece of the puzzle, but Inclusion programs are where the current pedagogy is and there is plenty of literature to support it (and as someone in a classroom on the daily I'll admit that I'm not sure where I fall on the topic).

> I think the paras are very underpaid and often leave to take positions in Somerville, Arlington and Winchester. Medford HS is in dire need of a rebuild/new school.

A new contract with their union came early this school year and I don't know how it's changed, but at the beginning of this school year my Medford school had classroom para-professionals who were bringing home a whole $16/hr.

Think about that for a minute. No, these aren't licensed teachers, but they are in mainstream classrooms every day, often dealing one-on-one or in small groups with the most vulnerable students in a building. These days, they're absolutely essential parts of a well-run school district.

How the hell do you keep quality personnel in your classrooms when you're paying them less than the line cook pressing your burgers at Five Guys?

Interesting, geographic influence was my first guess; the vast majority of my kids are Mineiros so I was wondering if there was a connection to MG or Belo Horizonte. If there's a Lula crowd in my school I haven't seen it and I've got one eleven year old who has, since early September, been walking around the school telling anyone who will listen that "Lula is a dirty squid" (I know this is a translation of 'Lula', but this is a kid on the spectrum and I think this has become a stereotypie for him rather than carrying any meaning, but it must have originated in the home).

It's funny that you mention indigenous policy because the thing that really got me wondering about this was spending my lunch break today reading this article about the murder of a journalist in FUNAI territory.

This may be an unanswerable question and I don't want to start a political flamewar, but I'm genuinely curious to know.

Is there an easily identifiable reason that Jair Bolsonaro has (what seems to me anyways) a pretty decent hold among the local Brazilian diaspora?

There are a number of pockets of Brazilian population in and around Boston and I've noticed a lot of Bolsonaro material around. There are at least three separate vans in my immediate neighborhood that have been painted in his support and I've seen a number of cars with window writing in his favor over the last couple of weeks. The Brazilian bakery in my area had a rack of Bolsonaro t-shirts on the sidewalk last weekend. Many of my kids (I teach sixth grade) have worn these shirts to school or made statements in his favor this school year - I've asked, and the best answer I got was "my dad says he's a good strong man".

Like I said, not looking for political opinions, just curious to know if there's something unique about our local Brazilian population that might explain this support. I can't think of a time when I've seen an overseas election garner so much visible attention to an outsider like myself and am just wondering why.

This is a surprisingly true statement.

This question is always answered with some combination of Union/Kanes/Blackbird and I don't understand why David gets no love in the donut conversation.

If you want simple then the honey dip and Boston creme are just as good as elsewhere. If you want something fancy they put together a real nice strawberry shortcake (I assume it's still there, it's been awhile since I've been).

I don't know why Davis Square seems to get left out of the donut conversation - it's more than cromulent in a city with a weak overall donut scene