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What are we teaching our kids, anyway? Does anyone know?

I have a question. It's a serious question, though I doubt anyone has an answer. Here it is:

What do we actually teach in our public school classrooms these days?

Obviously I'm talking about history classes and racism here, not auto shop. And just as obviously, this is going to vary from school to school and teacher to teacher.

But do we know anything concrete about this, even as some kind of rough observational average? Has anyone toured the country, sitting in on classes, to find out first hand what's going on?

I'm not really concerned about diversity training for teachers or anything else that happens outside the classroom. That's a topic for another day. I want to know what our kids are being taught in public schools. Does anyone have even the slightest idea?

61 thoughts on “What are we teaching our kids, anyway? Does anyone know?

  1. Justin

    I have the privilege of working with half a dozen new college grads. Engineers. They are all pretty sharp and I really don’t care what they think about racism in America today. Why would I? Maybe they are republicans or maybe they don’t vote at all. Whatever the case, they are getting the job done fine. The culture wars are for silly pundits. The rest of us get stuff done. You’re welcome.

    1. Loxley

      So, you're happy being doomed to repeat history- and not the nice parts- got it.

      Engineering is not education. It's job training.

      1. Maynard Handley

        Try to hold onto that attitude as long as you can.

        You might imagine that there is some kernel of sense or insight below the culture wars/identity politics if you just look hard enough; but no, there is not. It really is irrational, incoherent cluelessness all the way down.

        If you know anything about Christian History, it really is just the 4th century's Christological fights in different dress, with the exact same degree of fighting over words utterly detached from their referents'.

    2. D_Ohrk_E1

      I get what you're saying.

      Yet, culture wars are now being used to blind, distract, and numb people to the bifurcation of rights -- a tangible disunity of communities -- that will be used in support of autocratic regimes.

      So, when KD's asking what they're teaching in schools these days, don't you want to know how pervasive the anti-democracy narrative is being taught, or how widely kids are being sold on the narrative that Christianity, not democracy, is the soul of this country?

      1. Justin

        I’m a middle 50’s age guy and I was taught this relatively sanitized version of American history in public schools. Yet somehow I managed to learn all the things that the CRT theory allegedly wants to teach. I know all about slavery and Native American genocide and Japanese internment camps and all the rest of America’s ugliness. In fact, I see this ugliness in the actions of the US government and military today all across the world from Afghanistan to Iraq and Somalia and all the rest. And lots of good liberals are just fine with this endless war. Even as President Biden attempts to extract us from Afghanistan, there are those who would have us treat the Taliban as we treated other “savages”. No one has learned that lesson it seems to me. And no amount of 10th grade history seems likely to change that.

        So I don’t know what to say except that i don’t think this type of education really matters in the long run. Intelligent and inquisitive adults figure it out eventually. The rest are lost causes anyway. Good luck.

        1. Unabogie

          I think like the rest of us, he's so forgettable that we keep missing him until someone reminds us. Have you tried using a sticky note?

          1. cld

            Vance is the kind of self-important banality who thinks no one gets the dull so he's going to get it for them.

      1. Justin

        The so called culture war is not exactly the same as politics. I care about policy. I’m anti war, for example, but these other cultural issues are immovable. Everyone knows what they think about abortion and no one is ever going to change their minds. Same with systemic racism or whatever you think history class should teach kids.

      2. Maynard Handley

        :eyeroll:

        Able to understand people's motivations with a single glance? The essence of woke. Usually white.

    3. J. Frank Parnell

      I recently retired as an engineer. At the start of my career most of the people I worked with were conservative Republicans, almost exclusively male. When I retired they were mostly reasonably progressive Democrats appalled by the Republican distaste for science. A significant number of them were female, a few were out of the closet gay.

  2. heelbearcub

    Does “anyone” know what they are teaching our kids about physics or chemistry these days? Biology? Ok, let’s narrow it down to another culture war topic, evolution. Does “anyone” know what they are teaching our kids about evolution?

    Do you know what your kids were taught about any of these things when they were in school?

    How about what other kids your age, in other classes, other schools, in other states were taught? Do you even know what you were taught?

    This is one of these “they changed math” kind of questions. Could you please stop yelling at the kids to get off your lawn?

    Education is a profession, with myriad complexities, made more complex by the fact that parents, school boards and the public have a significant influence on how the profession is conducted. If you want to know the answer to the question you are asking, you’d need to approach it as a journalist, talking to many sources, not an opinion writer who thinks the answer is supposed to be obvious. The best random readers might be able to answer is what they’ve gotten filtered through their kids or what they remember from their individual classes when they went through school.

  3. Gary Koutnik

    Education has never really grappled with "what the eventual goal of education is." We can make a list of what is taught, but that's not the right question. What is the vision of education? What are we trying to accomplish by educating our children? We have vision statements to spare, but they're just pap and unrelated to what we do every day.

    So in the absence of any driving vision or common, agreed-upon purpose, American public education continues to be training for a middle class life, and college prep, the former done well (including the exclusion of those not deemed acceptable to the middle class) and the latter done poorly.

    1. azumbrunn

      This is seriously mistaken. Education professionals in my experience have more of a "vision" than all those business people who keep throwing around the word when in fact all they mean is to make lots of money for number one.

      1. Maynard Handley

        OK, flip the question around.
        How do you know what "those business people who keep throwing around the word" mean when they talk about what "the eventual goal of education is"?
        Why are you so certain you know? Aren't you operating on a few ridiculous stereotypes, a few cartoon (often literally cartoon) villains?

      2. Gary Koutnik

        I was talking about public education in general - why do we have it? What do we - i.e., the citizens of a national democracy - want to accomplish by education our kids? Sorry I used a buzz word ("vision") but I find it useful.
        Most teachers I've known over a 40 year career have had their own, usually pretty intense, visions - outcomes they want to accomplish, places they want to bring their students - which are usually (not always) positive influences on the kids they teach.
        But if we can't articulate a single purpose for public education, we'll continue wandering as we have for over 100 years. Individual kids; individual teachers; there will continue to be miracles. American high school graduates and dropouts as a whole? We need a better overall purpose than "getting into college," because that only works out for about 25 to 30% of us.

        1. ScentOfViolets

          Oh, we can articulate the purpose of education all right, and be 80% in agreement to boot.

          What we disagree on is methods and implementation. As is almost always the case, you agree, right?

          1. jamesepowell

            No, but this is no place for a fuller discussion.

            I'm not ready to agree to 80% agreement. I'm not sure I can agree on any percentage because I'm not thinking of it that way.

  4. Loxley

    'What are we teaching our kids, anyway? '

    It depends: are we using Texas-approved text books, or real ones?

    1. Vog46

      Loxley-
      ESPN2 had the Scripps spelling Bee on last night
      4 of thew 11 finalists were from Texas! They must be doing something right.
      The winner was a 14 year old black girl from New Orleans Named Zaila Avante-Garde. Goodness I had never heard of MOST of the words they were asked to spell!!!!!
      But the reaction of one of the contestants was striking:
      From the Huffington Post story about the contest the runner-up said this:
      "She will take home more than $50,000 in cash and prizes. The runner-up was Chaitra Thummala, a 12-year-old from Frisco, Texas, and another student of Shafer-Ray. She has two years of eligibility remaining and instantly becomes one of next year’s favorites. Bhavana Madini, a 13-year-old from Plainview, New York, finished third and also could be back.

      “Zaila deserved it. She’s always been better than me,” Chaitra said. “I could review a lot more words. I could get a stronger work ethic.”

      That is an amazing amount of self awareness and clear thinking. She's already seeing what she needs to do to improve.
      The kids were amazing

      1. Special Newb

        In fact Zaila Avante-Garde is kind of a genius. She wants to work at nasa and play pro basketball and likely has the chops to do both.

      2. azumbrunn

        The spelling bee is an extremely stupid undertaking. If you can spell the most common 2000 English words correctly you are good to go. Anything more than that is senseless competition and frankly a waste of young people's time.

        English spelling is absurd--and anyway the absurdities are most evident in commonly used words (who came up with "to laugh"?). It adds nothing to education in the generally understood meaning of the word.

        1. Maynard Handley

          I do agree with you, in the sense that I'm not sure what useful purpose the exercise serves, either societally or at the individual level.

          I won my share of these sorts of things when I was a teenager (so I'm not speaking from a place of sour grapes) and I don't think they had much of an affect on my life, good or bad. In my case, I was the kind of kid who wanted to study everything anyway, and would have done so without the competitive aspect. The Bee seems more specialized than Olympiads meaning, I suspect, that it attracts kids who are more competitive, and channels their energies in a more useless direction; but I suspect it's a marginal effect.

          I once read an article following up on kids considered prodigies, and their life outcomes were mostly as I'd expect (based on my life) -- they most optimized for happiness, and so appeared unspectacular. Good jobs, stable home life, but didn't change the world. I'd be curious to see such a post-mortem on Bee winners.
          My suspicion, as you convert the contest from one where success depends on generic ability plus love of learning in some field to one based on specialization and competitiveness (and public visibility) the degree of train wrecks in post-win life substantially increases.
          (cf I suspect team captains across all sports in US high school do fairly well above average, but as you move to the more visible sports, in more visible arenas, with promises of post-high-school careers and such like, again the degree of train wreck increases.)

      3. MontyTheClipArtMongoose

        It's fifty-fifty whether Thummala's parents are upset that a Black affirmative action participant in the Bee won.

    2. Martin Stett

      "Yet somehow I managed to learn all the things that the CRT theory allegedly wants to teach. I know all about slavery and Native American genocide and Japanese internment camps and all the rest of America’s ugliness."

      Exactly. There was enough in the library to supplement the sketchy survey that Coach tried to get through between sketching plays. With the added benefit of an early dose of skepticism about the 'official' version.

    1. akapneogy

      Thanks. Good article. I can't resist quoting the concluding paragraph: "White supremacy is a toxin. The older history textbooks were like syringes that injected the toxin of white supremacy into the mind of many generations of Americans. What has to be done is teach the truth about slavery as a central institution in America’s origins, as the cause of the Civil War, and about its legacy that still lives on. The consequences of not doing so, we’re seeing every day."

  5. Kelvin

    To answer your question directly: we don't know much. Lesson differentiation in the US is widespread and deeply rooted, so studying it would be difficult - but it's not like anyone's really trying. People interested in race and education tend to focus on differences in instruction by teachers of particular races or students of particular races, not the actual content taught in the classroom. RAND's AEP shows that many teachers use their own materials in the classroom, and social studies teachers use more than anyone else, so we don't really have much idea of what goes on there. The field is in need of surveys and field observations; also, it might be possible to generate some data by looking at teaching materials websites and their top downloads. As far as I know, it's been more than a decade since anyone did a survey like this (https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED516497) - and even that wasn't especially detailed.

  6. cephalopod

    Thanks to distance learning, plenty of parents know too well every lesson plan and assignment from the last year.

    1. MontyTheClipArtMongoose

      El Jefe was playing the long game by bungling COVID response: students learning on Zoom from home would allow (suburban) parents to know firsthand that the liberal left teachers unions are indoctrinating their charges with Saul Alinsky, Marcus Garvey, & Elijah Muhammad, this leading to a reversal of Democrat gains as seen in 2018.

      The Jefista restoration is coming.

  7. sonofthereturnofaptidude

    The best way to know what is being taught is to examine state curriculum frameworks and textbooks. Teachers are supposed to follow the frameworks and they almost always use the textbooks, at least some of the time. There are plenty of studies on these -- research studies, dissertations, etc -- whole books have been written. The APUSH curriculum has already been discussed.

    I'd say that the biggest change in history classrooms over the last few decades has been an increased use of primary source analysis. The "just the facts" people have a hard time criticizing a teacher who uses primary sources to undermine the standard narrative that conservatives like to push. That's one reason why I use them so much.

    1. Maynard Handley

      Do you assume there is a SINGLE narrative that "conservatives like to push"?
      What are the contents of that narrative? Is there a single "liberal view" that every liberal wants to push?
      There are as many Mormons as Chinese in America (and substantially more than Chinese). Should American History spend as much time on Mormons (and Mormon persecution, of which there was plenty) as it does on Chinese and Japanese persecution? Or should it highlight Mormon atrocities (of which there were also a few) along with throwing in some equivalent Native American atrocities?

      Your cartoon version of "monolithic conservative America" shows all the downsides of the agenda you are trying to push. You know everything about the grievance agenda, nothing about the rest of American society, and your response to that is not to try to learn about those alternatives, but to insist that everything not on the grievance agenda be even further marginalized.

      1. sonofthereturnofaptidude

        Project straw men much? What makes you think I'm trying to push an agenda? I said I'm trying to undermine the standard narrative that conservatives like to push by using evidence from primary documents in the classroom. I'll agree that there is no "monolithic conservative America" -- your phrase, not mine. But there are common features that many conservatives like to push into US history curricula, and it doesn't take much work to find it. Just read NRO and AEI, observe what Fox News includes and doesn't include in their grievances about what's taught in public schools. I don't know if you have taught history in a public school classroom, but I have for years. I have reviewed state frameworks and textbooks for use and discussed them with colleagues, and I've had to decide what to include and what to leave out. When the textbook devotes three pages to the War with Mexico, almost nothing to the role of the US in the Philippines, and nothing at all about LGBTQ history, it's not hard to see that there is work to be done to expand the narrative. So I include primary documents to flesh out the skeleton narrative the textbook provides.

        And yes, I do include the Mormons and their persecution, as well as the atrocities that Mormons committed. It's a big country with a big history. Why wouldn't I?

        1. Maynard Handley

          "I said I'm trying to undermine the standard narrative that conservatives like to push by using evidence from primary documents in the classroom. "

          Which part of
          //Do you assume there is a SINGLE narrative that "conservatives like to push"?//
          did you not understand?

          You'd be appalled if someone said something like "Chinese/Japanese, what's the difference, they're all basically the same". But you're happy to make such a claim about "conservatives". This is what I mean, that you're ignorant and proud of it.

          What do you want history to be?
          - the story of bad things America has done?
          - the story of good things America has done?
          - the story of bad things a subset of Americans has done?
          - the story of good things a subset of Americans has done?
          - the story of bad things THE WORLD has done?
          - the story of good things THE WORLD has done?

          That's the starting point. Where many people (conservatives or otherwise) agree with you is at this very starting point. We see an obsession with
          - the story of bad things a subset of Americans has done?
          and zero interest in the world aspect of the issue.

          As I said before, the counterweight we want to the supposed way history was taught is not "all American white males are evil" but "human societies have been immensely varied across time and space". To my (outsider) eyes the primary problem with American History teaching is that it is so freaking self-centered -- there is so little of it compared to world history, and even so, American Schools spend so much more time on it than the rest of the world.

          Resulting in the crazy pathologies of American politics where you can have so many people utterly unaware of (to take one issue that's considered apparently the single most important point in human history)
          - slavery in the classical world
          - slavery in the muslim world
          - slavery in the eastern world (chinese babies still being sold in 20th C, still present in some forms in Tibet till the Chinese invasion)
          - slavery in Africa (still ongoing, eg pygmies in Zaire)
          - slavery in Europe (eg slavs of course, but Muslim raiders of islands until the Baroque, also devshirme)
          - slavery during WW2 (by both Germans and Japanese)

          How can you have a populace that builds its entire political world-view on slavery, but then refuse to actually educate them in the fullness of the subject?

  8. royko

    My kids are a bit too young for me to provide any anecdotal data, but my familiarity with our schools and any schools I've gone to or interacted with, a) there's a good deal of pressure on public schools to avoid controversy, and b) grad school topics don't immediately or directly get adopted in K12 education. Sure, there's influence, but it's slower and less direct.

    All of that (plus the fact that this is quite obviously a manufactured right wing point of outrage) make me really skeptical to the idea that schools have adopted CRT or even particularly radical versions of US history.

    I'm sure how racism is addressed has changed -- which I think is generally a good thing -- and maybe there are issues with how its being taught that need to be discussed, but unless someone is willing to point to specific things that are going on in a sizable percentage of schools, they're not interested in having an honest discussion.

  9. rreichardt303

    I have spent the last 20+ years doing k-12 research and evaluation. The answer to your question is no, nobody knows what kids are taught. .

  10. mcdruid

    A while ago, I looked over Holt & McDougal’s World History, Patterns of Interaction – a standard text for California High School students, there are only a couple of problematical areas I see.
    Since the tome clocks in at over 1100 pages, it does manage to cover just about everything , though some parts are perhaps less salient than they should be.
    The first I noticed was the diminishment of the Japanese attacks in Asia before WWII. The invasion and occupation of Korea and Taiwan are not mentioned. There is only a small nod give to the atrocities committed by the Japanese in China. Considering that these still have a substantial effect on the region’s politics, they are worth more space. Although there are four pages devoted to the Holocaust, including a quarter-page table of Jewish deaths, no mention is made of total Chinese deaths until several chapters later. In the war summary section there is even a graph of casualties that omits both the Ottoman Empire in WWI (a quarter of their population) and China in WWII.
    The chapter on Israel has some egregious errors. The Nakba is not mentioned at all, but the book claims that “Arab governments forced out 700,000 Jews living in Arab lands.” Considering that most of them voluntarily emigrated under pressure from Israel, this is false. The rest of that section has several falsehoods.
    It gives some credit to Reagan for the end of the Soviet Union, more than Reagan deserves, but ignores the effect of the collapse in the price of oil.
    The text ends around 2003–2009. It does include the second Iraq war, stating that it was due to suspicions that Hussein had WMD. It does not mention that was false intelligence.

  11. golack

    1. Are the schools well maintained?
    2. Do they have metal detectors and armed guards?
    3. Are the meals served nutritious?
    4. Do they have access to green space?
    5. Do the buildings have air conditioning?
    6. How long is the commute?
    7. Are after school activities offered?
    8. In the environment, at all levels, respectful?

    Children pick up on a lot of things, not just the coursework.

  12. cld

    Trade school is focus, education is context.

    Conservatives think everything should be trade school, bereft of context, which they will be more than happy to provide in the nature of an aesthetic or religion.

  13. Leo1008

    I’m currently in a grad school program (humanities) in a liberal city. I don’t know much regarding the K-12 stuff in this area, but I suppose, relatively speaking, I’ve run into some students in the grad program who come across as “kids.”

    And what’s being taught? Very little, as far as I can tell, that relates to the “controversies” over race, 1619, ant-racism, etc. Honestly, I get the clear impression that very few people (professors or students) are interested in wrapping their grad class time around those issues.

    Nevertheless, there are minor or indirect references to or influences from the broader culture’s current emphasis on everything racial. I think there’s a wider diversity (of racial and ethnic backgrounds) in the authors that we read than there might have been in the past. Usually I have no problem with that. Occasionally we’re asked to read a book or essay that honestly doesn’t seem very good (to me), and I suspect it was chosen simply to represent the minority race its author belongs to. But on the whole I feel I’ve been exposed to a lot of excellent material.

    Even the professors sometimes express some surprise at the generally conventional focus of many of their students. One example: a young student who decided to do a presentation - involving a lot of work - on Henry James. And that’s not unusual. Jane Austen is another one who seems to remain perennially popular regardless of what controversy swirls through modern times (despite the connection many of her characters have to slavery);

    But one area where I do see change: economics. The younger co-hort really does seem deeply swayed towards socialism (whatever that means to them). And discussions along those lines come up much more often than racial discussions (regardless of the demographics of a given class).

    Bernie Sanders, and/or the economy facing the younger generations, seems to my anecdotal experience to have had much more of an effect than the recent racial controversies. But we’ll see if that lasts.

  14. jlhartman

    I'm probably missing the point, but for anyone unaware there is a search engine for the California state education standards. I assume other states have something analogous, especially those that have adopted the Common Core framework. It's fair to say these standards are what is being taught in classrooms since they are what students are tested on each year and thus (at least partially) what educators are evaluated upon.

    As an example, the search engine reveals that "Reconstruction" is addressed in both 8th and 11th grade in California, covering topics including Jim Crow laws, buffalo soldiers, the KKK, and the Freedman's Bureau (I have to admit I'd not heard of this last one before).

    https://www2.cde.ca.gov/cacs/all?query=Reconstruction

    1. jakejjj

      Oregon just repealed its already weak high school graduation standards because the favorite "progressive" minority field hands can't meet them. And then you people wonder why most of the employees in that state's high-tech sector are from India, Japan, and China. I guess "progressives" aspire to serfdom to foreigners. It's logical, given that they hate this country's guts.

  15. Justin

    What are they teaching?

    “It was a normal day in one of my 11th grade US history courses. During class, a kid, I’ll call him Billy, asked, “Why is it such a big deal that the police killed someone? Why is there so much fuss about this one? He should have just listened to the police.”

    While this conversation could have happened this year, it occurred in the spring of 2015, amid the media uproar surrounding Freddie Gray, a young black man who died while in Baltimore police custody. But Billy didn’t understand why this was happening, and now I — a high school teacher — was tasked with explaining this national moment to my young student. So I took a deep breath and launched into a brief historical context about the history of police brutality, Black resistance to it, and how all of this goes back to America’s Reconstruction era.”

    So… I just can’t imagine that kind of conversation in class some 35 or 40 years ago when I was in high school. I don’t really think it’s important for the teacher to explain it as they did either. But this isn’t curriculum, it’s a spur of the moment current events discussion.

    And for what it’s worth, I don’t even think I agree with the interpretation, because the reason “it’s such a big deal” is not rooted in that history. Reasonable people may disagree, of course.

      1. Maynard Handley

        Like everything in this discussion, that article begs the question, ie assumes the point it claims to prove.

        The essence of the article is that
        - race is an important (the most important?) fact about modern society

        - the things that need to be taught about it are not how some version of tribalism has been a constant in world history, but how the specific details of how this played out in America are worse than any other version at any other place or time

        - the appropriate place to discuss this is in school, and specifically in History class; rather than outside school, in church, at home, with friends, whatever; or inside school but in the context of maybe social science.

        Every one of these is a contested point. You don't convert people who are already hostile to your viewpoint by insisting that the above points are non-negotiable before we even start.

        We all agree that the history curriculum cannot teach everything, but this fact about time cannot be resolved if one side insists that the principle on which curriculum decisions should be made is "everything we say is correct, everything they say is wrong" which is the essential principle I'm seeing proposed here, with any sort of deeper principles being mocked.
        MOST of the complaints against the modern US history curriculum are complaints of omission, of the principles on which choices are being made. And I see zero good faith efforts in this thread to deal with this complaint.

        1. jakejjj

          Forget it. The Party Line is now that whites are to be hated, especially by themselves, at least if they live on the coasts -- and especially in New York City, which is too corrupt and incompetent to run a municipal election, and whose governor is a killer and a rapist. But hey, he's a Democrat. It's all good. LOL

          1. Maynard Handley

            Whether or not you agree with jakejjj's summary, the point I am making is not trivial, and insisting that I am wrong because I don't agree with you get's us nowhere.

            Let's try a different version: replace race with X

            - X is an important (the most important?) fact about modern society

            - the things that need to be taught about it are not how some version of tribalism has been a constant in world history, but how the specific details of how this played out in America are worse than any other version at any other place or time

            - the appropriate place to discuss this is in school, and specifically in History class; rather than outside school, in church, at home, with friends, whatever; or inside school but in the context of maybe social science.

            OK, how do you feel when I say
            - SATAN is an important (the most important?) fact about modern society
            - and needs to be discussed in school (ideally in every class)

            Do you think that's a great way to run society? Do you think it's true?

            How about we make X equal to COMMUNISM? There was a time much of the US did in fact think that way. Was that a great way to run society? Did it result in better decision making and a more educated public?

            What about X equals MIND-ALTERING-SUBSTANCES?
            The US has had a few versions of this, from Prohibition to the War on Drugs. Opinions very much differ, still, as to whether this was and is a good idea.

            Point is: not everyone agrees with the theory that will
            - last especially long
            - is especially important in the grand scheme of things
            - needs to be the obsessive focus of everything, from politics to art to pop culture to the school curriculum.
            And loudly asserting that "This time is different! This time we really do have, in our particular hysterical panic, the key to all human society and behavior across all time and space; it really is that important" does not convince those of us who have not drunk the woke koolaid.

            And adding further insult works, yes, every bit as well as shouting at a Muslim that they're an infidel headed for hell.

  16. jamesepowell

    Every state has content standards that are available online.

    https://www.cde.ca.gov/be/st/ss/documents/histsocscistnd.pdf

    No critical race theory. I scanned the above for the word "race" and found it used once in an eleventh grade US history standard.

    "Describe the changing landscape, including the growth of cities linked by industry and trade, and the development of cities divided according to race, ethnicity, and class."

  17. jakejjj

    I'm Latinx, and I so much appreciate it that the "progressives" have decided that my first language -- Spanish, all of whose nouns are either masculine or feminine -- is inferior to USA English. Are you racists? Of course you are, but that's okay. LOL

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