Moving to blu*sky country now. (temporarily un-retired) high school AP Psychology teacher. Erstwhile constructor, now a happy crossword solver.
Durham NC
Joined August 2009
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Steve Jones retweeted
My wife has taught high school in Tokyo for twenty years.
Every year, a few of her students spend a year living with a family in America. When they come home, she asks each of them one question.
"What do you miss?"
She expects hamburgers.
She almost never gets hamburgers.
And these aren't old stories. Most of these kids came home in the last two years.
"Every time I left the house, my host mom said, 'Text me when you get there.' In Japan, nobody needs to know where I am. In Ohio, somebody always did." (Mina, 17, Ohio)
"If you walk toward a door, an American will hold it open. Even if you are very far away. So you have to run. I ran to so many doors." (Itsuki, 16, Georgia)
"My host brother screamed on the floor of a grocery store. A stranger walked by and said to my host mom, 'You're doing great, Mama.' She almost cried. I didn't know strangers were allowed to say that." (Aoi, 17, Texas)
"We went away for the weekend and left our trash can at the curb. When we got back, it was by the garage. Nobody said who. My host dad said if it had been there one more day, the neighbor would have knocked." (Haruto, 16, Minnesota)
"A car got stuck in the snow in front of our house. Four men came out of four houses. Nobody called them. They pushed, the car drove away, and they went back inside without saying their names." (Ren, 17, Michigan)
"Every American has jumper cables. Maybe half of them know which clip goes where. The other half help anyway." (Shin, 16, Montana)
"In July, my host family put a cooler on the porch. Cold water, snacks, and a sign: 'For our delivery drivers. Thank you!' I asked if they knew the drivers. They said no." (Nanami, 16, Arizona)
"Downtown, there are banners on the lampposts. Photos of soldiers from the town. Some old, some very young. My host grandpa walked me down the street and told me every name." (Yuna, 16, Iowa)
"I got a C-plus on my first test. My host dad said, 'I'm proud of you,' and put it on the fridge. In Japan, nobody is proud of a C-plus." (Takeru, 17, Pennsylvania)
Then the quietest girl in the class raised her hand.
Sora. Seventeen. Missouri.
"Nobody asks me 'home safe?' anymore," she said.
She was wrong.
In September, there was a typhoon warning for Tokyo. At 2 a.m., Sora's phone lit up.
It was her host mom. In Missouri. Watching the weather in a country she had never been to.
"Saw the storm. You home safe?"
Sora told my wife she cried for a long time. Then she typed the answer she had typed a hundred times, from football games and friends' driveways.
"Home safe."
Her host mom wrote back one line.
"Good. That's all I needed."
My wife has asked that question for twenty years. Not one kid has ever said they missed how big America is.
They miss how America says goodbye. And how it checks that you got home.
So, America. You think you've lost something.
You haven't. It's on a porch in Arizona. It's pushing a car in Michigan. It's awake at 2 a.m. in Missouri, watching our weather.
You don't remember doing any of it.
A kid in Tokyo will never forget.
Steve Jones retweeted
😌✨👃🏻COVER REVEAL👃🏻✨😌
I’m over the moon to share the cover of the US edition of Under Your Nose, which will be published in the US, Canada, Latin America, and the Philippines on May 4th and is now available to pre-order!
Steve Jones retweeted
Even though I painted this little illusion, and I've seen the video a million times, it still blows my mind.
Steve Jones retweeted
New ad by the Norwegian Consumer Council about the declining lifespan of products.
Steve Jones retweeted
This is a long shot, but you never know. If your child lost this little guy at the Amtrak station in Philadelphia today please tell me the name embroidered on his foot for verification and I will be pleased to mail him back to your family. (Keywords: toy rat philly kid found)
Steve Jones retweeted
The 2026 AP Psychology Exam scores:
5: 15%; 4: 35%; 3: 24%; 2: 18%; 1: 8%
This AP Psychology Exam was taken by over 379,000 students, 2% of the U.S. high school population, making it one of the most widely taken AP Exams.
AP Psychology Multiple-Choice Questions (MCQ)
• Students performed exceptionally well on questions assessing Unit 1: Biological Bases of Behavior and Unit 2, Cognition, with 45-50% of students earning most or all available points for these sections.
• Students also performed well on MCQs assessing Skill 2: Evaluate Research Design, with 45% earning most or all available points — an indicator that many students are internalizing AP Psychology’s emphasis on scientific literacy and critical evaluation of studies.
• The most challenging MCQ content area was Unit 4, Social Psychology and Personality, suggesting students may benefit from more focus on these topics.
AP Psychology Free-Response Questions (FRQ)
apcentral.collegeboard.org/m…
I’ve been so impressed by the way the exam Development Committee of professors and teachers has designed these two FRQs to provide students with real-world, relevant opportunities to demonstrate scientific reasoning. Both questions place students in the role of a practicing psychological scientist: reading real peer-reviewed research, evaluating methodology, interpreting data, and constructing evidence-based arguments about human behavior.
FRQ#1, the Article Analysis Question on cell phone absence and anxiety, presented students with a study on whether not answering a ringing phone triggers anxiety. To earn all points, students needed to: identify the research method, operationally define anxiety as measured, interpret a statistically significant result, identify an ethical guideline, assess generalizability, and argue whether the evidence supports or refutes a FOMO explanation. Part C, in which students needed to describe the statistical significance, was the key differentiator for AP 5s, the most challenging part of this FRQ for students. Otherwise, to earn an AP 3, students needed to answer most parts of this question correctly, and generally scored very well on Part E, in which they explained the generalizability of the study, and Part A, in which they identified the research method.
FRQ#2, the Evidence-Based Question on retrieval and long-term memory retention, asked students to read and analyze three peer-reviewed studies examining how different learning schedules affect retrieval and retention of recently learned information. Students selected evidence from the sources and explained how each piece of evidence connected to a psychological concept, applying a different psychological concept to their second piece of evidence. Students did a terrific job forming a defensible claim (94% of AP Psychology students earned this point) and identifying supporting evidence. The challenge for some was connecting evidence to a psychological concept in Part C, which was a key differentiator between AP 4s and AP 5s. Students earning AP 5s are typically meeting all of the standards represented in this question, not missing any points.
All subjects’ AP score distributions for 2026 will be posted here when available: apstudents.org/score-distrib…
Steve Jones retweeted
BREAKING: Brittney Brown, a state employee who was unlawfully fired over a social media post about Charlie Kirk, has secured a $485,000 settlement with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
Steve Jones retweeted
Happy New Year! We love sharing these pro-book posters from the Works Projects Administration Poster Collection in the Library's Prints and Photographs Division. Of the 2,000 WPA posters known to exist, the Library of Congress's collection of more than 900 is the largest.
ALT Poster for statewide WPA Library Project, Illinois, showing an illustration of a child pulling a sled full of books toward a house. Text reads: "January--A year of good reading ahead."
Steve Jones retweeted
This is a bombshell, but it's also an infuriating example of burying the point. It's not until 4,400 words into a 9,000-word piece that we are told that the key stories in one of the most famous science nonfiction books of the 20th century are made up!
Bombshell: Oliver Sacks (a humane man & a fine essayist) made up many of the details in his famous case studies, deluding neuroscientists, psychologists, & general readers for decades. The man who mistook his wife for a hat? The autistic twins who generated multi-digit prime numbers? The institutionalized, paralyzed man who tapped out allusions to Rilke? Made up to embellish the stories. Probably also: the aphasic patients who detected lies better than neurologically intact people, including Ronald Reagan's insincerity. newyorker.com/magazine/2025/…
Steve Jones retweeted
Students and teachers preparing for the upcoming AP Psychology exam, here's a video explanation of the new style of free response called the EBQ: youtu.be/G75Y5MrV-9g?si=pYCe… #APPSYCH
Steve Jones retweeted
Let's be clear: You need 2/3 of Congress & 38 state legislatures to ratify an amendment. Trump doesn't have that.
For all that my GOP colleagues claim to love our Founding Fathers, they seem to have forgotten the words of Thomas Paine: In America, there is no king but the law.
Constitutional amendment to allow Trump third term introduced in the House cnbc.com/2025/01/23/trump-th…
Steve Jones retweeted
Here's the flag flying at half-staff over Nixon's 1973 inauguration, in honor of the late Harry Truman who had died a few weeks earlier.
Jazz artist Ethel Ennis sang the national anthem.
Steve Jones retweeted
Let’s be clear: North Carolina is not the democracy we think it is if the NC Supreme Court goes along with this..
Everyone in America should be watching our state right now.
wral.com/story/republican-nc…
Steve Jones retweeted
What I find most interesting about all this is that trans women have been using women's restrooms in the Capitol and the House and Senate office buildings and the White House and the Pentagon for many years now, including during all four years of the Trump Administration.
Under Donald Trump's leadership, trans women were permitted to use women's restrooms in federal buildings in D.C. and there was never any issue.
In the four years that Rep. Nancy Mace has been in Congress, she's known that trans women use women's restrooms in federal buildings in D.C. and it's never been an issue for her. Not once. In all this time.
Until the first openly-trans person was elected to Congress. Then it suddenly became an issue.
Doesn't it seem like this is an incredibly cynical attempt to manufacture outrage and divide people over something that hasn't been a problem?
Steve Jones retweeted
I am looking forward to learning from some of the best social science educators at #NCSS. Please join me for my session, Elevating Vocabulary! It might be a power session, but it is jam packed with effective strategies that can be implemented the day you get back to your schools.
