870 stories
·
1 follower

Is Teaching to the Middle of a Class Settling for Mediocrity?

1 Share

This time of year, when classes are over, but I haven’t yet graded, I start thinking about what I could have done differently. Inevitably, I think about the students I didn’t quite seem to reach, the ones I could have helped more. Inevitably, those are students at either end of the spectrum, the top and the bottom. Without intending to, I often teach to the middle.

Sure, the students could have done more themselves. They could have come to class more or pushed themselves more, but often, they don’t even know what to do. And that’s where I think I could step in more and offer more guidance….

The top students, I think, are less harmed by my inability to teach to them. They will push themselves anyway, if not in my class, in another class along the way. It’s the students at the bottom that I feel like I’ve let down. And some of them, frankly, are not motivated and would likely balk at my strategies for helping them, or they would do the tasks in a half-hearted way. I could insist and insist, but ultimately, it’s up to them to do the work. And, of course, that’s how I justify not putting forth the extra effort, thinking to myself, well, they wouldn’t do it anyway.

A middle school math teacher wrote this in 2005*. It applies, I believe, to most public school teachers today who face 25-30 students (or more) in an elementary school classroom about six hours a day or secondary school teachers who face about 125-150-plus students daily in five 50-minute segments in math, science, foreign language, or social studies classes.

It surely applied to me in the 14 years that I taught high school history and social studies between the mid-1950s and early-1970s and then in the mid-1990s. That I was doing so in schools where students were tracked by subject area was unclear to me in the early years of making lesson plans for my classes. But it became clear to me by the third or fourth year that I was doing exactly that. I had mentally divided up each class into top-of-the-ladder, middle rungs, and bottom of the ladder students. Sure, I varied my questions, activities, and assignments to get students to participate but my choice of content and skills aimed at the high-middle of my imagined students’ performance in classes.

And this was true for me, as I suspect for others, who teach (or taught) classes tracked for similar abilities and performance. In Washington, D.C. in the 1960s where I served for a decade, the “track system” used group intelligence test scores to sort students into the “Honor,” “College Preparatory,” “General,” and “Basic” tracks.  For example, I would  teach College Preparatory and Basic Track classes and even in these classes, students varied in performance and, yes, I would teach to the middle.

Like the above blogging teacher, she and I did a lot of things to mitigate the thrust of our lessons to the middle. We used small groups, set aside time to work individually with low- and high-performing students, offered extra credit for additional reading and projects, etc., etc. All well and good but within the confines of our limited time with students and having a life outside of school and few additional resources, there was not much more that could be done.

What the teacher and I faced was a dilemma anchored in the DNA of public schools. We prize the historic and pervasive American values of treating all students equitably, encouraging individual excellence, and building classroom communities. But all three values can not be achieved within age-graded schools where teachers teach mixed-ability groups of children and youth for four to six hours daily and where they are required to give letter grades to students.

Recognizing this dilemma, then, I ask: Is teaching to the middle of a class another way of saying that such teaching is mediocre?

My answer: No, it is not.

Mediocrity, as used in describing U.S. schooling means inferior quality of a product and performance. It is a slur slung at those who are “average” or in the middle of a distribution–the C student or the girl who finishes 15th out of 30 runners in the 100-meter dash. Both tried hard but came up short in earning that C or finishing the race in the middle of the pack. It is unfair.

Why unfair? Two reasons.

First, few policymakers, administrators, and practitioners acknowledge, much less recognize, the common dilemma of crafting compromises–you sacrifice some values in order to satisfy other values–to achieve some version of these prized values embedded in the American ethos. A prime example is the value of excellence–creating a meritocratic ranking of excellence (e.g., A-F letter grades, honor roll societies, class valedictorians)–yet parents, policymakers, researchers, and practitioners believe in their heart-of-hearts that only a few grab the high letter grades and achieve excellence as defined by the school while most others fall in the middle and there will always be a few students who perform below the teacher’s standards.

The second reason are iron-clad social beliefs in the bell-shaped curve. Teachers see this graphical distribution of students in classrooms as “natural” and a fact of life anchored in groups of students. Policymakers and practitioners accept this visual distribution of intelligence and performance as true and use it as basis for ability grouping within a class and tracking students within a school. Surely, varied talents (e.g., artistic, athletic, cognitive) are distributed unequally across individuals. In a competitive society where individual performance and equal opportunity are prized everyone cannot get As or win races.  The middle is shunned because “average” and “middling” have become synonyms for mediocrity in American society.

The larger issue of fairness is whether the purpose of the school is to continue reproducing the societal inequalities embedded in the grading system and through ability and tracking policies or embrace a belief that the primary purpose of the school is to reduce–not reproduce– racial, ethnic, and class inequalities through restructuring the age-graded school and its time schedule, grouping policies, letter grades, and other initiatives aimed at breaking the iron cage constructed by locked-in social beliefs in the bell-shaped curve and the existing age-graded school.

But an experienced teacher now faced with the practical issue of evaluating students with varied talents, motivations, interests, and performance–whether it is a class stuck in the bottom quintile, an “average” class or teaching Advanced Placement courses–wants to be fair and equitable to each student. She wants academic excellence while building a classroom community. She wants all students to achieve. But she cannot because of unceasing time demands that require her to follow a rigid daily schedule and contractual obligations inherent to the job of teaching. She requires her students to do homework, take tests, and then issues grades on report cards. She ends up teaching to the middle.

_______________________________________

*When I quoted this middle school math teacher seven years ago in an earlier version of this post, her blog was available. As of September 2025, geekymom.blogspot.com  has disappeared from the Internet. The practice of teaching students in the middle of the bell-shaped curve, however, remains.



Read the whole story
mrmarchant
16 hours ago
reply
Share this story
Delete

The Wind, a Pole, and the Dragon

1 Share
Read the whole story
mrmarchant
1 day ago
reply
Share this story
Delete

In Defense of Children’s Work

1 Share

A corner store opens to the street. A fourteen-year-old steps on a milk crate behind the counter so he can see over the register. He counts back change to a neighbor he calls by name and later sweeps across the stoop into a metal dustpan. Nothing he does is dramatic. But it is precise, relational, and accountable. The task places him in a web of faces and expectations. He is needed, not merely supervised.

The claim is simple: when it is local, supervised, age-appropriate, and limited, children’s work helps form responsible adults. Somewhere along the way we let the worst abuses of industrial child labor define the whole idea of kids working. We mistook the sweatshop for the shop. The first deserves prohibition; the second deserves protection.

Before the argument goes farther, the bright lines. School comes first. Jobs must be safe, supervised, undertaken with parental guidance and a child’s assent, and bounded by modest hours. Hazardous or industrial tasks are out of bounds. Kids must be paid fairly for real contributions. These guardrails already exist in law and custom, and we should honor them.

For most of human history, children’s work lived inside the household economy: milking before school, stacking split wood, sweeping a shop floor, carrying casseroles through a church kitchen, running a paper route before dawn. The aim wasn’t résumé padding but membership. Work stitched children into the daily fabric of place—into the habits, adults, and neighbors that give shape to a young person’s sense of identity and duty. We once recognized this as apprenticeship to life. It did not compete with learning; it was a form of learning—about time, trust, tools, and other people.

What changed? The entry-level seams in local life thinned. Chain stores replaced counters run by owners who knew your family. Liability worries made even simple junior roles feel risky. Childhood schedules ballooned with the college-application arms race. And some of the most iconic kid jobs simply vanished. By the late 1970s nearly three out of five teens worked—paper routes, grocery shifts, babysitting. Today, it’s closer to one in three. The point isn’t to rewind to 1979; it’s to notice how ordinary, steady work lost its on-ramps.

Ask any employer what’s missing and you’ll hear the same refrain: young people struggle to show up on time, talk to strangers, take correction, finish what they start. Those aren’t mysteries. They’re habits learned in small jobs. Standing where you said you would. Greeting people you do not know. Sweeping a floor until it shines. Light, face-to-face work teaches these things because the task itself requires them. In its absence, it is no wonder that schools are increasingly focused on developing the competencies which we have come to refer to as executive functioning skills.

When children’s work is done right, the benefits are immediate and plain: cash-handling trains numeracy and trust; stocking to a checklist breeds order and persistence; greeting customers builds courage and neighborliness. There is also an intergenerational kindness at work. A barber can show a high schooler how to sweep, greet, book the next appointment, and keep a register square without ever touching a blade. In a church kitchen, an elder can teach teens to stack chairs and run a dish line with steady rhythm. In a thrift shop, a volunteer with a label maker can teach back-room inventory and first-in, first-out rotation. Places become classrooms; adults become mentors; teenagers become known by name for more than their test scores.

Fair objections deserve answers.

Kids need rest and free play. Agreed. That is why hours must be modest during school weeks and end early. The point is not to cram another achievement into a teenager’s schedule but to trade a few abstract obligations for a few concrete responsibilities that bind them to real people. With sane limits, work complements rest rather than cannibalizes it.

School is already demanding. Yes—especially for students with long commutes or heavy coursework. That is why a child’s off-ramp must be real and why parents or guardians, not just employers, decide whether a role is appropriate in a given season. If sleep and grades slip, the job pauses.

Won’t this widen inequities or invite coercion? It could, if we forget the words voluntary and local. Opportunities should be additive, not primary; a teenager’s hours must never substitute for childcare or adult wages. Kids should never be pressed into jobs out of family desperation, and no teen should feel trapped. But forbidding all junior roles heals nothing. What helps is opening dignified on-ramps so work becomes a teacher rather than a punishment.

Recent headlines about illegal child labor in dangerous settings are rightly alarming. But the answer is not to bar all work—it is to distinguish: keep strict prohibitions on hazardous labor while recovering small, relational apprenticeships that happen within sight of adults, under clear limits, and alongside school.

So what would recovery look like—something small, sane, and doable this semester?

Households can tie real chores to real outcomes. Not tokenism, but contributions that actually change the home: dinner on Tuesdays, lawn on Saturdays, younger sibling pickup on choir nights. A small stipend can teach budgeting without turning the household into bureaucracy. The object isn’t to monetize family life; it is to make it clear that a home is a shared enterprise and that children participate in its real work.

Congregations and civic groups can post a “Neighbors Hire Teens” board with brief, screened listings: a few hours shelving each week at a thrift shop; a Saturday morning bike-repair table; nursery help during the early service alongside a certified lead. They can host “Skill Saturdays”—cash-register basics with a borrowed till drawer, food safety 101, customer-welcome practice with a smile and a sentence. The point is not to merely simulate work but to lower the first rung so kids can step onto it without embarrassment or fear.

If the argument still sounds quaint, it may be because we have grown used to abstraction. Screens will instruct, but they will not correct your change. Coursework will elevate, but it will not require you to look a stranger in the eye and say, “How can I help you?”

Picture again the boy perched on the milk crate. He is learning to stand where he said he would, to greet a neighbor by name, to sweep a stoop with pride. That is not exploitation. It is apprenticeship—small, local, bounded, and humane. It is one way children are apprenticed to adulthood, not in theory but in practice, in place, and in the company of others.

Image Credit: Camille Pissarro, “Apple Harvest” (1888) via rawpixel.

Read the whole story
mrmarchant
1 day ago
reply
Share this story
Delete

Earth’s Largest Mirror Shattered by Science

1 Share

In southwest Bolivia, near the border with Chile, lies what is commonly referred to as “the world’s largest natural mirror.” When it rains on the massive salt flat called Salar de Uyuni, tourists flock from around the world to pose for photos, hoping to capture themselves, their vehicles, and the surrounding mountains, clouds, and sky perfectly reflected in dreamlike mirror scenes. 

Although it might not actually be a perfect mirror. This, according to researchers who studied the area using satellite imagery, ground-based measurements, and drone data. They reported their mirror-shattering findings in Communications Earth & Environment recently.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .
Credit: nature / YouTube

The scientists found that while the ephemeral, shallow lake that forms at Salar de Uyuni is exceptionally smooth and calm, it does not behave like a mirror would, according to satellite data. Particularly in the interior parts that tourists can’t reach. For a surface to behave like a mirror, variations in its surface must generally be smaller than a wavelength of visible light. The research team analyzed more than 390,000 radar measurements—where satellites shoot radio signals at the water in the salt flat and measure the smoothness of the signal that bounces off of it—collected over the course of about 8 years. The scientists concluded that the salt flat’s smoothness and reflectiveness vary over time and across the extent of the surface. 

To confirm their remote sensing measurements, the scientists collected data on the ground last year at Salar de Uyuni. They used an optical tool to characterize the lake’s surface, pairing that measurement with similar optical data from drones flying overhead.

ADVERTISEMENT
Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

It turns out that the lake’s surface is less than uniform. Across its 3,800 square mile surface, some patches wrinkle based on environmental conditions. Remarkably, though, few waves form on the gigantic lake, even though winds do push water around. The researchers suggest that the shallowness of the temporary lake—it averages less than an inch deep—and the presence of salt crystals at the surface help to keep the water so calm.

While its perfect mirrorness failed to stand up to strict scientific scrutiny, Salar de Uyuni is still a marvel. After a good rain, its a dazzling reflection of Earth’s capacity to inspire and surprise.

Lead image: Desizned / Shutterstock

Read the whole story
mrmarchant
1 day ago
reply
Share this story
Delete

Bell Labs Scientists Accidentally Proved the Big Bang Theory

1 Share


“How did we get here?”

That existential question about the universe has captivated humankind for centuries. Many scientists have attempted to answer it, including the Rev. Georges Lemaître, a Belgian cosmologist and Catholic priest. In 1927 he theorized that the universe was created from a single particle he called the “primeval atom.”

That atom later disintegrated in an explosion, LeMaître figured, creating space, time, and an ever-expanding universe, according to the American Museum of Natural History.

LeMaître’s idea likely sounds familiar, as it is now known as the big bang theory. Direct evidence for the theory wasn’t found until almost four decades later, entirely by accident.

Bell Labs researchers Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson were conducting radio astronomy experiments in 1964 using a horn antenna located on the company’s campus in Holmdel, N.J. The reflector antenna was the most sensitive in the world at the time. It was constructed to pick up weak radio signals from space for Project Echo, NASA’s experimental 1960 satellite communications program. The project successfully did so twice, first in 1961 through the passive Echo communication satellite, and a second time in 1963 through the active Telstar communications satellite.

While Penzias and Wilson were using the Holmdel antenna to map radio signals from the Milky Way, it picked up a mysterious buzzing noise that wouldn’t go away despite their attempts to eliminate it.


The signals, which persisted day and night, turned out to be cosmic microwave background radiation that permeates the universe—a remnant from the creation of the cosmos—that helped confirm the big bang theory. The accidental breakthrough earned Penzias and Wilson the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Project Echo, Telstar, and the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation were recognized as an IEEE Milestone at a ceremony held on 25 May in Holmdel at Wilson Park, where the horn antenna is located.

Penzias and Wilson’s evidence for the big bang theory shaped “our understanding of this universe and our place in it,” Thomas Coughlin, 2024 IEEE president, said in a news release about the dedication.

“Cosmic background radiation, one of the most transformative discoveries in the second half of the 20th century, has also led to non-terrestrial communication innovations that address some of the world’s greatest needs, including disaster relief aid,” Coughlin said.

Building the world’s most sensitive antenna

After the Soviet Union in 1957 launched Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite put into low Earth orbit, the U.S. government increased its efforts to fund the development of non-terrestrial communication innovations, as detailed in an Engineering and Technology History Wiki entry.

Government and industry worked together on initiatives at laboratories around the country. One of the first programs was Project Echo, which aimed to achieve two-way voice communication between NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Goldstone, Calif., and Crawford Hill in Holmdel, 5 kilometers from the Bell Labs complex.

Three men looking into a satellite balloon during inflation tests.Langley engineers (from right): Norman Crabill, Edwin Kilgore, and an unidentified man take a peek inside the vast balloon during inflation tests of the Echo 1 Satellite in Weeksville, N.C.NASA

To make the communication possible, project leads developed and built the horn antenna on the Bell Labs site. The antenna was 15.24 meters long by 6.1 meters wide, weighing in at 16,329 kilograms. It funneled radio waves in or out of the horn shape, and the reflector bounced the waves into a single focused beam—similar to a huge metal megaphone pointing into a curved mirror. Despite its large size, the machine could be precisely aimed.

Unlike other antennas that are tuned to only one frequency, the Holmdel antenna worked across a wide band of frequencies, so it could pick up several types of radio signals. It also could handle radio waves moving in linear or circular paths.

The design accounted for the potential need to eliminate unwanted noise from the environment.

The receiver was placed at the horn’s apex, eliminating the need for a connecting line, which could result in external noise and signal loss.

The antenna allowed Project Echo to complete the first high-quality long-distance voice circuit in 1961 through its namesake’s passive communication satellite, Echo. A similar experiment was successfully completed two years later through the Telstar satellite, according to the proposal for the IEEE Milestone.

In 1964 Penzias and Wilson began using the Holmdel antenna to perform their own radio astronomy experiments.

What’s that buzzing sound?

The duo was trying to map weak radio signals from the Milky Way. They took pains to eliminate external noise from the ground, the environment, and the antenna itself so that their readings would not be affected. They even suppressed interference from the receiver on the antenna by cooling it with liquid helium to -269 °C—only 4 degrees above absolute zero, the theoretical temperature at which all motion stops.

Yet they kept hearing a persistent buzz. It was low, steady, and 100 times more intense than the researchers would expect for interference noise—and it was coming from all directions in space.

Penzias and Wilson redoubled their efforts to eliminate the interference, painstakingly retesting their equipment.

Penzias and Wilson’s evidence for the big bang theory shaped “our understanding of this universe and our place in it.” —Thomas Coughlin, 2024 IEEE president

“They went so far as to take rags and detergents to carefully wash the antenna from the droppings of a pair of pigeons that had nested there,” Leonardo Colletti told IEEE Spectrum in a 2023 article about the discovery. Colletti is a physics professor at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, in Italy.

But even after all the duo’s work, the mysterious buzz continued.

After Penzias and Wilson had accounted for everything, including the pigeon poop, they concluded that the radiation they detected could not have come from the Earth, the sun, or anything else in the galaxy.

They later learned that researchers and astrophysicists Robert H. Dicke, P. James Peebles, and David Todd Wilkinson at Princeton University predicted the existence of cosmic microwave background noise, which “they believed would have resulted from the big bang,” according to an entry on the Nokia Bell Labs website.

“As it turned out,” the article says, “the radiation detected by Penzias and Wilson was a perfect match for what the Princeton researchers had predicted.”

Saving the horn antenna

In 1989 the Holmdel antenna was named a national historic landmark. But in 2021 Nokia, which had acquired Bell Labs, sold the 43-acre area to technology entrepreneur Rakesh Antala.

The following year, the Holmdel planning board voted to undertake a study to consider reclassifying the site as an area in need of redevelopment.

Three people, one woman on the left and two men, standing in front of a horn-shaped antenna.[From left] Holmdel Deputy Mayor Kim LaMountain, former Bell Labs researcher Giovanni Vannucci, and 2024 IEEE President Tom Coughlin celebrating the Milestone dedication in front of the Horn Antenna in Holmdel, N.J.Bala Prasanna

That put the landmark at risk of being demolished, IEEE Spectrum reported.

The local community banded together, launching a publicity campaign and an online petition to save the antenna. The township ultimately secured ownership of the horn antenna site following an extensive legal process. Last year it dedicated the site as Dr. Robert Wilson Park, honoring it as the place where “we gained a critical understanding of the birth of our universe.”

A plaque recognizing the IEEE Milestone designation is displayed in the lobby of the AT&T Labs Science and Technology Center in Middletown, N.J., which is about 7 kilometers from Crawford Hill. The plaque reads:

In 1959–1960, NASA and AT&T developed a satellite Earth station in Holmdel, N.J., including a novel tracking horn-reflector antenna, maser preamplifier, and FM demodulator. The Earth station demonstrated the first high-quality long-distance voice circuit via the Echo passive communication satellite in 1960–1961, and via the active Telstar communications satellite in 1962–1963. Experiments conducted in 1964–1965 provided the first indication of the cosmic background radiation associated with the Big Bang.

The IEEE New Jersey Coast Section and the IEEE Photonics Society sponsored the nomination.

Administered by the IEEE History Center and supported by donors, the Milestone program recognizes outstanding technical developments around the world.

Read the whole story
mrmarchant
1 day ago
reply
Share this story
Delete

Modern Dating

1 Share

The modern dating scene is brutal. That is not just my opinion. That is an established fact that I have personally verified over the course of literally minutes of research on the Internet.

In survey after survey, single women complain that the dating pool of acceptable men is pitifully small — that too many single men are immature, uninterested in meaningful relationships and afraid to even initiate a conversation with a woman, let alone make a long-term emotional commitment. For their part, single men did not participate in the surveys because they were playing video games.

Ha ha! I’m kidding! Sort of! But seriously, the dating scene is bad.

Q. How bad is it?

A. It’s so bad that single women in New York City are reportedly trying to meet eligible men by stealing their lunches.

Q. You made that up.

A. I did not. Here’s an actual headline from the New York Post:

This story quotes a woman known on TikTok as @nicoleee461, who made a TikTok video — which I urge you to watch for yourself — in which she says, while brushing her hair:

Guys, the dating scene is getting so bad in New York City that I am seeing on TikTok, there are girls going into midtown during the week and stealing finance bros’ salads, for lunch, and then looking their name up from the salad order on LinkedIn, and then messaging them through there and being like, “Hey, so sorry, grabbed your salad, like, let me just make it up to you and buy you a new one.” And that’s how they’re, like, sliding in, which, like honestly, smart, why are we stealing men’s salads? Like, that’s... why can’t they just come up to us in a bar? Like why is it getting to this point? Men, just please step up, or your salad’s gonna f**king get taken, your lunch is gonna get taken every week. Like I’m seeing girls get so creative these days, like they’re making bracelets with their phone numbers on them and giving them to you guys at the bars... all just different ways to try to talk to you guys ‘cause you guys don’t come up to us....

In short, @nicoleee461 is issuing this chilling ultimatum on behalf of single women, to single men: TALK TO US OR, LIKE, LOSE YOUR SALAD.

Of course many single men would respond by briefly pausing their video games and saying: “Oh really, @nicoleee461? If I approached you in a bar, you’d probably reject me for being unattractive, or too short, or not rich enough. Also I don’t even LIKE salad.”

These single men have a valid point, despite the fact that I made them up. Dating is rough for men, too, because traditionally men are expected to make the first move, which can — I speak from bitter experience — lead to humiliation. This is not true just for human males; this is true throughout the animal kingdom, as evidenced by this headline:

This story concerns researchers who studied the mating behaviors of the European common frog and found that female frogs employ a variety of strategies to avoid males who want to mate with them, including pretending to be dead. On one hand, this is understandable. I myself would do pretty much anything to avoid mating with a frog. But on the other hand, think how this strategy could impact a sensitive male frog, whom we will call Brian.

Let’s say Brian has a crush on a female frog, whom we will call Trixie. Let’s say Brian finally works up the courage to attempt to mate with Trixie, only to discover that she is dead. Brian is of course disappointed, but he doesn’t view it as a reflection on himself... until a short while later, when he sees Trixie, who it turns out is very much alive, getting it on with Raoul. Who Brian thought was his best friend.

Brian is not going to be the same frog after that. None of us would be. And yet he’s supposed to just shake off this humiliation and find the nerve to hop up to @nicoleee461 in a bar? I don’t think so.

And humiliation isn’t even the worst fate that can befall males who attempt to initiate dates in the animal kingdom. Do you know what male praying mantises have to do to have sex? According to Google AI, this is the procedure:

1. A male mantis cautiously approaches the female, often using a specific mating dance.

2. The female may bite off the male’s head at some point during the courtship, copulation, or shortly after.

3. Despite being decapitated, the male’s body can continue to mate because the nerve center that controls the mating movements is located in the abdomen, not the head.

4. In fact, decapitation may even increase the male’s copulatory vigor, leading to a greater likelihood of successful sperm transfer.

5. When the mating sequence is complete, the female steals the male’s salad.

No, I made up Step 5. But Steps 1-4 are absolutely real. For male praying mantises, the price of having sex is getting decapitated, and even after THAT happens they’re supposed to keep right on having sex. Is it any wonder that so many of them turn to video games?

My point is, the dating scene is rough for all of the major sexes. So is there any hope for single people? To answer that question, we turn to a story published in April by Michigan Live, headlined:

This story, written by Garret Ellison, concerns a Michigan man named Mitchell O’Brien who went for a walk on the shore of Lake Michigan with a co-worker, Breanne Sika, whom he was “kinda-sorta” dating. They were walking by the water when O’Brien stepped into quicksand and quickly sank to his waist. The story quotes him as saying “Man, I was stuck, stuck — like, my left leg, I couldn’t move it. It’s like there was something holding it underground. It was crazy how hard it was there.”

Mitchell O’Brien

He struggled to get out for 15 minutes, but could not, so he and Breanne both called 911. And that’s when the story, according to Michigan Live, got romantic:

“...we both get through at the same time,” he said. “And I just go, ‘I think my girlfriend’s trying to call, too.’ And she, at the same time, about 20 feet away, says, ‘my boyfriend is stuck in the sand.’”

At that point, he said, they became a couple. “That was literally the first time we defined our relationship. It happened with two separate 911 operators at the same time.”

Yes! Quicksand brought them together! Aw.

To me this story was like a real-world Hallmark-movie-style rom-com, a shining example of how you never know when, or how, you’ll find romance. In a vast dark sea of dating pessimism, this story was a bright lighthouse beam of hope.

So I phoned Mitchell O’Brien and asked him for permission to use the photo of him stuck in the sand. He said sure.

“But there’s one thing you should know,” he added. “Breanne and I are no longer together.”

Oh.

I decided to include this story anyway, for two reasons:

First, even though it didn’t work out this time, Mitchell told me he hasn’t given up hope. “I still do believe you can find love in crazy ways,” he said.

Second, if you’re a single person, and you’re on any dating apps, and your profile states that you enjoy long romantic walks on the beach, you might want to revise that section.

And now it’s time for you lovely paying subscribers to weigh in.

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

Read the whole story
mrmarchant
1 day ago
reply
Share this story
Delete
Next Page of Stories