Coffee Break: Jada Flats
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I forgot one of the best parts of Prime Day — you can also get a lot of good deals at ShopBop if you link your Prime account. There are a lot of pieces on 25% off, including a lot of Freda Salvador shoes. Readers have sung the praises of their shoes (and especially their boots) as beingcomfortable and “more cool than trendy” so they last a few years.
I can definitely see what they mean — the shoes all have a cool girl vibe more than someone just blindly following trends. These ballet flats are a woven suede and I can see them being incredibly comfortable.
The shoes were $368, but with the code they come down to $296 after you link your accounts and use the code. (If you don't first link your account it will say the shoes are excluded from the promo.) (Oooh, also love this Staud bag, which comes down to $183 with the code.)
Other good brands I'm seeing in the ShopBop/Prime sale: A.L.C., Aeyde, Alex Mill, Alice & Olivia, Anine Bing, Barefoot Dreams, Beyond Yoga, Birkenstock, Black Halo, Clare V., Cult Gaia, Farm Rio, Ferragamo, Frank & Eileen, Jenni Kayne, La Ligne, Marine Layer, Nili Lotan, Printfresh (!), rag & bone, RAILS, STAUD, Stuart Weitzman, Theory, TWP, Veronica Beard, Vince, White & Warren, Xirena, and Z-Supply
(Psst: here's our full roundup of what to get in the Amazon Prime sales!)
Sales of note for 6/25:
- Amazon Prime Day has started! You can check out our roundup here… Also don't forget that sister site Shopbop is offering 25% off a lot of great brands if you link your Prime account, including brands like A.L.C., Aeyde, Alex Mill, Alice & Olivia, Anine Bing, Barefoot Dreams, Beyond Yoga, Birkenstock, Black Halo, Clare V., Cult Gaia, Farm Rio, Ferragamo, Frank & Eileen, Jenni Kayne, La Ligne, Marine Layer, Nili Lotan, Printfresh (!), rag & bone, RAILS, STAUD, Stuart Weitzman, Theory, TWP, Veronica Beard, Vince, White & Warren, Xirena, and Z-Supply
- Nordstrom – 25% off clearance! Nice selection of Vince, Veronica Beard, Boss, Theory, Beyond Yoga, and Zella
- Another Tomorrow – Seasonal sale, 50% off select styles
- Ann Taylor – 25% off new arrivals! Readers love this blouse and I always love the variety of colors/textures for this jacket (it's a great separate)
- Athleta – 30-60%off reader favorites like Brookyn and Endless pants, and the Pranayama wrap is marked down to $55
- AYR – Ooh, good sale section — but lots on final sale. Readers love (LOVE) these comfy work pants and these jeans.
- Bare Necessities – Semi-annual sale, up to 70% off, plus get an additional 40% off clearance swim. Readers have sung the praises of these cooling pajamas and their bra-sized swimwear
- Boden – Summer sale, up to 50% off
- Evereve – 20% off dresses!
- J.Crew – Extra 15% off your purchase (on top of up to 50% off select styles)
- J.Crew Factory – Extra 60% off clearance – readers love their schoolboy blazers and sweaters, and they have a great selection of summer suiting in the sale. Ooh, and these scallop-trim t-shirts have major Boden vibes.
- Jenni Kayne – Semi-annual warehouse sale
- M.M.LaFleur – Archive sale! (Try code CORPORETTE15 for 15% off on other items)
- Nordstrom Rack – Clearance, new arrivals up to 75% off! Nice selection of Vince, Veronica Beard, Reiss and Rag & Bone, a ton of affordable work dresses from Calvin Klein, Maggy London, Eliza J, and Donna Morgan
- Ruti – Semi-annual sale, up to 70% off!
- Splendid – Up to 60% off women's sale!
- Talbots – 6/25: Flash sale, all markdowns 60% off two or more, 50% off one, and 40% off the rest of your purchase
I did something mildly selfish and I am gleeful! DH and I are both WFH today, so I made tacos for lunch, there wasn’t enough avocado for both of us so I took it! No avocado for you if you didn’t put in the labor.
I hope it was delicious. And so cold.
If you don’t make the taco, you don’t get the avocado.
Hahaha, I love this. As I tell my husband when I eat all the sour cream “You don’t even LIKE sour cream” (untrue statement)
Explain to me like I am 5:
When I read that a good automation can be better than AI, what do you use to create that automation? I am used to powerpoint mostly, but open to try to use non-AI that I can be in charge of programming how I want (vs checking behind AI for hallucinations).
It entirely depends what you need to do, sometimes it’s power BI, sometimes it’s code, there’s lots of different options depending on the task.
This depends on what you are you looking to do. Could be something like a Slide Master in PowerPoint so you don’t have to format from scratch, or PowerBI to importing data from some other platform, or a mail merge for sending the final version to a predetermined group, etc.
Totally depends on the task. Macros in MS Word, or even just AutoHotKey for typing are some common ones.
Programmer here! As people have said, it’s entirely dependent on what you’re trying to automate. I mostly use shell scripts and Python scripts for my computer automation stuff, but that’s specific to my use cases.
An example of something I automated that people may be using AI for now – I needed to write documentation. I have XML files that define the structure, but people don’t read XML easily. So I use a python script to extract the information from the XML and put it into a human-readable document. I needed to explain in the script exactly how the document should be structured and draw the lines of “XML says X, put it in Y place in the document” and that means that there’s no AI guessing at what is meant or intended.
Lots of good suggestions depending on what exactly you need, and using ai to write basic code to automate a task is also a valid option. The important thing is to review the code (like you would review anything else produced by AI), and to thoroughly test that the automation runs exactly like you wanted.
It’s the difference between having a recurring delivery carried up ten flights of stairs for months by capricious interns vs having an intern custom build an elevator where you need one. Using the intern each time will be a waste of resources and they will always need strong oversight to not go off the rails. But overseeing them for a limited time and getting a working elevator can be useful.
I think we have a few teachers/teacher spouses here, so please talk me down if this is a terrible idea.
I am in my late 40s and have hated my career, not just my current job but the actual job function, for years. Now federal funding cuts and shifting priorities from private donors have decimated the field. All of our competitors have downsized, and the signs point to layoffs at my org very soon. I am currently searching for a job where I can apply my technical skills in a different subject matter area, but it’s a long shot in this market and I just don’t want to do this any more.
Before I went back to grad school, I had a side job as a tutor for several years. I enjoyed it and was really quite good at it. My specialty was tweens who were scared of math. At many points since then I have contemplated chucking it all and becoming a teacher, either upper elementary or a high school subject related either to my bachelor’s degree or to one of my graduate degrees. My husband and I have run the numbers, and at this point we could actually afford for me to take the substantial pay cut. I can imagine myself being happy, or at least much less miserable, teaching to age 65 than continuing in my current job for that long. Having summers off would also make it a lot easier for me to deal with the fact that my husband will retire before I do (he is five years older).
There are a couple of alternative pathways to a credential that could put me in a public school classroom immediately. A big problem is that now public school teaching in my state has become more like babysitting than teaching, teachers aren’t allowed to actually teach much of substance, and there is zero support for administration for classroom discipline. The obvious alternative is an independent school, but those all want classroom experience and don’t seem to have much turnover.
Even though it’s not peak hiring season, there are a few public school positions posted, but I expect those to be competitive. I could also try to get on the sub lists for public and private schools to get some classroom time and build relationships with administration at my target schools. The best bet is a teaching fellowship for new grads and career switchers at the top independent school in town that I could apply to for the 2027-2028 academic year. If I quit to take a teaching position this year or the fellowship next year, or just let myself get laid off and started subbing, I probably would never be able to go back to my old career. Is this whole idea just a grass-is-greener fantasy? Is it worth pursuing? If so, where can I bone up on classroom management, assessment, etc. in a hurry?
It depends how high stress your job is now. For anything high achieving and high pressure the grass really is greener. Kids are a-holes, but unlike the boardroom they don’t have the social prowess to be cunning. The two months off is amazing for mental health and you can really automate teaching after the first few years when youve designed solid lesson plans.
I am assuming that just the fact that I would no longer have to spend time in jails and courts would reduce the stress considerably. I’m worried that I would trade a narcissistic attorney boss for a narcissistic principal, though.
I will say that I feel physically safer visiting a jail than in a public school these days, though!
Yeah principals are really hit or miss. Some are the kindest sweetest people ever, and some have a God complex relishing in control.
I find it stressful when a lot of a school’s students are attending entirely unwillingly, so that may be a factor to consider.
My personal experience with tutoring contrasted with teaching: tutoring more often involves dedicating your time and attention to students who want to learn (or at least to ones whose parents want them to learn enough to pay for one-on-one tutoring), while teaching is a total crapshoot where you are likely to spend significant amounts of your time and energy dealing with classroom drama and behavioral issues and very little on actually teaching.
Is there any possibility of tutoring full time? I have a friend who tutors and she makes big hourly bucks. And you can do it all year.
This, especially in STEM. No pension tho
+1 – especially in higher level math – AP Calc A/B, AP stats, etc. My parents paid a retired Calc teacher $$$ (I recall $25/hr) for tutoring for calc way back in the olden days of the 90s.
What sort of student were you in high school? Most teachers and folks in higher ed were diligent students who liked and/or were good at school. Chances are you were in a school that tracked students, if you’re in your 40s, and took college prep or honors courses. You and your classmates weren’t the typical students. You never saw the disruptive kids. The kids who give not one iota of a damn (and the parents who don’t care either).
Can you work with these students so as to not disrupt everyone else’s learning? If you can handle or even enjoy the more chaotic classrooms we have today, you’ll be fine.
This is what I am worried about. My daughter hated public school because of the disciplinary issues even in her gifted, AP, and honors classes, and all of my friends who teach in public school complain about chair-throwing, elopement, etc. My friend who teaches at an independent school is very happy, though.
I’m the 2:41 poster and that’s going to vary so much from school to school. At my spouse’s school, violence is truly rare but apathy is rampant. Parents push back at any attempts to impose deadlines or any friction. The faculty is top notch but frustrated.
The worst offenders for texting during the day are parents texting their kids.
Spouse is going pen/pencil and paper only next year because of how much of a distraction Chromebooks are. I tutor, but most of the time the offers of one on one help aren’t used. The vast majority of kids who fail (or pass with Ds) fail because they just don’t do anything or turn anything in, not because they don’t understand the material.
I think it’s worth exploring, which may be a better way of reframing it. The first teaching role you take doesn’t have the be the perfect fit, it just has to be a foot in the door that lets you confirm you still enjoy teaching tweens and gives you the qualifications to move on to the next role.
On a different note, teaching is very intrinsically rewarding. My bet is you’ll still find happiness in it, even with the usual frustrations.
I can’t answer this for you, but FYI – my sibling just left a lucrative job that was unsatisfying and went back to teaching. He loves it. He also teaches math, and taught math early in his career. He left when he was burned out from discipline issues, school politics and testing, and honestly unsafe work conditions.
His solution is he teaches adult learners at the community college level, focusing on remedial teaching and even some GED classes run by the city, including some in Spanish (he is fluent). The pay is horrendous. But he finds it extremely gratifying, and the impact he has on his students is huge. There are never discipline issues, and students are lovely and grateful and mostly immigrants of all types/ages/backgrounds. He will continue this long into retirement, I suspect.
It is so sad to me that our tax dollars are being wasted on invading foreign countries and paying companies not to build windfarms and building more shrines to Trump. Yet we invest almost nothing into teaching our kids who don’t finish high school or our immigrants (and US graduates!) who need remedial teaching. Investing in education is invaluable, and yet we continue to fail.
Everyone I know who retired to teach community college mathematics loves it.
Having an educated populace is bad for fascists, though, so this is a feature and not a bug.
This is what I’d suggest, you don’t need a PhD either
Read the teacher subr*ddit for a while. Kids and parents suck these days and educators are constantly under attack. This is a grass-is-greener fantasy for sure.
+1
I would not want to be a teacher today. It sounds like absolute hell.
I’m a former teacher turned administrator and that subreddit is filled with burned out trolls who seem to hate kids and think every last parent is a lazy idiot. Take their complaints with a boulder of salt! I work with lots of wonderful teachers who love their job (even if it can be really tiring!).
School can still be hell with good teachers (certainly for students, but probably for wonderful teachers too).
I think it’s easier to get in the door at private schools than you are making it sound if you network a little. They’re communities, but if you meet people and make it known that you’re interested and available, opportunities will eventually arise. But you want to be somewhere with low turnover ultimately.
+1 private schools like pedigrees, it’s easy to get in if you schmooze and have a cool resume. My BIL is an ex c-suite employee and managed to parachute himself into a principal position at a private school because his prior career was fancy.
This. Private schools do in-house remedial math and tutoring and may bring you on full-time just for that. I would not teach in most other schools and I also love math, especially algebra and geometry (where kids start struggling and decide they hate math). I had such a gifted teacher in middle school.
To be bl*nt, yes, I think it’s a fantasy. I tutored too, and was good at it, but I’m under no illusions I would be a good K-12 teacher. The skills involved for working with kids one-on-one are so different than the skills involved in managing a classroom. We love our public schools and our teachers have not been merely baby-sitting (my kid is in elementary, not high school, so it may be different) but the skillset is very different and it takes a certain personality type.
Tutoring can be quite lucrative. Possibly even more lucrative than teaching, depending on the speciality and advanced math is a lucrative one. Is there any possibility of tutoring full-time instead?
Or look into adjunct/teaching professor jobs at a college? I know it’s stereotypically not a good job, but depending on field it can be decently lucrative with a pretty cushy lifestyle. My local flagship State U has “teaching professors” in CS who only have master’s degrees, not PhDs, and they make six figures teaching several large lectures each semester, with TAs to do all the grading and summers off. Doesn’t seem like a bad gig to me. Humanities is a different story, but it sounds like you have a solid STEM background.
I teach in an independent school as a second career and I love it. I would not teach in a public school, and obviously independent schools are hit or miss as well. I’m back at my alma mater, so I knew what I was getting myself into.
At my school I’d say about half of the upper school teachers, as well as a smattering of middle and lower school teachers, are second career teachers who are now teaching about the fields they used to work in.
I, of course, still have frustrations about the administration, students, and parents from time to time, but it’s manageable. In addition to having a no tolerance policy on violence and stricter behavior standards, we have fewer apathetic students as parents aren’t willing to pay tuition for students who don’t do the work. Now, do I think kids are getting away with murder (both their behavior and the quality of work/rigor) when compared to my time at this school? 100 percent! In talking with veteran teachers, it is a very, very different school than the one I attended! But, overall I am happy!
i know this question gets asked daily in various forms but… france and spain for 10 days in august. i’m middle aged, middle sized. planning on packing a variety of quince and uniqlo linen and a full old navy cotton dresses and full pants and tops. Definitely bringing one real pair of real sneakers. for a second pair of day to day shoes– birkenstocks or cute sneakers? question is more fashion that comfort….
You will look like a tourist no matter what. But sneakers are more fashionable than Birks.
If the Birkenstocks are broken in, and your feet are used to them (like you’re wearing them all the time right now), bring the Birkenstocks. If not, DO NOT buy and bring new ones with you. The straps (of any sandals, really) will chew up the tops of your feet and you will be miserable. If that’s the situation bring the cute sneakers or a pair of flats. I prefer the flats because they pack down “flat”. I wear the sneakers for touring and switch to the flats for après-tour.
I would bring two pairs of comfortable sneakers and one pair of sandals for dinners etc. You’re going to want to alternate what shoes you’re wearing if you’re doing a lot of walking so your feet don’t get too tired.
I’d truly forget about fashion and make this is a comfort choice, unless you already own both pair and know that you can walk and stand in both of them for hours at a time with the equal level of foot fatigue / pain.
cute sneakers. Then bring a pair of pretty flats or sandals for dinners.
+1 – depending on where you’re going in France or Spain I might try to buy a pair of pretty leather sandals there by locals.
How do you give feedback to a boss? I work as the #2 at a small non-profit, am coming up on a year here. I get occasional, positive feedback from my boss, especially about new ideas or new initiatives I’ve started. I think I’d say that there was a honeymood period for both of us where he thought I was great and vice versa.
He is an extremely mercurial person though, and has…not mood swings, but opinion swings. So, one day a program we have is great and the person who runs it needs to be running more things; a few months later, he wants to cut it completely and says its not core to our mission. I am a pretty loyal soldier and so I find this really distressing because I think I see a direction and head us one way and then get caught up short. Another example: I have a mid-year review coming up and I gave myself some “meets expectations” and some “exceeds,” and he asked me to go back and provide more information about why I thought I was exceeding in those categories. Then today he stopped me in the hall (much better mood today, I’d say) and told me I didn’t need to do that. I am going to be extremely interested to hear his review of me and I think that will provide some clarity, but I would love this community’s take on his behavior as well as if there’s anything I can do to constructively address it (I don’t think I can quite say — well you are generally pretty nice and great but occasionally sort of a sociopath). And, anything I can do to not let it bother me so much. I like this job, like the organization, feel like its a good fit for my abilities, and am old enough in my career to know that each job brings its challenges.
Where do the changes come from? What does the board think? Get more plugged into the organization and how decisions are made
I’m really not sure. It’s unclear how decisions are made here and how much others are weighing in on things outside of my view.
I can definitely chat more with the board, that is for sure.
What do you (concretely) want him to do with your feedback? If there’s something simple or concrete that he could do, then you could ask for that. But otherwise, it sounds like you want his personality or habits of a lifetime to be different. My instinct says that someone in a position of power is never going to moderate their personality/behavior at that level unless (painful) circumstances force them to do it. This kind of fundamental change is . . . hard.
Yes! But he is not adverse to personal growth and welcomes feedback. And for my sake, I think it’s worth saying something just to have said it?
Is this behavior of his well-known in the organization, and is he by any chance the founder? If so, you may have to resign yourself to dealing with it or knowing that at some point it may get so bad you can’t handle it anymore and you need to move on.
For your first example, I would ask Boss something neutral like ‘oh, this feels like a change in direction from October, when we were planning to expand Jane’s role. Did something change behind the scenes?’ to ferret out the context.
I can definitely do that, thank you. Other times, it’s sort of just been that he’s changed his mind? Which is fine I guess but…lots of whiplash.