falling in love with someone is problematic because then you are promoting queerbaiting (showing romantic interest without any explicit moments) and forcing the other one into a corner before considering their boundaries. it's also problematic to daydream about them being in love with you because that's rpf
Do you ever wonder what happened to the weird girl from your middle school?
hi im dj, im a disabled transbi aboriginal australian and i am genuinely losing my goddamn mind.
centrelink is still cutting my payments and im not eligible for student support or any further income supplements and i'm genuinely not making enough at work to get by, i cant pick up more shifts and i can barely manage the job i have let alone get another.
i need help like really badly paying for food, transport (its too cold for me to walk to and from work now especially with my arthritis) and medical expenses (especially therapy as im dealing with trauma from recent family issues and resurfaced memories)
i genuinely appreciate any and all assistance i get. please dont tag this with anything.
hello. i need to pay for food, transport and my new medication now that i finally have a (preliminary) fibro diagnosis. any help is appreciated. ily
me when i'm so normal
how dare you use german words at me
Like??? They've been stalking you for 3 years?? Is that not more embarrassing??? People will just go online and admit they have no life.
A shrinking number of kids are reading widely and voraciously for fun.
The ubiquity and allure of screens surely play a large part in this—most American children have smartphones by the age of 11—as does learning loss during the pandemic. But this isn’t the whole story. A survey just before the pandemic by the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that the percentages of 9- and 13-year-olds who said they read daily for fun had dropped by double digits since 1984. I recently spoke with educators and librarians about this trend, and they gave many explanations, but one of the most compelling—and depressing—is rooted in how our education system teaches kids to relate to books.
What I remember most about reading in childhood was falling in love with characters and stories; I adored Judy Blume’s Margaret and Beverly Cleary’s Ralph S. Mouse. In New York, where I was in public elementary school in the early ’80s, we did have state assessments that tested reading level and comprehension, but the focus was on reading as many books as possible and engaging emotionally with them as a way to develop the requisite skills. Now the focus on reading analytically seems to be squashing that organic enjoyment. Critical reading is an important skill, especially for a generation bombarded with information, much of it unreliable or deceptive. But this hyperfocus on analysis comes at a steep price: The love of books and storytelling is being lost.
This disregard for story starts as early as elementary school. Take this requirement from the third-grade English-language-arts Common Core standard, used widely across the U.S.: “Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, distinguishing literal from nonliteral language.” There is a fun, easy way to introduce this concept: reading Peggy Parish’s classic, Amelia Bedelia, in which the eponymous maid follows commands such as “Draw the drapes when the sun comes in” by drawing a picture of the curtains. But here’s how one educator experienced in writing Common Core–aligned curricula proposes this be taught: First, teachers introduce the concepts of nonliteral and figurative language. Then, kids read a single paragraph from Amelia Bedelia and answer written questions.
For anyone who knows children, this is the opposite of engaging: The best way to present an abstract idea to kids is by hooking them on a story. “Nonliteral language” becomes a whole lot more interesting and comprehensible, especially to an 8-year-old, when they’ve gotten to laugh at Amelia’s antics first. The process of meeting a character and following them through a series of conflicts is the fun part of reading. Jumping into a paragraph in the middle of a book is about as appealing for most kids as cleaning their room.
But as several educators explained to me, the advent of accountability laws and policies, starting with No Child Left Behind in 2001, and accompanying high-stakes assessments based on standards, be they Common Core or similar state alternatives, has put enormous pressure on instructors to teach to these tests at the expense of best practices. Jennifer LaGarde, who has more than 20 years of experience as a public-school teacher and librarian, described how one such practice—the class read-aloud—invariably resulted in kids asking her for comparable titles. But read-alouds are now imperiled by the need to make sure that kids have mastered all the standards that await them in evaluation, an even more daunting task since the start of the pandemic. “There’s a whole generation of kids who associate reading with assessment now,” LaGarde said.
By middle school, not only is there even less time for activities such as class read-alouds, but instruction also continues to center heavily on passage analysis, said LaGarde, who taught that age group. A friend recently told me that her child’s middle-school teacher had introduced To Kill a Mockingbird to the class, explaining that they would read it over a number of months—and might not have time to finish it. “How can they not get to the end of To Kill a Mockingbird?” she wondered. I’m right there with her. You can’t teach kids to love reading if you don’t even prioritize making it to a book’s end. The reward comes from the emotional payoff of the story’s climax; kids miss out on this essential feeling if they don’t reach Atticus Finch’s powerful defense of Tom Robinson in the courtroom or never get to solve the mystery of Boo Radley.
... Young people should experience the intrinsic pleasure of taking a narrative journey, making an emotional connection with a character (including ones different from themselves), and wondering what will happen next—then finding out. This is the spell that reading casts. And, like with any magician’s trick, picking a story apart and learning how it’s done before you have experienced its wonder risks destroying the magic.
This is so terrible and miserable and the worst part is that fucking shit George Bush implemented is still tanking education 20 years later. It already made school worse for multiple generations of school kids now and we never fixed it.
autistic who goes “fun fact” and then proceeds to tell you the most gruesome unfunny thing you’ve heard all day
I think it should be illegal to make a fictional character with blue eyes, choose something else.
Next Pixar movie is going to be called Colors. It will be about different colors living in color city
wish i had a bit going where whenever i said "the prophecy" like three of my friends would repeat "the prophecy" in different tones while squinting into the distance and rubbing their chins like sages deep in thought. i would also do this for them, im a team player
happy pride month to those with ambiguous sexualities and loose morals
the alternative girl with pathetic boyfriend thing has to end
Hi, I run a small Etsy business selling replica Scott Pilgrim cosplay items. You’re personally hurting my livelihood by saying this. Think about the effect your words have on others.
Anyway adults saying “I don’t know isn’t an answer” is part of the reason I learned to lie and bluff so well.
logical-crow
Really though, what was that about? I don’t know is a valid answer. It communicates very clearly that the child cannot answer your question, and therefore maybe needs more help understanding the question/situation. Why do you try and push them to give an answer they don’t have? That stresses them out and it makes them feel like they’re being punished for not knowing something.
i thought i was the only one with an “i don’t know” problem because my parents made it seem it was the strangest and also most horrible thing in the world. i genuinely didn’t know and they got angry and that only blocked my thoughts more which meant i didn’t know the answer to anything else.
erytria
THIS ^^^
sproutnabt
Also “I don’t know” is a commonly used sentence for children with ADHD/Autism. We DON’T know why we can’t do our homework. We DON’T know why we can’t eat certain foods sometimes. We DON’T know why we forgot to do a chore. It’s really distressing when you genuinely don’t know and people think you’re just lying or indifferent
I think the university course database should have a filter to only show classes taught by extremely old people who are insane
ALSO. on the concept of funky genders. "socially unacceptable" genders or "genderweird" people i love you. transmascs who are girls i love you. transfems who are men i love you. transmascs who feel transfem and transfems who feel transmasc i love you. everyone who feels like their gender is too "weird" or "complicated" or are an "oxymoron or self-contradictory" i love you and we are all trans and good and community and perfect ok.
if i ever write something set in the united states im just going to do zero research whatsoever and make stuff up to sound cool it’s equality
the lush impenetrable jungles of massachusetts
this is probably the best take I’ve heard so far on the debate of people being told that they aren’t having enough ‘compassion’ for billionaires making bad decisions and paying the obvious consequences for it
Astronomy I-
Archaeology: it is mandatory, it is ritualic.
Fun fact about archeology!
if it's a rock and you lick it, your tongue got a little dirty.
If it's a bone, it sticks to your tongue.
Bones remember being inside a body where they could be wet all the time, and they want to return to that state.
Cheers science side of Tumblr. Never say that again though
