theres one right answer and then one REALLY wrong answer :)
seriously have been thinking about this all night long. call me autistic but the fact that 90% of workplaces the point is not to get your work done and then be done doing it but to instead perform an elaborate social dance in which you find something to do even when you're done doing everything you need to do in order to show your fellow workers that you, too, are Working . because you are at Work . disgusting why cant we all agree that if there is no work immediately to be done. we just dont do anything
being a scavenger animal must be so fucking great. imagine if every time someone died a new restaurant opened up downtown.
My boss is having us all pitch in to do office work while we're understaffed for the spring season, but instead of doling out orders she asked us what responsibilities we'd like to have, enjoy having, or be comfortable doing. It means getting more hours, which I'm kind of desperate for these days.
So I said I'd do anything that involves design (making info cards for clients, designing yearbooks, cropping photos). And she said cool. Done. You get those things, I'll let you know when we need them.
Time came last week where she needed me to do 15 separate info card designs, each with it's own qr code to the gallery, unique passcode, and I had to make it look cute but readable.
It took me about 5 hours. I came up to her desk at the end of the day with a thumb drive. She asked me how they were coming.
"This is them." I handed her the usb.
"You're done already?"
"Yeah."
"How did you do them so fast?"
"You asked me to do a task that plays on my strengths and that I enjoy doing. This is what happens when you put people in roles that suit them."
"If I'd tried to do it, it would have taken three days!"
I have a degree in a design discipline that emphasizes completing a large number of nearly identical drawings very quickly, and my side hustle requires me to be my own PR team. Making a bunch of quarter-page flyers out of clip art is something I've had to do for free and yall just paid me to do it.
Onion headline: Manager is Accidentally Good at Job
Local Manager Discovers Specialization Not So Bad, Actually
im not really big on petnames, not against them, just find most of them kind of meh. but oh man. if a guy called me ‘babydoll’? i would be a mess
reblogging SPECIFICALLY for the End Note which is widely applicable
Listen I don't care how bad it gets, you're not gonna be able to drag my ass off Twitter I'm sorry I can't leave this place
Ok here's a thing or two I know about literacy and why it matters. Full disclosure, I am not a scientist, however, what I am about to say is aligned with what I have heard from scientists who study literacy (whom I have gotten in contact with because I study Swedish and English at university).
- Literacy is not a binary of literate–illiterate, it is a spectrum. Furthermore, it is not a one-dimensional spectrum either. High level literacy branches like a tree, where you can have a high degree of literacy in one regard but not in another.
- The lowest level of literacy (in writing systems that use alphabets) is called decoding. This is what a child is doing when they are sounding out the individual letters to figure out what the word is. This was the level of literacy people tended to be measuring historically: if you lived in a protestant country before public schools were the norm, your priest would be coming around and have you read a few lines out of the bible and if you could stutter through them at all, you were literate.
- The next few levels of literacy are the faster reading that most teens and adults are capable of today, reading word-by-word or in groups of words. Some people make the same mistake as people made 300 years ago about decoding with this though: just because you can read fast doesn't mean you are "fully" literate.
- Above this level, keywords like "reading strategies" start coming in. Different reading strategies are different ways of approaching a text, and mastering them is independent, so you can be good with some and bad with others. That's where the problems begin for modern-day literacy.
- A few reading strategies that most people are very good at include skim reading and a few other non-fiction strategies that tend to be very useful for working with textbooks. Students spend a lot of time in school looking things up, quickly searching for specific points of information, and getting an overview of non-foction text. They do this in almost every subject, to different amounts.
- Modern students also tend to be very good at reading very short texts, like text messages. Again, what you read a lot of you get better at reading.
- A few of the things modern students are much less good at include identifying subtext, reading longer texts, and reading fiction. A simple reason for this is that young people just read less. I'm not trying to be an old man yelling at clouds, that's just a fact. Sure, they read a lot of shorter texts online, but that's not the same type of text as a novel. A text message will only ever demand of you that you keep a couple of sentences in mind at once: a book can ask of you to consider an entire chapter or more as a single unit, which can be a huge mental exercise.
Your reading level isn't just how difficult the words you understand are. High reading level can involve very high-order mental tasks, and in my limited teaching experience, students have a very hard time with many of the things longer fiction texts entail. They aren't dumb: that's obvious from the other things they can do, but specifically when it comes to things like paying attention to a longer narrative, connecting the dots between pieces of information that were presented very far apart, etc. these kids have a really hard time: a measurably hard time compared to previous generations that read books more.
Also I'm not that old, I notice a lot of these trends in myself, too, by the way.
And I don't think it's a surprise that when people today read books, it tends to skew heavily towards YA too. I'm not here to shit on YA, I don't think teenagers are stupid for reading books marketed towards teenagers (nor do I think it's wrong to read those books even if you're not a teen anymore, a lot of people in their 20's have very similar anxieties to teenagers nowadays, we live in a society etc. etc.), however YA is not particularly demanding when it comes to noticing themes or anything else that I've mentioned. It tends to be direct, and it tends to only require the basic "word-by-word" literacy that I mentioned at the start. Your enjoyment of a YA novel will not diminish too much even if you don't care about symbolism, intertextuality, or extensive information that will only become relevant later.
I don't know what we can do about this, but I hope this was informative. And it really is disheartening to try to teach classics to a classroom of kids who don't have the tools to "get it." I hope against reason that people might start reading more, and reading more difficult stuff, in the future. I think it's a useful skill to have.
some favorite responses to my “make some noise” twitter game
the reason none of us can ever leave tumblr is because we've already evolved to having this be our only suitable habitat. we're the devils hole pupfish of people.
me and my mutuals