Philadelphia: High school students walk out of class and march to City Hall to protest severe budget cuts and planned school closings, May 9, 2013.
The budget cuts are absolutely horrific. Here are some of the proposed changes:
- Schools with more than 1,000 students would no longer be required to have librarians or librarian assistants.
- Schools would no longer be required to have counselors, and counselors’ caseloads would no longer be capped.
- Teachers could be assigned to unlimited classes outside their subject area, and high school teachers could be assigned an extra class without pay. There would be no limit on amount of consecutive time taught in a school day.
- There would be no limit on class size
- The district would no longer be required to provide copy machines, or “a sufficient number of instructional materials and textbooks.”
- Counselors would no longer be guaranteed to have rooms with privacy and confidentiality, a telephone, a locked filing cabinet and a door.
There’s more here.
notice most of the posters are children of color
I just want you to notice
Okay. This isn’t even some fucking “Let’s scale back the Arts, because drawing by perspective and understanding treble scales won’t be on the SATs.” This is “Let’s not even give you fucking books, let’s not give you fucking counselors—pffft, we expect you to be on fucking welfare anyway, so why would you even need someone to advocate for you to get a college education?—and let’s let you monkeys run wild with the fucking library which we won’t fund to have anyone keep up to date or in good condition.”
This is incredibly toxic, and fuck you very much.
GUYS I’M WRITHING FROM SHEER NOSTALGIA AND EDUCATION. LEEEEEAAAAARRNIIIING!
a post about having a learning disability (namely dyscalculia) but also considerable amounts of determination (or maybe just a questionable attitude toward the near-impossible)
(featuring eatius-slobbius and super-sonicus-tastius)
i have severe dyscalculia,…
Shit, I need to know things like this for future teaching.
And here is an obvious fact: this OP is an intelligent person. Stupid people don’t analyze logically and draw illustrative comparisons. Intelligent people do. An teachers of any field need to work with multiple intelligences.
In a list of things I can do right: write papers.
Blessed be my professor, whom you need know by no other name than JSirce, who wrote this response to a paper draft I sent him for the first paper due in his Shakespeare class (this being an informal character guide and analysis using one of this critic’s interpretative guide things. Things like this are nice to justify my life choices and skills.
The problem with school is that it’s forced.
I’m thirsty for knowledge when I have the freedom to seek it myself.
I cannot express this enough.
I believe what you are looking for is called a Montessori school, where in theory students choose what they want to learn and when they want to learn it. I am not here to discount their work in contradiction to studies with results showing their favorable effects.
Though, broadly speaking on the subject of compulsory education: Here is a John Green video to put the value of that nasty schooling into perspective. It is specifically about compulsory education, titled “An open letter to students returning to school.” And in a much less intelligent point, I will ask for a show of hands from everyone who has ever had to deal with someone very ignorant, or “an idiot” who would have only been worse without compulsory education.
con.sent
verb (used without object)
1. to permit; approve; or agree.Consent is freely given approval; an agreement made between people who are sober, which is open to discussion throughout any interaction, and can be revoked at any point by either individual. Any sexual activity with a person who is unable to give consent it considered sexual violence.
MYTH: If a woman is drunk she deserves to be sexually assaulted.
FACT: Being under the influence of alcohol or drugs will impair a person’s perceptions and judgement. Getting drunk is not an invitation for non-consensual sexual activity and is never a reason for sexual violence. Both men and women have a right to drink if they choose. Without the threat of sexual assault as a punishment. Offenders are responsible for their choices; no one ever deserves to be sexually assaulted.
MYTH: If a woman agrees to a certain level of sexual interaction, she has agreed to have intercourse. Therefore, it is acceptable to force sex on a woman who is saying no because she actually means yes and is just afraid to say it.
FACT: People are capable of deciding what should happen to their own bodies. No one else has the right to assume that “no” means anything other than “no.” You have the right to change your mind at any time.
[Information adapted from - Help In Healing: A Training Manual for Advocates, 2011 edition, Maine Coalition Against Sexual Assault]
Guess whose color-coded bjectives are good? (And the teacher even said not to mind the “helps” she put on the papers, and I see no “helps” on mine!) FUCK YEAH DOING EDUCATION RIGHT!
It’s a game called “How Many Schools of Literary Criticism Can Victoria Hit In One Paragraph Not About Literary Criticism?”
Also known as Lit Crit Croquet.
Oh, what’s that? Nothing but the first draft of the first lesson plan I’ve ever written, no big deal.
Actually, it is a big deal.
And may future potential employers see this post if they potentially see my Tumblr, because if they’re going to see me curse, let them see this because I’m excited about education here!
I mean, I spent weeks worrying about this. I’ve spents two weekends just waiting on damn emails, sending in duplicate, and resorting to in-person visits, and possibly making at least one school secretary SFD with me for daring to show up at a school twice in one day because I was desperate for an opportunity to see/talk to a teacher who wouldn’t answer any emails. I missed the clinical day our Education professor gave us because she wanted us to be in the schools, and we were learning lesson plans as I was awaiting some damn initial contact from candidate No.2.
Now, I don’t blame these teachers for rejecting me! It put me in a bad place, but they both had legitimate reasons, and I respect them with full professional integrity.
But this woman! Responds to emails within 24 hours! And then within an hour and within 20 minutes! I don’t know what to do with the promptness except show enthusiasm! She didn’t just give me time blocks, but also details about the classes and student groups. Bless, bless, bless.
So, in short, Victoria gets to be in a classroom for her clinical experience, to talk to an actual teacher, and to teach and you can bet she’s gonna make it a damn fine lesson.
And while I am perfectly comfortable with future employers seeing my “I love and accept you for who you are” posts when you look at my posts tagged “self harm,” and with seeing the amount of gay on here, and even with seeing me curse up a blue streak—totally fine.
But with seeing me complain about the problem of being an Education Major? That is unacceptable. We are to be, at all times in public record, polite and appropriate as the future teachers that we are.
That is why, under the Read More, I will not launch into a diatribe regarding how the system has wronged me and how everyone but me is wrong and victimizing me. I will, however, talk about the situations.
- Your ability to memorize mostly useless things
- Your ability to regurgitate information in the way others want you to
- Your ability to understand what adults want from you and give it to them
- Your tolerance for working on tasks you don’t find useful because others want you to do them or believe them to be helpful/socially acceptable
What grades do NOT determine:
- Your intelligence
- Your creativity
- Your emotional capabilities
- Your likeliness to succeed
- Whether you’re a good person
In defense of grades: Learning to work within a structure is actually a lifelong skill. I spent a lot of time memorizing those “useless facts” in high school. When is an English Education major going to use intermediate algebra and geometry in life? As often as possible, because there is value in the information learned.
A grade is a quantitative measure of the relationship between what was expected of the student and what the student showed knowledge of.
Grades do not determine intelligence. Grasp of material can be a sign of intelligence, but is by no means the only sign of intelligence. Grades have no bearing on emotional capacity because in most classes I am familiar with, a student’s emotions are not a major part of the curriculum.
Grades are not of the devil. I have much greater anxiety with classes where I have fewer and/or more subjective grading because I cannot tell at a glance what the basic demands of me are, and where I stand after attempting to fulfil those demands.
I am at no point saying that the place of grades in a classroom is sacrosanct—the teacher must keep a realistic scope of the situation, and if his or her expectations are unrealistic the grades reflect problem teaching as much as problem learning.
So, in short, I’d like to say that grades are important within the context of the classroom, and that those “useless facts” that you intend to forget might be just a bit more useful than you’re giving them credit for. But then, what do I know?
I’m not even sorry; ARE YOU BLOGGERS FUCKING IDIOTS, or have you just not paid attention in English since Junior High because you were too busy spouting truly awful pickup lines in order to pay one damn iota of attention?
Selected criticisms:
And you see, I would be laughing so fucking hard if this was written by nerds to be needlessly cruel to have a laugh with (willful) idiots. Except this just seems to be written by idiots targeted at nerds.
A nerd pickup line requires thought. It requires understanding. It requires shared interest. I should think it requires mutual respect. And all I am getting from this post is “You are not worth understanding. Your English class if for my crude passes at other students, not for learning the material.”
Well, Ms. Lisa Bernier, if that is not what you were going for, and if you find me completely bereft of a sense of humor, and if these are somehow both funny and respectful to every other English nerd on the planet, then on that thrice-conditional I hang my apology. I apologize wholeheartedly for perceived insult, I apologize for my language, I apologize for comments made towards the entity of author which I later put myself into the position of naming, I apologize for finding no humor in what apparently every other person on the planet finds hilarious. And most of all, I’m sorry I read your article in the first place.
An English Education Major Post: Oh God, Mother…
So my Mom is in college as well right now.
She’s talking about this paper she has to turn in Tuesday, no longer than 5 pages with the bibliography, at least 6 sources.
Her current problem is that it is too long. She decided she would just write her paper, and then pick her thesis statement last once she had everything down.
SHE DECIDED TO JUST WRITE HER PAPER AND THEN PICK THE THESIS STATEMENT LAST.
How do you make sure every paragraph supports your thesis if you don’t have a thesis. How do you argue a thesis without a thesis. How do you write more than six pages of argument without having an argument. OH YEAH. YOU WRITE TOO LONG, YOU WRITE SUPERFLUOUS SENTENCES, AND YOU RAMBLE.
Guys, there are reasons we have writing processes. It’s to help you out. It’s to make it as efficient as possible. It’s so you don’t waste time writing things you don’t need to and don’t waste time revising wasted words when you could be revising words that help your paper.
Throughout my four years of college I have learned how to handle difficult assignments calmly and to not overreact when faced with a stressful situation
Actually, as someone studying to be an English teacher, I am going to encourage this as a part of the writing process. Embrace your freakouts, even put them on paper, but just make sure you fix them later on.
(And I won’t be able to use profanity in the classroom, darn it all.)
