story time: i taught my little cousin her first longer word when she was very young. i taught her to say “tax benefits”. and to this day my aunt still doesn’t know where she got it from, but it was a hilarious sight to see a little toddler waddling around the house, wearing a big diaper, all the while yelling “TAX BENEFITS!!!!”
My parents did this with me and “nuclear disarmament”.
I taught my little brother to say “micro-surgical vasectomy reversal” (saw it on a billboard) on a road trip, and he didn’t stop saying it for literal years.
My parents taught me to chant “Get your laws off our bodies!” for a pro-choice rally when I was like four and I went to preschool and taught all the other kids the chant and led them on a mini-parade around the playground and the teachers were like ?????????? ?????????? ????????????
whenever my brother threw a tantrum as a baby my parents would chant “live free or die” until he calmed down it was fuckin weird
when i was a kid whenever we got stuck in traffic my dad would say “what the fuck?!?” in a very comic voice and i would repeat it and then he would say it with a slightly different inflection and i would repeat that too and so forth and so basically my poor mother would be stuck in standstill traffic listening to her husband and 4 yr old daughter swearing at each other without end
i’m a preschool teacher and we like to joke around using radical vocabulary with the children, the other day i overheard one kid say ‘this is my truck’ and the other one said ‘no, this truck belongs to the collective’; they all say it now
whenever anyone picks up my daughter or she goes upstairs, she announces “I ASCEND” it’s the best thing
^ Shots of both the front and back of my sign today.
Education cannot happen within an environment where the students are afraid: Guns & Learning are mutually exclusive.
You see, we don’t simply teach academics in school. School is where children learn how to interact with their peers, learn who they are as people, develop the ability to make responsible decisions, learn how to set (and achieve) positive goals, develop empathy for others, and develop the skills necessary to identify, manage and communicate their own emotions in a healthy manner.
This is the entire basis of social-emotional learning. It’s a necessary aspect of school that is directly embedded in the process of creating a community that students can flourish in. These are skills tied to a child’s self esteem, self advocacy and relationship development.
A student cannot learn if they are focused on self-preservation.
A student cannot learn if they are in an unstable, unsafe or violent environment
A student cannot learn if they cannot trust the people that they are with
I can help keep my students safe from many of the harms out there: Backpack programs, clothing drives, mediation, CPS, counselors, social workers, career training programs, job fairs, mental health services…all these things can combine together in order to get a student through whatever troubles they’re experiencing. But guns? Mass shootings? Violence across the nation? I can discuss it, I can comfort, but I can’t stop it. And that’s not a situation that any of us should be in.
I don’t know where I’m going with this – Teachers are pressured not to discuss any of these things. We’re meant to always defer to the Union for official statements and always turn questions back on the students who may try to talk to us: “What do you think? How do you feel?” This past year has been an isolating experience, trying to formulate my own thoughts and deal with the ever-increasing number of tragedies. So just seeing this march today was comforting. Knowing that others are still concerned and ready to take action makes me feel less alone.
The first hint that something might be different this time came the morning after the shootings, from a Douglas High School sophomore named Sarah Chadwick, who informed the President of the United States, via his favorite medium, in words that quickly went viral, “I don’t want your condolences you fucking piece of shit, my friends and teachers were shot.”
Their grief was raw, their rage palpable. Emma Gonzalez, a senior at Douglas, had the most searing indictment:
“The people in the government who were voted into power are lying to us. And us kids seem to be the only ones who notice and are prepared to call B.S.
“Companies, trying to make caricatures of the teen-agers nowadays, saying that all we are are self-involved and trend-obsessed and they hush us into submissions when our message doesn’t reach the ears of the nation, we are prepared to call B.S.
“Politicians who sit in their gilded House and Senate seats funded by the N.R.A., telling us nothing could ever be done to prevent this: we call B.S.
“They say that tougher gun laws do not prevent gun violence: we call B.S.”
The crowd was now joining in.
“They say a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun: we call B.S.
“They say guns are just tools, like knives, and are as dangerous as cars: we call B.S.
“They say that no laws would have been able to prevent the hundreds of senseless tragedies that occur: we call B.S.
“That us kids don’t know what we’re talking about, that we’re too young to understand how the government works.” The crowd was now in a frenzy of anger and sadness, the people around me were tearing up as they yelled, “We call B.S.”
And then, in unison, the people gathered began to chant, “Vote them out, vote them out, vote them out.”
Hi. I’m a 20-year-old French student. If you follow me, you’ve maybe seen this post I made a couple of weeks ago. I’m going to explain real quick, because it’s not the point here. Maybe you know this, but college in France is free. We are very lucky, we do realize that. In February, the Ministary of Higher Education decided to pass a law which will create selection before entering uni, start an entrance fee, and all sorts of unpleasant, expensive things. Collectively, French students have decided to stand up against this law. My university, Paul Valery in Montpellier, has been the leader of this movement. In the past two months, we have blocked the university for weeks, stopping classes and creating an alternative schedule with our own courses. It has been wonderful, and we have been heard.
Yesterday, March 22nd, was a day of National Strike decided by the unions and syndicates. Not only were the universties blocked and teachers striking, but so were a lot of people in other fields. As a consequence, the University of Law of Montpellier was legally occupied by the Paul Valery collective to instigate debates and discussions. There was a vote, which decided that one amphitheatre would be occupied during the night.
At midnight, the Dean of the University of Law was seen counting students in the lecture hall. One minute later, a group of masked men broke into the amphitheatre, armed with wooden bars, tasers, metal bars. They attacked the students who were pacifically speaking, some of them sleeping. There were high schoolers occupying the room.
They sent three girls to the hospital and hurt a dozen more. That picture is a friend, who had her skull fractured, ribs cracked, and was dragged out of the room by her friends while she was bleeding in the hallways.
Since then, we’ve learned that the Dean was the one who called the fascist group and let them in. The university personnel held the doors open while the masked men beat my friends, my fellow students, minors, into submission. As the girl was dragged out, the personnel closed the door stores on her legs and almost crushed them.
A student recognized one of the masked man as one of the University of Law’s teachers.
I spent the entire day in the streets, with hundreds of students, protesting against what happened. They sent the police against us. We peacefully went to the local senator’s office and waited hours for the Minister to take a stand. She didn’t. Only the local authorities condemned the Dean’s actions. Until a few hours ago, the only news spread was that students from my University decided to attack students from the University of Law.
Let me stress this out. The DEAN of a Univesity called a fascist group to beat up uni students and high schoolers. This morning, as I sat in front of the University of Law with almost a thousand students, there was still blood on the stairs leading to the doors.
Please share this around.
Last night, a teacher sent a girl to the hospital with a cracked skull.
wupacing 