usbdongle:

turkish-delightful:

detached1026:

turkish-delightful:

How could you be against free college. Like if I think about student loans for more than a few minutes I think about jumping off a cliff have some pity damn

Because hundreds of thousands of people have already paid for their tuition. Should they be reimbursed? It’s not fair to the people who have already paid/ are paying for college. That’s why.

Yeah I love thinking how my kids are gonna cry and have panic attacks because of the heavy student loans they’re gonna have just because they want to go to a good school. Yeah I really want them to suffer just like I did bc yknow I paid why should they have it any easier than me?? I don’t want America to be better than I found it. Fuck future generations.

i dont think we should use cars because it’s not fair to the people who had to travel via horseback. should they be resurrected with necromancy and allowed to apply for a drivers license?  think logically here

redadhdventures:

Shout out to my Arabic teacher that looked at us yesterday mid-lesson and said, “I’m worried. You all look exhausted and depressed.”

Of we were all like, “Oh yeah we’re dead inside, you haven’t noticed?”

And he snapped shut the textbook, threw up his hands and said, “That’s not healthy! No more vocab! Time for dancing!”

And he taught us a dance from Iraq and we danced instead of doing vocab. We didn’t stop dancing until he saw all of us laughing and was satisfied that we were all feeling better. It was perhaps the coolest, most kind-hearted thing I’ve ever seen a college instructor do.

lillyrosaura:

There’s a website where you can learn ASL (American Sign Language) on your own, free and it’s a 31 Day program! The woman on there, her name is Rochelle Barlow, she runs the site and she actually is a homeschool teacher and teaches ASL. I am passing this on to some of you guys cause most of y’all on here is open-minded and curious and it is something important to learn.

I truly believe this site is helpful for some people who can not afford to going to ASL classes, or someone like me that just enjoys learning something new. This site will help with that. Once you sign up you will put in your email address and Rochelle sends you emails on tips on how to sign, gives you practice sheets, and gives you your weekly videos. And its all online. No need to paying for anything. (Unless if you want to she has something very different to this program) 

IMO and yes, this site is really amazing and is important because you never know if someone who is deaf or HOH needs help, if you end up losing your hearing ability this is something you will at least have on the back of your head, and it is just like any other language and should be taught. 

chazkuangshi:

pantheris:

deadhisoka:

blackness-by-your-side:

The sign of high quality is the fact the book was banned by the government. Trash literature NEVER EVER had any troubles with the law.

FARENHEIT 451 IS ON THE BANNED BOOKS LIST???

IT’S LITERALLY ABOUT THE SOCIETAL DANGERS OF BANNING/OUTLAWING/BURNING BOOKS

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME

That’s the reason it’s on the bloody list.

BECAUSE IT’S ABOUT HOW BANNING AND BURNING BOOKS IS WRONG.

I’m so glad my school purposely had us read every banned book they could fit into the curriculum.

systlin:

darthvcder:

darthvcder:

the fact that community colleges are seen as less valid and for “stupid” people is a result of classism and in this essay I will-

ppl in the tags saying that it’s “genuinely a lesser tier of education because people go there for trades and nursing and thats about it” are just proving that its classism. bc a) no thats absolutely not correct. a good chunk of people that go to community colleges do so to knock out their gen eds at a lower price than they’d be if they went to a four year, then transfer to a four year. and more importantly b) trade professions are not lesser than other professions that take higher degrees. people who go into things that take associates degrees are not “stupid”.

if you think ppl who are too poor to attend a four year university for all four years, or that ppl who are too poor to/don’t want to get their bachelor’s/master’s/doctorate are “stupid” then i have news for you:

thats classism, babe

My parents were both college professors, and they’ve said precisely this for years. 

pacificnorthwestdoodles:

fyrasha:

pacificnorthwestdoodles:

pacificnorthwestdoodles:

pacificnorthwestdoodles:

My mom cried as a first year teacher when she realized many of her students were food insecure. She put a snack pantry in her class and has had one ever since.

My sister cried with anger as a first year teacher because of how few of her students grew up without being exposed to violence, poverty, and neglect.

My dad didn’t cry as a first year teacher, but was convinced he was the worst teacher ever for 4 years straight. (He wasn’t)

My aunt was exhausted for the first year because her students were convinced she’d only be at their school for one year and then move to a better paying school district like all of their other new teachers. She spent the entire time teaching, actively gaining trust, and calming anxieties.

Some of these things are not technically school related, but have an impact on students in the classroom. As new teachers, my relatives got varying levels of support. New teachers need better support.

3 quit at my old job because they didn’t feel like they were getting the pay or support that was appropriate for what they were doing in the classroom. All of the teachers I have encountered pay for many of their own supplies. Many take time before or after school to check up on students they feel are at risk.

There are teachers that have students live with them or end up fostering students. My mom fostered 2 students and had another 2 live with us.

What many teachers do on the job isn’t as supported as it could be. They aren’t paid like they should.

Did I mention that a lot of the first year teachers I have worked with qualify for SNAP benefits and/or WIC? 😦

This post has 2k notes.

Re: Why Teachers Provide Snacks (at my work)

ALL of the teachers I work with at my school provide snacks to students.

We’re a Title I school. This means almost all of our students are food insecure. It’s unreasonable to expect food insecure families to provide their own snacks to school.

ALL of the teachers and many of our other staff members provide snacks for their classrooms or offices. Our counselor has snacks in her office. Our health room assistant has snacks in her office.  Our principal has snacks in his office. Our vice principal has snacks in her office. The office professionals have small snacks available as well.

Our new teachers usually can’t afford to do this, so veteran teachers and support staff often chip in.

When students DON’T have access to snacks, they get tired. Our students can’t focus. Students get irritable. They’re feeling the effects of hunger and cannot focus on their work. We see escalated behaviors because kids are hungry.

Providing food not only prevents some problems from happening, but it’s The Right Thing To Do.

Many of our students’ Only Guaranteed Meals are at school. School meals are not designed to provide a child’s only source of nutrition.  The caloric value of school lunches isn’t enough.  So—Kids get snacks with lunch.  Kids get multiple ‘breaks’ (which they think are ‘‘regular breaks’‘) for snacks.

Anyone who wants a small snack will get one.

We have a Friday Weekend Bag Program, but many families HATE THOSE.  Those snack bags come from the Thurston County Food Bank. They only contain shelf stable food since many of our families don’t have a reliable way to cook things.  Most of the families decline the bags because the Instant Noodles, Dry Granola Bars, and Vegetable Soup aren’t what they’d eat anyway.

__

A lot of the kids DO want fruit/vegetables. (Downside is if they can’t store those at home).  We have some kids who try to hoard milk. <—a problem since many kids don’t have access to reliable refrigeration at home! Our milk ‘‘collecting’‘ kids ALL don’t have reliable refrigeration since they’re in living situations that don’t have refrigerators or freezers.

We provide snacks for the kids because we need to.

My Personal Project this coming school year is connecting My School with local nonprofit Fairshare Food Share Resource. It’s a group of volunteers who harvest small amounts of fruit and vegetables and give them away.  They’re for smaller home gardeners who aren’t up for sending items directly to our food bank system due to time/health issues/etc.

The Thurston County Food Bank is expanding our school garden this year. I’m hoping that the garden will eventually be a nice Community You Pick for our students and the surrounding neighborhood.

The last big ol’ update had links. I’ll add links to this because food insecurity TICKS ME OFF. It shouldn’t be a thing. We’re fighting food insecurity at my elementary school.

All of my coworkers and all of my now-retired relatives have paid for classroom snacks/pantries With Their Own Money.

Food insecurity is a big issue in the United States.
When our kids aren’t eating enough they are tired, can’t focus, and are irritable. It’s difficult to get work done when you’re feeling the effects of hunger

I’ll post excerpts of some articles below.

Feeding the need: Expanding school lunch programs


 “Schools have always been the front line in the battle against
childhood hunger. It started with the National School Lunch Act, signed
by President Truman in 1946, which gave federal money to states to fund
school lunches.

Today more than 30 million kids benefit. And yet,
by some estimates at least one in six still doesn’t know where the next
meal is coming from.

“School
lunch is no longer this Brady Bunch convenience; it is a soup kitchen,”
said Jennifer Ramo, of the New Mexico anti-poverty group Appleseed.

“It
is a place where kids who haven’t eaten at night or haven’t eaten that
weekend, go to get basic nutrition so they can function. I think
we just have no idea how big the problem is and how many children are
suffering. And the best thing to do is just must make sure they’re fed.”

Growing Hunger in Schools is a Growing Problem (2012)

“What do parents tell their kids on the first day of school – stay
out of trouble, do your homework, and listen to your teachers,” Nelson
said.

“That’s our message today: listen to your teachers. What are they
telling us? Hunger needs to be a national priority.”

One in five children struggle with hunger nationwide and six out of
ten teachers report students regularly coming to school hungry.  According to 80 percent of those teachers, the problem is only getting worse.

Educators realize the toll hunger takes on students. Nine in ten
teachers consider breakfast to be “extremely important” to academic
achievement. Fifty-three percent of teachers spend an average $26 of
their own money each month providing snacks for their students.”

Reading, writing and hunger: More than 13 million kids in this country go to school hungry

“There
is tremendous stigma of children going into a cafeteria before the
bell,” said McAuliffe, “whereas with the alternative breakfast model, it
normalizes it, creates community in the classroom around a meal, and
starts the day off strong.”

Underscoring the crucial impact a
healthy breakfast can have, a 2013 study done by Deloitte for No Kid
Hungry found that kids who have regular access to breakfast score 17.5
percent higher on standardized math tests

.Breakfast and lunch
programs in schools are making great strides in attacking childhood
hunger, but a huge gap remains. According to No Kid Hungry, a quarter of
all low-income parents worry their kids don’t have enough to eat
between school lunch and breakfast the next day; and three out of four
public school teachers say students regularly come to school hungry.

Increasingly, advocates are focusing on programs that ensure kids have
enough to eat when they are not in school, and after school and summer
meal programs are on the rise.”

Yep. My school is poor enough that it has all the kids on free breakfast and lunch, and nearly every teacher has a box of protein bars or fruit snacks or something to give to hungry kids in their classroom. We all buy them with our own money. How fucked are we as a society that this is pretty much normal at all the poorer schools?

A lot of our school funding is through property taxes. Low income areas have lower taxes which means lower funding for their neighborhood schools. It sucks.

Schools in high poverty areas are Title I schools. Almost every school in my district is Title I.

ALL public schools should be properly funded and NO ONE should be food insecure. (my 2 cents)

Further reading for anyone interested:

Why America’s Schools Have A Money Problem  

Is It Time to Stop Funding Schools With Local Property Taxes?

School Funding Inequality Makes Education ‘Separate And Unequal,’ Arne Duncan Says

Schools with greater than 40% of families considered low-income are qualified to apply funding to school-wide programming 

Federal Title I Funding for Students who Struggle with Literacy

Title I: Rich School Districts Get Millions Meant for Poor Kids

Then there’s schools that are literally falling apart:

I work at one of America’s underfunded schools. It’s falling apart

It’s Not Just Freezing Classrooms in Baltimore. America’s Schools Are Physically Falling Apart

Detroit teachers fed up with shoddy school conditions

Leaking sewage, splintering walls: Parents complain Wake County school is falling apart

Without State Support, Michigan’s Schools Will Continue to Crumble

We’re dealing with students and families that are food insecure:

KIDS IN AMERICA ARE HUNGRY

Food for Thought: How Food Insecurity Affects a Child’s Education

Schools becoming the ‘last frontier’ for hungry kids

This is why classes need library instruction

tikkunolamorgtfo:

librarian-amy:

okayto:

okayto:

Student: I can’t find any scholarly articles on this subject!

Me: Okay, what’s the subject?

Student: Creating a culture of sharing in west-coast technological companies.

Me: Alright, and what/where have you tried searching?

Student: I searched “creating a culture of sharing in west-coast technological companies” on the library website!

Me:

I’m still mad about this because it happens frequently. Students at all levels of education need library and research instruction–they should get it before graduating high school, they should be getting it in several different classes in college, and there should be something in grad school–seriously, there are people in my master’s program who don’t know anything besides Google.

And don’t say “they should have learned in [previous level of university education].” Do you think every person continues education within a few years of their first degree? THEY DON’T. Even if they did get a then-good introduction to research, you think nothing changed between 2008 and 2018? How about the doctoral student I met today whose last degree–and last experience with academic libraries–was in 1996? How about the guy in my master’s cohort who got his bachelor’s degree in 1987?

Because look. See that very specific topic the student wanted? There may or may not be actual scholarly articles about it. But here are a few things you can do:

  • First, zoom out. Start broad. Pick a few phrases or keywords, like “tech companies” and “culture.” See what comes up.
    • Actually, back up. First, does your library’s website search include articles, or do you have to go into a database? My library’s website searches some of our 200+ databases, but not all. And you’ll need to find (in advance search or adjustable limiters that pop up after your initial search) how to limit your search to scholarly and/or peer-reviewed articles.
  • What other keywords are related or relevant? For the search above, you could use a combination of “silicon valley,” “company/ies” or “organization/s,” “sharing,” “collaborative,” “workplace culture,” “social culture,” “organizational culture,” and those are just the ones I can come up with off the top of my head.
  • Did you find something that looks promising? Great! What kind of subjects/keywords are attached (usually to the abstract, sometimes in the description section of the online listing)? Those can give you more ideas of what to search. Does it cite any articles? Look at those! Some databases (ilu ProQuest) will also show you a selection of related/similar articles.
  • If you’re researching a very specific topic, you may not find any/many articles specifically about your subject. You may, for example, have to make do with some articles about west-coast tech companies’ work cultures, and different articles about creating sharing/collaborative environments.

That said, this student did the right thing: they tried what they knew to do, and then reached out for help.

They tried what they knew to do, and then reached out for help.

I get goddamn professors pulling this shit, there is not one single level in the academy where research literacy isn’t lacking.  

earlhamclassics:

meeras-studyblr:

itstudyblr:

answer this with any university-related advise you’d give someone who’s starting it soon

(Humanities) At the end of the semester, always ask professors what their main take aways from a course are. This way you can walk away with just brief snippets of the most important themes of the course.

One semester I took ancient political theory from the government department. It was a lot of Plato and Aristotle on top of Thucydides and tragedies. I didn’t think I would learn anything from studying the philosophers in the government department when I had studied them intensively in, well, the philosophy department.

At the end of the course we had an “optional” last day of class to get help on our papers and just chat. I had never asked a professor about takeaways before, but as the semester seemed discordant studying all these different pieces of classics at once, I decided to ask. And my professor said something like this:

By studying ancient political theory, we see in Thucydides how human motives, over all this time, are no different. Even today in political situations, humans react the same as they did during the Peloponnesian War. The philosophers foil the tragedies; there were some Greeks (namely philosophers) that are desperately seeking something outside of what is human, some ideal or some perfection or some means of living that just isn’t possible, but the Greek culture at large realizes their mortal fate, as reflected by the tragedies. The philosophers and the tragedies represent opposite sides of a spectrum regarding how to live, but in practice (in Thucydides), all men essentially act the same. And, we are still this way, even after millenia have passed.

This is probably one of the most fascinating ideas from a class that I walked away from, although the class wasn’t even in my department. I wouldn’t have ever been able to piece together something like this on my own so easily, and though I’ve forgotten most of the class (as you will forget the things you learn, too), I will never forget this.

Take a variety of classes, but more importantly make sure that you take something away from them.

Meera

Assorted advice in no particular order from a classics prof:

  • If you graduate thinking about the world the same way as when you started, something went horribly wrong [unoriginal but worth repeating]
  • USE A DAY PLANNER / CALENDAR
  • Make friends, be adventurous, try new foods
  • Eat some goddamned vegetables
  • Talk to your professors! Office hours are tools not punishments
  • College is not just a slightly harder version of high school
  • You’re not here to earn good grades you’re here to permanently improve yourself over four years
  • Proofread your papers
  • If you don’t know something ask. If you’re too embarrassed to ask during class, do it after (either in person or via email). You’re here to learn. If you knew all of this already, you wouldn’t need a professor