crabtrain

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This is the magic lucky word count. Reblog for creativity juice. It might even work, who knows.

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do you have any ideas about why so many students are struggling with literacy now? I know that illiteracy and reading comprehension have been issues for years and most americans read at like a 5th grade reading level but I’m curious why it seems to be worse now (pandemic? no child left behind?)

It is everything. There’s not one answer. I could talk about this forever so instead I set a five minute timer on my phone and wrote a list of as many of the many things that are causing this on a systemic level that I could think of:

It’s parents not reading with their kids (a privilege, but some parents have that privilege to be able to do this and don’t.)

It’s youtube from birth and never being bored.

It’s phasing out phonics for sight words (memorizing without understanding sounds or meaning) in elementary schools in the early aughts.

It’s defunding public libraries that do all the community and youth outreach.

It’s NCLB and mandating standardized tests which center reading short passages as opposed to longform texts so students don’t build up the endurance or comprehension skills.

It’s NCLB preventing schools from holding students back if they lack the literacy skills to move onto the next grade because they can’t be left behind so they’re passed on.

It’s the chronic underfunding of ESL and Special Ed programs for students who need extra literacy support.

It’s the cultural devaluing of the humanities in favor of stem and business because those make more money which leads to a lot of students to completely disregard reading and writing.

It’s the learning loss from covid.

It’s covid trauma manifesting in a lot of students as learned helplessness, or an inability to “figure things out” or push through adversity to complete challenging tasks independently, especially reading difficult texts.

It’s covid normalizing cheating and copying.

It’s increasing phone use.

It’s damage to attention span exacerbated by increased phone use that leaves you without an ability to sit and be bored ever without 2-3 forms of constant stimulation.

It’s shortform video becoming the predominant form of social media content as opposed to anything text-based.

It’s starting to also be generative AI.

It’s the book bans.

what did I miss.

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A Twitter Thread from David Bowles:

[Text transcript at the end of the screenshots]

I'll let you in on a secret. I have a doctorate in education, but the field’s basically just a 100 years old. We don’t really know what we’re doing. Our scholarly understanding of how learning happens is like astronomy 2000 years ago.

Most classroom practice is astrology.

Before the late 19th century, no human society had ever attempted to formally educate the entire populace. It was either aristocracy, meritocracy, or a blend. And always male.

We’re still smack-dab in the middle of the largest experiment on children ever done.

Most teachers perpetuate the “banking” model (Freire) used on them by their teachers, who likewise inherited it from theirs, etc.

Thus the elite “Lyceum” style of instruction continues even though it’s ineffectual with most kids.

What’s worse, the key strategies we’ve discovered, driven by cognitive science & child psychology, are quite regularly dismissed by pencil-pushing, test-driven administrators. Much like Trump ignores science, the majority of principals & superintendents I’ve known flout research.

Some definitions:

Banking model --> kids are like piggy banks: empty till you fill them with knowledge that you're the expert in.

Lyceum --> originally Aristotle's school, where the sons of land-owning citizens learned through lectures and research.

Things we (scholars) DO know:

-Homework doesn't really help, especially younger kids.

-Students don't learn a thing from testing. Most teachers don't either (it's supposed to help them tweak instruction, but that rarely happens).

-Spending too much time on weak subjects HURTS.

Do you want kids to learn? Here's something we've discovered: kids learn things that matter to them, either because the knowledge and skills are "cool," or because .... they give the kids tools to liberate themselves and their communities.

Maintaining the status quo? Nope.

Kids are acutely aware of injustice and by nature rebellious against the systems of authority that keep autonomy away from them.

If you're perpetuating those systems, teachers, you've already freaking lost.

They won't be learning much from you. Except what not to become. Sure, you can wear them down. That's what happened to most of you, isn't it? You saw the hideous flaw in the world and wanted to heal it. But year after numbing year, they made you learn their dogma by rote.

And now many of you are breaking the souls of children, too.

For what?

It's all smoke and mirrors. All the carefully crafted objectives, units and exams.

WE. DON'T. KNOW. HOW. PEOPLE. LEARN.

We barely understand the physical mechanisms behind MEMORY. But we DO know kids aren't empty piggy banks. They are BRIMMING with thought.

The last and most disgusting reality? The thing I hear in classroom after freaking classroom?

Education is all about capitalism.

"You need to learn these skills to get a good job." To be a good laborer. To help the wealthy generate more wealth, while you get scraps.

THAT is why modern education is a failure.

Its basic premise is monstrous.

"Why should I learn to read, Dr. Bowles?"

Because reading is magical. It makes life worth living. And being able to read, you can decode the strategies of your oppressors & stop them w/ their own words.

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Oh my god. I need to share another story of my new friend making today. So my friends husband says, very casually, as we’re about to leave for the ren faire, “Yeah, it’s like my story about fucking a chicken.”

And of the four people present I was the only one who was shocked. The others all nodded as if to say, yes yes, we know, the chicken fucking.

So he explained, when a progressive person is analyzing a behavior they will typically use the metric, Harm/No Harm. They may not like things in the No Harm category but they wouldn’t object.

Conversely, a more conservative mindset used something like eight metrics. Authority/No Authority Moral/Not Moral, things like that.

So, he posited if you want to sound out someone’s mindset (and you’re willing to live with the repercussions) you can ask: if a man buys a dead chicken from the store, cleans it thoroughly, then fucks it, and then eats it himself…?

I listened in dawning horror, both rapt and disgusted. But into the growing pause I whispered, “No harm…” because it really has no effect on me or anyone else if a man fucks a dead chicken. I don’t like it, I think he’s a weird dude, but like. That’s his dick. But a more conservative person will hear that and object on moral grounds despite not being harmed.

It’s been haunting me all day, so please enjoy.

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The problem with commercial F/M romance is that it's written by the most heterosexual women alive and reading it you feel yourself slowly suffocating from the Gender of it all like a fish in a eutrophying lake. And what we actually need as a culture is F/M written by insane bisexuals violently allergic to heteronormativity

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I watched Suzanne Desan’s “Great Courses” lectures on the French Revolution and one of the things that had stuck with me the longest is the definition of privilege. Today we often have this idea of privilege as a sort of amorphous advantage you can have or sort of have or not have. But in pre-revolutionary France it literally meant “Private Law”, “Privi lege”.

How do they keep making later and later stages of late-capitalism

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i hate to be that guy, but the idea that gender, sex, and sexuality are ontologically pure concepts that can be rigidly defined if we simply police our language enough (our english language, because of course) is—i cannot stress this enough—a total waste of time. you may as well spend your afternoons teaching a brick how to swim

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Banging on the walls chanting "OPEN ENROLLMENT FOR ACA THRU JAN 15" like some deranged town crier. Election results aside, you have options to access healthcare as a RIGHT through the ACA. NO one can dismantle the Affordable Care Act in less than 4 years, so SIGN UP! GET YOUR CARE! USE THE SYSTEM!

You have options RIGHT NOW that will be stable thru the next year, the one after that, and I'd be shocked to see them shrink even the year after that. That means RIGHT NOW you can get signed up for next year to gain 100% covered preventative care (your annual check ups, pap smears, dental cleaning, vision check). You have the option to get checked and screened as you need, do NOT be dissuaded from exploring ACA choices. They are SOLID, LEGISLATED, and WORK BEST WHEN PEOPLE USE THEM.

I can't change most things around me, BUT I CAN tell everyone I know that THEY CAN GET LIFE SAVING CARE. THEY CAN GET PRESCRIPTIONS. THEY CAN GET PREGNANCY CARE. THEY CAN GET CANCER CARE. AND THEY WILL GET THAT CARE!!!!!!

SIGN UP BY DECEMBER 15, 2024 FOR COVERAGE TO BEGIN ON JANUARY 1, 2025. ENROLLMENT AFTER 12/15/24 WILL HAVE COVERAGE BEGINNING FEBRUARY 1, 2025.

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scurvy has got to have one of the biggest disease/treatment coolness gaps of all time. like yeah too much time at sea will afflict you with a curse where your body starts unraveling and old wounds come back to haunt you like vengeful ghosts. unless☝️you eat a lemon

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reddit is absolutely unhinged right now it has me feeling like I'M the weird one for saying don't fucking get your neighbor's family deported by ICE because one family member voted trump. actually I got hate before on *this site* for saying don't make fun of a teen girl dying in childbirth just because she was pro life so maybe some people need to grow and change as a person. it's deranged to fantasize about these things especially when you portray yourself as otherwise progressive? i'm not sure you were the one most scared of a trump presidency if you feel you can so easily leverage these policies against others without consequence anyway

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Puritanism is getting worse around the globe and conservatives and fascists will absolutely be first going harder against porn, then use that against queer people. You HAVE to realise this and oppose anti porn measures and laws, be in solidarity with sex workers, and listen to them when they call this shit out. It's going to be vitally important.

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due to systemic oppression, usamerican leftists don't currently have the political power to instate a leftist president. we do, however, have enough power to make one of two candidates lose the election. we could use this power to make the white supremacist lose to the black woman, or we could use it to make the black woman lose to the white supremacist. the obvious choice for leftists would be to prioritize making the white supremacist lose, but tumblr users have devised a loop hole, where they agitate primarily for making the black woman lose, but omit the detail about who she would be losing to. this makes their stance more palatable to people who correctly believe that having a white supremacist president would be the worst possible outcome.

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My biggest life hack: Develop a sense of the inherent and profound value of all human beings, including yourself.

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That video of Alex Hirsch reading S&P notes for Gravity Falls conveys a few things to me:

1) the U.S. entertainment industry (especially animation) is run by older conservative types who make up offensive terms and get really mad about them.

2) the people who run Disney would be the first to fall in line with a fascist regime.

3) most of the media we consume is tailor-made and watered-down to appeal to the tastes of older, deeply religious conservative audiences.

4) conservatism, not the left, is and always has been the biggest voice of censorship in American culture.

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Remember if you’re out at a store and someone says “This is a robbery” you can say “no it’s not” and then the robber will leave because theyre a robber and this is no longer a robbery .