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I have started doing… the school run

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So cute but please tell me you tied the shoelaces later, because the tripping hazard makes me nervous.

SPOT ON PUMPKIN

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Cat are ridiculous.

Cats That Don’t Care About Your Personal Space

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Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking of yourself less.

C.S. Lewis (via staypozitive)

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*bows lowly* My Liege, can you tell another near-death experience that happened in theater?

I’m starting to think you guys want me to die. 

Anyway. 

Once upon a time I was in the world’s worst production of Hamlet. I’m not exaggerating–our Hamlet was a ginger who didn’t know his lines, our Gertrude had food poisoning, our Ophelia had never been in a play before, our ghost missed his entrance more than once and I had to ad-lib blank verse until he came back on, and in the midst of all this clowning around, I was the world’s most exasperated Horatio.  

Now, for those of you who aren’t familiar with the play, there’s a scene where Hamlet and Horatio talk to a friendly gravedigger, who makes a lot of jokes and just generally alleviates the uninterrupted sense of suffocating tragedy–and in our case, suffocating fucking boredom–that is Hamlet. And for some reason we’d blocked out this like slapstick Three Stooges bit where the gravedigger tosses the Yorick skull to Hamlet, who talks to it for a bit like an absolute fucking loon, and then tosses it to me to catch and hold until the end of the scene because, in case you haven’t noticed, HORATIO IS HAMLET’S BITCH, EVEN WHEN HAMLET DOESN’T KNOW HIS FUCKING LINES AND HORATIO HAS TO BE ONSTAGE FOR AN EXTRA FIVE SCENES TO MOUTH THEM TO HIM WHEN HE FUCKING FORGETS. WHY FOR THE LOVE OF RICHARD BURBAGE DIDN’T THEY JUST MAKE ME HAMLET???

But, uh, that’s beside the point.

Anywhoo, I’m standing around like a piece of fucking furniture like Horatio usually does while Hamlet is chatting up the gravedigger, and because this dude is a comedian at heart (BAD CASTING CAN YOU SAY BAD CASTING) he decides to change the blocking. He catches the skull, kisses it smack on the teeth, says, “Alas, poor Yorick, I knew thee well!” and just fucking flings that motherfucker over his head. Now, what you have to know for the rest of this to make sense is that we borrowed this skull from the fucking anatomy school at a local university and if we broke it we owed them like $500, and let me tell you, this whole damn company wasn’t WORTH $500. So, in retrospect, giving Hamlet free reign to toss the skull all over the fucking stage just maybe wasn’t the most genius plan, o Herr Directrix. But nobody ever listens to Horatio. 

So Hamlet just fucking chucks this very valuable skull over his head and I’m completely unprepared for it because this is not where he usually throws it (probably because he forgot the rest of his goddamn lines) so I hurl myself across the stage and fall and slide six feet on my knees like I’m Zac fucking Efron in High School Musical 5: Disney Destroys Shakespeare, BUT YOU HAD BETTER BELIEVE I CAUGHT THAT GODDAMN SKULL BEFORE IT HIT THE FLOOR. WHAM Yorick lands smack in my outstretched hands and I’m relieved for all of two seconds before I realize oh right, human skulls have fucking TEETH, which sank straight into my palm when this thing fell from the sky like a ballistic missile, and I am now bleeding everywhere. (There’s a hand-injury theme happening this week apparently.) And it all happened so fast that Hamlet hasn’t even fucking noticed, because Hamlet is a self-centered twat, so he’s still talking with the gravedigger and I’m just staring at the friggin’ skull in my hands like Wtf Yorick you fucking BIT me–and the audience is beside itself because this is a travesty tragedy and they don’t even know what to laugh at.

But I still have lines, I can’t leave the stage, so for the rest of the scene I’m just kind of sitting on the floor, holding a skull, casually bleeding all over it, waiting for Hamlet for finish his fucking tea party so I can wash my hands and soak poor Yorick in bleach so the anatomy school doesn’t have to deal with any actual human anatomy (i.e., my blood). But this is a long-ass scene, so I had to get up and stand in the back for the whole fucking funeral while Hamlet and Laertes are fighting over who loves Ophelia more (like it matters now, you morons, bitch be DEAD). Eventually Hamlet has his tantrum and storms out and everyone turns around and looks at me like they’ve forgotten I’m there, because everyone always forgets Horatio is there until Hamlet has a tantrum, and I’m standing there, looking sketchy as hell, still clutching a fucking skill with blood all over my hands. And Claudio gets this really confused look on his face and just goes, “Horatio…?”

And I swear, it took every ounce of my self control not to just yell, “That’s right, ‘twas I that killed Ophelia! Plot twist, motherfuckers!” and spike Yorick on the floor and swan the fuck offstage. 

And that is the story of the time Hamlet sucked and Yorick almost bit my fingers off.

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Flower Power: Pit Bulls of the Revolution

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A student blows up at a teacher, drops the F-bomb. The usual approach at Lincoln – and, safe to say, at most high schools in this country – is automatic suspension. Instead, Sporleder sits the kid down and says quietly: “Wow. Are you OK? This doesn’t sound like you. What’s going on?” He gets even more specific: “You really looked stressed. On a scale of 1-10, where are you with your anger?” The kid was ready. Ready, man! For an anger blast to his face….”How could you do that?” “What’s wrong with you?”…and for the big boot out of school. But he was NOT ready for kindness. The armor-plated defenses melt like ice under a blowtorch and the words pour out: “My dad’s an alcoholic. He’s promised me things my whole life and never keeps those promises.” The waterfall of words that go deep into his home life, which is no piece of breeze, end with this sentence: “I shouldn’t have blown up at the teacher.” Whoa.

Lincoln High School in Walla Walla, WA, tries new approach to school discipline — suspensions drop 85% (via mchotdog)

what a radical idea yo

(via matthewdgold)

Bam. Kids “misbehave” for actual, real, valid reasons. And have feelings.

(via amydentata)

For fuck’s sake, it takes the people in charge so long to figure shit like this out! Good for Lincoln High!

(via psychetimelapse)

This needs to be the policy EVERYWHERE…

(via 3dela)

Preach.

(via butchdragon)

This is also why teachers need more resources, smaller class sizes, more adults in the classroom.

Something like this happened when I was student teaching in a third grade classroom. During a writing assignment, a boy was not working, muttering swear words at his desk, banging things. Instead of telling him to stop being disruptive or putting his name on the board, I came close and crouched down and said I could see he was feeling upset and asked what was wrong. It turned out he had forgotten his rough draft (they were supposed to be copying their edited rough drafts into a final draft) and he didn’t know what to do now and he figured he was going to get a zero and fail the assignment and be in trouble.

I suggested he could do his best to rewrite his one-page story from memory. Just write as much as you can, give me your best effort and I’ll accept it as your assignment. Well, he was SO HAPPY that he wasn’t just going to straight-up fail that he actually did a great job remembering what his story had been about and rewriting it as best he could. I know this isn’t as big an issue as the alcoholic father, but it’s still a case of finding the cause of the problem vs. punishing the symptom.

But here’s the thing: I couldn’t have done that if I hadn’t been a student teacher in that room, if the regular teacher hadn’t been there to keep the rest of the class on task and quiet. One teacher in a room of thirty kids isn’t always *able* to give that kind of individual attention. 

Teachers get so much crap for what they do and don’t do, for the choices they make with the resources they have. Criticism is always necessary, but it needs to be followed up with support. 

(via vixyish)

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Priyanka Chopra Rehabilitated An Entire Slum As Part Of Modi’s Swachh Bharat Abhiyan

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Frankenstein enters into a body building competition and finds he has seriously misunderstood the objective

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Dog day afternoon 🐶

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these idiot s fell right into my trap. the menu tonight is rich ppl soup

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Kid saves woman from being Kidnapped! :D  Good going :)

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The way Ed just turns around like “what the hell are you doing Taylor" 

But seriously Taylor… what do you call this dance move? 

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