#Children’s literacy

[andrewjbernhard]

Great 2024 of Community Service: Bernhard Law Firm Volunteering with Uplift Literacy

As 2024 comes to a close, we are thankful for the great work of Uplift Literacy, a nonprofit dedicated to helping children in underserved communities develop essential literacy skills. What a great program!

[booksinmythorax]

My dear friends: When a librarian or teacher says "Audiobooks count as reading", we do not literally mean that audiobooks are the same as decoding visual meaning via symbols representing sounds. We mean, among other things:

Audiobooks can expose listeners to new vocabulary and forms of syntax.

Audiobooks can present listeners with long-form fictional narratives with engaging characters, interesting literary devices, and poetic turns of phrase.

Audiobooks can teach listeners new information in a long-form manner that goes into depth or wide breadth on a particular subject or subjects.

Audiobooks can help listeners' verbal comprehension skills.

Audiobooks can do all these things without presenting the same difficulties to blind, low vision, partially sighted, visually impaired, or dyslexic listeners; listeners with ADHD; listeners who experience physical difficulty with holding a book or e-reader; or listeners who are disabled in a host of other ways that a physical book or e-reader might present.

The written word is not specially imbued with magical noble worth above the spoken word, and if you think it is, you may have some ableism and/or racism to deconstruct.

[yandere-daydreams]

god every time i stumble across one of those 'if you write about fictional characters having sex the WRONG BAD IMMORAL WAY then you're also WRONG AND IMMORAL' it pushes me closer to using their list of bad immoral things as a checklist for my next fic. i'm already trying my best man don't push me to be worse.

[jedi-enthusiasm-blog]

Jedi: *start training when they're fourteen at the earliest, don't have solo missions until they have several years of training in their shoulders and are Knighted/become socially adults in their early twenties*

SW Fandom: They indoctrinate babies and use them as child soldiers 🤬!

Mandalorians: *they actually indoctrinate babies into their culture after killing their parents, and finish training them at thirteen*

SW Fandom: They adopt and protect children 😍

JA series has the aging out at thirteen thing, but considering Ahsoka was asigned to Anakin at fourteen and he thought she was too young, that shows have canonity priority over everything but the movies, aging out at thirteen is not canon. Ahsoka in TCW is the same age Padmé is in TPM. The Jedi are unironically the ones who take child protection the most seriously in the GFFA.

Mandalorians take their children into warzones to train them at eight years old, and are considered adults at thirteen. This is in the Karen Traviss worldbuilding, which I'm sure most of us despise, but it has yet to be contradicted by new movies, shows or even books, so unfortunately it's still canon.

[underwater0firework]

me in 2016, age 12: I.... think Bill and Ford had a gay situationship literally everyone else, 8 years later: OH IS THAT WHAT IT IS!?!

[someblueyearning]

I love Vincent x Thomas with my heart and soul because with all that forbidden love legit all they want is vanilla marital sex. They are not angsty, no hate, just romantic love.

They are the older couple in the house next door. You look out the window to the beautiful garden they have grown having been in the neighborhood for decades. You ask them how they met, and they gush talking how they found each other at a time they both felt lost and it felt like a second chance. They are both retired. They are active participants in the community. They go to church every Sunday. Their sons and daughters visit every other week, the yard filled with noise of their grandchildren playing. They are that soft quiet love that make people wish they grow old together for.

But he is the Pope and he is the Dean.

[3liza]

don't want to engage in a debate because I agree with the spirit of this post and don't want to pledge any time to having to sort out misunderstandings that will arise from reblogging it directly. i just want to post some data. reading and math scores were improving very slightly since 1980 but then took a hard downturn at the beginning of the pandemic. No Child Left Behind "improved" test scores, but I was actually in school for that the year they made they switch, and can report that it was because they gutted the entire curriculum to force us to spend all day every day borderline cheating on standardized tests so they wouldn't lose their funding. i assume the methods of cheating on these tests improved and became more institutional after I graduated and I also assume all testing after that point has deeply misrepresentative data due to the score manipulation.

also as a personal aside I did not know anyone personally who used SparkNotes, cliffnotes, et al. they existed but we're not part of my school culture at all personally. the ubiquity of open cheating, essay mills, and obviously chatgpt has absolutely increased but I don't think that has anything to do with intellectual ability, I think it has to do with increasing access online and especially homework being increasingly bullshit and also the number of hours of homework assigned continually bloating.

i can't find statistics on hours of homework assigned in the 90s vs now (actually here's a paper from 2003 estimating USA children spent half that amount of time on homework at that point which aligns with my experience and observation) but statistics in the 2010s estimate high schoolers are assigned around 17 hours of homework a week, which is insane. if you have any sort of executive function issues or interruptions at home that could easily double, and then you're essentially holding two full time unpaid jobs age 14-18. this is way more homework than pediatric and education experts have been recommending as healthy or effective, but they also recommend children are not forced to get up at the crack of dawn every day and be shipped to large punitive holding facilities 🤷

anyway in conclusion the data is largely pointing towards the learning gap being real, but the reasons have nothing to do with kids being different, because they aren't. conditions are just a lot worse and kids are doing what they can to survive, like always, and being failed by adults, like always

[remma-demma]

I think some people don’t realize homestuck is a story about storytelling.

I was thinking about people insisting the Epilogues, hs^2, or Beyond Canon aren’t canon. And like. Yeah, that’s the point.

What does it mean to be canon anyway? Stories that get tied up in neat little bows are hard to expand upon. What happens after the happily ever after?

You can take it the direction of mundane day to day fluff (candy) or send them on another world shattering adventure (meat) but neither one is really real because… it’s a story. Homestuck was never really real. They’re both real. None of them are real.

This is all so clearly spelled out in the post canon material that I’m forced to assume they just. Have not engaged in it and / or ignore it on principle.

[calware]

this comment about the new severance episode is pissing me off so bad... i'm not even going to get into why it's a bad take i just need to get this out there

[disabled-dragoon]

"Why are children's literacy levels dropping? Kids just don't want to read books anymore."

Books can be pretty expensive and we're in the throws of a cost of living crisis

Theres been a steady increase in the policing of children's and young adult literature

Theres been a steady decline in public libraries

It's not a statutory requirement for schools to have a library

Even if schools do have a library, kids don't always have easy access to it/aren't allowed in it

Kids can be cruel. If they're taught to shame reading, they might see fit to shame other kids for reading and continue the cycle.

Shaming or ignoring kids who struggle to or can't read physical books instead of showing them alternatives or helping them find ways to make it easier doesn't help the situation

The problem isn't just the kids. Don't put this all on their shoulders.

[scorpiusmalfoylovesoscarwilde]

I've said it before, I'll say it again, and I'm sure it won't be the last time. I AM SICK AND BLOODY TIRED OF THESE MFS, HALF OF WHO DONT EVEN CARE ABOUT CURSED CHILD, BITCHING AND MOANING ABOUT AN ANGSTY TEEN DARING TO BE AN ANGSTY TEEN, I WILL FIGHT THE LOT OF YOU

(this is gonna be a bit long and probably incoherent so sit down and fucking listen to me 🔫 stick with me because I'm not just complaining about albus haters)

eVERYBODY wants cOoMmpllEeXx relatable HUMAN characters - and then SHIT themselves when the flaws a CHILD has isn't just 🥺 uwu im socially awkward and traumatised 🥺. that's why scorpius doesn't get this fuckass treatment, because his terrible human flaw is that he's a bit shit at conversation and gets sad about his dead mum (generalised understatement, but this post isnt about him. dont come for me i love him 🫶🏻)

god forbid albus, who feels unloved and unwanted (with valid evidence for a teenager), albus who feels completely out of place and outcast from his entire famously-close-knit family, ablus who is well known by the world by default via Harry and hates the attention and high expectations, albus who then gets targeted and bullied by his peers because he's not as perfect and brilliant as his father, albus who is then isolated from his one friend because Harry is making irrational ptsd fueled decisions, albus who tells Harry completely sincerely that he knows he's unlikeable but he'll try and change himself and be more like his siblings because he genuinely believes that's what Harry and everyone else whos had the misfortune of meeting him wants, albus who spends the entire play trying to prove himself and fix things via idiotic childish decisions BECAUSE HES A WHOLE UNSTABLE CHILD

god forbid that CHILD doesn't react like a patient, supported, well adjusted, level headed adult. god forbid he reacts outwardly. god forbid he reacts at all, my bad. clearly he should just sniffle a bit as if he doesn't feel suffocated and helpless by everything in his life, because obviously hes just a spoiled brat who doesn't know what real suffering is. god forbid he complains or feels anything negatively, or doesn't quite grasp that other people are struggling too because he is too busy trying so hard to deal with himself and his declining mental health the best he can with basically no support or understanding. god forbid he isn't completely perfect.

you all sound like some fucking boomer telling teenagers they don't know what real struggling is, they aren't mentally ill, they dont have any problems because they have a roof over their head, they should all go to war kids are too soft these days 😫😖😱 fUCKING‼️SHUT UP‼️

he does things wrong but he knows he does and he does everything he can to fix it! and he is fourteen!!! do none of you remember what being fourteen is like 😭😭 I swear half of you have got to be basically fourteen yourselves cmon man

cause I'm seeing this fucking pattern a lot recently. not just for albus, not just in this fandom, everywhere. ‼️ no one can fucking handle flawed characters anymore ‼️ the only thing any character is allowed to have wrong with them is trauma apparently, otherwise they have to be perfect, and I'm getting sick of it. characters and stories are meant to reflect real life, they're meant to help shape our world view, why are you expecting everyone to be fucking perfect??? what happened to nuance? what happened to understanding character development? you are all acting like characters and people are so black and white. either they're perfect or they're insufferable and evil. I won't lie, the most common victims i've noticed of this are women. but the flawed women are typically demonised, whereas the men are typically turned into uwu baby boys who actually aren't capable of doing anything wrong and then fanon goes nuts making them into ittle wittle victims. and I'm so fucking sick of all of it, I hate this. (obviously this is not a strict rule. Albus Potter, and also Albus Dumbledore now I mention it, are demonised beyond belief)

BRING BACK FLAWS AND BRING BACK NOT COMPLETELY WRITING OFF A CHARACTER BECAUSE THEY DARE TO BE HUMAN

I AM FED UP, ALBUS POTTER GET BEHIND ME

[communistkenobi]

do not want to start a fight but isn’t this totally normal. in middle school you’re like what 11 years old? I didn’t know any of this shit at that age and that has not made my life difficult as an adult even remotely. in particular I was shit at touch typing and remember being miserable in class because I was horrible at it and now I’m perfectly comfortable touch typing because I’m no longer 11 years old. I’ve taught several semesters of upper year undergraduates (meaning all of them were over the age of 21-22) in a similar coding/technical class setting who didn’t know anything about windows file structures and it was fine, they didn't blow up their computers or bring about the downfall of civilisation, they eventually picked it up over the 12 weeks of the semester because that’s how learning works

[mando-abs]

Guys, I’ve read the Wild Robot

And let me tell you, if I hadn’t recently taken a Children’s Literature class in college, I would’ve said this was the best middle-grade book I’ve read since elementary/middle school. I almost read this book in one night (I was sleepy 😴) like I couldn’t put it down.

The heart behind this book is astounding and it never shies away from showing complex and difficult concepts. You will fall in love with Roz and her gosling son along with all of the other animal on the island.

If you’ve got younger ones, I highly recommend reading this to them or having a little book club moment with them. However, be prepared for whatever hard questions may come your way (i.e. circle of life and climate issues). You know your child and how much they can handle/understand. If you’re like me and much older, it’s a quick read and a great way to finish off a long day. It’s a part of a trilogy and you bet I’m patiently waiting for my hold on a copy at the library.

If the movie is anything like the book (which, given a rewatch of the trailer, it’s looking like so), we are in for a special treat.

[rabbit-hearted-girl]

Something that really infuriates me is how some people say they would like more movies in the hunger games franchise about the previous games. Four books, five movies and the point still flies right over their heads...

[c1trvswurld]

Haven't interacted with the mtl fandom anymore bc I simply don't like it as much for a multitude or reasons but I saw a post saying you shouldn't ship Charles with any of the members bc those are his "kids" and I physically said "that's an opinion of all time" out loud. And it reminded me why I stopped being in it sm.

[beigetiger]

It’s fucking over you guys. What the fuck.