#High Ability sucks

[alive-pancake]

Something that still bothers me about my school life even though it's summer break and this was last year in 7th grade is that I was in high ability class for reading. If you don't know what that is It might also be called Honors or Gifted class but basically you do the work for the next year above you. So if you're a ninth grader you do 10th grade stuff. But anyway.

In order for me to get into HA when I hadn't been in it in 6th grade I had to take a test which makes sense. But a few things went wrong when I took it. The program wasn't uploaded to the testing computers so they had to rush to put it on there. I don't know how they upload it but I swear something had to have gone wrong. The math part of the test was math as you would expect but the reading part had nothing to do with reading at all. It didn't go over paragraph comprehension, reading level, grammar, anything related to reading at all. Instead the test was folding paper.

An example- On the Computer (we didn't have physical paper) it would show a standard piece of paper. Then it would show the paper being folded in different ways to create lines in it. You would have to imagine where the lines were on the paper. That was the reading portion of the exam.

So while I didn't go into 7th grade expecting to be folding paper I took it to mean that I already knew all of the concepts and had all the skills that I would need for 7th grade. I did not.

I had to teach them to myself. And all the rest of the students already knew the concepts that were needed since they had learned them in HA 6th grade. The rest of the students had been in HA for many years prior again 7th grade was my first time.

So we were learning new concepts in 7th grade that required knowledge that I didn't have. Because in normal classes they don't teach them. So I had to teach myself both the old concepts and the new ones that we were actually learning in class. This probably sounds really confusing so here are some examples.

7th grade Ha reading teacher- Today we will be learning the abc concept (new material). Now all of you should know the xyz concept (old material which I never learned) you will need the xyz concept to learn the abc concept.

Rest of the class in 7th grade- Okay (They knew the xyz concept from HA 6th grade so they were prepared for the abc concept)

Me in 7th grade-Okay? (I did not learn the xyz concept since I was not In HA in 6th grade meaning I had to learn xyz and learn the abc concept as well)

Because I had to teach myself xyz I fell behind in learning abc and since we needed abc for the next unit I fell behind in that one as well and that same cycle just continued throughout the whole school year.

Also the reason I believe that the paper text was wrong was because I asked my older sister who has taken the test many times what it was like for her. She had normal math, normal reading, and she also had the paper test but, the paper test was not considered a reading test simply a basic IQ test. So I think in the rush to get the program onto our computers it got messed up and the actual reading questions did not upload and the paper test got labeled as the reading test.

Ha = High Ability (again that is the same thing as Honor or Gifted classes)

[adaines-furious-feast]

I still keep coming back to why the fuck Porter only brought Jace and the Rat Grinders. Part of me was like "oh well he thought that the dragons would kill the Bad Kids and everyone else." But you didn't think to maybe keep one behind, just in case. And they had spells they were concentrating on so they knew someone was coming.

Didn't think to get some senior year barbarians who you've gotten on with/shatter star-ed before? Don't have any family members that might support your cause? Couldn't get the wizard to conjure anything before hand?

[mashmouths]

so i started this show and it just gets worse and worseeeee not only did it lift the romance subplot directly from twilight (and not well) but they also are trying to play the forbidden love angle hard in the fantasy racism vein except it's a "cross-species" relationship between the two whitest people i've ever seen in my life and there are three people of color in the whole (first season of the) show who aren't villains and it seems that every other episode (and sometimes ebery episode and sometimes twice an episode!) there is a man physically or magically subjugating a woman and i keep waiting for the big reveal at the end to be stolen from fucking rainbow rowell

[essektheylyss]

ngl, mentioning one of my hyperfixations does not necessarily activate my trap card. mentioning a book or media that I LOATHED, on the other hand,

[lettucedloophole]

getting back into darkest dungeon and im terrified. gaming is so high stakes .. i just want a game where i can chill. Minecraft? high stakes, lose diamonds in lava. stardew valley? pass out, fine and lose time. slay the spire is low stakes because you're supposed to lose over and over again. darkest dungeon is semi-lowstakes but I DONT WANT TO LOSE MY PEOPLE I HAVE EMOTIONAL ATTACHMENTS TO THEM

[naivety]

sorry dashboard. and i love you

[blue-eyed-giant]

man i kinda miss having normal casual friendships with men ngl

[viktortittiforov]

the 2010s sure were a time in my life

[todayisafridaynight]

my only crime in finding jingu hot is that his voice is fuckin grating i may be deranged but im not delusional

[timeisacephalopod]

People debating on whether "queer" is a slur or not acting like whatever pain they feel around that word being tossed at them (despite the fact that in my personal experience growing up in a town with less than 3000 people in it "queer" never once hit the insult list- I was gay, dyke, and a friend of mine was a tranny and another was a faggot but we never got called queer) means they can then treat the way other people identify as a slur.

Like "gay" has always been more of a slur to me than "queer" since only half of those were hissed at me insultingly by classmates, but the real issue here is that debating whether or not a word people use to identify themselves is a slur means it's less safe to identify as queer, even within a community that's meant to support you because instead of getting that support they're all debating if the way you identify is a slur or if it's been sufficiently reclaimed enough for them to bother with you. So if you have pain around that word I suggest you put it away, because supporting people who identify in a way that used to hurt you is far more worth your energy and time than giving cishet people even more power over a word we long ago decided was ours for the taking. And also as someone who identifies as queer I don't like being told I'm a fucking slur nor do I like being treated as a Gay Culture War- like don't news institutions do this to us enough without deciding to Culture War each other too??

[david-watts]

today I’m going to be angry about past decisions

[honestlyvan]

In 2018, Quinn Curio made a video essay talking about storytime youtubers, and the cottage industry of people who only exist to criticise the content put out by storytime creators. It's an excellent overall video, but my main takeaway from it at the time was that when you're drinking deep from the well of dunking, it's easy to start dehumanising your target and... essentially getting high off your own supply. The other points -- about how many of these animators had broadly done nothing more than make art in a genre the critics didn't care for -- are also good, but the observation that this kind of "slime ranching" serves to gratify the critic primarily, and it's actual usefulness as criticism is limited by the context.

I'm not trying to make a direct comparison here -- I don't really watch HBG but I did watch this video and I think he did the best he could to impart an anti-slime ranching message to the video -- but the response to the video does, when it's not sheer schadenfreude from people who have carried hatchets for a long time, hit a lot of the same high notes what the appeal of something like storytime critics is. The easy hit of "at least I'm not that bad" is very tempting and sometimes genuinely necessary if you're low, if your self-esteem is truly garbage.

But I did also watch little hoots' video on the dirtbag left like an hour after release and I do kind of... wonder if the urge to find emotional release through "righteousness" isn't kind of inherently reactionary, and how that plays into a general contempt for compassion and giving grace that is inherent to any hierarchies. (After all, hierarchies aim to calcify -- with too much fluidity between classes they will not function as effectively). I wonder if there isn't something inherently sinister about our tendency to absorb criticism of other people from the perspective of the critic, rather than absorbing it from the perspective of a potential target of such criticism.

Because criticism, social pressure tactics, mobbing and dunking aren't primarily tools of the powerless. They're not primarily power wielded by those with little to no social clout to wield them. There's a reason the "twitter reply guy" is such an enduring fixture of the pantheon of people on the internet whose opinions we almost wholesale discard. And the people with no integrity to speak of are, let's face it, not as affected by them as we would like them to be, because the opinion of any given segment of the total population of people they can have influence on doesn't super matter to them.

At the very least, I think what OP is describing is our tendency to want to individualise the problem, and solve it by Getting Rid Of the Bad Ones (against a nearly inexhaustible supply of new Bad Ones), when this is largely a matter of incentives. When is your integrity worth less than the money being a grifter could bring in? (Have you ever even been rewarded for your integrity?) When is the social validation from your peers more than your repulsion towards socially aggressing against the outgroup? (Have you ever been rewarded for aggressing?) When you say "well I would never do something like that", who is that I you're talking about?

i think the thing that is specifically bothering me about the conversation about the new hbomberguy video ("live your life in a way so that hbomberguy doesn't tear into you for 3 hours", "hbomberguy has figured out how to death note someone through video essays", "oh new hbomberguy video [incredibly dense paragraphs of text] i now despise james somerton") is that it really feels like people aren't paying attention to what hbomberguy was actually saying. like, as much as he wanted to make people aware of the plagiarism issue, he also very explicitly did not like the fact that he might even remotely have a financial incentive to make those sorts of videos. and rather than the last video, which was a "get mad about this" call to action, hbomberguy spent this whole video sympathizing with the people who were directly out indirectly affected, and wanted the focus of people's attention to be on uplifting small queer creators

but also, negativity drives engagement so i guess it's to be expected.

[yaoianime]

Ozmafia dnd au *goes crazy insane explodes into million tiny pieces*

[orcelito]

Actually it is SO weird to me to remember that I was an engineering student and that later on I had been pursuing a minor in statistics

I may be a IT & com person in the end, but I do have the foundations of engineering and statistics in my brain too. Wild !

[cloned-sheep97]

I took a Rorsarch online test (or how my friend Diego pronounces it: rosca) for the funsies and the reference. I'm relatively healthy but "with some of the awnsers being peculiar...But nothing's wrong about having imagination!"

What the FUCK does that mean

[gonzodangerfeels]

Those pesky adverbs