#and yet despite all that. despite all the pain and hardship and disadvantages they had with all the cards stacked up against them

[vociferans]

i honestly couldnt bear to finish watching this because it just really made me so sad

[theholycovenantrpg]

In the beginning was ROMILDA ALTIER, a GIFTED loyal to the cause of the MORTALS. She is said to be TWENTY-SIX and uses SHE/THEY pronouns. In this New Testament she serves as a MEMBER of the ROUND TABLE. Blessed be their name.

THE INDELIBLE MARK.

It is at her will that they dance for her, it is at her will that their heart beats and pounds. The movement of their muscles bow and bend to her will. Her ability to puppeteer others - to make their blood boil, their heart beat faster - is one that she does not enjoy implementing often due to how invasive it feels. In a bout of anger she discovered her abilities, causing the subject of her attention great pain as their muscles twisted and bent into shapes at Romilda’s bidding. However great these powers are - and she’s quite aware they are capable of being developed further - they come with dire drawbacks if she overextends herself, that being the near-bursting of her own heart if she doesn’t take care. It makes this gift a great disadvantage when engaging, unprepared, in combat. And, as all who have suffered and survived the Blood Plague, Romilda’s scars are obvious and unsettling: she looks as though claws have been dragged from her right eye, where her birthmark colors her face, down her cheek, along her neck, and to her chest. The flesh that has knit together looks as though it is iridescent and shifts in the light.

THE HISTORY.

For as long as she could remember, she had hoped to swallow the sun. Not to cast the world in darkness, no, she hopes to swallow the sun so that she might be the one to fill it with light - what a blessing it would be, to shine upon the visage of each and every one of her loved ones so that she might warm them to the marrow of their bones and guide them through the harrowing darkness of the night. As a young babe she seemed intent on doing so, her howls of protest quickly turning into coos of delight, eyes shining in wonder at the world about her, hungering already to illuminate it with her light - though the wet-nurse quickly marked her as cursed, seeing the birthmark that marred her face, that colored it in a way that was thought to be unnatural. Cursed in the eyes of all except her mother, who held her daughter’s face in her hands and could see her as nothing other than blessed. And how young Romilda longed to share her blessings, practically blistering and bleeding with unerring warmth, with the entirety of the world. Though such dreams are lofty and often short-lived, it has never been one that she has quite let go of, keeping a white-knuckled grip upon it despite how foolish it seemed. Her mother had often whispered into her ear, tucking a lock of hair behind it, that she was meant for such a destiny of unparalleled greatness, despite what her others might say in contradiction. A blight, they would whisper, while her mother would laugh- as loud and melodically as a lark, saying  that children such as hers could never be; they were creatures made of prophecy, of legacy, of gold-tinted glory - Romilda was made to swallow the sun. 

All too soon she learned that the tales of heroines were woven with tragedy, woe, and heartache - that few of them were ever truly happy. So she took the grief and anguish that life gave her, the beginnings of hardships budding at a young age, starting first with her father, robbed from her far too soon - his face becoming nothing more than an ever-shifting memory of kindness and affection. A good man, her mother reassured her, that was far too tender to survive in a world such as this. Perhaps that is why she married a man made of iron and metal soon after, whose voice was as harsh as his hand. He taught young Romilda the importance of discipline, the value of a quick-striking blade and an even quicker wit. Under his tutelage she was molded into a striking figure - and still, she hoped to swallow the sun, to press it between her lips and bask in its decadent, scorching heat so that all who met her might know of its warmth. How could she not when her young sister deserved nothing less? The moment that the pink-cheeked babe was placed upon their doorstep and  opened her eyes, she knew, in her heart that this was who her destiny would be forever tied to and shaped by - the two of them, the strings of their fate knotted together in an irrevocable way. Such knowledge, though, such companionship did not make the loss of their mother any easier to bear. It did not make the wound of her loss any less raw and aching. Even numbness came with its own peculiar brand of pain. 

Yet she knew her story was not meant to end in this chapter, so, with weary fingers, she turned the page. It was in the tall trees of the forest that she made herself at home, the cries of its night-birds becoming the sweetest of lullabies. They were driven there like crows from wreckage and ruin, their father muttering to himself of the abhorrence of the winged creatures that walked upon this earth. He bemoaned the loss of an earth that was never his to begin with, while her sister longed for the earth that she still had yet to discover. Romilda, however,  was content with the lot that fate had given her, taking to the life of a hunter as though it were second nature. And soon, it became Arianne’s as well. For a half-moment she thought that life might stagnate in this way, repeated patterns that might have been mistaken for tranquil if it were not for the blood that stained their hands each day. Then the Blood Plague descended upon her sister, lakes of red welling in Arianne’s eyes as she realized what their father might do to them, hate-filled as he was for those that he considered other. She did not doubt it when she felt his hands wrap around her throat, sickened and fevered as she was. She did not doubt it when her sister skewered him like the boars that they hunted, nor when she slid her knife across his throat as she looked at him, blistering with rage at this madman. Was this to be her gold-tinted glory? Was this to be the story of the girl who swallowed the sun? 

The moment they were well enough to, Romilda packed her and her sister’s bags, embarking upon a journey with an ending that seemed nowhere in sight. She watched as her sister took to society as a bird takes to the skies, wings spread and wind catching beneath it easily. They left whispers in the wake, traveling from village to village, city to city - the story of the return of the Altier sisters catching like flames. The story that the sisters wove was an intricate one, their deranged father -- broken by the weight of grief, they mourned -- driving them to the point of bone-deep exhaustion until they were well practiced in the art of hunting the unnatural, until they knew nothing but the company of the creatures in the forest, erasing any notion of the legacy that they carried and the weight of their family name. A name that was revered and treasured within the mouths of the populace of the Holy Land, a city that was a sanctuary to angels, demons, mortals alike was like a newborn fawn, tottering upon weak and inexperienced legs - it could fall to the wolves so quickly, the ravenous greed of fallible creatures eager to sink their teeth into something so tender and new. Yet, the populace had embraced them both with open arms, heralding them as grand, legendary, blessed, even. And it was then that Romilda realized that this chapter of her life was to be the one rendered in ink. It would be the story that minstrels and bards would sing about, that mothers would tell their young babes when recounting the harrowing adventures of the great Romilda Altier, a woman that was the sun incarnate. She would set the world alight with her  blistering glory - and she might yet raze it all in her fire and leave the world in ruins.

THE CONNECTIONS.

ARIANNE ALTIER & REVNA VOLK: The Trinity. The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb - and they are bound by the blood that stains their hands and the water that they shared as they grew older. They spilled the blood of their father, embraced their sisterhood as though they were two parts of the same soul, and embarked upon the journey of their Fate together. It came as no surprise that when they realized the gifts bestowed upon them by the Blood Plague reflected their counterpart nature. Where Romilda blisters like the sun, Arianne stirs the soul like a full moon; where the elder Altier edges their words as bluntly as their blades, the younger sweetens hers like honeyed cakes. And when Revna entered their lives, it was as if the stars of the skies began to populate their world, adding to it a wealth of novelty and color. She added a pensiveness that quieted their volatility, a methodical deliberateness that rooted them in their ties with one another. In Revna, Romilda found kinship in their belief that there was something greater for the Gifted -- in Revna, she found a brother-in-arms, the two of them utterly fixated in giving the world a reckoning. With Romilda’s determination, Arianne’s magnetism, and Revna’s ruthlessness, it is the wonder that the entirety of the universe has not fallen under their thrall already.

LUCA RICHE: Kindred Spirit. It was inexplicable, what drew them to one another so innately -- yet neither of them has ever thought to question it. Why should they ever think to question what is so clearly a blessing? What is so clearly something to horde and keep safe when Fate was so benevolent as to grant it? They are two blistering, burning souls that dance around one another in perpetual harmony, laughter ever present on their faces, secretive smiles shared as they glance at one another from across the Round Table. As of late, though, he has noticed how their own light blinds them -- how they are so consumed with the fulfillment of their destiny that they are blind to the darkness that is slowly surrounding them, seeking to stifle their innate goodness and virtue. Romilda only ever seeks to protect the Holy Land from an onslaught of anarchy, but Luca? He only wants to protect them from the oncoming promise of a perpetual night. 

RAPHAEL: Pygmalion. When they had asked him to instruct them in the art of healing, it was with their head held high and their eyes blazing. After all, she had only ever been told of the atrocities angels had committed -- their father all too eager to instill in them the fear that would make celestials so hateful in her eyes. When he had looked upon them, it was with the enthrallment that consumes an artist looking upon their muse, with the singular, fixed intensity of a predator encountering their prey. Still, though, they did not balk and stared right back, determined that, if they were to endure this Gift, they were very well going to remake the world into something greater than it had been before. So they had sought out the most highly regarded healer that had been lauded in the Old World and in the New -- and if what they must endure is the bending of their pride and the shudder that runs down their spine whenever he lifts his gaze to theirs, then so be it. There are times though, when they look at him, that they see the excitement and passion that paints his face. They think that he looks almost human, rather than something cut from marble. They tell themselves that they have faced monsters worse than this -- but that is so far from the truth. 

MAMMON: Hound. When Mammon first sloughed off the darkness that had clung to them, they remembered that relief that had pervaded them. Then the hunger had set in. An insatiable craving had overwhelmed them until, for one fleeting, hope-filled moment, they had experienced a semblance of satisfaction. And they have hunted for it ever since, ruthless and obsessive, snarling in frustration until their gaze dragged along the profile of a figure who seemed suffused with an inexplicable warmth of spirit that they offered the singular relief of satiation. Bedecked in gold armor, brows drawn together in confusion, she had looked back at them -- quite obviously annoyed by the attention she was receiving from the infernal demon, a Vice no less. In that spiteful look, they immediately knew that this was the delectable rabbit that they would perpetually chase after, relentless as a hound that has caught the scent of their unexpecting prey.

Romilda is portrayed by Taelor Thein and was written by ROSEY. She is currently TAKEN by ROSEY.

[gatewaygeek]

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.” -Oscar Wilde

Jim Kirk has spent his life trying to be more than the sum of his circumstances. He was born with a lot of advantages; born in the Federation, born with a family, had a roof over his head (for the most part), he was intelligent and did well in school, and always managed to find food and comfort. That being said, he was also given a fair few disadvantages; father died the day he was born, forced to live with an abusive Uncle, lost almost all connection with his brother, forced to go to a boarding school, forced to survive and take are of nine other children during the Tarsus IV massacre. And though it was many years before he became the noble, honest Captain that Spock befriended, Spock knew that there were aspects of Jim Kirk’s confidence, perseverance, and determination that could not be learned, only born with. He was a man who fought tooth and nail to survive, to make a name for himself, and to prove to the universe that anyone can overcome the space they occupy and be more. 

As much as Spock didn’t want to admit it to himself, and would never admit it out loud (partly out of fear that Doctor McCoy would hear it), Spock was jealous of the man’s at times reckless, or even aggressive, optimism. The Vulcan had been born into a life of luxury, his father was one of the most well-known ambassadors in the quadrant and had even made strides to make peace talks with the Romulans, often seen as a modern day Surak with his impressive use of logic--despite his “lapse in judgement” when he married Amanda Grayson and fathered a hyrbid son. Spock had a large, protective pet who imprinted on him when he was born, and a loving, doting mother who sacrificed everything to give him a good life. However, that’s not to say he didn’t face his own adversity, being half-human on Vulcan was hardly something to be proud of. He had more than his fair share of abuse and general degradation from his peers, and spent the majority of his life up to this point confused and frustrated over who he was supposed to be. Xenophobia is alive and well, no matter the species, and no matter the age.

But when Spock met Jim, the man gave him a wide smile and told him that he liked how blue looks on him, gave him an almost perfect ta’al, and then got to showing Spock around the ship and discussing ways they might improve certain areas. He was generous, and thoughtful, and Spock thought it might be easier if Jim wasn’t so... warm. He remembered thinking rather naively that this is how all humans were, acting without a care in the world, oblivious to the hardships they were likely to face on this journey, and then he read Jim’s file. He noticed that it was a public file (meaning any officer could open it, including ensigns and cadets), and Jim didn’t hide anything. He noted his time on Tarsus IV, his only living relative being his mother, and that his father was, indeed, George Kirk. Spock learned the rest over the next three years as the two became more trusting of each other; Jim had even referred to Spock as his best friend, knowing more about him than anyone on the ship (except perhaps for the aforementioned Doctor McCoy). Jim had been through so much more difficult and pressing things, and yet, never once seemed annoyed when Spock admitted his own hardships as a child. 

Spock had asked him about this once. His Captain explained to him that only a fool uses his pain to judge others. Spock pointed out that most humans use their pain as a reference point. Jim just smiled and said;

“Well, that says a lot about them, doesn’t it?”

Spock knew that it said a lot about himself, too. 

Another thing that Jim did that had it been any other human, would have inhibited them from doing was that he was so unabashedly kind. Spock was cold, even by Vulcan standards, mostly because he spent a large portion of his life trying to achieve the idea of the perfect emotionless Vulcan, and partly because of his own trust issues. But Jim was authentic and warm, and had so much love to give to all of his crew, all the while remaining respectful and professional. He was absolutely diplomatic in everything he did, and firm when he needed to be, and seemed to always know when it was the right time to speak, and when it was the right time to remain silent. And while Spock had a general sense of the same thing, when he didn’t know, he often just remained silent, whereas Jim knew exactly the right thing to say and how to say it. There was a reason Starfleet sent the Enterprise to handle delicate negotiations. 

“Jimmy can sweet-talk his way into anything.” 

The words had been spoken at a party that Jim had coerced Spock into going to six months into their five year mission by a drunken Doctor McCoy. Spock was aware of the meaning, it was something his mother mentioned every now and again. He remembered her being especially capable in the skill, managing to ‘sweet-talk’ his father into talking the two with them on trips to the safer planets. Those trips eventually died out when Spock got older. But the First Officer didn’t know just how true those words would eventually become over time. 

But perhaps the most astounding thing about Jim Kirk was his honesty. Spock spent a long time lying to himself about what he was, telling himself that if he abided by Surak’s teachings, had some kind of disregard for Humans as most Vulcans do, and repeated the mantra of ‘I am Vulcan’, then maybe one day he could believe it, and maybe then he would no longer be questioned about being Vulcan. But Spock has come to understand that the questions will never stop, only be repeated, and if people stop asking them, the truth never changes. But truth is an ever-evolving concept, especially regarding the development of a person. Spock had to come to terms with the truth: and the truth is, Spock wasn’t entirely Vulcan, and he had to accept that, or his true self would never fully be realized. It is incredibly hard to lie around such an honest man, even to oneself. 

It was these things that made Spock realize he had developed something of a romantic attraction to Jim. It wasn’t logical, not in any right. It was never logical to want to mate with a superior. But Jim was so respectful of his boundaries and his heritage, challenging him, and stroking his ego when he needed it. He would compliment Spock, and Spock knew that he truly meant it, because Jim didn’t lie unless he was under order to (and Jim liked to compliment Spock quite a bit). He would stand up for Spock, and he would let Spock fight his own battles. He was everything that the universe told him he couldn’t be. And Spock loved him. 

Oh, Spock loved him.

[tremendouspeachduck]

Japan is big news - YEAH!

why?

In 2019, Finland has the best schools but not recognized in the USA.  Why?  Gov. run schools can indoctrinate students.

Also, in many countries, the United States included, students’ economic backgrounds often determine the quality of the education they receive. Richer students tend to go to schools funded by high property taxes, with top-notch facilities and staff that help them succeed. In districts where poorer students live, students often get shoddy facilities, out-of-date textbooks, and fewer guidance counselors.  

Not in Japan - ranked 2nd. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a group of 35 wealthy countries, Japan ranks highly among its peers in providing its rich and poor students with equal educational opportunities: The OECD estimates that in Japan only about 9 percent of the variation in student performance is explained by students’ socioeconomic backgrounds. The OECD average is 14 percent, and in the United States, it’s 17 percent. “In Japan, you may have poor areas, but you don’t have poor schools,”

John Mock, an anthropologist at Temple University’s Japan campus, told me.

Perhaps as a result, fewer students in Japan struggle and drop out of school—the country’s high-school graduation rate, at 96.7 percent, is much higher than the OECD average and the high-school graduation rate in the United States, which is 83 percent. Plus, poorer children in Japan are more likely to grow up to be better off in adulthood, compared to those in countries like the U.S. and Britain (though Scandinavian countries lead in this regard). “It’s one of the few [education] systems that does well for almost any student,” Andreas Schleicher, who oversees the OECD's work on education and skills development, told me, adding, “Disadvantage is really seen as a collective responsibility.”

For instance, in the village of Iitate, which was evacuated after being contaminated by radiation after the Fukushima nuclear-power-plant disaster in March 2011, many families still have not come back. Piles of contaminated soil, covered up, still dot the landscape, and many homes are shuttered. The local primary school has just 51 students, compared to more than 200 before the accident. Yet the quality of education given to returnees is top-notch. 

The government built a new school for students outside the radiation zone, in a town called Kawamata, and though the classes are still very small—first grade has only two students—the school is well staffed. In a classroom I visited, all five second-graders in the school watched a teacher demonstrate flower-arranging as three other teachers surrounded them, helping them with each step. In another, a math teacher quizzed students on odd and even numbers, and as the students split into groups to discuss a problem on the board, another teacher leaned in to help. Walking around the school, it almost seemed there were as many teachers as students.

“The quality of education is better than before March 11th [2011],” Tomohiro Kawai, a parent of a sixth-grader and the president of the school’s parent-teacher association, told me, citing the low student-teacher ratio. Many of the children who returned to the area are from single-parent families, a group prone to struggling economically; some parents moved back to Iitate because they needed help from their own parents in watching their children, according to Satoko Oowada, one of the school’s teachers. But the federal government takes pains to prevent economic hardship from affecting the quality of students’ education. It gave a grant to Iitate so that all students in the school would get free lunch, school uniforms, notebooks, pencils, and gym clothes. “Equality of education is very important for children in Iitate Village,” the school’s principal, Takehiko Yoshikawa, told me. “Everywhere, students receive the same education.”

The equity in Iitate stands in stark contrast to a place like New Orleans, which was also hit by a disaster. While Japan’s national government tried to ensure that students in the affected area got more resources after the accident, officials in New Orleans disinvested in the public educational system in their city. Public-school teachers were put on leave and dismissed, many students disappeared from schools’ rolls, and the New Orleans system now consists almost entirely of charter schools. (To be sure, New Orleans is something of an outlier—districts in New York and New Jersey, for example, received federal money to help deal with Hurricane Sandy’s impact on education.)

There are a number of reasons why Japan excels in providing educational opportunities. One of them is how it assigns teachers to schools. Teachers in Japan are hired not by individual schools, but by prefectures, which are roughly analogous to states. Their school assignments within the prefecture change every three years or so in the beginning of their careers, and then not quite as often later on in their careers. This means that the prefectural government can make sure the strongest teachers are assigned to the students and schools that need them the most. “There’s a lot going on to redirect the better teachers, and more precious resources, towards the more disadvantaged students,” Schleicher said.

It also means that teachers can learn from different environments. Young teachers are exposed to a series of different talented peers and learn from their methods. That’s a big contrast to some place like the United States, said Akihiko Takahashi, a onetime teacher in Japan and now an associate professor of elementary math at DePaul University’s College of Education. “Here in the U.S., the good teachers go to the good schools and stay there the whole time,” he told me.

Japan’s educational equality is also a matter of how funds are distributed. Teacher salaries are paid from both the national government and from the prefectural government, and so do not vary as much based on an area’s median household earnings (or, more often, property values). The same goes for the funding of building expenses and other fees—schools get more help from the national government than they would in the U.S. According to Takahashi, the Japanese educational system aims to benefit all students. Their system is really carefully designed to have equal opportunity nationwide,” he said. This contrasts with the U.S. education system, he said, which he judges to raise up the best students but often leave everyone else behind.

What’s more, Japan actually spends less on education than many other developed countries, investing 3.3 percent of its GDP in education, compared to the OECD average of 4.9 percent. It spends $8,748 per student at the elementary school level, compared to the $10,959 that the United States spends. But it spends the money wisely. School buildings are not much to look at. Textbooks are simple and printed in paperback, and students and teachers are responsible for keeping schools clean. Japan also has fewer administrators on campuses—there is usually just a principal and a few vice principals, and not many others in the way of staff.

.

Despite the country’s relatively low spending on education, Japan’s teachers are paid more than the OECD average. And the profession has high barriers to entry: Much like the bar exam for American lawyers, Japan’s teacher entrance exams, which are administered by prefectures, are very difficult. Oowada told me she took the Fukushima Prefecture teaching exam five times before she passed it. She’s now a permanent teacher, guaranteed a pension and a job in the prefecture until age 60; she said that the year she passed, 200 people took the test, and only five passed. (Her co-teacher, Yuka Iinuma, had still not passed the test, and was working as a one-year contract teacher, moving from school to school each year. Many people who think they want to become teachers eventually give up when they can’t pass the exam, Oowada and Iinuma told me.) And even after their full certification, teachers have an incentive to perform better and better, as every three years they get reviewed for a promotion.

There are of course some downsides to being a teacher in Japan. Because they feel responsible for all students in their classes, teachers often spend lots of time outside of normal hours helping students who are falling behind. Yoshikawa, the school principal, told me of a teacher from Iitate who, when there was a gasoline shortage that prevented him from driving, rode his bike 12 miles to school each day from the evacuation zone to Kawamata, which includes an impressively hilly stretch. One teacher in Tokyo I talked to, who didn’t want her name used, said it wasn’t uncommon to work from 7 a.m. to 7:30 p.m., and said some teachers stayed until 9 at night. (There are teachers’ unions in Japan, but their power has eroded somewhat in recent years.)

Still, Japanese teachers are rewarded with a great deal of autonomy on how to improve student outcomes, Takahashi said. In a process called a “lesson study,” teachers research and design a new lesson over a set time period, and then present it to other teachers, who give feedback. Teachers also join together to identify school-wide problems, and organize themselves into teams to address those problems, sometimes writing a report or publishing a book on how to solve them, he said. “It’s not about an individual star teacher, but about teamwork,” he said.

Schleicher says that teachers’ focus on pedagogy contributes to the Japanese education system’s equality. The emphasis, he says, is not as much on absorbing content as it is on teaching students how to think. “They really focus on problem-solving, which means the ability to attack problems they had never seen before,” Takahashi said. In subjects like math, Japanese teachers encourage problem-solving and critical thinking, rather than memorization.

 For instance, Japanese students were explicitly taught how to solve just 54 percent of the problems on the international Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) test, but received an average score of 565, according to the Lesson Study Alliance, an education nonprofit. Students in the U.S. were explicitly taught how to solve 82 percent of the problems, yet received a lower average score, 518. Ironically, some of these Japanese teaching methods came from the United States—in particular, from an American group, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, which urged American teachers to change their methods throughout the 1980s. But it was Japanese teachers who listened to this advice.

Indeed, in the math class I attended in Kawamata, there was a great deal of back and forth between the students and the teacher, who was asking the students increasingly difficult questions. Even after the bell rang, the discussion continued, with students running up to the board to try their hand at the problems. The teachers seemed particularly good at helping students develop complex problem-solving skills, and Schleicher theorizes that this is why the persistence of Japan’s “cram schools”—programs that many students attend after the school day to study for high-school or college entrance exams—doesn’t entirely disadvantage students who can’t afford to attend them; when students are taught how to think, they can still excel in tests on math, science, and reading.

Of course, there are other reasons that Japanese schools are more equitable than American ones—reasons that have more to do with features of the U.S.’s system. Japan has an extremely homogeneous population, which means that the racial segregation that persists in U.S. schools is a nonissue there. Japan also doesn’t track students into gifted programs, which means that all students share the same classroom, and better students are expected to help ones that are struggling. Tracking students may help the sharpest American students thrive, but it can also leave other students behind.

And wealthy students in Japan do hold several advantages over poorer ones. Child poverty is growing in Japan—about 20 percent of kids in Tokyo live in poverty, according to a recent government survey. I visited Kid’s Door, an organization in Tokyo that provides tutoring and after-school programs for children from low-income families. Yumiko Watanabe, the founder of Kid’s Door, told me that some poor students in Japan drop out of school because they can’t afford expenses like field trips or school uniforms. When I asked her about the OECD’s data indicating that Japan’s schools performed well in equally educating rich and poor students, she said that this might be true in elementary schools, but that as they get older, poor children get less help on homework from their parents since their parents are working. These families are also less likely to be able to afford tutors or other outside help. “There's a natural tendency to fall behind because they are not getting the support that wealthier children get,” she said.

One single mother, Shinobu Miwa, whose 16-year-old son attends programs at Kid’s Door, told me she was frustrated that she couldn’t send him to cram school and worried he’d be at a disadvantage. “He’s in a weak position compared to other families,” she said. He’ll likely face even more problems if he decides to go to college; Japan’s colleges are very expensive, and there are fewer scholarships available to poor students than there are in the U.S.

Japan’s schools can also be extremely stressful places for students, who are sometimes bullied if they fall behind. “As long as I performed well in school, things were okay. But once I started to deviate just a little—they [parents and teachers] went to the extreme and started treating me incredibly coldly,” one student told Anne Allison, a cultural anthropologist at Duke University who has written extensively on Japan. Japanese students are also expected to belong to after-school clubs for sports or dance, which can keep them at school until 6 p.m. “When they come home, it's already dark and all they have left to do is eat dinner, take a bath and do their home assignment and sleep,” the Tokyo teacher told me.

Despite these flaws, Japan’s educational system still sets an example for other countries to follow. That’s partly because Japan has different goals for its schools than somewhere like the United States does. “The Japanese education system tries to minimize the gap between the good students and everyone else,” Takahashi told me. That means directing more resources and better teachers to students or schools that are struggling. It also means giving teachers the freedom to work together to improve schools. This could be difficult to transplant to the United States, where education has long been managed on a local level, and where talk of sharing resources more often leads to lawsuits than it does to change. But Japan’s success is relatively recent, according to Schleicher. About 50 years ago, Japan’s schools were middling, he said. Countries can make their schools more equitable. They just need to agree that success for all students is a top priority.

ALANA SEMUELS is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Sadly, in the USA we’ve learned that Control of public school curriculum is a very desirable prize for those who seek to control the future.

A Proposal:  The school administrator in charge of curriculum holds the responsibility of providing the destination and/or direction for the development and implementing a comprehensive school curriculum. Curriculum development for all disciplines necessitates the establishment of a districtwide curriculum council that meets on a monthly basis during the school year.

The curriculum council should consist of professional staff in leadership positions— that is, the curriculum director, building principals, department heads, team leaders, and others in leadership positions. 

Council members should be cognizant of the school district’s mission, vision, philosophy, exit outcomes, program philosophies and rationale statements, program goals, program objectives, learning outcomes, learning activities, assessment, textbooks used (including publication year, edition, and condition), and so on.

The curriculum council should also select teacher representation for curriculum development. The representatives should be chosen using one of five methods: voluntary, rotation, evolvement, peer selection, or administrative selection.

The community also needs to get involved.  How to get participation?

Please leave message below, then Go To top, nav to previous or next

[heartlandhq]

❝ i consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. ❞

INFORMATION,

full name ⋯ Silas Hallowa age ⋯ 20 years old pronouns ⋯ He/Him/His origin ⋯ Omaha, Nebraska affiliation ⋯ Rodeway Inn West Dodge position ⋯ Sioux Falls, South Dakota

SURVIVABILITY,

advantages ⋯ steadfast & optimistic disadvantages ⋯ idealistic & selfless preferred weapon ⋯ colt 1991A1, hunting knife

BIOGRAPHY,

trigger warning ⋯ drunk driving, underage alcohol, drug abuse

BEFORE DECEMBER 25th, 2017,

Silas was raised on bible stories, every lesson came in the form of verse and while many children his age grew to hate the religion forced upon them, Silas found comfort in it. A wild little kid, he was always getting into trouble and hurting himself with adventurous ideas. His parent’s never just told him that something he did was wrong, they explained why. It always seemed to do with getting into heaven and little Silas could never grasp that idea, still at the peak of childhood mortality was only an illusion. But he could understand how those actions hurt others and in turn lessened his own personal value. so as he aged, he began to take their stories to heart, seeing them as they were: not true accounts of actual happenings, but stories with a meaning so that you did not have to go through the pain to learn the lesson. He was never really certain that he believed in God or Heaven, but he believed in Faith, and how important it was to people and how great a tool it was to lead them down a path of good.

The son of the preacher, he was teased tremendously by his peers. In a world that has not only lost faith, but lost the respect for it, he didn’t seem to have any place. He grew up quiet and lonely, but never once doubted that all his strength of will would pay off. His parents were his best friends and there was never a family happier than the three of them, sitting around the table for dinner. That was, until Silas’s mother passed when he was fourteen. It was breast cancer, and the will of God, of course, causing Silas to doubt his faith for the first time. Of course he knew the verses, how hardships were tests of one’s faith from God, but this time Silas was sure the big man upstairs pushed him too hard. His father never failed in his faith, heading up the proceedings at his wife’s funeral, but the loss left a sad man in place of the once pillar of faith Silas had known. It wasn’t intentional, pulling away from him, but soon enough Silas felt he had lost everyone and he was loosing his faith as well.

He fell off his path of goodness and unfortunately there was a line of people just waiting to corrupt the preacher’s son. It wasn’t hard to find a million alternatives to facing the grief, his peers introduced him to alcohol, a common substance for fighting (and, coincidentally inducing) depression, marijuana (which, they were quick to tell him, came from God’s good earth) and nicotine to deal with (and, once again, induce) those fits of restlessness when your mind and fingers couldn’t stop moving. He was staying out late and throwing his father’s bible verses back in his face when he tried to reign his son in. It seemed the death of his mother had finally broken the good obedient boy he had once been. That was not his rock bottom, though. Rock bottom would come in the back of a car filled with teenage boy who drank too much and paid too little attention to the road. Losing two of his friends to a car accident was what it took to remind him there was more about faith than getting into heaven. It wasn’t about showing off that you were the best or even getting in God’s good graces. It was about protecting innocents from the terrible things that happened in this world. Be them caused by the devil or mankind themselves, Silas was never sure, but he was certain he should have voiced his concerns about getting in a car with a drunk driver.

Three weeks in the hospital and two funerals later, Silas was back on his path, though now there was more appreciation than ever. He’d experienced now, those awful happenings that God’s Word had tried to protect him from, help him through, and he knew he wouldn’t make it through another one without his faith. After he graduated, he joined the seminary with the hopes of becoming a missionary and spreading faith to those who needed it most, the downtrodden and oppressed who needed His strength more than anyone who only cared about getting into heaven. But it seemed his Lord had one more test for him, the final test of faith.

AFTER DECEMBER 25th, 2017,

When the rumors began, Silas left school and returned home to find his father had been bitten. In the earliest days, before they knew what that meant, Silas tried to save him. None of his attempts worked, and eventually his father died and Silas was sure the Lord had no more trials for him. Then his father woke up. He remembered the story of Lazarus, dead for four days but Jesus rose him still, yet something felt very unholy about his father before him. His father lurched at him, teeth grinding and Silas backed away, seeing that his eyes were no longer his own. Despite wanting to believe his father was alive and okay, Silas did the unthinkable and put his father out of his misery, unable to see him like that any longer. He stayed in his home for a good while, burying his father and saying the rites himself, though he had never been ordained into the church. Eventually he had to leave, his hometown had been overrun with the risen.

As he traveled alone, he questioned his faith a lot, but still every decision he made was made with his teachings in mind. He couldn’t help but wonder if this was indeed an act of God, and what that made those people who had risen. Eventually he came to the conclusion that they were dead, not risen like Lazarus and bared from entering the Lord’s Kingdom by their physical form. Killing them was, indeed, the only way to help them, as Jesus said “he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live”. He understood there was a life beyond this one, a good life spent in the hands of the Lord and killing these unfortunate souls was not murder but release. That became his mission, to free as many of God’s children from this curse as he could. It was a lonely life, so it was no surprise when Silas came upon a group, he felt the need to join them. His priority must lie with the living now, else wise he might have been dead himself.

The small group seemed to share his sentiments, but Silas learned quickly they were a bit too fanatical, believing this was the second coming and it was their duty to give the gift of unlife to all they came across. He barely escaped himself, the others wanting to turn him once they found he disagreed, and he was on his own again. He has never been able to bring himself to kill another living human being, using his smarts to get him out of most all jams he’s been in. He was conflicted about approaching the Rodeway Inn, which obviously had people living inside, but he was low on supplies and desperate for human interaction, so he joined the group as a scavenger, hoping that way he would be able to continue his mission of sending as many of God’s lost children as he could back to Him.

CENSUS,

faceclaim ⋯ Nat Zang played by ⋯ Cal

[renegadewangs]

Chapter 25 preview

Wow okay, I am definitely not going to get this chapter done before the move starts (which is tomorrow). I’m pretty far in, but it’ll probably be another long one. Since it’s been a week since my last update, here’s a preview to keep you in suspense! --I mean... To make you totally happy and content, and relieve all worry. Nothing bad is happening here. Nope.

(obviously there are huge spoilers for the Dai Gyakuten series here.)

----

There was something to be said about awakening from a state of 'nothingness'. It held blissful ignorance to it; something pure and pleasant, unhampered by the influences of reality. Such a thing could never last, of course. Tick tick tick- The first thing Yuujin became aware of was a splitting headache, which presumably spread itself out from the throbbing pain in the back of his skull. He was cold, he realized soon after. He was on the floor. His wrists hurt. This was not home. He must've collapsed. Tick tick tick- Something had happened. Something awful enough to fill him with tense, overpowering dread, even when the details failed to come to him. What was that blasted ticking sound? ...No, it was more than ticking. There was whirring and creaking. Where...? His eyes opened to a blur, further intensified by the haze of semi-darkness. Neither blinking nor squinting did much to relieve the problem, at least not at first. The process of the world coming into focus was a gradual one. He attempted to move his hands to the back of his head, only to run into an immediate problem: his wrists were bound together behind his back with thick rope. Tick tick tick- A pair of black leather shoes stepped into his field of vision, their progress aided by a hardwood cane so smooth that traces of light danced along the surface. With that, he remembered. While he'd fallen unconscious in Baker Street, he was no longer home now. Fighting his way through the numbing pain and the protest of his muscles, he moved himself up into a kneeling position and looked upward. Moriarty was standing less than five feet away, watching him with such leisure, he gave off the impression of someone enjoying the sight of a caged animal at the zoo. Yuujin would have none of that. “Where is Iris?!” was the first thing to come to mind, and thus the first thing he blurted out. “Detained,” Moriarty said, entirely too calm. “Where is Iris?!” Yuujin tried again, putting more force behind his words despite his obvious disadvantage. A loud tisk, then Moriarty raised his cane and jammed it straight into Yuujin's chest, just below the ribcage. The pain was so fierce that it caused him to double over and even then, the cane wasn't removed. Moriarty leaned against it with most of his weight, pressing it firmly into Yuujin's abdomen. “Don't you dare raise your voice to me,” the man hissed. “You are lucky to live up until this moment. The both of you. Bait doesn't serve its purpose unless it wriggles about in a helpless manner. So long as there is even the slightest hope you may survive, Holmes will avoid doing anything impulsive.” For a moment, Yuujin assumed that Moriarty was speaking of the younger Holmes brother, only to remember that it could pertain to Mycroft as well. Either way, it caused him to grimace. His response came in something of a wheeze. “If that's what you believe, you don't know him as well as you think. Impulsive behavior is guaranteed.” “Regardless, once you die, there is nothing stopping him from taking this entire building down in order to eliminate us,” Moriarty said, and Yuujin thought that was a fine hypocrisy from the man who destroyed a slaughter house less than a day ago. The tip of the cane was finally removed from his abdomen, allowing him to breathe easier, and with that, Moriarty took a step backwards. He was off balance in the left side of his body, Yuujin noted, making the cane more than a luxury item. It was an opportunity in the making. If Moriarty suffered from such an obvious physical problem, he would be easy enough to overpower. How unfortunate that a better glimpse of their surroundings ruled that option out. Koroshiya was standing near a window, leaning back against the wall, still as a statue. Mycroft and the others were supposed to have been tracking him, which had Yuujin wonder just how long he'd been unconscious and just how much he'd missed. Where was he now? The origin of the ticking and creaking became perfectly clear; despite the overall appearance of a library, its bookcases holding nothing but dust, there was clockwork all around them. Enormous cogs and gears led all the way up into a high ceiling. Never before had Yuujin seen so many things moving in unison. Glass plating of a clock's backside took up one particular portion of wall, allowing Yuujin to tell that it was past three in the morning. This wasn't the Chief of Justice's office- it couldn't be- and yet... “Disorienting, isn't it?” Moriarty asked, having noticed Yuujin's stare. “One must give Hart Vortex credit for his complete and utter absence of taste. One out of ten, I would've graded it. This monstrosity of a building was to become the new headquarters to Scotland Yard's forensics department. Can you imagine the amount of money he invested? ...No, I doubt someone like you could ever hope to comprehend it. Now it's been left to rot, as Vortex's disgrace has set criminal investigation back by several decades. And whose doing was that?” “Hart Vortex was an integral part of the very problem he was attempting to fight. We've lost nothing of value in his disgrace, just as we lost nothing of value in yours,” Yuujin snapped back at him. About a second of silence, then Moriarty burst into roaring laughter. It was as disturbing a cackle as it'd ever been. “All these years,” he began through his snickering, “and you still cannot pronounce the letter R the way one ought to! Why you still bother with the pretense of your English gentleman front, I will never understand! Though, I suppose returning to your backwater country for another decade has sent you straight back to where you started!” Yuujin felt his cheeks flush with a mixture of anger and embarrassment. “The very same backwater country which sheltered you for a good decade, Professor. Or should I address you as 'Common Criminal' instead? The title of Professor is mine now after all.” “You'd better watch yourself, Mikotoba.” Moriarty pressed the tip of his cane up against Yuujin's throat and while he didn't apply too much force this time, the threat was there nonetheless. “The more you antagonize me, the more painful your death will become. I'm quite looking forward to it already.” Yuujin waited until the cane was removed before he dared to speak again. “What is this about? This twisted plan for revenge? It seems as if you are risking everything for a petty grudge. Had you remained hidden, you could've continued to live the easy life in this opium empire of your own making,” he pointed out. Apparently, that had been the wrong thing to say. “The easy life?!” Moriarty roared. “Simply because I have money, my life is meant to be easy?! Do you believe this is what I dreamed I would become?! What use are all my diplomas and titles now?! Years of hard academic work have been wasted! Even my own reports and theses were discarded as if they'd been plagiarized! My former colleagues viewed me nothing more than an imbecile!” “I-I...” “Do you know what it feels like to have a bullet pierce your body at a sideways angle,” Moriarty growled, prodding at Yuujin's gut with the tip of his cane, “searing through flesh and muscle, not coming to a stop until it collides with the inside of your hip, fracturing bone in the process? I know it quite well, thanks to Sherlock. The pain was unfathomable. I was convinced I wouldn't live to see another day, and so, dragging him down with me was the least I could do. Imagine how much my body protested when I fought him. Imagine my disappointment when I lost track of my target by the river. Imagine my agony as I struggled to fight the current and clamber onto shore.” Yuujin didn't want to imagine it. Not one bit. He said nothing. “The bullet is still in there. I could hardly chance a visit to a doctor at that time, after all. I had to focus all my efforts on recovery, even as I was whisked away from my home country. It took two years until I could walk with crutches. Three years until I was limited to a cane. Even now, the pain persists and my only relief is to be found in the very opium I peddle. Do not fool yourself into believing I live an easy life, Mikotoba. The punishment I suffered was quite severe, and so, my revenge shall be far from petty. I will destroy you, I will destroy Sherlock... And I will destroy the one who tricked you into action- that despicable brother.” With that, Moriarty withdrew himself a second time. He stumped over to a nearby table, where several cups of tea had already been set out, and took a seat. While Yuujin found it difficult to sympathize with a thief who'd had his own students assassinated, it did allow him to understand just a bit better how far their opponent was willing to go. The more hardship Moriarty had gone through, the more he would take it out on them.

[redditnosleep]

The Suicide Orphan

by Cymoril_Melnibone

I’ve long been fascinated by internet horror stories and creepypastas. I was young and impressionable when I stumbled across my first; Jvk1166z.esp, a story about a video game mod that went eerily wrong. That tumbled me down a dark and narrow rabbit hole into The Russian Sleep Experiment, then further lost me in the cryptid wonderland where all those other internet classics live. No matter how unsettling the story, I really wanted to believe it. At first, I wanted every single detail to be true. Later, I came to most relish the tales that seemed to contain one or two real ingredients, liberally seasoned to please the palates of the audience. And there was a growing envy that rode along with my fascination; I wanted to wield the spices, to be just like those infamous writers. I wanted to create a viral sensation that would sweep across the internet and make people’s spines tingle and burn with genuine, inescapable fear. The kind that really makes you feel alive. But first, I needed to find the raw, true heart for my recipe. I began to pore over old newspaper articles, looking for weird things in my area. I sifted through mountains of garbage online, looking for a tasty kernel of truth hidden within the bland layers of unappetising urban myths. But inspiration eluded me, and I started to lose interest. As adulthood took hold, it slowly began to strangle my childish ability to believe there was some wild truth running around out there, despite never finding any footprints. I was almost ready to admit that perhaps the world was far more mundane and uninteresting than I’d ever imagined – and that every one of my treasured stories were in fact just marvellous fictions, all pretty frosting and no cake. Then, like a horrible gift dropped right into my lap, I chanced to overhear two nurses at the local hospital talking in hushed whispers about the mystery of The Suicide Orphan. How could I not do everything in my power to find out more?

I’ll spare you all the dusty details about how I came by the information I have. Most of it was uncovered by boring hard work; ordinary journalism and archive delving. And I’m not proud; when that fails, I’ve found that there’s very little information you can’t dig up if you use some natural and enhanced advantages. In my case, honey-blonde hair, a splash of bright lipstick and a short skirt. The real story begins in the 1970s, when a young couple, Danny and Susan Johnson, prematurely birthed their second child. They named her Catherine. The baby grew quickly and was soon healthy enough to come home, where she was doted on by her elder sister and her parents. She was bright and happy, apparently escaping any disadvantages of her prematurity; she began to speak at 18 months, and started to read by the age of four. The first tragedy struck the family when Catherine was in kindergarten. The elder sister, Sarah, was found hanging in her wardrobe, a pink plastic skipping-rope looped about her neck. Emergency services were called, but the nine-year-old girl was not able to be resuscitated. As you would expect, the family was devastated. They cooperated with the police and the coroner, and endured a protracted and gruelling investigation into every aspect of their lives. No evidence of foul play was ever uncovered, and the ruling on Sarah’s death was left inconclusive. Either it was accidental, or it was a rare child suicide. Everything slid rapidly and predictably downhill for the Johnsons from there, with the mother falling into black depression frighteningly fast, and the father drowning his own pain in a bottle. The date on the second ambulance report is barely six months after the one on the invoice for Sarah’s headstone. Susan Johnson was found in the family garage, her asphyxiated corpse as pink as a child’s skipping rope, a side-effect of carbon monoxide inhalation. The car was still idling, with a hose from the exhaust pipe pushed through a crack in the window. The grim trifecta of paperwork is complete two months later, when Danny Johnson successfully hanged himself in the very same garage, a sawhorse kicked out from underneath him, and his wife’s perfume heavy in the air. With no other living relatives able to be traced, Catherine Johnson became a suicide orphan.

The Walders were her first foster family. They were experienced in caring for children from difficult circumstances, loved her to pieces, and did everything they could to heal the poor girl. Only five, she barely understood what had happened and why, so she adapted quickly. I found one of her first school reports, buried amongst random papers in a forgotten box beneath the Walder’s house. It paints a bright picture of an exceptionally gregarious child, a little girl who made friends easily and was radiant in her happiness. All seemed to be going very well for Catherine and her new parents. She’s all dimpled smiles in the photograph of her cuddling the kitten she received on her seventh birthday, and certificates and trophies suggest that she was something of an athletic prodigy, outrunning every other girl in her district. There was not a single warning sign that anything was wrong for Jenny Walder, the foster mother. According to the archived reports, she had appeared completely normal, right up to the day she was found in her bathtub, the life seeped out of her into the deep crimson water. There were no hesitation marks surrounding the long, definite cuts in her wrists from where she had opened her veins. The foster father, Michael Walders, survived his wife for another nine months before he succumbed to catatonic depression and was taken to a mental health facility. He didn’t move nor speak for the next six weeks, so none of the staff appear to be sure how he got onto the roof. The leap from the fifth floor shattered his skull into nine separate fragments, and his life ended in a concrete parking lot. Catherine was left utterly alone for the second time in her short life. She was put into state care while another family was sought to take care of her.

Now, this is the point where the rumours really start. The pool of prospective foster families was much smaller thirty-odd years ago, and it was becoming difficult to keep her history from the community. People back then were superstitious enough to be very leery of a child with so much death in her past. Families long noted as being eager for a child, any child, abruptly change their tune when it is revealed that the child being considered is Catherine, the suicide orphan. People were beginning to speculate, very quietly, that Catherine herself was to blame for the five deaths. I like to think that there were others who shushed them and told them not to be so crude and cruel. A pair of childless atheists, Melissa and Tony Lipsey, finally accepted the girl into their care and instantly fell in love with her. Melissa was an aspiring writer, who kept long, detailed journals of her life and experiences. After some convincing, her family let me read a few of the ones concerning Catherine. Their existence seemed idyllic, with no great calamities afflicting them, only the very ordinary hardships of family life. Psychological support was provided for the couple and the child from the day Catherine entered their home, and appears to have been quite careful and thorough for the time. Right up until the point of her suicide, Melissa’s diary spoke of love and hope and great plans for their new daughter when she grew up. Indeed, Catherine was excelling in every aspect of school life, and had even been moved up a year. The final entry in the notebook is uncharacteristically short, and contains one curious sentence about feeling ‘empty’. For no reason that anyone could fathom, on that date Melissa and Tony Lipsey drove their car to the river, then walked into the water, fully clothed and hand-in-hand, and drowned together. It was ruled an accident, but anyone who knew about Catherine knew that was a lie.

Nobody wanted to adopt her after that. Ten years old, she languished in a state orphanage, other children coming and going. She seems to have made the best of it; her tattered, photocopied file repeats the same phrases as reports from her early life; she was a child who smiled easily and often, was loved by the other children, and she never caused any trouble. She educated herself, borrowing great piles of books from the local library, clearly reading well beyond her age, and engaged the facility’s staff in thoughtful and philosophical conversations about her plight. Anyone close to her appeared to like her, yet heartbreakingly, she seemed to understand exactly why nobody wanted her. The first staff suicide – that of Catherine’s primary caregiver – sparked a panic, and half of the orphanage workers refused to come to work the following day. Children were quickly shifted to other facilities in nearby cities, and the place was temporarily shut down. Catherine knew precisely what was going on and asked several times to ‘just be let go’. She said she didn’t want to trouble anyone anymore, that she would find a place in the woods and live on her own. She was interviewed and re-interviewed by law enforcement and by psychiatrists from her temporary, solitary room in a juvenile holding facility, until no-one had any questions left to ask. The conclusion was rational, and completely sensible. It was not this child, but the mythos following this child, that was the cause of the suicides. Catherine should be provided with a new identity and placed anonymously in another home on the other side of the country, and then the suicides would stop. Unfortunately, this conclusion was also completely wrong.

Tracking Catherine became difficult at this point. I eventually managed to find her again when a fellow student, her school teacher, and her new foster parents all killed themselves within a few months of each other. She was fourteen, and must have been very much aware what that meant. When she was taken into custody, she fought like a demon and required two male police officers to restrain her. There is a curious note in that police report, stating that those officers ‘received injuries’ but Catherine’s later medical examination showed no injury at all to herself, not even a bruise. She was placed into inpatient psychiatric care. The breezy, bright child with the easy smile does not appear in any more of the reports I was able to obtain; she was gone. The teenage Catherine is clearly deeply disturbed, and any trace of her personality was probably medicated away. The range of psychotropic drugs they managed to dose her with is extensive, despite some odd notes in her charts from this time. Initial attempts to administer heavy-duty sedatives by injection are simply recorded as ‘unsuccessful’, and followed by a recommendation for ‘oral medication only’. But pills must have been enough; with ‘the suicide orphan’ locked away in a psych ward and a chemical straightjacket, anyone would assume that was an end to the bleak trail of death that Catherine Johnson left wherever she went. And with a high turnover of overworked staff, there wasn’t much risk of anyone getting attached to the young woman. Some of the inmates in her facility were found hanged or dead from self-mutilation, but, well, it was a place for crazy people – that sort of stuff happened all the time. No more connections appear to have been made. But on August 3rd, 1991, two staff members deliberately overdosed on patient medications and several inmates escaped using the keys of the deceased. Amongst those that escaped was Catherine Johnson.

She was smart, once the drugs left her system. Much smarter than the others, who were all caught in a matter of days. I think Catherine probably cut and dyed her hair and hitch-hiked as far as she could get, as there are no sightings of her despite bulletins and flyers. The trail of documents was cold for a long time, and I expanded my search wider and wider, hoping to find the lost thread of her existence. And I had one grisly card up my sleeve; even someone as smart and resourceful as she was couldn’t do anything about the one thing that made her trackable: everywhere she went, people killed themselves. Unfortunately, suicide is more common than you might first think, so the background noise is extensive. People kill themselves every other day, for all kinds of reasons. A seemingly happy father of three will take a shotgun into the shower and blow his brains out, even though he was recently promoted at work, and his life seems perfect. After reading far too many of those stories, I did eventually find her carrion footsteps. Leading out west, a neat line of unexplained suicides which pointed to the forested mountain wilderness – the common factor that drew my attention was that each of the deceased owned some sort of supply or convenience shop. I contacted the library near Catherine’s teenage orphanage, posing as a family member to access her library records. My suspicions were confirmed; since she was ten years old, she had been researching outdoor survival and how to live self-sufficiently in the wilderness.

I’m really not much of an outdoors person, but the heady prospect of finding the mythical Suicide Orphan was too much for me. I probably overstocked on supplies and safety gear, but I didn’t want to be caught short in poor weather. With an expensive GPS machine and enough food for a month, I started searching the mountains for Catherine Johnson. I suspected I was on the right track when I started finding increasing numbers of dead animals. Although that’s not unusual in the wilderness, the corpses became very regular, mostly intact, and quite fresh. Birds had seemingly fallen from the sky mid-flight, as though their tiny hearts had simply given up. Further on, dead rats and larger mammals marked a sort of grisly perimeter around Catherine’s isolated bolthole. The first sign was terrible and stark, a white board nailed to a tree and splashed with faded red paint. “STAY AWAY OR ELSE” it read, like the warning on a child’s treehouse. There were more signs as I pushed through the scrub, bearing similar imprecations. Each of them threatened some kind of violence, without being specific. Eventually I saw a crude hut through the trees, and painted on the door in that same naïve hand were the words “COME INSIDE AND YOU WILL DIE”. I knew what was going on here. Catherine blamed herself for the deaths of everyone around her; she had done so since she was very young, and she didn’t want it to happen again. By isolating herself in the wilderness, she believed that she could avoid bringing any more death to other people. And if she didn’t have anyone who cared about her, she couldn’t lose anyone she cared about. I had walked in Catherine’s appallingly sad footsteps for so long, that at this point I really did care about her. And I was no longer thinking about what that meant. Perhaps, having spent my whole life looking for that kernel of truth, when I found it, I didn’t want to believe it. “I’m coming in,” I declared loudly as I pushed open the door.

She sat by the stone fireplace, a small figure lost in a chair made of carefully woven branches. Dark hair was piled up on top of her head, tied in place with a frayed scarf. Inside, the hut was tidy and clean, meticulous care evident in the orderliness of the piles of split logs and the fur-covered furniture. She seemed to know immediately that I wasn’t there by accident; that I was not some lost hiker or hunter who had stumbled into her hideaway despite the warning trail of animal corpses and signs. “I should have moved,” she said without preamble, turning her gaze towards me. Her face was too youthful, she looked like a twenty-year-old. “I should have stuck to my plan and moved to another place in the wilds, to stop people like you finding me.” “Well, I’m glad I did find you,” I replied weakly, unable to stop staring at her. I felt strangely uneasy at how young she looked. She was almost twice my age, yet somehow it felt quite the reverse. “You won’t be,” she said simply, with a small and solemn shake of her head. There was a tense, pregnant pause, then she glanced at the iron kettle hung over the fireplace. “Would you like some tea? It’s mostly mountain herbs, but it’s hot.” Not knowing what else to say, I simply nodded. The tiny hut should have been cosy, yet I was cold. “Tell me how you found me.” And so I told her the same tale I’m telling you now. I laid out all my clever discoveries from end to end as she poured tea into fired clay cups, the sharp scents of mint and pine suffusing the air. She was silent while the account unfolded, but would sometimes nod, confirming a snippet of information when I sounded uncertain. At other revelations, she bowed her head and averted her eyes as though ashamed – but she never interrupted. When I was empty of words, she finally spoke. “So. You wanted fame. That’s why you sought me out? You wanted to tell my story to the world and become a sort of television celebrity.” Her voice was layered heavy with undisguised contempt, and I felt the colour rise in my cheeks. “I guess so,” I mumbled. My stomach twisted, hollow, despite the tea. “Well, now you have your story. You found your Suicide Orphan, and everything about her is true. Wherever I go, death follows.” It was my turn to be silent for a long moment; what could I say to that? But I needed to ask. I needed to be sure about one more thing. “I have a question,” I said finally, my voice dull in my ears. She shifted in her chair, placing one hand on the rough-hewn table. “You want to know why I never killed myself,” she stated flatly. “Yes.” A knife hung from her belt in a leather sheath, and with a well-practised movement, she pulled it free – stabbing it cleanly through the hand resting on the rough wood between us. I shrieked in alarm, and reflexively jerked away, the wicker chair nearly tipping me onto the floor. As quickly as she had drawn the blade, she yanked it free; leaving a deep cut that glimmered white tendon, then welled dark with blood. She raised her wounded hand in the air, and I watched, disbelieving, as the vicious rent in her flesh knitted immediately, like some kind of claymation. It left not even a whisper of a scar betraying where it had been. “Poison doesn’t work, either,” she said, calmly wiping the knife clean on her sleeve, “even deadly nightshade only gives me a tummy ache. I tried a pistol once, but the bullet bounced right off my skull and made a mess of my crockery.” The knife was rehomed in the scabbard and she gave me a wan smile, “I’d bury myself alive, but I’m too frightened of spending an eternity screaming into the lightless dirt.” Another long silence followed as we sipped our cooling tea. I drained my cup and stared at the dregs of grey leaves, their green all boiled away. “I’m going to die, aren’t I?” I asked. It wasn’t really a question. “Of course you are. What other possible outcome did you think there could be? Did you really think just because you were the one to find me, you’d somehow be immune? That caring about the truth would save you? That’s not how real life works, I’m afraid.” I swallowed, fear swelling like an ugly bubble inside me. “How does it happen?” “It will start as an ineffable feeling of loss, like you’ve misplaced something important. The emptiness grows inside your breast, then invades your head until it gnaws at all your thoughts, tainting everything good with poisonous doubt. Eventually the yawning nothingness within will be so complete that you’ll have naught left to live for, and you’ll end your life.” “So there’s nothing I can do.” She leaned forward and grasped my head in her strong, dirt-rimed hands. “You can do exactly what you were going to do all along, but not for yourself. Tell your story. Write out your little electronic letter and send your ‘creepypasta’ all around the world. Tell people that this horror is true – I am real, and that if anyone comes near me, they will die.” She let me go, the intensity fading from her eyes. “Now leave me. I can’t stand seeing yet another human being die because of me.”

And so I guess I got my wish. I hope you enjoyed my little story, because it’s the last one I’ll ever tell. I can already feel that void inside me, widening, growing, feeding. It’s grey and it’s cold and it’s deeper than space. I’ve tried as much as I can to stop it – therapy, medication, immersing myself in dizzyingly happy music and distracting myself with books and films – but everything seems so hollow, so trite, and so utterly pointless now. Nothing feels real any more. I’m not exactly sure how I’ll do it, but I think that somewhere in my old things from my childhood, there might be a pink plastic skipping rope.

Yes, that seems real. That feels right and true.

[newstfionline]

Japan’s School System Is More Equitable—and Less Costly

By Alana Semuels, The Atlantic, Aug. 2, 2017

KAWAMATA, Japan--In many countries, the United States included, students’ economic backgrounds often determine the quality of the education they receive. Richer students tend to go to schools funded by high property taxes, with top-notch facilities and staff that help them succeed. In districts where poorer students live, students often get shoddy facilities, out-of-date textbooks, and fewer guidance counselors.

Not in Japan. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a group of 35 wealthy countries, Japan ranks highly among its peers in providing its rich and poor students with equal educational opportunities: The OECD estimates that in Japan only about 9 percent of the variation in student performance is explained by students’ socioeconomic backgrounds. The OECD average is 14 percent, and in the United States, it’s 17 percent. “In Japan, you may have poor areas, but you don’t have poor schools,” John Mock, an anthropologist at Temple University’s Japan Campus, told me.

Perhaps as a result, fewer students in Japan struggle and drop out of school--the country’s high-school graduation rate, at 96.7 percent, is much higher than the OECD average and the high-school graduation rate in the United States, which is 83 percent. Plus, poorer children in Japan are more likely to grow up to be better off in adulthood, compared to those in countries like the U.S. and Britain (though Scandinavian countries lead in this regard). “It’s one of the few [education] systems that does well for almost any student,” Andreas Schleicher, who oversees the OECD’s work on education and skills development, told me, adding, “Disadvantage is really seen as a collective responsibility.”

For instance, in Iitate Village, which was evacuated after being contaminated by radiation after the Fukushima nuclear-power-plant disaster in March 2011, many families still have not come back. Piles of contaminated soil, covered up, still dot the landscape, and many homes are shuttered. The local primary school has just 51 students, compared to more than 200 before the accident. Yet the quality of education given to returnees is top-notch. The government built a new school for students outside the radiation zone, in a town called Kawamata, and though the classes are still very small--first grade has only two students--the school is well staffed. In a classroom I visited, all five second-graders in the school watched a teacher demonstrate flower-arranging as three other teachers surrounded them, helping them with each step. In another, a math teacher quizzed students on odd and even numbers, and as the students split into groups to discuss a problem on the board, another teacher leaned in to help. Walking around the school, it almost seemed there were as many teachers as students.

“The quality of education is better than before March 11th [2011],” Tomohiro Kawai, a parent of a sixth-grader and the president of the school’s parent-teacher association, told me, citing the low student-teacher ratio. Many of the children who returned to the area are from single-parent families, a group prone to struggling economically; some parents moved back to Iitate because they needed help from their own parents in watching their children, according to Satoko Oowada, one of the school’s teachers. But the federal government takes pains to prevent economic hardship from affecting the quality of students’ education. It gave a grant to Iitate so that all students in the school would get free lunch, school uniforms, notebooks, pencils, and gym clothes. “Equality of education is very important for children in Iitate Village,” the school’s principal, Takehiko Yoshikawa, told me. “Everywhere, students receive the same education.”

The equity in Iitate Village stands in stark contrast to a place like New Orleans, which was also hit by a disaster. While Japan’s national government tried to ensure that students in the affected area got more resources after the accident, officials in New Orleans disinvested in the public educational system in their city. Public-school teachers were put on leave and dismissed, many students disappeared from schools’ rolls, and the New Orleans system now consists almost entirely of charter schools. (To be sure, New Orleans is something of an outlier--districts in New York and New Jersey, for example, received federal money to help deal with Hurricane Sandy’s impact on education.)

There are a number of reasons why Japan excels in providing educational opportunities. One of them is how it assigns teachers to schools. Teachers in Japan are hired not by individual schools, but by prefectures, which are roughly analogous to states. Their school assignments within the prefecture change every three years or so in the beginning of their careers, and then not quite as often later on in their careers. This means that the prefectural government can make sure the strongest teachers are assigned to the students and schools that need them the most. “There’s a lot going on to redirect the better teachers, and more precious resources, towards the more disadvantaged students,” Schleicher said.

It also means that teachers can learn from different environments. Young teachers are exposed to a series of different talented peers and learn from their methods. That’s a big contrast to some place like the United States, said Akihiko Takahashi, a onetime teacher in Japan and now an associate professor of elementary math at DePaul University’s College of Education. “Here in the U.S., the good teachers go to the good schools and stay there the whole time,” he told me.

Japan’s educational equality is also a matter of how funds are distributed. Teacher salaries are paid from both the national government and from the prefectural government, and so do not vary as much based on an area’s median household earnings (or, more often, property values). The same goes for the funding of building expenses and other fees--schools get more help from the national government than they would in the U.S. According to Takahashi, the Japanese educational system aims to benefit all students. “Their system is really carefully designed to have equal opportunity nationwide,” he said. This contrasts with the U.S. education system, he said, which he judges to raise up the best students but often leave everyone else behind.

What’s more, Japan actually spends less on education than many other developed countries, investing 3.3 percent of its GDP in education, compared to the OECD average of 4.9 percent. It spends $8,748 per student at the elementary school level, compared to the $10,959 that the United States spends. But it spends the money wisely. School buildings are not much to look at. Textbooks are simple and printed in paperback, and students and teachers are responsible for keeping schools clean. Japan also has fewer administrators on campuses--there is usually just a principal and a few vice principals, and not many others in the way of staff.

Despite the country’s relatively low spending on education, Japan’s teachers are paid more than the OECD average. And the profession has high barriers to entry: Much like the bar exam for American lawyers, Japan’s teacher entrance exams, which are administered by prefectures, are very difficult. Oowada told me she took the Fukushima Prefecture teaching exam five times before she passed it. She’s now a permanent teacher, guaranteed a pension and a job in the prefecture until age 60; she said that the year she passed, 200 people took the test, and only five passed. (Her co-teacher, Yuka Iinuma, had still not passed the test, and was working as a one-year contract teacher, moving from school to school each year. Many people who think they want to become teachers eventually give up when they can’t pass the exam, Oowada and Iinuma told me.) And even after their full certification, teachers have an incentive to perform better and better, as every three years they get reviewed for a promotion.

There are of course some downsides to being a teacher in Japan. Still, Japanese teachers are rewarded with a great deal of autonomy on how to improve student outcomes, Takahashi said. In a process called a “lesson study,” teachers research and design a new lesson over a set time period, and then present it to other teachers, who give feedback. Teachers also join together to identify school-wide problems, and organize themselves into teams to address those problems, sometimes writing a report or publishing a book on how to solve them, he said. “It’s not about an individual star teacher, but about teamwork,” he said.

Schleicher says that teachers’ focus on pedagogy contributes to the Japanese education system’s equality. The emphasis, he says, is not as much on absorbing content as it is on teaching students how to think. “They really focus on problem-solving, which means the ability to attack problems they had never seen before,” Takahashi said. In subjects like math, Japanese teachers encourage problem-solving and critical thinking, rather than memorization. For instance, Japanese students were explicitly taught how to solve just 54 percent of the problems on the international Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) test, but received an average score of 565, according to the Lesson Study Alliance, an education nonprofit. Students in the U.S. were explicitly taught how to solve 82 percent of the problems, yet received a lower average score, 518. Ironically, some of these Japanese teaching methods came from the United States--in particular, from an American group, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, which urged American teachers to change their methods throughout the 1980s. But it was Japanese teachers who listened to this advice.

Indeed, in the math class I attended in Kawamata, there was a great deal of back and forth between the students and the teacher, who was asking the students increasingly difficult questions. Even after the bell rang, the discussion continued, with students running up to the board to try their hand at the problems.

Of course, there are other reasons that Japanese schools are more equitable than American ones--reasons that have more to do with features of the U.S.’s system. Japan has an extremely homogeneous population, which means that the racial segregation that persists in U.S. schools is a non-issue there. Japan also doesn’t track students into gifted programs, which means that all students share the same classroom, and better students are expected to help ones that are struggling. Tracking students may help the sharpest American students thrive, but it can also leave other students behind.

Japan’s schools can be extremely stressful places for students, who are sometimes bullied if they fall behind. “As long as I performed well in school, things were okay. But once I started to deviate just a little--they [parents and teachers] went to the extreme and started treating me incredibly coldly,” one student told Anne Allison, a cultural anthropologist at Duke University who has written extensively on Japan. Japanese students are also expected to belong to after-school clubs for sports or dance, which can keep them at school until 6 p.m. “When they come home, it’s already dark and all they have left to do is eat dinner, take a bath and do their home assignment and sleep,” the Tokyo teacher told me.

Despite these flaws, Japan’s educational system still sets an example for other countries to follow. That’s partly because Japan has different goals for its schools than somewhere like the United States does. “The Japanese education system tries to minimize the gap between the good students and everyone else,” Takahashi told me. That means directing more resources and better teachers to students or schools that are struggling. It also means giving teachers the freedom to work together to improve schools. This could be difficult to transplant to the United States, where education has long been managed on a local level, and where talk of sharing resources more often leads to lawsuits than it does to change. But Japan’s success is relatively recent, according to Schleicher. Fifty years ago, Japan’s schools were middling, he said. Countries can make their schools more equitable. They just need to agree that success for all students is a top priority.