#computer engineering homework help

[essaywritinghelp]

[robertreich]

Combine this with Trump’s attacks on higher education — his gutting the funding of the National Institutes of Health (which provides a large portion of biomedical research) and the National Science Foundation (engineering and computer research) and his effective closure of USAID (which underwrites research in global diseases). Put this together with Trump’s attacks on the freedom of speech of university students and professors. And with Trump’s (and RFK Jr.’s) attacks on vaccine science. With Trump’s and right-wing governors’ attacks on teaching the truth in our schools about America’s history of slavery and Native American genocide. Combine this with Trump’s attack on America’s libraries — last week’s executive order mandating cuts in the funding of libraries around the country — which will jeopardize literacy development and reading programs, reliable internet access for those without it at home, and homework help and other resources for students and educators. And his attacks on America’s museums (the same executive order cut their funding, too). And his attack on the arts, as illustrated by Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center (last month, he announced himself its new chair, replaced 13 board members, and inserted a new interim president). What’s the larger picture? Not an “attack on the liberal state,” as I keep reading. Not “the culmination of Trump’s culture wars.” Certainly not that Trump is seeking “small government” over “big government” or advancing traditional conservatism over traditional liberalism. What’s really occurring is an attack on the American mind.

[royharperwifey]

-–☆⁂☕︎Hacked☕︎⁂☆–--

Credits: I got this lovely idea from @sobbingscripter go give her some love on her fics. Part 2

[yearning!tim] [slow burn] [mlw] [x reader] [fluff] [cutesy!tim] [sequel?] [plot twist?] [damian wayne cameo] [reader has glasses] [tim has glasses] [I repeat TIMMY BOY WEARS GLASSES]

Tim is currently very high on energy drinks, trying to hack into Black Mask's mainframe. He is sure that he is behind the recent kidnapping, but he just can't prove it, yet.

He types in the encryption code into the Bat computer and before he can notice and fix his stupid caffeine induced typo, he clicks enter and he is met with a catalogue of photos.

At first, he sees screenshots from a lab website. Sionis working with chemicals? Then, he scrolls through and sees a photo of you. A young woman with at least 16 fries in your mouth, grinning at your friend.

Huh?

Tim closes the laptop and decides that he needs sleep. He's hallucinating and he needs desperate sleep.

After one of Alfred's soothing cups of 'sleepy tea' — that he's almost 75% sure has ground up and dissolved sleeping pills — Tim is out like a light.

The next morning, Time climbs back onto the Bat computer and nearly spits out his fresh croissant when he sees that you were not a hallucination of a pretty girl as he previously thought.

He scrolls through the camera roll, candid photos of the same young woman. Birthday videos, 0.5 photos, videos your friends took of you having a crashout about engineering homework. You were so cute with your messy hair and glasses gone askew on your face.

Tim threw the thought in the trash along with his croissant wrapper and continued his work from last night. He needed to get a grip. He types in the encryption code a second time, correctly and gets the same cellphone. Yours. He decides to dig a little deeper, but gets pretty distracted.

You're struggling with a homework question and asked many of your friends for help. Tim decides, you know, while he is in your phone, he'll just.. help you along. So, he types out a message, screenshots it and sent it yo your gallery.

>>—♡—>

"Oh my gosh. Look!" You say as you read the random Maths help that popped up in your gallery in a folder called 'Maths for pretty girls'.

>>—♡—>

That's how it started. You knew you'd been hacked but by a completely helpful guy. First it was Maths. It was the only reason that Tim hadn't un-hacked you, yet. Or, at least that's what he tells himself. In truth, he actually found your weird videos cute and the way you would send thank you pictures to him from the most unflattering angle known to man, captioned 'thank you mysterious elf'.

Tim despised being an elf but he supposed if a pretty girl called him that, he didn't mind.

>>—♡—>

After a month of Tim helping you with Maths, he decided to send a silly photo of himself, back. Was he dead on his feet? Yes. Was he on another caffeine high? Yes. Should he have gone to bed and left the Bat computer alone? Yes. Did he? No. But my goodness did he look damn good in blue light glasses, in a white t-shirt, messy dark hair as he leaned back in that gaming chair? Yes. Yes, he did.

Your jaw practically dropped when you saw that the guy helping you with your Maths problems was not only a nerd, but an attractive nerd. The universe was on your side.

You didn't respond because it was like 12am and you were half-asleep.

The next morning when Tim saw that he not only sent a picture of sleep deprived Tim to you, but he didn't get a single response. He was left on read.

He just sulked the whole morning and pretended he didn't jump when you added a picture of your outfit of the day to a shared album. He reached for his phone so fast, Bruce looked at him funny.

It was a cute dress. A dress. You looked so beautiful. The dress wasn't even revealing. it was flowey, had tulips on it. You had an adorable smile and your hair was down.

Tim decided to copy you. And not just in the 'oh I'll send an outfit of the day, too', way. He bought a similar dress and did the same exact thing. It made you laugh.

Days passed and you did the same, even adding a picture of you brushing your teeth to the album and so did he. And then Tim did something he was 89% sure was not his greatest idea.

He sent a photo of his phone number. On his bicep. Stupid? Yes. Cliche? Maybe. Effective? 100% you took a second to ogle his bicep before texting him.

The first thing he said was to meet up for coffee. You agreed. Did this mean that Tim was going to un-hack your phone? No. Did this mean he was going to start adding photos of random updates to the album, and calling Timmy and Me, a Project? No.

>>—♡—>

The coffee date made you a little nervous. This man looked good from all angles, even a crappy one where the only lighting was a computer screen while he was dead on his feet. And the first impression he had of you was 0.5 pictures and crashing out over engineering homework.

Tim thought the opposite. He thought that you were so pretty and confident and he was just a weirdo with an energy drink addiction and an atrocity of a sleep schedule.

"Why in Father's name are you dressed like that?" Damian asked as he stood at the doorway of Tim's room. Tim was wearing a Red Robin t-shirt, jeans and his yellow converse.

"Why? Is- Is there something wrong with it?" Tim was panicking. Maybe you didn't like Red Robin. Now his dreams of you getting all excited when he told you were crushed by Damian's tone.

"The colours are off. The red doesn't go well with your bright shoes. You don't want to scare off the girl."

Time froze. "How do you know I'm going in a date?"

"Because unless you're getting ready to play Binky The Clown at a Garfield Character Look Alike contest, you're not winning any points. Let alone with a female. They are complex species, Drake." Damian said.

"You got rejected, didn't you?"

"Shut up and change your shoes. Or very least the shirt. Perhaps the dress will match." With that parting sentence, Damian left. Dammit, he knew.

"I am not a cross-dresser, I swear!" Tim calls.

"No need to be ashamed, Drake. Grayson can do the splits without castrating himself and you like to wear dresses. We all have our things." Damian retorted, making Tim groan and flop down on the bed.

>>—♡—>

When Tim arrived to the cafe, he was not wearing a dress, nor the outfit from before. He wore a simple white tshirt, a pair of black jeans and his black converse. Who can go wrong with monochromatic? Colour doesn't look good on everyone.

That rule doesn't apply to you, apparently. You were so pretty. In a lilac dress, white socks that had frills on the tops paired with little black heels, and a pink cardigan. Your hair was down on your shoulders and your glasses hung low on your freckled face as you read a book in the corner. Tim puts his glasses on to make sure he isn't dreaming. Youre so beautiful. Did he even brush his hair.

He runs to his car and spends an extra 5 minutes fixing his hair. He then walks in like nothing happened and sits down in front of you.

"Hey, stalker." You say.

"Hey, gorgeous." WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?? Tim doesn't talk like that?? He is having an existential crisis right now.

"I- I mean. Hi. You're really pretty." He blabbers.

"Thanks. You're not too bad yourself. I like your glasses." You compliment. His brain short circuits.

"Me too. I mean, thanks. I like yours too. Nice eyes, by the way, where did you get them- I MEAN your necklace- chest. Dress." He lets out a gargling noise of embarrassment and buries his face in his hands. He wants the earth to swallow him right around now.

Then you laugh. At first, he's thinking 'oh my gosh, this girl is laughing at me'. And then, he's like, 'oh my gosh, this girl is laughing. She has such a pretty laugh. And it's directed at me.'

Tim looks up at you, a small smile on his face as he tries to calm the blushing down.

"So, what are you reading?" He asks.

>>—♡—>

A full 2 hours, about 3 hot chocolates and maybe a croissant or two later, the two of you finally bid goodbye. He watches you walk to a car. A very fancy car with someone in the front. His blood runs cold.

He's seen that guy before. That's.. Sionis' right hand. Shit.

>>—♡—>

"Of course she had to work with him. Of course." Tim whines once he gets home.

"Master Timothy, perhaps she is simply an associate of the man whom was driving her. Henchmen have families." Alfred consoles as he swaps out Tim's energy drink with tea.

"But I've seen that car before. The plates match up with a car that goes in and out of Sionis's estate on the daily. See, there's the car." The young man points to the screen as a car rolls into the driveway, the plates match up.

"Oh, dear." Alfred murmurs.

"Shall I let master Bruce know of this?"

"No, don't. I'll dig deeper. Be inconspicuous."

>>—♡—>

"You know, putting on a trenchcoat and sunglasses is not inconspicuous." Damian whispers in irritation.

"Shut up." Tim whacks his head.

"Sleep with one eye open tonight, Drake." Damian warns.

"Shh." Tim shushes as you walk past the cafe they are hiding at. You walk into a makeup shop.

"What girl goes shopping alone?" Damian whispers.

"Shut up." Tim says again, "Lots of girls go shopping alone."

"They don't even go to the bathroom with any less than a group. I wonder what they need that many girls for?"

"To compare chest sizes?"

"Disgusting. Point is- girls go nowhere alone, let alone shopping."

"Oh hey, Tim." You wave.

Damian looks up at you, muttering something about Tim's taste in women not being completely abysmal.

"Hey." Tim smiles.

"What are you doing here? And why are you dressed like that?"

"We came to spy on you." Damian says.

"What?" Tim acts oblivious. "No, we didn't."

"Right." You say, quite unconvinced. "Why spy on me? I'm just buying makeup."

"Why are you with Roman Sionis?" Damian asks. "I have no recollection of him working with females." He adds factually.

"I don't work with him." The words nearly make Tim leap with joy that you aren't working with him.

"Why were you in an out of his estate, then?" Tim asks once he has successfully stopped himself from leaping.

"I'm.. like his ward or whatever."

"What."

If I get 150 likes on this I will make a part 2

[dreamdolldeveloper]

back to basics

mostly free resources to help you learn the basics that i've gathered for myself so far that i think are cool

everyday

gcfglobal - about the internet, online safety and for kids, life skills like applying for jobs, career planning, resume writing, online learning, today's skills like 3d printing, photoshop, smartphone basics, microsoft office apps, and mac friendly. they have core skills like reading, math, science, language learning - some topics are sparse so hopefully they keep adding things on. great site to start off on learning.

handsonbanking - learn about finances. after highschool, credit, banking, investing, money management, debt, goal setting, loans, cars, small businesses, military, insurance, retirement, etc.

bbc - learning for all ages. primary to adult. arts, history, science, math, reading, english, french, all the way to functional and vocational skills for adults as well, great site!

education.ket - workplace essential skills

general education

mathsgenie - GCSE revision, grade 1-9, math stages 1-14, provides more resources! completely free.

khan academy - pre-k to college, life skills, test prep (sats, mcat, etc), get ready courses, AP, partner courses like NASA, etc. so much more!

aleks - k-12 + higher ed learning program. adapts to each student.

biology4kids - learn biology

cosmos4kids - learn astronomy basics

chem4kids - learn chemistry

physics4kids - learn physics

numbernut - math basics (arithmetic, fractions and decimals, roots and exponents, prealgebra)

education.ket - primary to adult. includes highschool equivalent test prep, the core skills. they have a free resource library and they sell workbooks. they have one on work-life essentials (high demand career sectors + soft skills)

youtube channels

the organic chemistry tutor

khanacademy

crashcourse

tabletclassmath

2minmaths

kevinmathscience

professor leonard

greenemath

mathantics

3blue1brown

literacy

readworks - reading comprehension, build background knowledge, grow your vocabulary, strengthen strategic reading

chompchomp - grammar knowledge

tutors

not the "free resource" part of this post but sometimes we forget we can be tutored especially as an adult. just because we don't have formal education does not mean we can't get 1:1 teaching! please do you research and don't be afraid to try out different tutors. and remember you're not dumb just because someone's teaching style doesn't match up with your learning style.

cambridge coaching - medical school, mba and business, law school, graduate, college academics, high school and college process, middle school and high school admissions

preply - language tutoring. affordable!

revolutionprep - math, science, english, history, computer science (ap, html/css, java, python c++), foreign languages (german, korean, french, italian, spanish, japanese, chinese, esl)

varsity tutors - k-5 subjects, ap, test prep, languages, math, science & engineering, coding, homeschool, college essays, essay editing, etc

chegg - biology, business, engineering/computer science, math, homework help, textbook support, rent and buying books

learn to be - k-12 subjects

for languages

lingq - app. created by steve kaufmann, a polygot (fluent in 20+ languages) an amazing language learning platform that compiles content in 20+ languages like podcasts, graded readers, story times, vlogs, radio, books, the feature to put in your own books! immersion, comprehensible input.

flexiclasses - option to study abroad, resources to learn, mandarin, cantonese, japanese, vietnamese, korean, italian, russian, taiwanese hokkien, shanghainese.

fluentin3months - bootcamp, consultation available, languages: spanish, french, korean, german, chinese, japanese, russian, italian.

fluenz - spanish immersion both online and in person - intensive.

pimsleur - not tutoring** online learning using apps and their method. up to 50 languages, free trial available.

incase time has passed since i last posted this, check on the original post (not the reblogs) to see if i updated link or added new resources. i think i want to add laguage resources at some point too but until then, happy learning!!

[mariacallous]

On a blustery spring Thursday, just after midterms, I went out for noodles with Alex and Eugene, two undergraduates at New York University, to talk about how they use artificial intelligence in their schoolwork. When I first met Alex, last year, he was interested in a career in the arts, and he devoted a lot of his free time to photo shoots with his friends. But he had recently decided on a more practical path: he wanted to become a C.P.A. His Thursdays were busy, and he had forty-five minutes until a study session for an accounting class. He stowed his skateboard under a bench in the restaurant and shook his laptop out of his bag, connecting to the internet before we sat down.

Alex has wavy hair and speaks with the chill, singsong cadence of someone who has spent a lot of time in the Bay Area. He and Eugene scanned the menu, and Alex said that they should get clear broth, rather than spicy, “so we can both lock in our skin care.” Weeks earlier, when I’d messaged Alex, he had said that everyone he knew used ChatGPT in some fashion, but that he used it only for organizing his notes. In person, he admitted that this wasn’t remotely accurate. “Any type of writing in life, I use A.I.,” he said. He relied on Claude for research, DeepSeek for reasoning and explanation, and Gemini for image generation. ChatGPT served more general needs. “I need A.I. to text girls,” he joked, imagining an A.I.-enhanced version of Hinge. I asked if he had used A.I. when setting up our meeting. He laughed, and then replied, “Honestly, yeah. I’m not tryin’ to type all that. Could you tell?”

OpenAI released ChatGPT on November 30, 2022. Six days later, Sam Altman, the C.E.O., announced that it had reached a million users. Large language models like ChatGPT don’t “think” in the human sense—when you ask ChatGPT a question, it draws from the data sets it has been trained on and builds an answer based on predictable word patterns. Companies had experimented with A.I.-driven chatbots for years, but most sputtered upon release; Microsoft’s 2016 experiment with a bot named Tay was shut down after sixteen hours because it began spouting racist rhetoric and denying the Holocaust. But ChatGPT seemed different. It could hold a conversation and break complex ideas down into easy-to-follow steps. Within a month, Google’s management, fearful that A.I. would have an impact on its search-engine business, declared a “code red.”

Among educators, an even greater panic arose. It was too deep into the school term to implement a coherent policy for what seemed like a homework killer: in seconds, ChatGPT could collect and summarize research and draft a full essay. Many large campuses tried to regulate ChatGPT and its eventual competitors, mostly in vain. I asked Alex to show me an example of an A.I.-produced paper. Eugene wanted to see it, too. He used a different A.I. app to help with computations for his business classes, but he had never gotten the hang of using it for writing. “I got you,” Alex told him. (All the students I spoke with are identified by pseudonyms.)

He opened Claude on his laptop. I noticed a chat that mentioned abolition. “We had to read Robert Wedderburn for a class,” he explained, referring to the nineteenth-century Jamaican abolitionist. “But, obviously, I wasn’t tryin’ to read that.” He had prompted Claude for a summary, but it was too long for him to read in the ten minutes he had before class started. He told me, “I said, ‘Turn it into concise bullet points.’ ” He then transcribed Claude’s points in his notebook, since his professor ran a screen-free classroom.

Alex searched until he found a paper for an art-history class, about a museum exhibition. He had gone to the show, taken photographs of the images and the accompanying wall text, and then uploaded them to Claude, asking it to generate a paper according to the professor’s instructions. “I’m trying to do the least work possible, because this is a class I’m not hella fucking with,” he said. After skimming the essay, he felt that the A.I. hadn’t sufficiently addressed the professor’s questions, so he refined the prompt and told it to try again. In the end, Alex’s submission received the equivalent of an A-minus. He said that he had a basic grasp of the paper’s argument, but that if the professor had asked him for specifics he’d have been “so fucked.” I read the paper over Alex’s shoulder; it was a solid imitation of how an undergraduate might describe a set of images. If this had been 2007, I wouldn’t have made much of its generic tone, or of the precise, box-ticking quality of its critical observations.

Eugene, serious and somewhat solemn, had been listening with bemusement. “I would not cut and paste like he did, because I’m a lot more paranoid,” he said. He’s a couple of years younger than Alex and was in high school when ChatGPT was released. At the time, he experimented with A.I. for essays but noticed that it made easily noticed errors. “This passed the A.I. detector?” he asked Alex.

When ChatGPT launched, instructors adopted various measures to insure that students’ work was their own. These included requiring them to share time-stamped version histories of their Google documents, and designing written assignments that had to be completed in person, over multiple sessions. But most detective work occurs after submission. Services like GPTZero, Copyleaks, and Originality.ai analyze the structure and syntax of a piece of writing and assess the likelihood that it was produced by a machine. Alex said that his art-history professor was “hella old,” and therefore probably didn’t know about such programs. We fed the paper into a few different A.I.-detection websites. One said there was a twenty-eight-per-cent chance that the paper was A.I.-generated; another put the odds at sixty-one per cent. “That’s better than I expected,” Eugene said.

I asked if he thought what his friend had done was cheating, and Alex interrupted: “Of course. Are you fucking kidding me?”

As we looked at Alex’s laptop, I noticed that he had recently asked ChatGPT whether it was O.K. to go running in Nike Dunks. He had concluded that ChatGPT made for the best confidant. He consulted it as one might a therapist, asking for tips on dating and on how to stay motivated during dark times. His ChatGPT sidebar was an index of the highs and lows of being a young person. He admitted to me and Eugene that he’d used ChatGPT to draft his application to N.Y.U.—our lunch might never have happened had it not been for A.I. “I guess it’s really dishonest, but, fuck it, I’m here,” he said.

“It’s cheating, but I don’t think it’s, like, cheating,” Eugene said. He saw Alex’s art-history essay as a victimless crime. He was just fulfilling requirements, not training to become a literary scholar.

Alex had to rush off to his study session. I told Eugene that our conversation had made me wonder about my function as a professor. He asked if I taught English, and I nodded.

“Mm, O.K.,” he said, and laughed. “So you’re, like, majorly affected.”

I teach at a small liberal-arts college, and I often joke that a student is more likely to hand in a big paper a year late (as recently happened) than to take a dishonorable shortcut. My classes are small and intimate, driven by processes and pedagogical modes, like letting awkward silences linger, that are difficult to scale. As a result, I have always had a vague sense that my students are learning something, even when it is hard to quantify. In the past, if I was worried that a paper had been plagiarized, I would enter a few phrases from it into a search engine and call it due diligence. But I recently began noticing that some students’ writing seemed out of synch with how they expressed themselves in the classroom. One essay felt stitched together from two minds—half of it was polished and rote, the other intimate and unfiltered. Having never articulated a policy for A.I., I took the easy way out. The student had had enough shame to write half of the essay, and I focussed my feedback on improving that part.

It’s easy to get hung up on stories of academic dishonesty. Late last year, in a survey of college and university leaders, fifty-nine per cent reported an increase in cheating, a figure that feels conservative when you talk to students. A.I. has returned us to the question of what the point of higher education is. Until we’re eighteen, we go to school because we have to, studying the Second World War and reducing fractions while undergoing a process of socialization. We’re essentially learning how to follow rules. College, however, is a choice, and it has always involved the tacit agreement that students will fulfill a set of tasks, sometimes pertaining to subjects they find pointless or impractical, and then receive some kind of credential. But even for the most mercenary of students, the pursuit of a grade or a diploma has come with an ancillary benefit. You’re being taught how to do something difficult, and maybe, along the way, you come to appreciate the process of learning. But the arrival of A.I. means that you can now bypass the process, and the difficulty, altogether.

There are no reliable figures for how many American students use A.I., just stories about how everyone is doing it. A 2024 Pew Research Center survey of students between the ages of thirteen and seventeen suggests that a quarter of teens currently use ChatGPT for schoolwork, double the figure from 2023. OpenAI recently released a report claiming that one in three college students uses its products. There’s good reason to believe that these are low estimates. If you grew up Googling everything or using Grammarly to give your prose a professional gloss, it isn’t far-fetched to regard A.I. as just another productivity tool. “I see it as no different from Google,” Eugene said. “I use it for the same kind of purpose.”

Being a student is about testing boundaries and staying one step ahead of the rules. While administrators and educators have been debating new definitions for cheating and discussing the mechanics of surveillance, students have been embracing the possibilities of A.I. A few months after the release of ChatGPT, a Harvard undergraduate got approval to conduct an experiment in which it wrote papers that had been assigned in seven courses. The A.I. skated by with a 3.57 G.P.A., a little below the school’s average. Upstart companies introduced products that specialized in “humanizing” A.I.-generated writing, and TikTok influencers began coaching their audiences on how to avoid detection.

Unable to keep pace, academic administrations largely stopped trying to control students’ use of artificial intelligence and adopted an attitude of hopeful resignation, encouraging teachers to explore the practical, pedagogical applications of A.I. In certain fields, this wasn’t a huge stretch. Studies show that A.I. is particularly effective in helping non-native speakers acclimate to college-level writing in English. In some STEM classes, using generative A.I. as a tool is acceptable. Alex and Eugene told me that their accounting professor encouraged them to take advantage of free offers on new A.I. products available only to undergraduates, as companies competed for student loyalty throughout the spring. In May, OpenAI announced ChatGPT Edu, a product specifically marketed for educational use, after schools including Oxford University, Arizona State University, and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business experimented with incorporating A.I. into their curricula. This month, the company detailed plans to integrate ChatGPT into every dimension of campus life, with students receiving “personalized” A.I. accounts to accompany them throughout their years in college.

But for English departments, and for college writing in general, the arrival of A.I. has been more vexed. Why bother teaching writing now? The future of the midterm essay may be a quaint worry compared with larger questions about the ramifications of artificial intelligence, such as its effect on the environment, or the automation of jobs. And yet has there ever been a time in human history when writing was so important to the average person? E-mails, texts, social-media posts, angry missives in comments sections, customer-service chats—let alone one’s actual work. The way we write shapes our thinking. We process the world through the composition of text dozens of times a day, in what the literary scholar Deborah Brandt calls our era of “mass writing.” It’s possible that the ability to write original and interesting sentences will become only more important in a future where everyone has access to the same A.I. assistants.

Corey Robin, a writer and a professor of political science at Brooklyn College, read the early stories about ChatGPT with skepticism. Then his daughter, a sophomore in high school at the time, used it to produce an essay that was about as good as those his undergraduates wrote after a semester of work. He decided to stop assigning take-home essays. For the first time in his thirty years of teaching, he administered in-class exams.

Robin told me he finds many of the steps that universities have taken to combat A.I. essays to be “hand-holding that’s not leading people anywhere.” He has become a believer in the passage-identification blue-book exam, in which students name and contextualize excerpts of what they’ve read for class. “Know the text and write about it intelligently,” he said. “That was a way of honoring their autonomy without being a cop.”

His daughter, who is now a senior, complains that her teachers rarely assign full books. And Robin has noticed that college students are more comfortable with excerpts than with entire articles, and prefer short stories to novels. “I don’t get the sense they have the kind of literary or cultural mastery that used to be the assumption upon which we assigned papers,” he said. One study, published last year, found that fifty-eight per cent of students at two Midwestern universities had so much trouble interpreting the opening paragraphs of “Bleak House,” by Charles Dickens, that “they would not be able to read the novel on their own.” And these were English majors.

The return to pen and paper has been a common response to A.I. among professors, with sales of blue books rising significantly at certain universities in the past two years. Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, grew dispirited after some students submitted what he suspected was A.I.-generated work for an assignment on how the school’s honor code should view A.I.-generated work. He, too, has decided to return to blue books, and is pondering the logistics of oral exams. “Maybe we go all the way back to 450 B.C.,” he told me.

But other professors have renewed their emphasis on getting students to see the value of process. Dan Melzer, the director of the first-year composition program at the University of California, Davis, recalled that “everyone was in a panic” when ChatGPT first hit. Melzer’s job is to think about how writing functions across the curriculum so that all students, from prospective scientists to future lawyers, get a chance to hone their prose. Consequently, he has an accommodating view of how norms around communication have changed, especially in the internet age. He was sympathetic to kids who viewed some of their assignments as dull and mechanical and turned to ChatGPT to expedite the process. He called the five-paragraph essay—the classic “hamburger” structure, consisting of an introduction, three supporting body paragraphs, and a conclusion—“outdated,” having descended from élitist traditions.

Melzer believes that some students loathe writing because of how it’s been taught, particularly in the past twenty-five years. The No Child Left Behind Act, from 2002, instituted standards-based reforms across all public schools, resulting in generations of students being taught to write according to rigid testing rubrics. As one teacher wrote in the Washington Post in 2013, students excelled when they mastered a form of “bad writing.” Melzer has designed workshops that treat writing as a deliberative, iterative process involving drafting, feedback (from peers and also from ChatGPT), and revision.

“If you assign a generic essay topic and don’t engage in any process, and you just collect it a month later, it’s almost like you’re creating an environment tailored to crime,” he said. “You’re encouraging crime in your community!”

I found Melzer’s pedagogical approach inspiring; I instantly felt bad for routinely breaking my class into small groups so that they could “workshop” their essays, as though the meaning of this verb were intuitively clear. But, as a student, I’d have found Melzer’s focus on process tedious—it requires a measure of faith that all the work will pay off in the end. Writing is hard, regardless of whether it’s a five-paragraph essay or a haiku, and it’s natural, especially when you’re a college student, to want to avoid hard work—this is why classes like Melzer’s are compulsory. “You can imagine that students really want to be there,” he joked.

College is all about opportunity costs. One way of viewing A.I. is as an intervention in how people choose to spend their time. In the early nineteen-sixties, college students spent an estimated twenty-four hours a week on schoolwork. Today, that figure is about fifteen, a sign, to critics of contemporary higher education, that young people are beneficiaries of grade inflation—in a survey conducted by the Harvard Crimson, nearly eighty per cent of the class of 2024 reported a G.P.A. of 3.7 or higher—and lack the diligence of their forebears. I don’t know how many hours I spent on schoolwork in the late nineties, when I was in college, but I recall feeling that there was never enough time. I suspect that, even if today’s students spend less time studying, they don’t feel significantly less stressed. It’s the nature of campus life that everyone assimilates into a culture of busyness, and a lot of that anxiety has been shifted to extracurricular or pre-professional pursuits. A dean at Harvard remarked that students feel compelled to find distinction outside the classroom because they are largely indistinguishable within it.

Eddie, a sociology major at Long Beach State, is older than most of his classmates. He graduated high school in 2010, and worked full time while attending a community college. “I’ve gone through a lot to be at school,” he told me. “I want to learn as much as I can.” ChatGPT, which his therapist recommended to him, was ubiquitous at Long Beach even before the California State University system, which Long Beach is a part of, announced a partnership with OpenAI, giving its four hundred and sixty thousand students access to ChatGPT Edu. “I was a little suspicious of how convenient it was,” Eddie said. “It seemed to know a lot, in a way that seemed so human.”

He told me that he used A.I. “as a brainstorm” but never for writing itself. “I limit myself, for sure.” Eddie works for Los Angeles County, and he was talking to me during a break. He admitted that, when he was pressed for time, he would sometimes use ChatGPT for quizzes. “I don’t know if I’m telling myself a lie,” he said. “I’ve given myself opportunities to do things ethically, but if I’m rushing to work I don’t feel bad about that,” particularly for courses outside his major.

I recognized Eddie’s conflict. I’ve used ChatGPT a handful of times, and on one occasion it accomplished a scheduling task so quickly that I began to understand the intoxication of hyper-efficiency. I’ve felt the need to stop myself from indulging in idle queries. Almost all the students I interviewed in the past few months described the same trajectory: from using A.I. to assist with organizing their thoughts to off-loading their thinking altogether. For some, it became something akin to social media, constantly open in the corner of the screen, a portal for distraction. This wasn’t like paying someone to write a paper for you—there was no social friction, no aura of illicit activity. Nor did it feel like sharing notes, or like passing off what you’d read in CliffsNotes or SparkNotes as your own analysis. There was no real time to reflect on questions of originality or honesty—the student basically became a project manager. And for students who use it the way Eddie did, as a kind of sounding board, there’s no clear threshold where the work ceases to be an original piece of thinking. In April, Anthropic, the company behind Claude, released a report drawn from a million anonymized student conversations with its chatbots. It suggested that more than half of user interactions could be classified as “collaborative,” involving a dialogue between student and A.I. (Presumably, the rest of the interactions were more extractive.)

May, a sophomore at Georgetown, was initially resistant to using ChatGPT. “I don’t know if it was an ethics thing,” she said. “I just thought I could do the assignment better, and it wasn’t worth the time being saved.” But she began using it to proofread her essays, and then to generate cover letters, and now she uses it for “pretty much all” her classes. “I don’t think it’s made me a worse writer,” she said. “It’s perhaps made me a less patient writer. I used to spend hours writing essays, nitpicking over my wording, really thinking about how to phrase things.” College had made her reflect on her experience at an extremely competitive high school, where she had received top grades but retained very little knowledge. As a result, she was the rare student who found college somewhat relaxed. ChatGPT helped her breeze through busywork and deepen her engagement with the courses she felt passionate about. “I was trying to think, Where’s all this time going?” she said. I had never envied a college student until she told me the answer: “I sleep more now.”

Harry Stecopoulos oversees the University of Iowa’s English department, which has more than eight hundred majors. On the first day of his introductory course, he asks students to write by hand a two-hundred-word analysis of the opening paragraph of Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man.” There are always a few grumbles, and students have occasionally walked out. “I like the exercise as a tone-setter, because it stresses their writing,” he told me.

The return of blue-book exams might disadvantage students who were encouraged to master typing at a young age. Once you’ve grown accustomed to the smooth rhythms of typing, reverting to a pen and paper can feel stifling. But neuroscientists have found that the “embodied experience” of writing by hand taps into parts of the brain that typing does not. Being able to write one way—even if it’s more efficient—doesn’t make the other way obsolete. There’s something lofty about Stecopoulos’s opening-day exercise. But there’s another reason for it: the handwritten paragraph also begins a paper trail, attesting to voice and style, that a teaching assistant can consult if a suspicious paper is submitted.

Kevin, a third-year student at Syracuse University, recalled that, on the first day of a class, the professor had asked everyone to compose some thoughts by hand. “That brought a smile to my face,” Kevin said. “The other kids are scratching their necks and sweating, and I’m, like, This is kind of nice.”

Kevin had worked as a teaching assistant for a mandatory course that first-year students take to acclimate to campus life. Writing assignments involved basic questions about students’ backgrounds, he told me, but they often used A.I. anyway. “I was very disturbed,” he said. He occasionally uses A.I. to help with translations for his advanced Arabic course, but he’s come to look down on those who rely heavily on it. “They almost forget that they have the ability to think,” he said. Like many former holdouts, Kevin felt that his judicious use of A.I. was more defensible than his peers’ use of it.

As ChatGPT begins to sound more human, will we reconsider what it means to sound like ourselves? Kevin and some of his friends pride themselves on having an ear attuned to A.I.-generated text. The hallmarks, he said, include a preponderance of em dashes and a voice that feels blandly objective. An acquaintance had run an essay that she had written herself through a detector, because she worried that she was starting to phrase things like ChatGPT did. He read her essay: “I realized, like, It does kind of sound like ChatGPT. It was freaking me out a little bit.”

A particularly disarming aspect of ChatGPT is that, if you point out a mistake, it communicates in the backpedalling tone of a contrite student. (“Apologies for the earlier confusion. . . .”) Its mistakes are often referred to as hallucinations, a description that seems to anthropomorphize A.I., conjuring a vision of a sleep-deprived assistant. Some professors told me that they had students fact-check ChatGPT’s work, as a way of discussing the importance of original research and of showing the machine’s fallibility. Hallucination rates have grown worse for most A.I.s, with no single reason for the increase. As a researcher told the Times, “We still don’t know how these models work exactly.”

But many students claim to be unbothered by A.I.’s mistakes. They appear nonchalant about the question of achievement, and even dissociated from their work, since it is only notionally theirs. Joseph, a Division I athlete at a Big Ten school, told me that he saw no issue with using ChatGPT for his classes, but he did make one exception: he wanted to experience his African-literature course “authentically,” because it involved his heritage. Alex, the N.Y.U. student, said that if one of his A.I. papers received a subpar grade his disappointment would be focussed on the fact that he’d spent twenty dollars on his subscription. August, a sophomore at Columbia studying computer science, told me about a class where she was required to compose a short lecture on a topic of her choosing. “It was a class where everyone was guaranteed an A, so I just put it in and I maybe edited like two words and submitted it,” she said. Her professor identified her essay as exemplary work, and she was asked to read from it to a class of two hundred students. “I was a little nervous,” she said. But then she realized, “If they don’t like it, it wasn’t me who wrote it, you know?”

Kevin, by contrast, desired a more general kind of moral distinction. I asked if he would be bothered to receive a lower grade on an essay than a classmate who’d used ChatGPT. “Part of me is able to compartmentalize and not be pissed about it,” he said. “I developed myself as a human. I can have a superiority complex about it. I learned more.” He smiled. But then he continued, “Part of me can also be, like, This is so unfair. I would have loved to hang out with my friends more. What did I gain? I made my life harder for all that time.”

In my conversations, just as college students invariably thought of ChatGPT as merely another tool, people older than forty focussed on its effects, drawing a comparison to G.P.S. and the erosion of our relationship to space. The London cabdrivers rigorously trained in “the knowledge” famously developed abnormally large posterior hippocampi, the part of the brain crucial for long-term memory and spatial awareness. And yet, in the end, most people would probably rather have swifter travel than sharper memories. What is worth preserving, and what do we feel comfortable off-loading in the name of efficiency?

What if we take seriously the idea that A.I. assistance can accelerate learning—that students today are arriving at their destinations faster? In 2023, researchers at Harvard introduced a self-paced A.I. tutor in a popular physics course. Students who used the A.I. tutor reported higher levels of engagement and motivation and did better on a test than those who were learning from a professor. May, the Georgetown student, told me that she often has ChatGPT produce extra practice questions when she’s studying for a test. Could A.I. be here not to destroy education but to revolutionize it? Barry Lam teaches in the philosophy department at the University of California, Riverside, and hosts a popular podcast, Hi-Phi Nation, which applies philosophical modes of inquiry to everyday topics. He began wondering what it would mean for A.I. to actually be a productivity tool. He spoke to me from the podcast studio he built in his shed. “Now students are able to generate in thirty seconds what used to take me a week,” he said. He compared education to carpentry, one of his many hobbies. Could you skip to using power tools without learning how to saw by hand? If students were learning things faster, then it stood to reason that Lam could assign them “something very hard.” He wanted to test this theory, so for final exams he gave his undergraduates a Ph.D.-level question involving denotative language and the German logician Gottlob Frege which was, frankly, beyond me.

“They fucking failed it miserably,” he said. He adjusted his grading curve accordingly.

Lam doesn’t find the use of A.I. morally indefensible. “It’s not plagiarism in the cut-and-paste sense,” he argued, because there’s technically no original version. Rather, he finds it a potential waste of everyone’s time. At the start of the semester, he has told students, “If you’re gonna just turn in a paper that’s ChatGPT-generated, then I will grade all your work by ChatGPT and we can all go to the beach.”

Nobody gets into teaching because he loves grading papers. I talked to one professor who rhapsodized about how much more his students were learning now that he’d replaced essays with short exams. I asked if he missed marking up essays. He laughed and said, “No comment.” An undergraduate at Northeastern University recently accused a professor of using A.I. to create course materials; she filed a formal complaint with the school, requesting a refund for some of her tuition. The dustup laid bare the tension between why many people go to college and why professors teach. Students are raised to understand achievement as something discrete and measurable, but when they arrive at college there are people like me, imploring them to wrestle with difficulty and abstraction. Worse yet, they are told that grades don’t matter as much as they did when they were trying to get into college—only, by this point, students are wired to find the most efficient path possible to good marks.

As the craft of writing is degraded by A.I., original writing has become a valuable resource for training language models. Earlier this year, a company called Catalyst Research Alliance advertised “academic speech data and student papers” from two research studies run in the late nineties and mid-two-thousands at the University of Michigan. The school asked the company to halt its work—the data was available for free to academics anyway—and a university spokesperson said that student data “was not and has never been for sale.” But the situation did lead many people to wonder whether institutions would begin viewing original student work as a potential revenue stream.

According to a recent study from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, human intellect has declined since 2012. An assessment of tens of thousands of adults in nearly thirty countries showed an over-all decade-long drop in test scores for math and for reading comprehension. Andreas Schleicher, the director for education and skills at the O.E.C.D., hypothesized that the way we consume information today—often through short social-media posts—has something to do with the decline in literacy. (One of Europe’s top performers in the assessment was Estonia, which recently announced that it will bring A.I. to some high-school students in the next few years, sidelining written essays and rote homework exercises in favor of self-directed learning and oral exams.)

Lam, the philosophy professor, used to be a colleague of mine, and for a brief time we were also neighbors. I’d occasionally look out the window and see him building a fence, or gardening. He’s an avid amateur cook, guitarist, and carpenter, and he remains convinced that there is value to learning how to do things the annoying, old-fashioned, and—as he puts it—“artisanal” way. He told me that his wife, Shanna Andrawis, who has been a high-school teacher since 2008, frequently disagreed with his cavalier methods for dealing with large learning models. Andrawis argues that dishonesty has always been an issue. “We are trying to mass educate,” she said, meaning there’s less room to be precious about the pedagogical process. “I don’t have conversations with students about ‘artisanal’ writing. But I have conversations with them about our relationship. Respect me enough to give me your authentic voice, even if you don’t think it’s that great. It’s O.K. I want to meet you where you’re at.”

Ultimately, Andrawis was less fearful of ChatGPT than of the broader conditions of being young these days. Her students have grown increasingly introverted, staring at their phones with little desire to “practice getting over that awkwardness” that defines teen life, as she put it. A.I. might contribute to this deterioration, but it isn’t solely to blame. It’s “a little cherry on top of an already really bad ice-cream sundae,” she said.

When the school year began, my feelings about ChatGPT were somewhere between disappointment and disdain, focussed mainly on students. But, as the weeks went by, my sense of what should be done and who was at fault grew hazier. Eliminating core requirements, rethinking G.P.A., teaching A.I. skepticism—none of the potential fixes could turn back the preconditions of American youth. Professors can reconceive of the classroom, but there is only so much we control. I lacked faith that educational institutions would ever regard new technologies as anything but inevitable. Colleges and universities, many of which had tried to curb A.I. use just a few semesters ago, rushed to partner with companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, deeming a product that didn’t exist four years ago essential to the future of school.

Except for a year spent bumming around my home town, I’ve basically been on a campus for the past thirty years. Students these days view college as consumers, in ways that never would have occurred to me when I was their age. They’ve grown up at a time when society values high-speed takes, not the slow deliberation of critical thinking. Although I’ve empathized with my students’ various mini-dramas, I rarely project myself into their lives. I notice them noticing one another, and I let the mysteries of their lives go. Their pressures are so different from the ones I felt as a student. Although I envy their metabolisms, I would not wish for their sense of horizons.

Education, particularly in the humanities, rests on a belief that, alongside the practical things students might retain, some arcane idea mentioned in passing might take root in their mind, blossoming years in the future. A.I. allows any of us to feel like an expert, but it is risk, doubt, and failure that make us human. I often tell my students that this is the last time in their lives that someone will have to read something they write, so they might as well tell me what they actually think.

Despite all the current hysteria around students cheating, they aren’t the ones to blame. They did not lobby for the introduction of laptops when they were in elementary school, and it’s not their fault that they had to go to school on Zoom during the pandemic. They didn’t create the A.I. tools, nor were they at the forefront of hyping technological innovation. They were just early adopters, trying to outwit the system at a time when doing so has never been so easy. And they have no more control than the rest of us. Perhaps they sense this powerlessness even more acutely than I do. One moment, they are being told to learn to code; the next, it turns out employers are looking for the kind of “soft skills” one might learn as an English or a philosophy major. In February, a labor report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported that computer-science majors had a higher unemployment rate than ethnic-studies majors did—the result, some believed, of A.I. automating entry-level coding jobs.

None of the students I spoke with seemed lazy or passive. Alex and Eugene, the N.Y.U. students, worked hard—but part of their effort went to editing out anything in their college experiences that felt extraneous. They were radically resourceful.

When classes were over and students were moving into their summer housing, I e-mailed with Alex, who was settling in in the East Village. He’d just finished his finals, and estimated that he’d spent between thirty minutes and an hour composing two papers for his humanities classes. Without the assistance of Claude, it might have taken him around eight or nine hours. “I didn’t retain anything,” he wrote. “I couldn’t tell you the thesis for either paper hahhahaha.” He received an A-minus and a B-plus. 

[misfitwashere]

Trump's attack on the American mind

Behind his closure of the Education Department, his assault on higher education, on science, and on libraries and museums, lie the oligarchs of the techno-state.

ROBERT REICH

MAR 20

Friends,

Today, Trump is dismantling the Department of Education. He’s ordering wrestling executive-turned-Education Secretary Linda McMahon to shut her department. 

His executive order will effectively destroy a $100 billion-a-year executive department created by Congress under President Jimmy Carter 45 years ago. 

But there’s a much larger plan here.

Combine this with Trump’s attacks on higher education — his gutting the funding of the National Institutes of Health (which provides a large portion of biomedical research) and the National Science Foundation (engineering and computer research), and his effective closure of USAID (which underwrites research in global diseases).

Put this together with Trump’s (and RFK Jr.’s) attacks on vaccine science, 

Combine this with Trump’s attacks on the freedom of speech of university students and professors. 

And Trump’s and rightwing governors’ attacks on teaching the truth in our schools about America’s history of slavery and Native American genocide. 

Put this together with Trump’s attack on America’s libraries — last week’s executive order mandating cuts in the funding of libraries around the country — which will jeopardize literacy development and reading programs, reliable internet access for those without it at home, and homework help and other resources for students and educators.

Combine this with his attacks on America’s museums (the same executive order cut their funding, too). And his attack on the arts, as illustrated by Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center (last month, he announced himself its new chair, replaced 13 board members, and inserted a new interim president). 

What’s the larger picture? What’s the overall purpose? 

Not to mount an “attack on the liberal state,” as I keep reading. Not “a culmination of Trump’s culture wars.” Or that Trump seeking “small government” over “big government,” or is advancing traditional conservatism over traditional liberalism. 

What’s really occurring is an attack on the American mind. 

Throughout history, tyrants have understood that their major enemy is an educated citizenry. Slaveholders prohibited slaves from learning to read. Nazi’s burned books. 

Ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny. 

Those who believe in democracy, on the other hand, have been at the forefront of the movement for free, universal public education; and for public libraries, museums, and the arts. They understand that democracy depends on people knowing what’s occurring around them and having the capacity to deliberate critically about it. 

Trump is only the frontman in this attack on the American mind. 

The attack is really coming from the anti-democracy movement: From JD Vance; and from Vance’s major financial backer, venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who staked $15 million on Vance’s Ohio senatorial election in 2022 and helped convince Trump to make Vance vice president; and from Thiel’s early business partner, Elon Musk. 

Thiel is a self-styled libertarian who once wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

Hello? Freedom is incompatible with democracy only if you view democracy as a potential constraint on your wealth and power.

Behind Vance and Musk is a libertarian community of rich crypto bros, tech executives, back-to-the-landers, and disaffected far-right intellectuals.

Curtis Yarvin comes as close as anyone as being their intellectual godfather. He has written that political power in the United States is held by a liberal amalgam of universities and the mainstream media whose commitment to equality and justice is eroding America’s social order.

In Yarvin’s view, democratic governments are inefficient and wasteful. They should be replaced with sovereign joint-stock corporations whose major “shareholders” select an executive with total power, who serves at their pleasure. Yarvin refers to the city-state of Singapore as an example of a successful authoritarian regime.

Make no mistake: Trump’s attack on the American mind — on education, science, libraries, and museums — is an attack on the capacity of Americans for self-government.

It is coming from the oligarchs of the techno-state who believe democracy is inefficient, and want to replace it with an authoritarian regime replete with technologies they control. 

Be warned.

[toastiemations-00]

Bubba Bubbaphant!

-

Age: 24

Spirit: Anni

-

Bubba, one of the most clever of the group. Ever since he was small he enjoyed taking apart electronics and making his own tech out of the parts. At a young age his parents places him in a day watch where he made his first friend. Crafty. He and crafty were both quiet but what drew them to each other was their spirits. Two halves of one great mind. The creative and the logical. The pair are constantly linked. Crafty and Bubba would then meet the other 5 critters. The group would stay together all through highschool. Bubba always stayed their quiet engineer often helping the critters with homework for learning things they struggled with. A long with DogDay he went to college early starting his engineering degree. The two dormed for a short while together before DogDay got his house, and while DogDay offered for Bubba to move in he refused preferring the quiet campus life. When their friends joined them in college Kicken moved into the dorm with Bubba. Around two years later Picky came up to Bubba with a proposal. "Let's get married. And the two of us can get our parents off our backs..." The two who had never really showed romantic attraction to each other nor to anyone else really ended up married and bubba moved in with picky to a brand new home. Picky ended up breaking bubba out of his shell. Getting him away from his world of tech and computers and outside. She taught him new hobbies. In turn he also taught her new hobbies and he loved to teach her about many topics she showed interest in. Slowly the pair actually started to grow affection towards each other. The two are a happy couple.

-

Bubba currently is still his quiet self. every so often he and Dogday go out for a couple drinks and often goes out with the group to supervise. The silent support whos always there for you when you need it. DogDay says he can be pretty sarcastic and have an attitude when he wants to though.

-

[nyoaeuikhoudu]

Elite Force highschool hc's

stealing this idea from @texanmarcusdavenport because I too have headcannons that I must scream into the void.

Centium city is located close enough to Logan High that the kids all go there. Bree and Chase changed their last names so they can go to Logan without being recognized. Their alias last name is "Douglas" because they're not creative and it's hilarious to see their teachers meet Douglas Douglas during conferences.

While the bionic teens are well known around the world, there wasn't quite as much coverage of them in the Philly area because it wasn't super local, so Bree and Chase are able to fly under the radar easier since they're not household names around here.

Idk if yall know what this is, but I feel like it would be fun to have their school structured under the academy system. In short, along with required core classes like math and english, you have to pick an area of interest or career for your other classes. You get cords for completing courses in your academy and most of your electives will be centered around that area of study, plus it helps with college applications.

As always, we'll do this in alphabetic order

Bree:

After much deliberation, she decided on the Natural Resources and Agriculture academy (green). She originally wanted to do Human Services and join ROTC for drill, but Chase wouldn't let her because that would draw too much attention to them.

- her adhd makes it difficult to retain information, so she struggles with classwork, especially lectures.

- in the gifted program w/ Oliver (Chase is jealous lol) no, the gifted program is not based on grades, it's IQ based.

- not super interested in her academy, mostly just in it for the field trips.

- thrives in English classes, can whip out a grade A essay in 20 minutes.

- expert procrastinator, usually doing her homework the morning it's due or in between classes

Chase:

Part of the Business and Computer Technology academy (blue). Though he'd probably thrive more in Engineering, he mostly just joined to work towards inheriting Davenport Industries like Donald wants him to.

- very booksmart

- sacrificed his perfect GPA for maintaining cover. (He's sitting at 3.5, though he's definitely capable of 4.0)

- not the most social, trying his best to lay low.

- started working the schools coffee shop and snack hut for the finance side of things

- refused to test for the gifted program, pissed that Bree did behind his back despite his insistence that they don't draw attention to themselves.

Connie/Skylar:

Part of the Arts and Communications academy (purple). While she's not particularly skilled in the arts, she does enjoy marching band and likes spending time with Jordan and Gus (who are also both in AnC, art and film respectively.)

- gets decent grades. B average

- took an interest in theatre after Gus's Skylar Storm movie, and now helps out on tech.

- works the booth for shows, light design and helps out with mic checks

- surprisingly good at history for an alien- she convinced Chase to join her at history bowl and their team obliterated the other schools.

- involved in multiple sports, namely wrestling and dance team, but colour guard is still her favourite.

- so used to the name Connie that she doesn't even realise when people call her that outside of school, though the twins still slip up and call her Skylar in class.

Kaz:

Part of Health Sciences academy (red) to help with work, though he's less serious about it. If given a choice, he'd choose not to belong to any academy and just go home. He focuses more on the sports injury side of things, learning how to prevent injury rather than treat it for the most part.

- his grades don't reflect his intelligence

- struggles in class due to his adhd

- the only reason he's not failing his medical courses is because Oliver helps keep him on task

- tried three other academies before MM, none seemed to fit him best.

- the only elective he takes outside of HnS is shop, he especially loves welding and blacksmithing.

Oliver:

Also in the Health Sciences academy (red). Though he originally joined because of Mighty Med, he actually found a love for field, focusing on the Medical side. He's been taking extra science classes for fun along with academy courses.

- gets good grades, but definately not perfect.

- terrible at anything that requires math

- builds study dates into his schedule to spend time with Kaz and help him learn the material.- has been in the gifted program since elementary school.

- was originally part of AnC with the rest of his friend group, but switched early his sophomore year when he started working at MM

- still participates in band, playing the oboe for concert and marimba for marching season.

Ages:

Skylar is a senior, everyone else is a junior.

[reading-writing-revolution]

Friends,

Yesterday, Trump dismantled much of the Department of Education. He ordered wrestling executive-turned-Education Secretary Linda McMahon to shut most of her department, although student loans and special education funding will continue.

His executive order will effectively destroy a $100 billion-a-year executive department created by Congress under President Jimmy Carter 45 years ago.

But there’s a much larger story here.

Combine this with Trump’s attacks on higher education — his gutting the funding of the National Institutes of Health (which provides a large portion of biomedical research) and the National Science Foundation (engineering and computer research) and his effective closure of USAID (which underwrites research in global diseases).

Put this together with Trump’s attacks on the freedom of speech of university students and professors.

And with Trump’s (and RFK Jr.’s) attacks on vaccine science.

With Trump’s and right-wing governors’ attacks on teaching the truth in our schools about America’s history of slavery and Native American genocide.

Combine this with Trump’s attack on America’s libraries — last week’s executive order mandating cuts in the funding of libraries around the country — which will jeopardize literacy development and reading programs, reliable internet access for those without it at home, and homework help and other resources for students and educators.

And his attacks on America’s museums (the same executive order cut their funding, too). And his attack on the arts, as illustrated by Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center (last month, he announced himself its new chair, replaced 13 board members, and inserted a new interim president).

What’s the larger picture?

Not an “attack on the liberal state,” as I keep reading. Not “the culmination of Trump’s culture wars.” Certainly not that Trump is seeking “small government” over “big government” or advancing traditional conservatism over traditional liberalism.

What’s really occurring is an attack on the American mind.

Throughout history, tyrants have understood that their major enemy is an educated citizenry. Slaveholders prohibited the enslaved from learning to read. Nazis burned books. Putin and Xi censor the media.

Ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny.

Those who believe in democracy, on the other hand, have been at the forefront of the movement for free, universal public education and for public libraries, museums, and the arts.

They understand that democracy depends on people knowing what’s occurring around them and having the capacity to deliberate critically about it.

Trump is only the frontman in this attack on the American mind.

The attack is really coming from the anti-democracy movement: from JD Vance and from Vance’s major financial backer, venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who staked $15 million on Vance’s Ohio senatorial election in 2022 and helped convince Trump to make Vance vice president. And from Thiel’s early business partner, Elon Musk.

Thiel is a self-styled libertarian who once wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

Hello? Freedom is incompatible with democracy only if you view democracy as a potential constraint on your wealth and power.

Behind Vance and Musk is a libertarian group of rich crypto bros, tech executives, back-to-the-landers, and disaffected far-right intellectuals.

Curtis Yarvin comes as close as anyone to being their intellectual godfather. He has written that political power in the United States is held by a liberal amalgam of universities and the mainstream media whose commitment to equality and justice is eroding America’s social order.

In Yarvin’s view, democratic governments are inefficient and wasteful. They should be replaced with sovereign joint-stock corporations whose major “shareholders” select an executive with total power, who serves at their pleasure. Yarvin refers to the city-state of Singapore as an example of a successful authoritarian regime.

Make no mistake: Trump’s attack on the American mind — on education, science, libraries, and museums — is an attack on the capacity of Americans for self-government.

It is coming from the oligarchs of the techno-state who believe democracy is inefficient and want to replace it with an authoritarian regime replete with technologies they control.

Be warned.

[misiahasahardname]

[NAME OF SCHOOL WITHHELD] au detail bullshit or smth (censored edition so i don’t get doxxed)

everyone here is in S5 for simplicity

apple

subjects:

art

graphcom

drama (acting)

apps

english (set 5)

dance for games

other stuff:

[RED HOUSE]

pse teacher forced her to start attending homework club (she hates it there)

has been begging her form rep to tell the student council to let older pupils take part in lego club

has basically every additional support option the SQA can offer for exams (smaller room, typing, spellcheck, +35% extra time, allowed a small calculator for non-calc papers)

forced to sit at the front in every class

balloon

subjects:

rmps

latin

psychology

mods

english (set 1)

badminton for games

other stuff:

[BLUE HOUSE]

stuck in all B purgatory

english teacher loves him, but keeps chewing him off for always going over the word count in his folio drafts

never goes out for lunch, just follows his mates around with his packed lunch

frequent at the nurses office

baseball

subjects:

mods

geography

spanish

maths (set 1)

english (set 2)

cricket for games

other stuff:

[SILVER HOUSE]

felt bad for constantly skiving in the toilets with nickel so he took a bunch of extracurricular to make up for it

took pe in nat 5 and was actually really good at it, but dropped it because the others kept fat shaming him

tries to hang around [NAME OF SHOPPING CENTER WITHHELD] for as long as possible so that he can spend as little time in the hettie* area

*the hetties are what we call the toxic straight guys. they tend to hang around the bag racks at the front gate of the school

blueberry

subjects:

pe

chemistry

business

maths (set 3)

english (set 3)

badminton for games

other stuff:

[BLUE HOUSE]

sits alone in every class

probably the only person that takes badminton seriously

always sleeps through pse (and is consequently always late for his thursday period four class)

absolutely CRACKED at rugby. part of the school team

pse teacher is annoyingly pushy with him. always asking “how are things at home?” (partially because of the sleeping thing)

bomb

subjects:

french

pe

computing

physics

english (set 3)

badminton for games

other stuff:

[YELLOW HOUSE]

beleived in the [LANGUAGE DEPARTMENT] ghost story in S1. pickle still digs on him for this

is exempt from talking exams because of his stutter

i feel like he’d like swimming for some reason… always participates in the swimming gala

back when cross country was mandatory, he would start off actually putting in an effort, but would start to linger when he looked back at where pickle and cheesy were

bot

subjects:

art

engineering

computing

classics

english (set 4)

hockey for games

other stuff:

[SILVER HOUSE]

took computing and engineering in case they ever wanted to make more alterations to themself

helps the alliance* organise stuff for diversity week 

goes to dnd with fan

took classics thanks to dr [TEACHER’S NAME WITHHELD]’s very convincing presentation

always goes to taco bell at lunch with goo

*the alliance is a group in our school for lgbt stuff 👍 i used to attend but our lunch breaks are wayyyy too short for that and i lost interest

bow

subjects:

drama (costume)

photography

music

graphcom

english (set 4)

dance for games

other stuff:

[RED HOUSE]

she thought graphcom would be like technology and she could make chairs and wooden trinkets :(. decided to stick around anyways because she likes drawing and discovered a passion for 3D modelling

always keeps a sharpie in her blazer so she can vent in the vent stall in the scientology* girl’s bathrooms

always auditions for the school show, always gets ensemble

*scientology is what my friend group call the science and technology department because i would keep combining the words by mistake (i speak too fast)

box

subjects:

history

ancient greek

classics

maths (set 2)

english (set 3)

hockey for games

other stuff:

[BLUE HOUSE]

oh she is ABSOLUTELY a history geek i just know this

uses every possible excuse to get out of swimming in pe

hangs around the library at break

HATES group projects. had to carry her group through ypi*

would do those open doors tours when she was in P7

*ypi = youth philanthropy itiative. some project you do in S4 where you make a presentation about a charity and get judged for it. winning presentation gets a few thousand pounds for their charity

cabby

subjects:

psychology

mods

history

biology

english (set 1)

can’t do games

other stuff:

[SILVER HOUSE]

girl why did you take so many subjects that are on high floors?? 😭😭

has a special door card to access to the lifts so she can actually get around

part of the src*

always copies her notes word for word off the board

gets +10% extra time for exams

*src = student representative council

candle

subjects:

psychology

rmps

music

maths (set 2)

english (set 1)

yoga for games

other stuff:

[RED HOUSE]

took psychology to better understand yinyang :]

rmps teacher saw candle ground silver from one of their ‘tantrums’ almost instantly and immediately changed the seating plan so they would sit next to eachother (decision was reverted when yang started throwing pens at silver from the back of the class)

working on her gold dofe* :]

always comes into school with the most stunning, jaw-droppingly beautiful traditional clothing on diversity week

*dofe = duke of edinburgh. some project thingy where you do a bunch of activities (volunteering, physical and skills) and then do some hiking trip??? idfk. i quit at our practice trip </3 looks good on uni applications, apparently

cheesy

subjects:

drama (acting)

french

german

apps

english (set 4)

badminton for games

other stuff:

[YELLOW HOUSE]

he took french and german for the easy A (he’s swiss and speaks both languages at home)

was part of the first group of kids to do the german exchange (just like me fr)

he’s a BRILLIANT actor, was able to convince people he was an S6 in S3 so he could participate in muck up day*. got a week of detention for this

pestering the src for a comedy club

keeps losing his door card

*muck up day is the day before exam leave. it’s a VERY special day for the S6s. they’re allowed to do whatever they want because this is the last proper school day they will ever have. there’s loads of pranks, and at lunch, loads of singing! can’t wait for my form class to kill it in house karaoke next year :3

cherries

subjects:

drama (acting)

physics

chemistry

maths (set 3)

english (set 4)

basketball for games

other stuff:

[BLUE HOUSE]

self proclaimed rule breaker — though all he really does is chew gum and plays hangman in the bathrooms

constantly scoring Cs and Ds because he keeps zoning out and staring out of windows in class

plays blooket in the library

clover

subjects:

art

biology

geography

spanish

english (set 1)

badminton for games

other stuff:

[SILVER HOUSE]

studies gaelic in her free time

straight A student

VERY outdoorsy, naturey person, so she signed up for dofe in S3. she enjoyed it, but decided against moving on to silver.

her group won ypi!!!

absolute joy to have in class. teachers LOVE her

went to greek myths club for a while

dough

subjects:

drama (acting)

music

graphcom

apps

english (set 5)

rugby for games

other stuff:

[RED HOUSE]

wanted to do dance with bow but it filled up quickly so he went for rugby as a second choice. he described it as “very sexy” (freak)

takes piano lessons. often forgets to email teachers about them

makes everyone use his boots advantage card when they buy their meal deals so he can get more points

actually kinda sucks at acting but he’s funny so people like being grouped with him for improv (him and cheesy are a great duo)

fan

subjects:

computing

mandarin

physics

maths (set 3)

english (set 1)

badminton for games

other stuff:

[BLUE HOUSE]

very dedicated member of dnd club. great dungeon master, always comes up with brilliant storylines

sucks ass at computing, except for html and css (has experience from customising his tumblr blog’s layout)

did some work for the school production club because he figured he didn’t do enough extracurriculars

his favourite part of the year is the final week before the christmas holidays because he gets to show off his useless trivia skills

the floor

subjects:

geography

biology

human biology

maths (set 3)

english (set 4)

can’t do games

other stuff:

[YELLOW HOUSE]

banned from the snack shack

a friend from another school said they were going to take home ec and, upon finding out what that was, the floor got reaaaallyyyyyy salty that [NAME OF SCHOOL WITHHELD] doesn’t have that as a subject

exempt from most uniform rules due to the nature (hah) of his body. still has to wear a tie tho

once lent his door card to cheesy since he doesn’t really need one (teleportation powers). a week later cheesy loses his card (sigh)

somehow got roped into the src??? (having mephone as your form teacher can result in many strange things)

goo

subjects:

art

geography

classics

maths (set 5)

english (set 5)

can’t do games

other stuff:

[BLUE HOUSE]

took geography for the fun trips! (it was not fun)

also gets a cool lift pass because he physically cannot use stairs. he and cabby have history and geography at the same time so they always wait for eachother so they can have quick chats in the lift

NEVER let this guy write presentations. his speaker notes for a single slide can last half an hour

was part of ms [NAME OF TEACHER WITHHELD]’s film club in S1 + S2

always gets himself and bot an ice cream at [NAME OF PARLOUR WITHHELD] on fridays. (and at the end of term… and after founder’s day… and before they go to watch a school show… the guy really likes ice cream!)

knife

subjects:

spanish

pe

human biology

history

english (set 4)

rugby for games

other stuff:

[BLUE HOUSE]

took human biology for the lols

he is BANNED from playing football because he always underestimates the force of his kicks and was able to break three windows in one match

reoccurring character in detention. always there for petty reasons

pse teacher is BEGGING her to get evaluated for autism

lifering

subjects:

human biology

pe

spanish

environmental science

english (set 3)

netball for games

other stuff:

[YELLOW HOUSE]

was fully locked in for that drug assembly in S3*. he hated the presenter for bragging about making people faint but he was INTRIGUED

always makes the podium for the swimming gala

always trying to hype people up to join house events. he’s not even a part of the src???

constantly being told off for wearing his midlayer** under his blazer

did volunteering with the [NAME OF JUNIOR SCHOOL SPORTS CLUB WITHHELD] for dofe, decided to stay after the six months because he enjoyed it

*a very, very infamous assembly we had on one fateful day in S3. it was INSANELY graphic and really fucking disgusting. two people fainted during the presentation. i was bordering on having a panic attack. everyone had english afterwards and there were MULTIPLE people who were taken out of class because they were crying or feeling sick. i was one of those people. i was so disturbed i nearly had a seizure… yeah, it really was THAT bad.

**part of the pe kit. we’re not allowed to wear it outside of pe. kinda stupid rule imo

lightbulb

subjects:

art

latin

classics

maths (set 5)

english (set 4)

badminton for games

other stuff:

[BLUE HOUSE]

took classics and latin for ya boy, dr [NAME OF TEACHER WITHHELD]!!! (also she didn’t know what else to take)

will be doing creative industries in S6

always first in line to the snack shack somehow…

another frequent visitor of the nurse’s office

absolutely CRACKED at win, lose, draw*. does it every year

lost all her marks for her nat 5 physics exam because she can’t stop doodling on her hands…

*a house event. basically just REALLY fast and REALLY competitive pictionary. it’s my favourite house event (and the only one i participate in)! my house ([RED HOUSE]) got second place in the S5 win, lose, draw this year which was TOTAL BULLSHIT!!!!!! 

marshmallow

subjects:

rmps

mods

french

art

english (set 2)

dance for games

other stuff:

[RED HOUSE]

was dragged into art by apple. i feel like she’d enjoy doing ceramics but otherwise she kinda just floats through lessons

NEVER able to make it to the library on time. has beef with the S1s and S2s (and cherries)* because of this

breaks the uniform rules constantly, but she’s very subtle about it (hides her friendship bracelet under a [FOUNDER OF SCHOOL’S SURNAME WITHHELD]’s tartan scrunchie, paints her nails a SUPER pale pink colour, rolls kilt up only a teeny tiny bit, etc)

*THESE MOTHERFUCKERS ARE SOMEHOW ABLE TO TELEPORT TO THE LIBRARY ALMOST INSTANTLY, AND THEY ALWAYS USE IT TO PLAY BLOOKET. US OLDER YEARS HAVE EXAMS WE NEED TO STUDY FOR, YOU HAVE PRACTICALLY NO RESPONSIBILITIES, GO OUTSIDE!!!!!!!!!!!!

mic

subjects:

music

computing

pe

spanish

english (set 2)

hockey for games

other stuff:

[SILVER HOUSE]

best buds with knife because they were in the same set in S1

got a good luck duck* before her first prelims in nat 5. she still keeps it in her breast pocket

she and knife sit at opposite ends of their spanish class because their teacher has learned not to trust them together. they spend most of their time in class messaging eachother lol

gets straight As in music

*little figurines of ducks. one of my english teachers gave me one in S4… i think i lost it </3

nickel

subjects:

business

accounting

spanish

maths (set 2)

english (set 3)

cricket for games

other stuff:

[SILVER HOUSE]

did everything he could to avoid being in a class sign lifering. they ended up in the same english class (L bozo)

spends half his time in the toilets. he’s one of the reasons the boy’s toilets don’t have doors anymore*

pse teacher HATES him. so does his form teacher. and most of his teachers actually

*yeah, i don’t know why they thought that was a good idea either. kinda fucking gross ngl!

oj

subjects:

mods

physics 

business

economics

english (set 1)

tennis for games

other stuff:

[SILVER HOUSE]

part of the src, of course. hoping to be a school captain in S6

won an award for nat 5 chemistry, maths and business

everyone knows this guy. EVERYONE.

does s shit ton of extracurriculars. his favourite is model un

has attended [NAME OF SCHOOL WITHHELD] since nursery

actually enjoyed ypi (madman)

paintbrush

subjects:

art

graphcom

chemistry

maths (set 3)

english (set 1)

hockey for games

other stuff:

[BLUE HOUSE]

sits next to silver in english. finds it HILARIOUS whenever they read parts in plays. had to be sent out one time because they went into hysterics at silver playing blanche dubois

got a detention in S2 for throwing their lunch tray at fan (they had INSANE beef with him at the time)

hates the [SOCIAL SUBJECTS/HUMANITIES + ART DEPARTMENT] building with a passion (but at least they’ve got strong legs after five years of walking up and down all those stairs!)

paper

subjects:

mods

business

psychology

apps

english (set 2)

badminton for games

other stuff:

[SILVER HOUSE]

gets extra time in exams because he always manages to send himself into a panic attack

chose badminton for games because it’s least likely to kill him

his teachers call him a “diligent but strange little boy” (they really need to study this freak)

goes to chess club like some kind of NERD

somehow got himself locked in the vent stall in the scientology girl’s bathrooms (don’t ask how he ended up in there) and actually started writing on the door to pass the time (it was… oddly therapeutic)

pepper

subjects:

photography

drama (costume)

chemistry

music

english (set 4)

netball for games

other stuff:

[BLUE HOUSE]

almost always late to seventh period because she INSISTS on going to primark at lunch 

that girl that always “forgets” her pe kit

whenever she gets a new jotter she HAS to doodle a bunch of tiny stars on the cover

always gets sent to the small study room with bow and salt so as to not be disturbed by the actors. they usually just end up gossiping the whole time rather than doing any work

pickle

subjects:

computing

history

physics

maths (set 5)

english (set 3)

badminton for games

other stuff:

[YELLOW HOUSE]

was one of the poor souls that chose [NAME OF CAMP PLACE(?????) WITHHELD] for S2 projects week*

a sweat at blooket. he takes it wayyy too seriously

did house choir one year and hated every second of it

sits next to bomb in computing — always lets him copy his work if he’s struggling (pickle ROCKS at computing)

everyone suspects cheesy and bomb are an item (which they are, but bomb doesn’t like the idea of people knowing), so pickle fake flirts with cheesy to throw them off

got absolutely zero sleep before the english prelim and ended up describing stanley kowalski as “freaky” in his essay (he failed)

*projects week is a week which is kinda supposed to be a pay off for all the hard work you put in over the year (though S3 and S4 projects are kinda just… more hard work?). in S1 you get a selection of club activities, in S2 you get a trip somewhere abroad (except for when my year (which is also THEIR year) was in S2… i went to edinburgh, but i heard HORROR STORIES about the trip to the camping or whatever place (ahem, the shit bag incident)), S3 is a bunch of community service (funner than it sounds), S4 is ypi (absolute asscheeks), S5 is the same as S2 but the trips are wayyy better, and in S6 you get. nothing

salt

subjects:

photography

drama (makeup and props)

spanish

music

english (set 5)

netball for games

other stuff:

[YELLOW HOUSE]

did highland dancing in primary school. is VERY embarrassed about this now

constantly getting in trouble for rolling up her kilt

had no idea what she was getting into with makeup (she HATES the bruise wheel and latex scars with fake blood)

took spanish to get closer to oj (he speaks portuguese)

silver

subjects:

drama (acting)

french

rmps

mods

english (set 1)

cricket for games

other stuff:

[SILVER HOUSE]

absolutely DESPISES cross country. the best part of graduating S4 was not having to do cross country anymore

annoying english cunt shocks teacher by ordering in perfect french (they’re actually half french (and a quarter french-polynesian) and, like cheesy, took it for the easy A)

HATED eating in the lunch hall in S2. would always sneak out* to buy some REAL food (their height helped them blend in)

they take drama VERYYYY seriously. people partnered with them for the practicals may find them REALLY pushy, but they just care a lot about doing well in their exam.

to everyone's annoyance, they’re actually a very good pupil.

*you’re not actually allowed to go out for lunch until you hit S3. after that you’re not allowed to eat in the lunch hall (mostly cus it’s really cramped, which is weird considering the size of the school + the funding)

soap

subjects:

biology

chemistry

music

maths (set 2)

english (set 2)

dance for games

other stuff:

[RED HOUSE]

part of the senior choir, and takes it VERY seriously — especially during the christmas service

though she doesn’t take drama, she’s pally with a lot of the pupils and teachers because she always takes part in the school shows

went with dance because she REFUSES to do any sport that involves holding or touching anything

people thought she was a weirdo because she was still wearing a mask in S3

suitcase

subjects:

history

art

psychology

rmps

english (set 2)

badminton for games

other stuff:

[SILVER HOUSE]

now she WOULD be another nurse’s office regular if it wasn’t for the fact she kept her hallucinations a secret

she’s really good at history, but history isn’t really good for her…

was one of the people that fainted during the drug assembly

regular attendee of wednesday wind down* — could do those super-detailed adult colouring pages for hours (sometimes she invites balloon or knife to come with her)

her kilt is WAY too long for her

*wednesday wind down is a club held on wednesday lunch times with loads of peaceful activities. the teacher always plays some corny calm music compilation from youtube. i am too loud to attend wednesday wind down.

taco

subjects:

french

spanish

physics

maths (set 1)

english (set 1)

hockey for games

other stuff:

[YELLOW HOUSE]

unlike in canon, she was genuinely a silly and goofy girl through primary school and S1. puberty (and the pressure that comes with it) hit her pretty hard…

cheats in kahoots and blookets

successfully blackmailed a group of girls she caught vaping in the [SOCIAL SUBJECTS/ HUMANITIES + ART DEPARTMENT] toilets. got them to do whatever she wanted for a month (she stopped because she got bored)

took out five different jackie w books from the library in S1 and lost all of them. has avoided the library like the plague ever since.

test tube

subjects:

physics

chemistry

biology

engineering

english (set 1)

badminton for games

other stuff:

[BLUE HOUSE]

perfect attendance record. hasn’t missed a single day of school in all thirteen years of her school career

takes model un a little TOO seriously

accidentally set someone’s hair on fire in chemistry

INSISTS on going to the mini science display whenever they go to [NAME OF SHOPPING CENTER WITHHELD] to get lunch, even though it’s lame and basically empty

tissues

subjects:

german

geography

human biology

maths (set 5)

english (set 3)

can’t do games

other stuff:

[BLUE HOUSE]

has only ever taken subjects he finds fun, easy or interesting since he knows he’ll never get to do anything considering his condishawn

rarely ever seen in person. his teachers usually just set up a google meet for him to join

in S2 he went to the bathroom during a lesson and fell asleep on the toilet. no one came looking for him because they assumed he just went home, so he just slept through the whole day.

trophy

subjects:

photography

pe

geography

maths (set 4)

english (set 3)

basketball for games

other stuff:

[SILVER HOUSE]

always plays football by the junior school building/hettie area at lunch

part of the rugby team — he isn’t opposed to playing dirty (though he’s good at getting away with it)

participates in EVERY house event, regardless of how lame he thinks it is

trophy REFUSES to stand up for hymns on founder’s day

yinyang

subjects: 

psychology

mandarin

rmps

physics

english (set 3)

rugby for games

other stuff:

[YELLOW HOUSE]

yang is constantly getting them into detention

yin has to take control very often so they can ACTUALLY get any work done

yang has gotten them banned from entering the lunch hall because he kept sneaking in to steal jelly and ice cream

yin has accidentally bitten off a chunk of skin from his arm because he was absentmindedly biting it in class 

[theee-collector]

Teen Wolf Librarian AUs

A collection of Sterek fics where one of them is a librarian (most play in a library themselves)

This is Lovecantrophy by orphan_account

12.1K | Sterek | Teen

In which Valentine's Day is closely approaching, and Derek is a disgruntled grad student who works at a library. He's hit a roadblock on his thesis, he's harboring a (not so secret) crush on Stiles, and he keeps receiving werewolf-themed gifts from a secret admirer. Basically, Derek is totally oblivious and angsty, Stiles does a lot of planning off-screen, and Erica and Scott are awesome friends who are awesome.

Unknowing First Date by gayderek

1.2k | Sterek | General

Derek doesn't share, but for some reason he lets the mystery boy sitting across from him borrow his headphones. Turns out that the Mystery Boy isn't mysterious at all. He's kind of annoying, but he's kind of cute too.

You're the piece that I just found out how to fit to by pseudofoucault333

23.2k | Sterek | Explicit

Stiles is known as the tattooed reference Librarian, the somewhat reluctant crush of most teenagers in Beacon Hills and the son of the Sheriff. Derek is the new Deputy in town who has a history of heartbreak. Will Stiles' persistence pay off to help him get Derek to trust him and will Derek finally admit to himself that not everyone looks at him and sees a pretty face?

Inside this place is warm by wolfcloaks

40k | Sterek | Explicit

Coming down; One love, two mouths  Stiles Stilinski: -Senior at Berkley -Double majoring in Human Biology and Biomedical Engineering -Student Librarian -Closet Artist -Basket case extrodanaire -Hopelessly crushing on Derek Hale (read as: pining) Derek Hale: -Grad Student at Berkley -Philosophy Major -Dog enthusiast -Does not cry during The Notebook, fuck you,Laura -Is definitely not pining over the librarian with the cute moles -Would very much like to tell the librarian's curly haired boyfriend to fuck off Or Where Derek and Stiles are complete dweebs in love and jump to horribly inaccurate conclusions Or When your meet-cute turns into a bit of an (light) angst fest but it's all ok in the end

Hale's Library & Coffee Shop by scarlettletterr

3.8k | Sterek | Mature

College Student Stiles is looking for a place to work - so he can pay his bills - when his friend from class, Erica, mentions that her boss is looking for someone to help at Hale's Library and Coffee Shop. Stiles gets the job, along with a giant crush on his boss, Derek, that seems obvious to anyone but him.

Don’t Judge a Book by its Cover by isthatbloodonhisshirt (wasterella)

6.1k | Sterek | General

“Hi,” Stiles said jovially with a bright smile. “How can I help you?” For a few seconds, hot, sexy guy said nothing. He just stared at Stiles like he’d never seen another human being before. Eventually, after a sufficiently long and awkward silence, hot, sexy guy had said, “I’m looking for a book.” “Sure thing!” Stiles had then waited. Because—he worked in the public library, so someone coming in asking for a book was normal, but only asking for a book with no other details was a little too vague. “Um, I’m gonna need you to be a little bit more specific,” he’d informed him. “Right.” Hot, sexy guy had looked flustered, some of his murderous aura dissipating.

Checking You Out by wherearethebreaks

7k | Sterek | General

Usually, the people who actually did come into the library used the computers. Usually, Derek could just sit at the small table behind the circulation desk and spread out his papers and get his homework done. But not that day. Oh no. No, some random guy just barged in, doors slamming loudly behind him, tripped over a display for some new books they'd gotten, and didn't sign in, (which, who doesn't know that you have to sign in during school hours?) all before running, running, into the non-fiction shelves. Who runs in the library? Who doesn't sign in? The librarian who usually had to deal with the rowdy and unruly teens that often wandered inside to talk loudly with their friends, was in the bathroom. Meaning, Derek was the one who was going to have to deal with this kid. Something he'd never really done before; therefore, didn't know how to deal with. "Uh, excuse me?" A.K.A: Derek is a library student aid and loves the peace and quiet, a quiet that is interrupted by a fellow student that Derek has to kindly deal with. To bad the guy's a total cutie that shows up the next day, and the one after that to ask him out.

You taste so bitter and so sweet by EmmisaryStilinski22

5.2k | Sterek | Not rated

Dear 402, Your two dogs woke me up every night this week at 4 am! Please silence your hounds from hell! Regards, 403

Dog Days of Summer by CarnalCoffeeBean

1.9k | Sterek | General

Beacon Hills, as it turns out, is actually boring as hell. Or, the one in which summer is boring, Derek accidentally becomes a library volunteer, Lydia and Erica get shit done, Stiles researches werewolves, and multiple people trip, stumble, and fall flat on their faces on their way towards something resembling love.

Special Collections by hannah_baker

16.4k | Sterek | Explicit

Stiles Stilinski is a senior in college working on his thesis. Derek Hale is the grumpy (though inhumanely attractive) special collections librarian. All they needed was a common interest to spark a friendship that becomes more than either of the bargained for.

Can I get Your (call) Number, baby by lielabell

4.9k | Sterek | Teen

Thing is, for the most part, Stiles's loves his job. He loves the quiet hush of the library, the way it smells like must and old books. He likes walking through the stacks, collecting books to be shelved. Likes sitting at the reference desk, hell, he even likes the fact that they still have a card catalog, even though no one ever uses it. Everything about the job is amazing. Except... Except for the music majors.

Stacking up by bravelittlesoldier

8.2k | Sterek | Teen

Stiles is working in the basement of the Library of Congress and is feeling his social skills quickly deteriorate. Then along comes a new librarian working at Circulation who is most definitely a male model. Maybe its time to start re-socializing.

Librarians Always Know What To Say by codarra

1.1k | Sterek | General

Derek comes into the library where Stiles works. A lot. Only he doesn't know Stiles' name. And he's fairly certain Stiles doesn't know Derek exists.

Baby, I'm yours by yodasyoyo

4k | Sterek | Teen

Honestly, Derek Hale didn’t think he could be surprised anymore at the things you see working behind the circulation desk of the university library. He thought he’d seen it all. There’s a guy that comes in on Thursdays that carries a kitten in his bag and thinks Derek doesn’t know. There’s another guy that comes in every other day or so to catch a nap in a secluded corner. And then there’s the couple that Derek’s had to kick out three times now for having sex in the stacks. There’s this one guy that has, by far, expanded Derek’s list of strange happenings in the library. He only knows the guy’s name because he has to come to Derek to check out his books and it shows up on the computer but it’s not actually anything Derek can pronounce so it doesn’t really help. Anyway, Unpronounceable-first-name Stilinski is always up to something.

#librarynerd by yodasyoyo

7.7k | Sterek | Teen

“I’ll likely get far more done in the group if I’m not distracted watching you with your pen--” “My--My pen?” “Pens. Drinking straws. Don’t act like you don’t know,” Derek says darkly. “You know.” ____________ In which Stiles follows Scott into his Spanish study group, takes one look at the hot nerd who runs it and then decides to stay... even though he doesn't actually speak Spanish.

Old you in the garbage(new you in display case) by dearericbittle (dutchmoxie)

13.5k | Sterek | Teen

Stiles is lonely and desperate and suffering from a crush on the grumpiest librarian. So what’s a boy to do but cook up a ridiculous plan to get himself dated and/or finally get laid before the holidays? He just wants his She’s All That moment, okay? He never expected that the plan would actually help him get the guy.

[theamityelf]

I like to imagine there comes a point where Taka has to buy a car and Mondo and Chihiro go with him to help him choose one, with their respective mechanical/technical expertise. The poor car salesperson is asked the most intricate questions about each vehicle; Chihiro is focused on the computer aspect, Mondo has questions about the engine, and best believe Taka has done his homework with regards to the reliability statistics and reputation of each model.

[danicadenniss]

Ninjago: Next Generation

High School

Kasai Jiang

Freshman (14-15)

Schedules & Grades

Per 0: Creative Writing- B

Per 1: Geometry- B-

Per 2: Chinese- A+

Per 3: Environmental Studies- B+

Per 4: Human Geography- A-

Per 5: Weight Training- A

Per 6: Concert Band- A-

Per 7: Drawing/Painting- A+

Per 8: Metalworking- A+

Cliques: Art/Sporty/Nerd Kids

Clubs/Sports: Art History Club, Foreign Language Club, Wrestling Team

Others: He is the son of Kai Jiang the previous ninja of fire, the new team leader of the new ninjas. He is a very good artist and pretty smart student and his father is in the monastery. He is the new ninja of lava.

He, his friends and his family were all there to help with the rescue, since his uncle’s sacrifice 20 years ago before he was born. He is a member of Art History Club. He is visiting his paternal grandparents in his father’s village near the city.

He felt worried for his paternal aunt with his cousin, they left the teams 20 years ago and he disliked Black da Bandits planning to everybody else’s stuff in the city. He and his team were to stop them from stealing things from the museum.

Leonardo “Leo” Lopez

Freshman (14-15)

Schedules & Grades:

Per 0: Poetry- A+

Per 1: Environmental Studies- A+

Per 2: Human Geography- A+

Per 3: Auto Mechanics- A+

Per 4: Spanish- A+

Per 5: Health- A+

Per 6: Computer Programming- A+

Per 7: Choir- A+

Per 8: Photography A+

Cliques: Choir/Nerd Kids

Clubs/Sports: Acapella Club, Book Club, Latinx Club, Robotics Club, Tennis Team

Others: His father is working at Ninjago Engineering Institute, where he and his friends see the company, which he is a member of Robotics Club in Ninjago City High School.

He have a big time rivalry with Alexander Mal who is a bully to him in school, the teacher send him to the detention office for bullying and harassment.

He trained with Kasai’s father Kai in the monastery of Spinjitzu, he and his friends trained in the monastery, his father find out that he is a ninja, he is the brain of the team, he is the new elemental of technology like his mother.

Finley “Finn” McCraig

Freshman (14-15)

Schedules & Grades:

Per 0: Geometry- D-

Per 1: Graphic Design- D-

Per 2: Poetry- D-

Per 3: Yoga- F-

Per 4: Environmental Studies- F-

Per 5: Geography- F-

Per 6: Drawing - C-

Per 7: Concert Band- C-

Per 8: Home Economics- C-

Cliques: Gamer/Rebel Kids

Clubs/Sports: Gaming Club, Slam Poetry Club

Others: Finn literally failing at school because his parents were furious at him because he didn’t pay attention in classes. He and Kasai have an argument about how to learn in classes.

Finn got his ass whooped by Kai’s staff, he tutored him and he is diagnosed with ADHD. ADHD can affect a student’s ability to focus, pay attention, listen, or put effort into schoolwork.

Finn genuinely love his family and friends, sometimes wrong but his father shouted at him, his mother tutored him to his homework and his maternal aunt and uncle treated like a baby. He is the new ninja of lightning bolt and the rebel ninja of the group. His parents see him that’s he is a ninja and they are shocked at him because they have to calm down.

Aisha River

Freshman (14-15)

Schedules & Grades:

Per 0: Swimming- A+

Per 1: Environmental Studies/Oceanography- A

Per 2: Human Geography A-

Per 3: Art History- A+

Per 4: Geometry- A

Per 5: Orchestra- A-

Per 6: Creative Writing- A+

Per 7: Home Economics- A

Per 8: Computer Programming- A-

Cliques: Nerd/Orchestra/Sporty Kids

Clubs/Sports: Art History Club, History Bowl, National Ocean Sciences Bowl, Swim Team

Others: Aisha is a very good at swimming in Ninjago City High School, but she is the ninja of ocean/wave inherited from her mother.

Her mother is the oceanographer and her father is a marine biologist who at Ninjago City Science Lab, he and his wife headed about the great hurricane in Ninjago City 20 years ago, since they were engaged in the Pacific coast of Endless Sea.

She is an athletic nerd of the group, Kai thought his younger sister as an elemental master of water like his mother, since she was a ninja until Jay’s sacrifice to save Ninjago from the storm monster. She is honored to the past elemental master of ocean and waves. She also is the member of between History Bowl and National Ocean Sciences Bowl. She have a crush on Leonardo during school and training in the monastery of Spinjitzu.

Sakura Mizuki

Freshman (14-15)

Per 0: Japanese- A+

Per 1: Geometry- A-

Per 2: Poetry- B+

Per 3: Human Geography- B+

Per 4: Culinary Art- A-

Per 5: Concert Band/Drama- A+

Per 6: Yoga- B+

Per 7: Environmental Science- A-

Per 8: Painting- A+

Cliques: Art/Cheerleader/Drama Kids

Clubs/Sports: Cooking Club, Drama Club Gardening Club, Cheer Team

Others: Sakura is the new ninja of flower, she is a member of Gardening Club. She’s pretty smart and a good student of Ninjago City High School.

Sakura is the best girl in the Ninjago City High cheer team and she have a big time rivalry with Noelle Laurent who is a popular girl. She dislikes her and she bullied her all the time.

Sakura and her friends meditate together in the monastery of Spinjitzu and Kai telling her how much her powers inherited from the mother. She is the calmness ninja of the group. She and her family and friends celebrate the cherry blossom festival every year in the city. Her mother is a gardener and her father is a florist who works in the garden of Ninjago City. They discover that she is a ninja and they’re both very proud of her.

[to-trek-or-not-to-trek]

TNG Characters as College Majors:

Picard: Definitely an English major. Why are all the Captains theater kids?

Riker: Political science, with a minor in Trombone. He thinks that Trombone should be a more respectable major.

Troi: Psychology. She's the top of her class and unofficial therapist of the friend group.

Worf: Something stuffy, like Law. He does not enjoy it, but it is honorable.

Dr. Crusher: Pre-med. Her study set up is aesthetic goals, and her notes are impeccable.

Data: Computer Science, with a minor in Philosophy. He was one class short of a dual major, and it high-key annoys him.

Geordi: Biomechanical engineering. He's infamous for being the best in class, and would gladly help everyone else with the homework, but they're too scared to ask.

[mamawasatesttube]

YJ all living in the same dorm/frat house in college would be amazing. What do you think everyone’s majors/clubs/athletics would be?

assuming this is still like... main universe-adjacent and they all still have powers etc. yknow i think cassie has a giant existential crisis because she doesn't know what she's gonna do with her life other than be wonder girl and that will NOT fly with her mom bc helena absolutely wants her to have a normal life as much as she can. late-night conversations at the kitchen counter where she confides that she has no idea what she wants to do and helena sits with her and tells her she has time but she does expect her to go to college and do something, even if she doesn't have to have it all figured out right yet. all of this to say i think cassie goes in undeclared. also i think she should be on the volleyball team.

tim in college is smth i was actually talking abt with moss and britta just the other day. he of course is an insane engineering major who skateboards to class with a naruto-themed energy drink in hand only to fall asleep there 14 minutes into the lecture. also he's wearing a blazer and formal shorts bc he's like I Am Getting A Good Grade In Presentable Student :) and theres just something wrong with him. he has to join an engineering student study group bc its the only thing that actually gets him to bother doing his homework even if hes a whiz at the actual content. hes a disaster but he cant drop out he wants to hang with his besties plus lucius was like listen you can work at WE r&d and tinker with shit to your heart's desire but you do need at least a bachelor's of mechanical engineering to do that even if i know you know your stuff. and tim was like well i guess that's fair :/ hey squad i can sugar daddy us an apartment near met u lets all get an education

kon... well i think he also has a crisis (see also: sotm) but eventually i do like him going into teaching or stuff with kids in general. im always bouncing btwn him being a childrens librarian or a high school biology teacher. he WILL tell all these kids about star trek or so help him god. i feel like he wouldn't really go for most athletics bc he'd be too worried about making sure he doesn't excel too unnaturally BUT just for me, i think he and bart should join the ballroom dance team together. i think they would have so much fun doing jive in particular

as for bart. well the thing about bart is that he could literally do anything he wants to? the real question is what subject would hold his attention consistently over several years. i think the answer is either computer science or theoretical physics. possibly both i think he might double major. he's also terrible at remembering to do his homework etc but he flies through it when he bothers to. and he and kon join the ballroom team together :)!!!

[aceship-sconesterprise]

In Our Favor

Part 383

McCoy

McCoy hurried across to his next class when he left Scotty after lunch. Eugene was already sitting and appeared to have saved McCoy a seat.

“Thanks,” McCoy said as he sat down. Eugene looked over with a smile.

When classes were over for the day, McCoy walked quickly towards the dorms. A cold breeze had sprung up and he couldn’t wait to be inside their warm room. His steps faltered as he passed the campus clinic and the counseling building. He stopped and turned around.

His class schedule had changed, and his regular Wednesday appointment with Dr. Cuthbert would no longer work. McCoy entered the counseling building with a quick shiver at the change in temperature.

“May I help you?” a young woman asked as McCoy walked up to the window inside.

“Yes, I normally have a Wednesday afternoon appointment with Dr. Cuthbert—”

“But your schedule is different?” the woman smiled.

“Yes. I have a lab at that time now.”

“Name?” she asked as she turned to her computer.

“Leonard Scott-McCoy.”

“Hmm… looks like he could see you on… Thursday afternoons. Same time as before.” She looked up at McCoy again.

Thursdays. After his time in the simulators. Would that be helpful? Perhaps. To see the psych right after flying, could Dr. Cuthbert help him relax after tense flights?

McCoy nodded. “I’ll take it. Thank you.”

“You’re all set then Cadet.”

McCoy walked back out into the cold air and pulled his coat tight. Scotty should be back in their room by now, unless some engineering something had caught his attention. McCoy hoped he was back. He could use a nice lie down with his husband for a while before they started in on their homework.

He sighed as he rode the lift to their floor. Every instructor had assigned at least a chapter of reading.

McCoy quickly typed in their door code and his breath caught for a second waiting to see if Scotty was home. He smiled and let the breath out as Scotty looked up from his desk.

“Hello love. How was the rest of your day?”

McCoy dropped his own books on his desk and stepped over to kiss Scotty.

“Fine. Just lots of reading tonight.”

“Same,” Scotty nodded.

“Let’s take a break first?” McCoy asked softly. He was already undoing his jacket collar and shrugging the garment off to hang on his desk chair.

“Let me finish this paragraph,” Scotty agreed. McCoy flopped backward on the bed as Scotty read.

In minutes Scotty was next to him and McCoy rolled onto his side to get closer. Soft lips touched his forehead and McCoy pressed himself tight to Scotty’s side.

Part 384

Scotty

They relaxed for a while and talked about the rest of the day. Leonard told Scotty that from now on he would always have his therapy sessions with the psychologist on Thursdays and Scotty quite liked that.

"I finish early on Thursdays too. So if sometime it's important to ye, I can accompany ye to the appointment," he said with a smile. He knew that it was important for Leonard to tackle the problems alone, but at least Scotty now had the option of standing by him.

"That sounds great. And... I also think it might be good that the session is now always after the day with the flying lessons. Then all the emotions are still fresh and maybe Dr. Cuthbert can give me tips on how to calm down better."

It filled Scotty with pride that Leonard thought like that. They were positive thoughts and good ideas.

"Aye. It'll be fine. I'm sure of it."

After dinner, Scotty and Leonard set about their homework. There were quite a lot texts to read and even though it was exhausting to get back to studying, Scotty also enjoyed getting to know new topics. There were some interesting new theories that he was keen to get to grips with.

Leonard, on the other hand, didn't seem ready to return to everyday life. He groaned and leaned back in his chair.

"I just don't feel like reading anymore. I want to finally relax and spend my precious time doing other things."

Scotty couldn't help but grin.

"I can well imagine what those other things are," he replied and gave Leonard a smirk and a quick glance before looking back at his PADD.

"We can just get up earlier tomorrow and finish reading the texts then." Leonard pouted.

That made Scotty laugh.

"Ye and getting up extra early? Have I landed in a parallel universe?"

"Hey! I can get up early if I want to! And... if the pay is right."

Scotty didn't take his eyes off his PADD, however, he heard Leonard stand up and a short time later arms closed around the Scotsman from behind and lips pressed against his neck.

"Len..."

"Please, please, please, please..."

A sigh escaped Scotty and he finally put his PADD down on the table. It was no use anyway.

"But ye'd better get up in the morning when the alarm goes off."

Leonard just grinned.

"A promise is a promise."

Even though Leonard found it difficult to get out of bed the next morning, he kept his promise. Scotty and he finished reading their texts before they showered and then went to the dining hall.

After breakfast, Scotty went with Jim and Sulu. The three of them had the medical basics class together. Scotty already knew that this was a class that would definitely cause him problems. He could fix any machine, but doctoring people? That really wasn't for him.

"Lucky you've got Bones by your side, huh? He'll tutor you," Jim said and gently elbowed Scotty in the ribs.

"Aye. I'd really be lost without him."

"Well, I sure hope we can borrow him from time to time? This is gonna be one of the hardest courses after all," Sulu grinned.

Scotty laughed and shook his head.

"Oh, nae, nae, nae. Len is all mine and I don't like to share."