#i think reading it in an academic setting helped me get additional contexts with my professor's explanations

[amesliu]

so disclaimer: I haven't read the book yet so I don't have the full context + i'm not USAmerican so I dunno how relevant this would be to pjo

Also so sorry for the essay... do ignore this if you don't want to go into this further! I just get rambly about cultures and cultural differences haha

In my family it really depends on who the guest is on what is acceptable behaviour? I guess? Closest to percy and annabeth would probably be my sister and her long term boyfriend (5 -ish years, they're early twenties). He isn't expected to help out, but he's allowed to and does regularly help set the table. In this case he also eats at my parent's at least twice a week. Sometimes he and my sister cook, sometimes they clean etc. (he also helps us host at birthdays sometimes! like offer other guests drinks that kind of stuff) Different example: close family typically helps out in the kitchen. My grandma refuses to let us do anything without her help no matter how insistent we are that "You're our guest! Let us do the work!" she'll just tell us that it would be rude of her to let her (grand)children do all the work while she sits and watches. We also always offer our help when we're over at family. (my mom's best friend, who she has known since college, is the same way btw. She also insists on helping us and we always offer our help when we are visiting her and her family) Now, if the boyfriend's parents came over to eat dinner my parents would not let them lift a finger. Same with neighbours, colleagues and other more casual acquaintances.

If I went off of my own experiences and no further context i'd say that rr is trying to show that percy, annabeth and their friends are very close

I totally get that and I agree it’s context sensitive. HOWEVER. My issues with this scene are as follows:

1. Percy appears to be not doing much of anything in this scene? Like the page I read is just him standing there narrating the scene…….? It literally says “Grover and juniper were setting the table which is usually my job” maybe I’m wrong and I’m missing context but that’s what it read like. But this isn’t rlly my main issue with the food stuff so oh well

2. I have a huge contention with Rick’s push to make Annabeth into a character that is like. Good at and interested in cooking and food handling in general. His justification for her learning to cook appears to be “she’s smart and so ahead in her classes she just decided to” which goes back to my point that I made on my side blog about the poor representation of Annabeth as a “smart adhder”. It feels like a retroactive and lazy justification for a character trait that he has already decided for her when her upbringing and personality has given me no reason to believe she would ever need or care to learn to cook. Her doing so could be an interesting way to explore the way her priorities shift as she gets older as Jules discussed on my post about sohaes last chapter but it’s not being used that way and when he randomly starts pushing his one female character in his main trio to start cooking when both his male characters have a much better characterization for it it also feels somewhat misogynistic and “mommy-ifying” with how heavily the cooking focuses on Annabeth being so so good at cooking

I don’t want this to come off as me saying a female character who cooks is inherently misogynistic but this sudden addition to her character says nothing and does nothing when it can and should. Either she remains not good at cooking and we see food as a medium for care and affection with Percy and Sally as caretakers expecting nothing in return or we see her learn with Sally as a symbolic representation of her gaining smth she lost as a kid. But learning to cook in a class bc she’s just so smart and good at school is… not it.

And even then. What if she does learn in an academic and STRUGGLES with it. How does that interact with her pride? Her personality? Etc.

I think this is a huge issue I have with a lot of the ideas he brings up where they could be incredibly interesting things to explore but he will never take it there so it just feels random. We’re not at a point where we’re supposed to be teaching an audience about a character we’re at the exploring their depth stage and he just. Doesn’t act that way.

3. A cultural issue I guess but my partner would never be allowed to do the work at my parents house but we are sort of a fist fight for the bill type of culture so 🤷‍♂️

Side note: the tangent about Percy being like “wow I’d never think to ask if salad was okay for juniper” followed by the immediate tangent about how hard he’s thought about the feelings of fish and whether or not he eats them was like… something. Idk what but it ticked me off LOOOL

[cr0ftisprocrastinating]

Crofty! My favorite and beloved academia Dramione writer! Will you be a student again this year? What is the back to school season like for you?

I also want to ask, how do you set intentions for the beginning of the semester/school year and make sure that you stay committed to them? How do you balance separate writing projects with your coursework?

In addition, would you be willing to share advice for a reader halfway through her undergraduate degree? For context, I’ve had some rough setbacks in my first two years, but I’m really eager to prove myself. I want to build back my GPA and earn my way into a humanities PhD program.

Thanks so much! I hope your academic years are wonderful (in the true old meaning of the word!) and give you great joy, wisdom and inspiration.

#ADHDinacademia #PhD #dramione #darkacademia #hogwarts #oxford #oxbridge #ivyleague #columbia #manuscript #marauder #hermionegranger #undergradwoes #lumos

Sweet Piedra! Happy September, aka the best month of the whole year! (it may or may not include my birthday).

I will be a student this year again! I'm just about to start my second year as a phd student (programs in the UK are usually 3-4 years, so I'm nearly halfway through already?!).

The biggest advice I can give about studying is firstly: wanting to do well is the first step to doing well in anything, so you are already a good chunk of the way there!

2. pick things that you are naturally interested in (for option papers). Life is a hell of a lot easier when you're not making it harder for yourself, even if you think you *should* be studying something bc it sounds impressive (personally, I am not into Russian Literature at all, so I just don't force myself to slog through Crime and Punishment, etc. This simple realisation improved my life by at least 100%)

3. Do as much reading as you can. When I did my undergrad I was so surprised at how little reading people did lol, and doing the reading makes a big difference. The Professors have made the reading lists for a reason and they want to help you.

4. Utilise office hours! It took me ages to realise that I can just...go to the office hours and talk to the people who were teaching me. Go in person if you can. Talk them through your essay plans and they will course correct before they're marked. Let them know that you're interested in pursuing it further, and find out what they think you need to do to fill in any gaps you may have. Don't be discouraged if they're short with you, bc academics are a weird bunch.

5. Try not to be so focused on an end result that you forget to enjoy what you're doing right now. Romanticise the hell out of your life whenever you can. It's short!

In terms of my 'process' (sorry this is SO long):

This term is going to be pretty hectic! In addition to my PhD I work Tuesdays and Wednesdays at a corporate job to help pay the bills. I have funding, but funding in the arts is just...not enough.

I will also be teaching this semester for the first time ever (yay!) so I have reading lists and essay questions to put together before Oct. That's every other week though, so it's not too much work.

My supervisors and I try to get a 'chunk' of my thesis written a term (8-10k roughly). I have about 8k due at the end of this month as I have written 2 chunks over the summer, and will have another due at the end of term in Dec.

Also, I've been asked to give a talk about my research at the end of the semester which I am SO excited about, but it means I'll be adapting one of my thesis chapters for that, too! :)

Broadly speaking I do fanfic writing Tuesday and Wednesday evenings, as after grown-up-job-things my brain is too toasted for academic work. When I'm getting to the end of a story however I get real itchy fingers and have to get all the words out as quickly as possible, so I let a lot of other things slide, like cleaning or cooking or washing my hair or also doing my work. Gross, I know, but I've never been particularly functional when I have an idea in my head.

However, I do believe that if you are busy then you are more productive. I have 2 modes: INSANE or blob. I do not recommend this approach, but that is just the way that I'm wired. Today, for instance, I spent the entire day in bed. Tomorrow I really must go back to the library.

Oxford terms are only 8 weeks long, and honestly no matter how prepared I am at the beginning, by halfway through I'm clinging on by a thread. I try not to be too hard on myself when that happens, and focus on getting my work done and not keeping my house clean or whatever else I've decided to beat myself up about.

My username is about procrastinating for a reason. I just kind of productively procrastinate and then at some point everything just gets done?

Some personal mantras:

'everything in moderation, including moderation'

'say yes and figure it out later'

'the work comes first' (normally I say this to try and galvanize myself into staying in the library when I want to go to the pub)

'fuck it' (said when the pub wins out)

'it'll get done, because it has to' (said when I have a week to write 4,000 words because i've procrastinated too close to the sun, again)

[wajjs]

Blob’s tips for academic writing

aka how I tricked my professors into thinking I Know Shit (when I don’t)

First things first, and this a general disclaimer, I’m going to try and keep what I’m about to say in mostly general terms. This is because I’m aware regulations for written stuff in academic circles sometimes change not from college to college, but from country to country.

Anyways, I’m going to keep this simple.

Be clear and concise about your objectives, aka what you are planning to prove/explain with what you are writing.

Include in the very beginning (aka the first two paragraphs) what your objectives are. Be it to prove some bitch is totally biased in their research or to explain the connection between popular singers and sainthood, no matter what you are writing about, always try to start by saying what’s the shit you hope to get done.

This helps a lot with organization and also takes pressure off the whole aaaaa I don’t know how to start this, this is fucking hell, why am I in college, fuck my life thing we all go through.

When possible, start with a quote.

This is something I do a lot. Together with adding in the first paragraph my objectives, I always try to start with some funky quote that’s related to the topic at hand. I’ve quoted academic authors, song lyrics, fictional novels, comics, etc. If it works within the context, I’ve added it at the very start of things, right in between the title and the first paragraph with right margin indentation.

What this does is that it not only takes pressure off the beginning words, it also helps to put your work in context. It sets the mood. It also shows that you’ve been thinking about this so hard, that you’ve found ways to connect it with new things. But honestly that’s not necessarily true, I personally grab the first thing I can think of that sounds great considering the topic I’m working with.

(Sub)sections are your friends

Dividing your work in easily definable (and searchable) parts is a blessing. Not only does this help keep track of what you’ve said, it also helps the professors when they have to read it. Basically, it makes reading significantly easier for everyone involved.

You don’t have to go the boring route of Introduction / Analysis / Evidence / Conclusion. I mean, it IS best if you keep that Conclusion around because that’s kind of the most important thing among the others. I’ve handed in tons of research papers and essays with subsections titled after song lyrics or quotes from novels, etc. And guess what? Each time I’ve done that, my profs loved it.

Now, granted, maybe first try to get a general vibe of what your profs prefer, because some might not be down to party, but do keep this in mind. It shows individuality and personality. Yes, profs say you don’t gotta reinvent the wheel, but adding some color and sparkle is always nice, isn’t it?

Think of examples. Add as many as you can. Spread them all over.

If there’s one thing professors go bonkers for, that is examples. Even more so if they aren’t ones that have already been provided during class or within the textbooks/study materials. This doesn’t mean you must crack your head open trying to come up with something original: take the examples you already have as template!

You can still totally add those anyways. Just add examples. They are your friend and they add to the word count in times of need.

Text organizers

There are key words/phrases that organize the text and make it seem more concise. Things like:

For example / On the one hand / In conclusion / On the contrary / However / In addition to / As well as / Not only ... but also / Besides / To begin with / etc

are ways to organize your paragraph and sentences, and they help keep track of ideas and points you have made or need to make. I’ve found these have helped me a lot when I’ve had to cut my writing in between sentences (or in the middle of writing a sentence). They place you immediately in the tone you need to use and what you are doing in that section of the thing you’re writing.

Sentence structure

This is something that stands true both for academic writing and fiction: varying the length of your sentences is probably the best thing you can do to make reading easier.

Try not to have too many long sentences (aka, around 3 to 5 lines) one after the other. It slows down the rhythm and makes the thing seem convoluted. Shorten some of them into 2 or 3 sentences, add ones that are at most 2 lines long in between.

Another thing to keep in mind is the word order: SVO is the most common one, yet keeping it up throughout the entirety of the writing can make it seem repetitive or, what’s worst, straight up boring. Switch it up if you can!

Conclusion

Saving the best for last, and this is the golden rule: no new information can be added in the conclusion.

This section is specifically saved to tie up all the loose ends you can find throughout the analysis part of your writing. Everything that goes here MUST have already been talked about beforehand. The conclusion is there for you to explain whether you’ve met your objectives, if there’s need for further investigation (but the limits of the current work don’t let you carry it on, so it must be saved for a future date), if what you set out to prove was in fact wrong, etc.

If you add new information in the conclusion, and there is no way around this, then your analysis will be considered as wrong. You either take the new info out, or you find a way to include it in the previous sections.

All you have to do in this final section is summarize your points, talk about whether your hypothesis has been proved right or wrong, and tie up anything else that needs tying up. That’s it. Nothing less, nothing more.

Hopefully this will be helpful to anyone who might stumble upon this! I tried to keep it all in general terms lmao

Anyways, good luck my pals, don’t let academia kick you in the ass and disillusion you!

[itsclydebitches]

I read you’re Chapter 2 recap, and your bit about Sun using the term “literally” immediately made me think of Weird Al Yankovic’s song, “Word Crimes.”

aldkfjalsfkja congratulations you’ve unlocked additional thoughts and feelings about this topic. Okay, funny as that song is and as much as I’m dragging BTD, I think it’s worth reiterating that I break a lot of grammar rules. Sometimes deliberately. Sometimes because I just plain make mistakes. Which brings up two very important things to remember when talking about all this: 

It’s more about editing than it is any natural talent for grammar 

Language evolves and the rules we use evolve with it 

In regards to #1 grammar does not, as the song suggests, tell us anything about the intelligence of the individual using it (though of course I get that this is done for humor’s sake). I say that as someone who has never, in her life, picked up an unfinished piece of writing that wasn’t riddled with mistakes, even when so-called professionals had written it. Now “good” writers usually have the more common rules down like two vs to vs too, but I guarantee they’re making different errors because people don’t naturally write according to rules someone else has come up with. Maybe you tend towards run-on sentences. Maybe commas trip you up. Me? I absolutely suck at parallelism. I didn’t even know I sucked at it until years into my graduate education because it took that long to meet anyone who cared about that particular issue. So the takeaway should not be “Learn grammar, morons!” but rather “Make sure that you’re putting good time and effort towards editing, getting help from others to spot the problems you never will.” My issue isn’t really with Myers potentially making a mistake (I’m still not even sure I just didn’t get it??) but more with the fact that a professionally published novel seems to have had rather subpar editing done. This is also, notably, in the context of “RWBY as a whole lacks good editing which exacerbates my reaction to seeing similar issues here” and “The purpose of these recaps is to comment on anything that catches my eye, so that inevitably leads to some nitpicking.” Myers is not an awful person for writing an awkward passage. Myers just needs a better editor and has the bad luck to be writing for a series with so many other problems. 

(I could also get into how knowing grammar means having access to very specific kinds of education which makes it a class issue... but that’s a whole other conversation.) 

#2 - Language changes! It evolves! Its entire purpose is to serve us and we change our language extensively depending on our environment and audience!! (Example: Internet speak is not “bad English,” it’s English specifically meant for the Internet.) Grammar, in turn, is meant to provide readability. It helps us understand one another’s writing in a world where everyone writes differently. Which means we should absolutely ignore and/or change the rules when we need them to do something else. “Literally” is a perfect example of this. You can 100% use “literally” to say

because you’re using it figuratively. We recognize that using “literally” is a great way to express the emotion attached to the action. If you tell someone you “literally couldn’t get out of bed” you’re conveying the extreme difficulty you experienced. It’s so hard it’s like it was a real impossibility. The “like” is culturally attached to “literally” and those who fail to acknowledge that aren’t doing some holy work, upholding the Sacred Grammatical Texts that must not change, they’re simply failing to recognize that “literally” has more than one meaning in the English language - and has for a very long time. 

The problem with Myers’ passage (again, far as I can tell) is that his use of “literally” isn’t serving any of these functions. It doesn’t seem to be figurative. Rather, as I explain in the recap, it sets itself up to be the literal form of “literally” (lol) via a specific setup of idiom + unexpected reality... but then doesn’t achieve that. The passage is confusing which is what grammar and writing, 99% of the time, is not meant to do. Making yourself understood is the entire point of non-fiction and creative expression. Thus, the writer who crafts a ten line sentence because they want to convey that this character is rambling and spouting everything in one breath... they’re doing good work. It doesn’t matter if a rule was broken because here that rule is an unnecessary limitation and breaking it doesn’t leave the reader behind. There are, however, writers who religiously follow every rule they personally know of and yet still fail to get their meaning across. Or do so in an incredibly dry manner. They’re the ones who need editors to say, “Okay, follow this rule as well so no one gets confused” or “This is a novel, not an academic paper. Spice things up a bit, yeah?” 

At the end of the day I don’t care how Myers uses the term “literally” provided I understand what he’s trying to achieve with it. Sadly, that wasn’t the case here. 

[yeli-renrong]

I remember the phrase "sound it out" from school, and I vaguely remember learning something about long & short vowels or such and to (on Between the Lions) but I don't think I ever understood that or paid it any thought since there were so many exceptions. of course, that doesn't mean it didn't do me any good, just that I didn't consciously recognize that it did (perhaps explaining what non-phonic approaches to teaching reading could be contemplated to begin with?)

One non-phonic approach to reading instruction is based on the belief that reading is a process of integration of syntactic, semantic, and graphic (i.e. whole word shape) cues -- in other words, a series of context-based guesses. This model has no allowance at all for the fact that spelling isn’t completely irregular -- as far as it’s concerned, the English alphabet may as well be a logography!

The paper that originally laid out this model (doi:10.1080/19388076709556976) can speak for itself:

Simply stated, the common sense notion I seek here to refute is this: “Reading is a precise process. It involves exact, detailed, sequential perception and identification of letters, words, spelling patterns and larger language units.”

In phonic centered approaches to reading, the preoccupation is with precise letter identification. In word centered approaches, the focus is on word identification. Known words are sight words, precisely named in any setting.

This is not to say that those who have worked diligently in the field of reading are not aware that reading is more than precise, sequential identification. But, the common sense notion, though not adequate, continues to permeate thinking about reading.

Spache presents a word version of this common sense view: “Thus, in its simplest form, reading may be considered a series of word perceptions.”

The teacher's manual of the Lippincott Basic Reading incorporates a letter by letter variant in the justification of its reading approach: “In short, following this program the child learns from the beginning to see words exactly as the most skillful readers see them . . . as whole images of complete words with all their letters.” In place of this misconception, I offer this: “Reading is a selective process. It involves partial use of available minimal language cues selected from perceptual input on the basis of the reader's expectation. As this partial information is processed, tentative decisions are made to be confirmed, rejected or refined as reading progresses.” More simply stated, reading is a psycholinguistic guessing game. It involves an interaction between thought and language. Efficient reading does not result from precise perception and identification of all elements, but from skill in selecting the fewest, most productive cues necessary to produce guesses which are right the first time. 

The argument in favor of this position is... a handful of case studies of reading errors made by young children! (And some Chomskyist stuff that I don’t care to work through.) And Ken Goodman, the author of the paper quoted above and one of the major proponents of ‘whole-language theory’, had some studies to back this up:

In a study conducted by Goodman (1965), students in grades 1-3 first read lists of words. Then the children were presented the same words to read in meaningful text. The students made many more errors when they read the words out of context (i.e., when the words were in lists) than they did when the words were read in context. This, of course, is consistent with the hypothesis that reading will be facilitated when semantic-contextual and syntactic-contextual cues are present (i.e., when words are read as part of a text) compared to when words are read devoid of context cues (i.e., when words are read on lists). This finding has been used repeatedly to defend the meaning-emphasis practice of teaching students to recognize words by analyzing syntactic, graphemic-phonemic, and especially semantic cues.

Nicholson (1991) detected several very serious shortcomings in the Goodman (1965) study, however. First, no attention was paid in the Goodman (1965) investigation of the patterns of performance by good and poor readers. In addition, the participants always read the lists followed by reading of the words in context, and thus there was the possibility that the improved performance in moving from list reading to reading in context might reflect some type of practice effect (i.e., the words in context had been seen before, on the lists).

In Nicholson (1991), students once again were asked to process words in lists and in context. In this study, however, the list-context order was manipulated such that some participants read the lists first and others read the words in context first. Moreover, the study included systematic analysis of reading as a function of the grade of participants and their reading abilities relative to other students (i.e., good, average, weak). The outcomes in this study were anything but consistent with Goodman's (1965) results:

- Some readers did benefit from reading the words in the sentence context -- namely, poor readers at each age level and average 6- and 7-year-olds. - In context, a positive effect on reading was obtained in sentence context for good 6-year-old readers and average 8-year-olds only when reading words in sentence contexts followed reading words in lists, consistent with the practice effect explanation of the original Goodman (1965) finding. - There was no positive effect derived from reading words in context for good 7- and 8-year-old readers. Indeed, when the 8-year-old good readers did sentence-context reading first, they did better on reading of the words in list format.

Oops!

In very simple terms: how do you prompt a student who’s struggling with a word -- “Sound it out!” or “Context clues!” (The teachers I had always said clues instead of cues; I don’t know if that was because children would be more likely to know the former word or if someone misread it somewhere in the chain of transmission.) And there are a few problems with that:

- No attention is paid to the process of encoding. Even if treating words as logograms whose readings are to be inferred from context works to teach children to read (it doesn’t), how are they supposed to learn to write? (At the height of whole-language theory’s influence, some states banned public schools from buying spelling books.)

- What happens if you hit a proper noun? Take the following sentence: “Notably, Ross' classification does not support the ☃☃☃☃ of the Tsouic languages, instead considering the Southern Tsouic languages of Kanakanavu and Saaroa to be a separate branch.” Context cues let you extract meaning from this sentence without knowing the reading of ☃☃☃☃, but if you have to read it aloud and you can’t sound things out, you’ll hit “Kanakanavu” and produce garble. (You might still be wrong even if you can sound it out, because stress is unwritten and English words aren’t marked for which rule-set to use -- consider the words alveolar and maraschino -- but there’s a difference between being wrong and producing garble. Garble will probably accurately represent the cues, including the vague, impressionistic shape of the word, but a stress or rule-set error will at least convey the spelling. Buegehti for Buttigieg is a good example of garble -- you have the word-shape cues (starts with Bu, most of the letters are there) and the semantic cues (weird surname from the periphery of Europe; I assume Buegehti is pseudo-Finnish), but it’s not even close, and probably unrecoverable without context. (So contextual information isn’t totally useless.)

- Even if the relevant actors were willing to accept lack of attention to spelling and inability to decode phonetic information that context won’t help you with in order to get gains in reading ability... there are no gains.

But, as things do, whole-language theory got a lot wackier from there. Its proponents started referencing Chomsky’s language instinct to posit a reading instinct, which, the theory went, would lead children to automatically acquire reading with no instruction necessary (except highly technical facilitation was still considered necessary, because if schoolteachers aren’t essential, what’s the point?); claiming that phonics actually impeded literacy; attacking opponents of their theory as part of a far-right conspiracy to suppress teachers’ freedom and destroy public education; calling whole-language education a ‘revolution’ that would lead to true liberation and model the egalitarian society of the future; and so on.

For example, Shafer 1998:

Over the years, various writers, politicians, and media sources have taken aim at whole language, vilifying its motives and misrepresenting its goals. While many of the attacks have come from a lamentable ignorance on the part of T.V. reporters and talk show hosts, evidence exists that a portion of it has been carefully orchestrated by conservatives who clearly seem threatened by the implications of a whole language curriculum. Indeed, the list of writers who have opposed whole language initiatives reads like a who's who of conservative pundits. William Bennett, Phyllis Schlafly, Cal Thomas, and Chester Finn have all written articles deriding whole language, despite its overwhelming acceptance among academic organizations and respected scholars.

Many theories have been offered as to why whole language has become so partisan and acrimonious - and why conservatives in particular seem threatened by its humanistic objectives. What seems glaringly clear, in the end, is that whole language - with its caveat for student liberation and control - scares people who want to maintain a hierarchical, top-down approach to learning. The threat of whole language, at least from my perspective, lies in its bold challenge to traditional icons and time-honored practices. Some teachers feel intimidated by the notion that their way is not the only way - that their favorite authors shouldn't be their students' favorite authors.

When students cease to be receptacles of information and begin generating their own ideas, they occasionally formulate theories that are disconcerting to those who want to maintain "authority" in the classroom. Thus, the recent controversy over teaching a literary canon and classes in western civilization helps illustrate the result of whole language - where students question rather than absorb - and where learning comes to be a very personal, reflective activity. "To study," argues Paulo Freire, "is not to consume ideas, but to create and recreate them" (4).

(On the same page: “It seems clear that people learn best when they are progressing from whole to part so that they understand the importance of correctness and the viability of certain non-standard dialects in certain settings.” First, what the fuck is this supposed to mean? And second, I can’t see something like “progressing from whole to part” without having flashbacks to the polemics against Hegel from one of my philosophy professors -- the direction of progression and the concomitant assignment of more basic status to that which one progresses from, he said, was what distinguished Hegelian from analytic philosophy, and the Hegelian progression from whole to part underlay all the most prominent horrors of the 20th century. It was hard enough to quibble with that then, but it gets harder every time I see someone try to shore up nonsense with that ‘Hegelian’ formula.)

Edelsky 1993 (doi:10.2307/3587486):

Whole language (WL) is, first of all, a perspective-in-practice, anchored in a vision of an equitable, democratic, diverse society. A WL perspective highlights theoretical and philosophical notions about language and language learning, knowledge, and reality. In a WL perspective, language is an exquisite human tool for making (not finding) meaning. The WL view is that what people learn when they learn a language is not separate parts (words, sounds, sentences) but a supersystem of social practices whose conventions and systematicity both constrain and liberate. And the way people acquire that system or are acquired by it (Gee, 1990) is not through doing exercises so that they can really use it later but rather by actually using it as best they can with others who are using it with them, showing them how it works and what it is for (Smith, 1981). ...

Appropriating the label, the jargon, or the typical materials and activities of WL without taking on the liberatory (and therefore status-quo-disrupting) political vision, and without adopting a WL theoretical perspective, is a sure way to prevent genuine change.

And from the sewer of journalism, Metcalf 2002:

Why the infatuation with testing? For its most conservative enthusiasts, testing makes sense as a lone solution to school failure because, they insist, adequate resources are already in place, and only the threat of exposure and censure is necessary for schools to succeed. Moreover, among those who style themselves "compassionate conservatives," education has become a sentimental and, all things considered, cheap way to talk about equalizing opportunity without committing to substantial income redistribution. Liberal faddishness, not chronic underfunding of poorer schools or child poverty itself, is blamed for underachievement: "Child-centered" education, "progressive" education or "whole language"--each has been singled out as a social menace that can be vanquished only by applying a more rational, results-oriented and business-minded approach to public education. ...

Why is the same conservative constituency that loves testing even more moonstruck by phonics? For starters, phonics is traditional and rote--the pupil begins by sounding out letters, then works through vocabulary drills, then short passages using the learned vocabulary. Furthermore, to teach phonics you need a textbook and usually a series of items--worksheets, tests, teacher's editions--that constitute an elaborate purchase for a school district and a profitable product line for a publisher. In addition, heavily scripted phonics programs are routinely marketed as compensation for bad teachers. (What's not mentioned is that they often repel, and even drive out, good teachers.) Finally, as Gerald Coles, author of Reading Lessons: The Debate Over Literacy, points out, "Phonics is a way of thinking about illiteracy that doesn't involve thinking about larger social injustices. To cure illiteracy, presumably all children need is a new set of textbooks."

Whole-language theory isn’t as popular now as it used to be. But the underlying Lysenkoist tendency has taken strong root in L2 education, which is why most of the people in my second-year German class couldn’t properly decline the definite article.

Sometimes you just have to drill.

[ksmithhanke]

finding my calling as a teacher and creating my own teaching philosophy

Beginnings 

I grew up in a suburb of Washington, D.C. and went to a series of large public schools from K-12. My educational experience was competitive and cutthroat; I pulled more all-nighters junior year of high school than I did all throughout college. By the time I got to Swarthmore, I was burnt out and ready to reject the type of education that had gotten me there. I had always planned to major in biology, get through undergrad, and go to medical school where I would pursue a career in pediatric medicine. My burnout started to cloud my dreams of going to medical school as I imagined the years of competitive schooling I had in my future if I wanted to fulfill this dream. I chose Swarthmore in an attempt to break free of the type of academic competition that caused my burnout in the first place, so why was I about to commit myself to the same type of schooling I had come to hate? As my passion for medicine waned, I was left without the identity I had built for myself through my dedication to this idealized life plan. I was totally lost on where to go from there, I didn't even know how to go about rebuilding a new future. 

In this moment, I found myself seeking the advice of Rachel Merz, a biology professor who I had previously confided in about my 10 year plan. She asked me to reflect on my favorite classes: the kinds of classes where you can't wait to do the readings, the ones where you find yourself raising your hand at every opportunity. I couldn't help but think about Intro to Education, which I had taken in the fall of freshman year. She asked me why I was so excited by that class, and I responded by talking about the experiences I had in my field placement and the connections I made with kids. It was at this point that I realized the common thread between my previous life goals and my favorite class: a commitment to children. The driving force behind wanting to go into pediatric medicine was the same force that would push me towards education. I realized I could still accomplish my goal of advocating for children and trying to address injustices in their care, but rather than doing it in the operating room I would do it in the classroom. With revitalized passionate for education, I was ready to jump in to accomplishing my new 10 year plan - becoming a teacher. 

The Theory that Inspired Instruction  

I was cautiously optimistic about my dream to teach at the beginning, but this cautious optimism was replaced by true excitement after taking Educational Psychology. Yamuchi, Wyatt & Carroll's piece about contextualized learning inspired me to think about the cultural context of my students and forced me to consider basing my teaching in real-world problems. Faber & Mazlish's book, entitled How To Talk so Kids Can Learn, begged me to consider the positive and negative connotations of the way we phrase things when talking to children. Engle and Conant introduced me to the idea of giving students "elements of ownership and choice" over their curricula, which gives them authority and a sense of agency within their learning environments. Reading these authors ignited my passion for creating a student directed learning environment where "children are probing into the working of the world and teachers are providing, demonstrating, learning, observing and responding," (Lindfors 1991). 

It was at this moment that I knew the type of environment I wanted to teach in. Kids are naturally curious and love to be asked what they want to learn about, we just have to listen better. By asking students what they are interested in, not only are we giving them authority and increasing engagement by using natural curiosities to our advantage, but we are also listening to their thoughts and validating their questions. Through listening to their curiosities and showing them that we take their questions seriously, we are communicating that we respect them and value what they have to say. Creating a classroom environment where we respect and validate our students helps to build meaningful relationships and gives them a space where they feel heard. By ensuring we create a feeling of comfort and a sense of belonging in the classroom, we are supporting our students to engage more deeply with material and setting them up to succeed. 

Reading about the Watershed classroom from Mark Springer and Ed Silcox's book to then experiencing it in person through my field placement gave me the privilege of seeing the power of this sort of learning environment firsthand. Researching the positive impacts of project based, integrated education on mental health solidified my commitment to this style of education even more. Hearing the teachers say things like "in here there are so many ways to be valuable… they have value in ways that aren't just their grades and test scores and that helps lessen the anxiety and stress and promotes community,” and “students aren’t a number, they're not data," about their classroom was crucial in my development as a teacher. Coming from my educational background, where students were literally just numbers in a ranked list, hearing this point of view from a teacher was a breath of fresh air. I knew this was the place I wanted to be, so I pursued a placement here for student teaching.

The Reality of Watershed and the Power of Relationships

When the bell rang on that first Monday morning and the kids came into the room, I felt an overwhelming sense of anxiety. Do I even know how to teach? Will they like me? What am I doing? These questions were ones I continued to ask myself (and my cooperating teachers) over the course of student teaching. During that first week, however, my fears of being a bad teacher were pushed to the side by a focus on relationship building. We spent hours playing team building games, learning about each other, establishing a connection that would set the stage for the rest of the semester. Leading activities like this was in my wheelhouse, but as we got to the end of the first week and started really diving into content, my worries about classroom management and being a responsive classroom leader came back. I spent days planning my first lesson, getting feedback from my cooperating teachers, thinking of every possible problem and what I would do in response. But as I stood in front of the kids for the first time, with 40 pairs of eyes on me waiting for me to say something, I realized that the many hours we spent on building relationships made the task of teaching a lesson easy. I wasn't talking to just any kids, I was talking to my kids. I knew what they liked, I knew their senses of humor, I knew what could get them engaged. 

Building relationships didn't just help me understand them, but it helped them understand me as well. Because of our rapport, they trusted me to be honest with them and support them through tough projects and even tougher group dynamics. They felt comfortable communicating to me when something was confusing, when they needed more support, or even when they just needed a break from their group members. They were also able to give me feedback on my work just as I was giving them feedback on theirs. Having such a strong relationship with them put me in a position where I could learn from them about what it means to be a good teacher, and what I can do to support them as best I could. The lessons I learned from them about teaching were just as valuable as the theory I learned to get me there. 

In addition to teaching the content, my cooperating teachers and I put a big emphasis on social/emotional learning. There were days when kids would seek me out because they were stressed about finishing a project on time, upset about uneven distribution of work in their group, or even just having a bad day. These kids gave me the privilege to work with them from their most vulnerable to their most brave. Watershed taught me the value of not emphasizing academic achievement as the only/most important kind of achievement. As teachers, we should be helping our students develop skills outside of traditional linguistic and logical intelligences. By emphasizing academic achievement as the most important type of achievement, we harm both students who achieve in ways outside of the traditional (through constant negative feedback on academic pursuits and lack of outlets for intelligences in which they excel) and students who achieve traditionally (by neglecting their social-emotional growth and cultivation of other intelligences). I have learned both from my cooperating teachers and from the model of integrated learning about the virtues of educating the whole child. By giving the arts a place in the classroom, we can "suggest new explanations of ways to achieve full individual and societal competence," (Heath and Roach 1999). "Schools worldwide must give children intellectual and practical tools they can bring to their classrooms, families, and communities," and if we only focus on academic achievement in school we are missing out on a whole "set of skills needed to successfully manage life tasks such as learning, forming relationships, communicating effectively, being sensitive to others’ needs, and getting along with others," (Elias 2006, pg. 5).

Considering the Future

Seeing the theory I spent years reading and writing about at work in student teaching leaves me with a commitment to the idea of teachers as learners, and students as teachers. This experience has taught me about the wealth of information that comes from relationships with students. The value of things learned through the cultivation of trust with students is remarkable. I end this experience with an understanding of the importance of validating student experiences and supporting them to take ownership over their educational trajectories. I am thankful for the essential role my students have played in my teacher education, and I will continue to be thankful for the opportunities I will have to learn and grow with each group of students that pass through my classroom. My identity as a teacher has been defined by my students, and I am thrilled to redefine this identity every year for as long as I have the privilege to teach.

[hopefulfestivaltastemaker]

August 9, 2020

My weekly review of things I am doing and looking at. A long one this time; topics included disease risk in the food system, my research work patterns, ROI for energy R&D, Apocalypse Never, OpenCog, and housing and transportation in Hillsboro.

Disease Risk and the Food System

Last week I started looking at zoonotic diseases for Urban Cruise Ship, and this week I continued a bit more on disease risk. The current page is here.

Sans images, there is now material on foodborne illnesses, antibiotic resistance as it pertains to antibiotics in livestock, ecological risk from GM crops, and crop disease risk from monoculture. The section is far from done, but it is probably going to go on hold for a while. A few observations:

- Disease risk in general is a major issue, very much on our minds due to COVID-19. That’s a big can of worms. It would take an indeterminate amount of work to do the topic justice and require that I move well beyond the food system. So it’s one that I will have to take one bite at a time.

- There is an image under development that portrays foodborne illness risk in the US by type of food, but there is also a need to look at underlying causes, recognizing that food is a transmission vector and not necessarily the underlying cause.

- Antibiotic resistance looks like a scary topic. There is a report that antibiotic-resistant bacteria could kill 10 million people per year by 2050, which sounds scary, but I need more context on that number. Does this assume a business as usual trajectory where we don’t develop new antibiotics or develop alternative treatments for AMR bacteria, such as plasma medicine, and how much do such developments bend the curve?

- Ultimately I would like to be able to assess externalized monetary cost from antibiotics in livestock in terms of AMR bacteria. I don’t have this yet, but it should be possible.

- I half-assed the genetic risks, and I think justifiably so. I don’t see any evidence, aside from vague appeals to the precautionary principle, to support any significant ecological risks from GM crops. Partly to justify the half-assedness of my effort on the topic, I pointed to a Google Trends search indicating that the public is losing interest in the GMO issue.

A few years ago, I thought I was being bold and edgy by pointing to a lack of evidence of any health or environmental risks from GMOs per se. Now that seems like the safe position, and GMO opponents have (deservedly in my view) generally lost credibility in the way the anti-vax movement has.

- One of my associates is interested in systemic risks from crop monoculture, which prompted me to add that section. It appears that disease risk is the major such systemic risk. The issue of crop and animal disease (as opposed to human diseases for which the food system is a vector) is also a major topic deserving of more careful review and analysis. I would suspect that, from the viewpoint of disease, monoculture is not the most important issue, but it appears that way because monoculture was my entry point into the topic.

The Urban Cruise Ship Work Pattern

I figured now would be a decent time to open the hood and make a few comments about how I am going about the work. Recently the funder made some major additions and changes to the scope of work. This is good for me from a job security standpoint, but it means I need to do some major rethinking about how I go about the project, to insure that things get done at a high level of quality and in reasonable time.

We are ultimately trying to present the best data, analysis, and solutions available on the full range of environmental topics.

Such a grandiose vision requires that I innovate not just in how I think about particular issues, but in how I think about the big picture and how I work. We are setting into a comparison and monetization scheme to present data, a view that was driven by the funder but I have been convinced is best.

One thing I have learned is that knowledge across topics is synergistic. That means that is probably going to be more efficient to aim for a broad and shallow understanding of the environmental landscape, after which we go deeper on the things that require a deeper understanding. This is why I am moving on from the agriculture risk section despite having a superficial treatment of the subject; I intend to come back to it later when it can be better informed by material elsewhere on the site, and I also hope that I have done there will help inform the next sections of work.

This is a work style that suits me well. My mind is always jumping from one area to the next, and I like to draw connections and look at the big picture. This is very much a contrast from most of academic work, which requires a very deep analysis of a narrow topic. I ultimately lost interest in my narrow corner of mathematical research and was not able to make a successful jump to another area; hence (in part) I was not suited for the tenure track.

The obvious drawback is what one sees on the site now. It is obviously incomplete and a bit of a mess, and it will probably remain in such a state for the foreseeable future. It means I have to move fast, which increases the risk of making major mistakes. I fear we are operating at too high a level of abstraction and generality to make actionable policy recommendations.

Although not a high priority, I really wish I could integrate the graphic making process into the larger codebase. The current division of labor is such that I see no way to do so. I dislike having these “Image Under Development” messages and lacking the flexibility to easily modify images as the research proceeds or new data become available.

Return on Investment for R&D

I mentioned before some studies that the US Department of Energy has done on effectiveness of its research and development efforts. Having looked at them more closely, I found something a bit surprising.

I tried my best to harmonize the numbers reported to make a fair comparison. It’s not perfect, but the following seem to be the central estimates of the ROI for the program investment areas studied:

Combustion engines: 53

Building technologies: 42

Wind: 5.07

Geothermal: 4.865

Hybrid and electric vehicles: 3.63

Solar PV: 1.83

They all look like good investments, though building technologies (HVAC, water heating, appliances) and combustion engines clearly stand out as the best. I would have expected the opposite. Since the building and combustion areas are more incremental, there should be more incentive for the private sector to do the R&D and therefore a “crowding out” effect that would blunt the effectiveness of the public investment.

Part of this could be an artifact of the study methodology. Since the time horizon for the lower return technologies is longer, they simply haven’t captured the full benefit. The solar PV study was done in 2010, and I would expect a higher return to be found if it was redone today. There could also be an attribution problem, in that with developing more novel technologies, it is harder to attribute gains to a particular R&D investment, therefore depressing the observed ROI.

I want to propose some solutions on R&D efforts for synfuels and industry, so these studies might provide guidance as to what kind of investments can be expected to work best. Maybe this is a sign that I should be thinking more about short term gains.

Apocalypse Never

Apocalypse Never is a new book by Michael Shellenberger castigating the harmful effects of what he sees as environmental alarmism. I haven’t read it, but I have read enough of Shellenberger’s work and discussion around it to make some relevant observations.

Not too surprisingly, the reaction from the environmental community seems to be mostly negative. This article from Snopes captures fairly well what academic climate/environmental researchers think. Despite being from Snopes, the character of the article isn’t a “debunking” so much as a critical analysis. There is much disagreement about semantics (e.g. are we really in the Sixth Mass Extinction?) rather than factual disputes. Though I have a few of those too.

Since I hope one day to have major public exposure for Urban Cruise Ship, the discussion is a helpful case study in how to present material and what kind of reception I should expect.

Since I am critical of several aspects of environmentalism--particularly degrowth and related elements--I expect some negative reaction. To blunt the effect of criticism, I think I need do to a better job of operating on the following principles:

- Focus on principles and avoid ad hominem attacks, including against abstractions such as fields and movements.

- Make every effort to insure facts presented are accurate.

- Find the right level of nuance. Too little nuance can be inaccurate. Too much nuance can water down a message to the point of meaninglessness.

Though most of the discussion I saw was pretty even-handed, there is some gatekeeping that goes on in the climate community. The bogeyman of the “climate denier” looms large and triggers a kind of circle-the-wagons mentality when the field is criticized, whether justly or unjustly. Lacking formal credentials or institutional backing, I am going to be vulnerable to gatekeeping and probably can’t do anything about it.

OpenCog

Having listened to Ben Goertzel on Lex Fridman’s podcast a while back, I got around this week to looking over OpenCog, which is Goertzel’s open source project to create artificial general intelligence.

There is a ton of material here that will take a long time to work through, especially considering that I am doing it only as a side project. Just reviewing the set of AI principles being brought to bear in the project, though, buoyed my spirits and excited me about the field in a way I haven’t felt in a long time. I am already thinking about some work I can do. Contributing to OpenCog is beyond my capabilities at present, but I have some related design ideas that have been sitting on the shelf for a long time and are time to give another look at.

I have no idea if this effort toward AGI will work. But I would guess that it is more likely to work than an approach rooted exclusively in deep learning, such as the GPT approach, which suffers from intractable diseconomies of scale. In particular, I think that a semantic encoding of knowledge is a necessary component of any AGI stack. There are people with far more expertise who disagree.

Housing and Transportation in Hillsboro

I’ve dialed back my political activities a bit lately, but there were some items at the Hillsboro (Oregon) City Council this week worth commenting on.

City staff presented on efforts to implement HB 2001, a piece of state legislation that mandates most cities allow for middle housing (du-, tri-, quad-plexes, cottage housing, small apartments) in residential areas. Without naming names, my read on the council and mayor is that among the seven, two are generally pro-housing, two are generally anti-housing, one is squishy, and two I don’t have a good read on. I have written to them to indicate my desire that we take advantage of the opportunity provided by HB 2001 for an expansive approach to opening up housing opportunities in Hillsboro.

We also had a presentation on the Get Moving package, which is the transportation package that Metro has now referred to the ballot in November. City staff seemed to be negative. The presenter asserted that Hillsboro gets a disproportionately low ROI (about 0.56) for the project and that Metro was unduly influenced by Portland-based anti-vehicle activists to reject road expansion capacity that Hillsboro needs. One council member expressed her concern (which I agree with) that the financial burden falls entirely on large employers, which will be particularly harmful in Hillsboro and I think is bad tax policy in general. On the positive side, the package includes some badly needed safety upgrades to TV Highway, which is the most dangerous highway in the state per-mile for both pedestrians and motorists. There is also money for a study of a downtown Portland MAX tunnel, which I think will be very important for the region. Ultimately, despite the extensive public engagement theatre, it is a pre-COVID package, based on economic and transportation demand assumptions that may no longer be reasonable.

I haven’t yet decided how I will vote on the package, but I am leaning toward a No right now.

[squarekid]

The Re-Making of Grace of Monaco: the Unfinished Cut

In the summer of 2013, I was invited by the now defunct U.S. distributors of a feature film I had written called GRACE OF MONACO to participate in the editorial process for a U.S. theatrical cut. As a writer, it was a rare and unusual position to be in. I had never edited a movie before. Never meaningfully set foot in an edit room. Only seen working cuts. Though I was very reluctant about stepping into the arena, I knew this work was going to happen anyway. As a producer on the movie, it was part of my required duties on a project that had been subject to much behind-the-scenes drama (check press for details). I decided to assist how I could in the attempts to restore some of the narrative focus, tone and characterizations that were in the screenplay but not in the finished movie. So much of cinema is about interpretation of the written word — lighting, dressing, design, direction, delivery and performance — that it was never a process of recapturing what was on the page (even if some of the scenes and dialogue were exact). But about re-imagination and careful detective work. About trial and error. A look here. A smile there. A line here. Page by page. Scene by scene. Reshaping story arcs and character movements. Work that often, I have since learned through post-production on my subsequent movies working with some incredibly talented and giving filmmakers, is ideally meant to be part of an intense collaboration between director, writer and producer. 10 years on, it’s become clear with the passing of time that this experience was a black swan that I will never live through again in my career.  But yet it seems with the passing years, and the changing headwinds in the business, this cut will be lost for good. I'm not aware of any other copies existing anywhere else. It would be a shame, because those few instructive and fascinating months proved educational enough for me personally to share as an academic and historic record (should any film historians find use for this). 

As such, what follows is FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY. 

A few words about what you're going to see for those of you who have never been in the process. This is not a finished movie. This is a working print of the movie many weeks prior to a picture lock; the moment the picture edit is done and you move on to other post production work —  VFX, color correction, Automated Dialog Replacement (ADR), looping, scoring, sound mixing, and so on. As such, there is no grading, the film is raw stock dailies, incomplete VFX, temp score, and you'll be doing as much reading as you would watching for all the ADR work. It was meant for many weeks more of input from the director, from the producers, from test audiences. It’s a work half-done. It's a unique viewing experience, but I hope an educational one. Also, no reshoots! The goal was to recut using existing material using the original script for guidance.

So, how is this cut different?

From Melodrama to Drama. A considerable toning down of the heightened style, to get to a more sober portrayal, and more evocative of the era. This included a more subdued and direct form of editing, and a new approach to the score.

Narrative cohesion to center on Grace’s journey and her conflicted relationship with Rainier. At its heart this was a story about a husband and wife who got married first, then figured the rest out later. This is all about POV and the choices Grace has to make to double down on or reject what may have been the biggest mistake in her life.  An unhappy woman who married her glamorous Prince, but now trapped in a grotesque place — except she has kids, and doesn’t know how to get out. It’s a tragedy. A story of acceptance. There is no nobility and quite a lot of sadness to the love affair. There were some baroque moments in the script that weren’t shot (for example, Grace taught her kids not to bite by biting them), that would have helped with getting into Grace's psyche. Nevertheless, the intent was to restore some of the essence of this to the movie. To get to the core of Grace’s self-actualization.

Create context for Monaco. Monaco in 1962 was trying to reframe itself as a tax haven to come out from under French colonial rule. They had rich people, they had grotesque people, but at its core, it was mostly a small provincial principality trying to make the most with very little. Monaco in 1962 was different to the Monaco of today, which Rainier subsequently remade into his vision of unbridled wealth and excess. When he echoes Thomas Jefferson in this cut, during a speech that was in the script but not in the other versions, there is an attempt to understand the underlying darkness of this. That though we may not (and should not) agree with him, we can see where his underlying motivations are what Grace has got herself into.  

Restructuring of the plot in some cases for more clarity and suspense. To more effectively balance the marriage story with the thriller aspects of the coup plot.

Delivery and additional dialogue. ADR requirements were extensive due to the shift from melodrama to drama. These are an attempt to mute the power of the delivery. So you’ll be reading a lot, as you will in context-setting scenes such as the opening “wall of sound” news-reels.

A final word on the much discussed original screenplay, with almost a decade of hindsight. It was written without much expectation, and a good deal of naivety. The work of a young writer starting out in Hollywood, who found a small pocket of history he found fascinating. Did I think it would end up under such intense scrutiny? Never in my wildest dreams. But fools go where angels fear to tread. Reading it back today, it feels like a great early draft, but not yet a movie, and with a lot of story and character left to be mined. For this I’ll need a whole other essay, but suffice to say it needed more time to develop. I regularly use it today as an example for young writers to show the pitfalls of moving to the production phase before the screenplay has been properly cooked. I will also make available the original treatment and first draft screenplay soon, again FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY. The treatment I remain very fond of because of the cleanness of its execution.

Finally … is this cut better or worse? Does any of this matter? I don’t know. That’s not the object of this exercise. I leave that for you the viewer to decide. It’s just different. It's impossible to remake a movie after its inception and execution. But the U.S. theatrical cut, as it was to be in an alternate timeline, exists in an orphaned semi-completed state. I moved on a long time ago but Quarantine 2020 opened up some time that allowed me to crack open old files, reflect and revisit those memories, good and bad. Not least of all learning how radically different versions of a movie are possible in post-production with the same material and with creative re-writing. Editing and screenwriting it seems do go hand in hand. 

Amel

Quarantine, April 2020

[nomadicism]

Any tips or things to keep in mind while writing a original mecha story? What about for original mecha stories aimed at a female audience? (Like ones that are more character focused, but have some Real Robot elements like TLGG, Gunbuster, Eva or Macross)

Hi Anon! Thank you for the Ask!

I’m more of an analytical and academic writer, but hopefully I can be of help anyway.

General Tips

1. If you haven’t already, ask yourself these questions:

What kind of mecha story? For myself (and I think this is true of a lot of mecha fans), “mecha is a genre”—but—it’s not a genre that happens in a vacuum. Both Real Robot and Super Robot can take place in hard science fiction settings as well as fantasy settings with magic.

What kind of writing? Short story, long form novel, novel series (light and long form), poetry, experimental formats, sequential illustration formats (e.g. comics, manga), plays, television/film/animation, etc.

Have you read a mecha story that was not in sequential illustration format?

And now I really want to read/listen to a mecha story in Middle English with iambic pentameter. It could have a name like: “Overwalken Searshaft: Caunterbury Legendes.”

(yes English nerds, that title is some sloppy Anglish smooshed with Middle English but you get the idea)

2. Most people are introduced to mecha via anime, manga, or film; and so are likely to not have read mecha stories in a non-visual format. When a show is scripted, there is a lot of writing that goes into describing scenes that we don’t think about because we’re seeing/hearing the visual and audial representation of that writing.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many words is a single frame worth? Without any context, what do you think is happening in the gif above? How would you describe this less than 3 seconds of action if you were writing it?

I recommend that you read a few novels or short stories that involve mecha or giant robots of one kind or another. They might not be the type of story you’re planning on writing, but they should help with deciding on how much detail you want to go into when writing scenes with mecha (action or otherwise).

Here’s a few to try:

The Pacific Rim film novelization by Alexander Irvine.

The Del-Ray Robotech novels by Jack McKinney. Skip the ones that are about events in the Robotech cartoon—they are all good—but I recommend reading the ones that are fully original, (books #13-17).

“The Relic” by Jonathan Green is a short story within the “Legends of the Space Marines” series from Warhammer 40K. In Warhammer 40k, a “Space Marine Dreadnought” is a powerful Real Robot mecha. One doesn’t need to know the entire mythos of Warhammer 40k to understand the story.

“Mobile Suit Gundam: Awakening, Escalation, Confrontation” by Yoshiyuki Tomino. This book is the English translation and compilation of the three light novels that Tomino wrote. It covers the MS Gundam 0079 story, but with added detail (more about New Types, politics of the Zabi family, etc), and is much darker than the anime.

All of the above are Real Robot mecha under different levels of “science-fiction hardness" and settings. I cannot think of any novels or short stories that are about Super Robots, but they probably exist.

Two Specific Things

1. World-building will need lore and rules for the mecha. Even hand-wavey science-fiction or fantasy-with-magic settings have rules about who can pilot a mecha, how it’s done, what materials the mecha is constructed from, its power source, how it moves, how the pilot(s) perceive the world around them while piloting the mecha, its weapon and defense capabilities, etc. The harder the science-fiction, the more constraints are imposed, and will likely require real world research to help describe it.

For example: Gravity is a Thing. Some Super Robots can fly in such a way that they can easily leave Earth’s atmosphere at or above escape velocity and do battle in multiple types of different gravity environments (e.g. Godmars vs Getter Robo). It’s hand-waved and not really thought about. This happens in Real Robot too, but there are many Real Robot stories that use gravity limitations, while hand-waving other things (not all giant robots can fly).

As shown above—in Gundam 00—the Gundams can do battle in space and LOE (zero gravity and Low Earth Orbit), and also in mid-air (atmosphere) and on the ground. That’s the hand-wavy part, because if we think through the physics of this, a machine optimized for aerial combat at Earth gravity (1G) is probably not going to be optimized for combat in LOE, in space, or in gravity conditions that are less than Earth’s (e.g. the Moon, Mars, etc). The Gundams can fight in all these conditions, but one of their constraints is that they cannot accelerate to escape velocity or shield themselves from high temperature friction during re-entry (atmospheric re-entry is a constraint used throughout the franchise). In Gundam 00, the Gundams have to be transported between surface to space via the space elevators.

Above: One of the things that is a “game changer” for these Gundams within that setting, is that Dynames can use the Super Substratospheric Altitude Gun, capable of hitting an orbital target from a stationery position on Earth’s surface. Use of this weapon comes with additional constraints (power, connection to a network for calculations, etc).

Super Robots can also have constraints. Both the Evas in Evangelion, and the combined form of Dairugger/Vehicle Voltron have a timed operational power limit. Evangelion has a lot of Real Robot elements, so as far as Super Robots go, they’re not very powerful. The more powerful the Super Robot, the harder it is to define a constraint. This is typically where a story hits the “His power level is over 9000!” problem, or “unleashing the full power will destroy the robot, or kill the pilot.”

Which brings us to Specific Thing #2: Why mecha? What problems do the mecha solve for the protagonist? Especially if a story with a lot of character focus is what you’re going for. How much focus do you want to put on the mecha? The answers to those questions are going to help with the lore and rules for the mecha.

Aiming for a Female Audience

I’m probably the worst female-ish person to advise on this because I rarely identify with female characters, especially as a tomboy in the 80s (of course, most of them weren’t written very well to begin with back then). I identify as gender fluid, but the gender binary that I grew up with still shapes my life. My tastes in fiction are all over the place and are probably not representative of a “female audience.”

But I do know that there were a lot of women who liked Gundam from the start. (ʘ‿ʘ✿)

Above: Amuro and Char fight with fencing foils in mid-air.

Any audience can be widely diverse, and not everyone within a demographic (broad or narrow) is going to agree on what they want to see, but it’s safe to assume that a sizable part of a female audience that would be interested in a mecha story is probably going to be Done™ with something that is commonly found in either mecha stories or mainstream science-fiction and fantasy. As to what that specifically is, that can differ quite a bit.

For me, I’m Done™ with “Tits And Camel Toe Out For Mecha” in stories with teen characters that are really just ecchi content with a veneer of a serious story slapped on top with a Gainax Ending.

I’m saying that as someone who loves Go Nagai and Satoshi “Plastic Nipple” Urushihara, and thinks that the Heavy Metal movie (gif above) is a work of art, which probably makes me a hypocrite, but hey, I have standards for my T&A.

I recommend looking at stories that are known to be popular with women, and then look at stories that are known to be popular to specific demographics of women (intersectional identities). They may not be mecha stories, but if they are in the current zeitgeist, then there is something about the narrative, characters, format, etc that might be common between these stories and quantifiable in a way that can help you aim for a female audience. It might be hard to find out what these are beyond a broad female audience, so research will be necessary.

There are much better sources for advice on this than me, so if audience appeal is something that you want to dive into, then you’ve got your work cut out for you.

Character Focused (a grain of salt)

In my biased and totally not expert opinion: the smaller the main cast, the easier it is to have a character focused story (unless you meant “character driven plot”?), and the mecha itself usually gets a lot of attention as that’s more or less the point of the genre.

However, a larger main cast provides more varied opportunities for focusing on character interactions, and more material for plot hooks to support multiple plots that can be structured/threaded in a variety of ways. TV Tropes (not my favorite source, but it’s good enough for this) has a rabbit hole of entries about different types of concurrent plots: Soap Wheel; A-B-C-Plot; Two Lines, No Waiting; Four Lines, All Waiting; etc. These entries are useful for getting outside of one’s head and considering options for how-and-when to introduce and wrap up plots. If character focus is what you want to prioritize, then start with “Soap Wheel,” as soap opera plots are all about character focus and they are a good example of staggering plots in a way that keeps the story going for 20 years or more.

Above: Wolfgang Mittermeyer and Oskar von Reuenthal from Legend of the Galactic Heroes enjoy a drink while scheming. LotGH makes the most of its hundreds of characters with scenes like this. It’s character focus of a different kind. Like Gundam, LotGH has a lot of female fans, but it’s not a show that one would immediately think of that would appeal to a female audience.

Returning to this thing about “character-driven plots”, that’s a concept that I’ve found to be generalized and abstracted to the point where it doesn’t mean anything anymore. A plot-driven story can have a lot of character focus, and most mecha stories are inherently plot-driven (b/c genre), as the mecha is the vehicle for the protagonist to get from Event A to Event B. Mystery and romance genres are an example of plot-driven stories, and in both (but especially romance), there can be a lot of character focus to the point where B and C plots could be “character-driven” if they are about the specific character’s internal change, conflict, growth, some essential part of themselves that demands action, etc.

A mecha story can be structured with a plot-driven long-running A Plot which requires the mecha (so not monster of the week as those are episodic and not long-running), and certain main characters are focused on in such a way that their own internal struggles, conflict, and growth drive B and C plots. It’s up to you if those plots are concurrent, cyclical, or rotate in-and-out of focus.

For example: Aoki Ryūsei SPT Layzner (shown in the gif above) is a Real Robot anime has two sequential long-running A Plots that are plot-driven and focused on the mecha and its pilot (the protagonist). The first A Plot drives the first half of the series, and the second A Plot drives the second half of the series (which was sadly cut short so technically it wasn’t the full second half). There is a time-skip between the A Plots. The protagonist, Eiji, has an internal struggle that is threaded throughout, the focus on him creates the “character-driven” B Plot (who he is, the mystery behind the strange things that happen to him as he pilots the prototype, his conflicting loyalties between both halves of his heritage, how he reconciles his extreme pacifism with being forced to fight and possibly kill, etc). The small main/supporting cast is used effectively as each supporting character interacts with Eiji in such a way that they are integrated into the B Plot for his growth and resolving his internal conflict. The other main/supporting characters have their own struggles and character growth as well, but not quite enough to constitute a “character-driven” plot. The story’s minor C Plot is external and puts pressure upon the A Plot.

For what it’s worth: A truly “character-driven” plot—or story that is fully character focused—is going to yield a story like Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” which would be interesting to explore within the mecha genre, but I have a feeling that you’re probably not interested in that much internalized character struggle.

Finally Anon, thanks to your Ask, I’ll have to add “Write a Canterbury Tales parody mecha story in Middle English” to my bucket list. I don’t know why my brain went there but it did. Please enjoy one of the best videos I ever found on YouTube:

(yes English nerds, the guy in the opening says “Old English” when it’s not OE, it’s ME)

[nicolepremier]

Nano’s Knife

I’m currently writing a Nano/Akira fic and it occurs to me that I need to explain to everyone what’s really going on with Nano’s knife and its mysterious inscription that appears on so much iconic TnC merch. I was planning to write a brief summary in the author’s notes, but I wanted to go into a little more detail here, since I thought some of you might be curious.

Fandom lore would simply state that Nano’s inscription reads “wish” in some mysterious language, a symbol that he “wishes” to meet Akira again, and leave it at that.

It’s a lot more complex than that. And spoiler alert - the inscription on that knife does not literally read “wish” in any language.

For starters, there is some confusion in the translation from Japanese to English. The word the Japanese use that is translated to English as “wish” is ��い (negai), and that word has another meaning, a meaning that contextually makes a lot more sense. “Negai” also means “prayer,” and the context that it is used in throughout Nano’s route suggests that “prayer” would have been a more accurate and appropriate translation. For example, when Akira finds Nano sitting alone in the church with the black kitten, Nano says that he is there because he is “wishing” for another person’s happiness (obviously Akira’s, though that goes completely over Akira’s head) because it’s the only thing left to one whose fate has already been determined (referring to himself). What he’s actually doing is praying for Akira’s happiness. You don’t go to church to “wish,” you go to “pray.”

This distinction becomes very important when translating Nano’s knife inscription.

The inscription on Nano’s knife is written in Elder Futhark, a pre-viking Norse and Germanic rune system. (Though popular perception today simply refers to them as “viking runes.”) Being of Scandinavian decent from a family who loves anything and everything to do with vikings, I recognized the writing immediately since the same runes are on a ton of decorations all over my family’s home.

If you try and translate Nano’s runes phonetically, you get “hingath,” which is complete rubbish and means absolutely nothing as far as I can tell. It most certainly does NOT mean “wish.”

There is some additional complication due to the fact that N+C is horribly inconsistent with the runes from one set of merch to the next (presumably because they mean nothing to the designers), and the designers sometimes write them in ways that make the inscription even MORE nonsensical.

I actually sent a number of the different versions of the inscriptions to a professor friend who studies runes in several dead languages, and he came up with exactly the same nonsensical gibberish I did - it’s badly written Elder Futhark mixing several time periods that says nothing. He said it wasn’t all that uncommon for people to write nonsense runes on all sorts of stuff just because they like the look of them. For example, a well-known rune translation guide book has runes going around the cover which translate to “These runes don’t say anything, but they sure look cool, don’t they?”

But I wasn’t satisfied.

Elder Futhark is not purely a phonetic language like the Latin alphabet. The god Odin “sacrificed himself to himself” by hanging on the world-tree Yggdrasil for nine days and nights, receiving no form of nourishment from his companions. At the end of this ordeal, he perceived the runes, the magically-charged ancient Germanic alphabet that was held to contain many of the greatest secrets of existence.

The fact that the runes have, since their conception, been thought to be imbibed with magical powers is the reason they have been so extensively used by modern Neopagans in so much of their ritual practice. Simply the act of inscribing the runes, or keeping inscribed objects close, can confer power and blessings. Each rune has multiple meanings, but keeping that in mind, I believe I have cracked the code of Nano’s mysterious knife inscription.

The knife isn’t a “wish” or a symbol of a “wish” - it’s a “prayer.” It’s a prayer to the old gods.

Name: Hagalaz, “hail.” Phoneme: H. Meaning: destruction, chaos, change, invocation

This is a common invocation to begin a prayer to petition the gods.

Name: Ingwaz, “the god Ingwaz.” Phoneme: Ing or ng. Meaning: male fertility, the beginning of something, the actualization of potential via sacrifice

He must offer a sacrifice. The old gods don’t work for free. One must give something up in order for one’s prayer to have a chance of being answered.

Name: Ansuz, “an Aesir god.” Phoneme: A (long and/or short). Meaning: prosperity, vitality.

He’s calling on one or more of the aesir gods for help - Odin, Thor, Frigg, Tyr, Loki, Baldur, Heimdall, Idun, and Bragi.

Name: Thurisaz, “Thor, Giant.” Phoneme: Th (both soft and hard). Meaning: danger, suffering, solitude. (Note that this rune is often written with shorter vertical lines so that it looks more like an angular D. Both versions appear on different TnC merch.)

He wants an end to his suffering and solitude. His prayer is a desperate cry for help.

To be clear, I do not believe that Nano is a time traveling viking, or even of Norse decent - if he were, he might have written a more sensible inscription that actually meant something in one of the Scandinavian languages - all of which use the roman alphabet nowadays, and that is NOT the alphabet that Nano’s book uses, since Japanese use romanji as well and Akira has never seen those sorts of letters before. No one writes books in Elder Futhark these days. Here is what I believe happened:

Nano was the son of academics. He mentions in Kou Un (his official afterstory) that his father whose face he can’t remember made the knife. That’s not a normal skill, and even a rudimentary knowledge of Norse runes (and Norse gods) isn’t common knowledge among the general populace. This is consistent with how Nano dresses and presents himself - he isn’t the sort of person who puts a lot of thought into his clothing, but he likely tends to subconsciously gravitate towards what some part of his brain still registers as “normal” - things his father might have worn, and which he probably wore himself as a child before he was taken to ENED. His primary hobby is reading, and his eloquent speech and precise pattern observation makes clear that he’s quite intelligent, despite his naivety and eccentricity.

I headcanon that Nano’s father was an engineer, and his mother was a history professor (probably NOT in Norse studies), both of whom worked for a Russian university with government funding in South eastern Russia, in close proximity to both China and Japan. His father may have been involved in the design or manufacturing of weapons during WWIII. Likely both parents had an interest in historical reenactment and were eager to involve their children. Nano likely spent a good deal of time with his mother as a child since his father would have been kept extremely busy during the war. He was almost certainly taught to read at a very young age and given books on his mother’s favorite subjects to keep him occupied while she worked. When he developed an interest in vikings and Norse mythology as a young boy, he was almost certainly encouraged to pursue it. Therefore, although he was raised Russian Orthodox Christian, he was aware of (and likely fascinated by) mythology from various cultures. His speech in the game illustrates that he does indeed have a distinct interest in Christian mythology in particular, and likely that of other cultures as well, given that his only known possession was a knife inscribed with Elder Futhark. His father likely recognized his interests and made the knife for him as a gift, then let him help inscribe it with a prayer. To a little kid who really liked vikings, that was probably very exciting, so it isn’t surprising that the knife would become his most prized possession, even after his memories were altered and he could no longer remember anything else about his family.

After Nano’s family was killed, he was put into an overcrowded Russian orphanage, then later taken away by the Japanese for use as a nameless test subject in what was often lethal experimentation. At that point he was so scared that he was willing to try just about anything. Having no control at all over his own fate, his only recourse was to pray for salvation. When no one answered his prayers and his circumstances kept going from bad to worse, he almost certainly started to lose faith in the Christian god, and tried to invoke the old Norse gods in hopes that maybe he was just praying to the wrong god and there was still SOMEONE out there who would listen. He may even have forgotten what the inscription on the knife actually meant, only recalling dreamlike bits and pieces. It was a prayer. To be completely honest, I find it completely unrealistic that Nano could have kept that knife hidden for so long from ENED, given that it’s fairly large, he had no privacy, was watched 24/7, and only wore a medical gown inside the facility. I think it is slightly more likely that he was allowed to keep it, given how submissive he was to the researchers, since the end goal was to brainwash him into BECOMING a weapon himself.

In the end, when Nano had lost all hope and knew he was about to lose even himself… the sacrifice he made to invoke his final desperate prayer WAS the knife itself, his last remaining possession, the last reminder he had of his humanity, and with it his last remaining hope of salvation. He gave it all to Akira, in hopes that maybe one day, they would meet again.

Now, Nano’s fate, and his salvation, depends entirely on Akira.

[achilds2012-blog]

Cumulative Assignment

Current available technologies in your classroom/school.

Hardware:

6 Laptops

1 cell phone (mine)

Mimio Teach

Document Camera- Old and New

Projector

Printer

Software:

Microsoft Office

Outlook

Firefox

Explorer

Chrome

Websites and/or database:

Scholastic.com

Stemscopes.com

LearningA-Z.com

Tumblebooks.com

Science4us.com

IReady.com

Firstinmath.com

Web 2.0 tools and/or applications

Google

Pinterest

Technologies I would like to you use next year

MimioTeach portable interactive whiteboard

Document Camera

Stemscopes.com

Use

Both teacher and student

Both teacher and student

Both teacher and student

Affordances

MIMIOTEACH-  Teacher- I will use the Mimio to keep my students engaged by allowing them to interact with the lesson that I am teaching. I searched online and found a lot of premade lesson plans, that are standard based, that can go directly with the Mimio. I will continue to look through these resources and locate which lessons I want to use in the classroom.

Students- The students will use Mimio by coming up to the whiteboard and interacting with it by answering questions that I give them.

DOCUMENT CAMERA-   Teacher- I will be able to project information and instruction from both the lap top and paperwork. This will allow me to project the information and teach using different learning styles in the classroom.

Students- Will be able to come to the document camera and participate in activities and concepts of the standard that they are learning. They will be able to be part of their own learning.

STEMSCOPES.COM- Teacher- I will use Stremscopes.com to teach my science standards. There are interactive videos to engage the students and resources that can be printed. There are tabs where I can get reteach and enrichment resources. It also has questions that can be directly asked to the students to teach the standard. I will assign work directly on the site for the students to complete.

Students- Students will be allowed to complete assigned work that I give them. There are also science games that I can allow the students to play to encourage quality work.

Limitations

MIMIOTEACH-As with technology I am sure that there will be times that Mimio will not work correctly. In addition, I will have to make sure to setup times where all students will eventually get a chance to use this technology. After doing research I also learned that Lovell and Phillips (did a research and discovered that daily interactions with the whiteboard can hinder and also interrupt the daily flow and pace in the classroom.

DOCUMENT CAMERA- The document camera can sometimes be blurry and needs to be adjusted. You also cannot always fit the full paper that you are trying to project. When using the document camera to project a worksheet, you may need to zoom in, in order for the students to see the full details.

STEMSCOPES.COM- Stemscopes.com is an online site so the students need to learn how to login to it. Students also may have an issue transitioning between the different portions of the site.

MIMIOTEACH-Before I start using it in the classroom I should attend trainings on how to properly use it to successfully and effectively teach lessons.  Researched and these class and webinars are free. Each on is about 60 minutes long. The students need time to learn how to properly use the device to write with. After the initial set up, the device is easy to setup.

DOCUMENT CAMERA- I am used to using a document camera, so it will just take some time to learn the new capabilities that come with this new one. There is a 15 minute video online that will train me with the new capabilities. It will always be contacted to a power source. Students will not be directly touching the device, just answering questions that will be projected.

STEMSCOPES.COM- Stemscopes.com takes time to learn. There is a day training to help with this site. Students need to be taught how to navigate and get access to the program. This will take weeks, depending on how much it’s used, to master this. BCPS already has a contract with the company so there is no additional fees.

Reliability

MIMIOTEACH-This technology is reliable, however, like with all technology, it has its chances on not working correctly. It can also be outdated and need updating to do certain things.

DOCUMENT CAMERA- Since this connects to a projector, I have to worry about the projector not working correctly also. The bulb could got out and the lightening needs to be correct. The document camera can also go out of focus and need adjusting, just like the projector.

STEMSCOPES.COM- If the internet is out, this site will be inaccessible. If the web browser is outdated, it will need to be updated in order to use this sight.

Supports

MIMIOTEACH-Operating systems: Mac 10, Windows Xp, Vista, or 7-10. Need to connect to a dry erase board. Need space for it to remain in the board.

DOCUMENT CAMERA- Need a projector. Needs something to sit it on. Need space for it remain.

STEMSCOPES.COM-Need a laptop to go to the sight, Needs an updated operating system.

Similar Products

MIMIOTEACH-White board, Dry erase board

DOCUMENT CAMERA- Elmo, Epson USB Documents camera

STEMSCOPES.COM- Science4us.com

Collaboration

MIMIOTEACH- Groups, individually, asynchronously, synchronously

DOCUMENT CAMERA- Groups, individually,

STEMSCOPES.COM-Individually, asynchronously

​

Final lesson with all three TIM levels

Text:

Pete the Cat and His Magic Glasses

Suggested Number of Sessions:  

2

Author(s):  

James and Kimberly Dean

Illustrator(s):

James Dean

Genre:  

Fiction Fantasy

Connection to Conceptual Topic (IUS):

Good Citizen

LAFS Standards (always embedded):

LAFS.1RL.1.2

LAFS.1.RL.1.1

Connected Content Standards:

SS.1.C.2.2

Describe the characteristics of responsible citizenship in the school community

Academic Vocabulary in the Standards:

Characteristics, responsible, citizenship

Domain-Specific, Content Vocabulary from the Text:

Feeling

In this lesson the domain specific content is incorporating ELA and S.S standards. With Pedagogical Approach, the students will be having open ended questioning, co-operative learning, and integrated learning. Students will also be interacting with each other through talk and share.

Main Idea/Theme of Text:

Theme: “Don’t focus on the bad things in life, look for the good every day.”

Unknown Vocabulary:

Select words that might not be in students’ oral vocabulary that teacher will need to explain or define during the reading, in student-friendly terms. Make sure the word(s) selected is/are not supported through context clues within the text (print and graphics).

Grumpy-

Bad tempered (grumpy)

Frustrated-

Feeling annoyed because you can’t achieve or change something

Session 1

LAFS Focus Standard (select one): This is the standard that is going to be taught. It won’t be fully taught with just one session with this book. Goals will change with different readings.

LAFS.1.RL.1.3 Describe the characters, settings, and major events in a story.

Academic Vocabulary in the Standard:

Describe

-To give a description of something or someone

Events-

Something that happens at a certain place or time

Goal from the Literacy Continuum:   This is the goal that was chosen for this lesson.

Talk about what is interesting in a photograph or illustration

Essential Question(s) from the Prompting Guides Part 1 or Part 2:

Invite students to talk about the text.

__ Thinking Within the Text                      _X_ Thinking Beyond the Text                  __ Thinking About the Text

What do you think is going to happen next in the text?

Introduction of the Text (to include the following):

** Teacher will project the text through PowerPoint. Therefore, all the students can have a clear look at the illustrations in this text. Teacher will point out parts of the illustration with a laser.

 ENTRY LEVEL OF TIM

Teacher: Students we are going to read a book titled Pete the Cat and His Magic Sunglasses by James and Kimberly Dean. James Dean is also the illustrator. The genre of this story is Fantasy Fiction.

Additional features specific to this text:

Teacher: I see a familiar animal on the cover of this book. Who is this animal? Where have we seen him before? What is he wearing? Teacher will point laser to the illustration. Maybe those are the glasses that are going to be magic. I also see a turtle upside down. It is not easy for a turtle to get off his back. He might be unhappy because of this. I am going to start reading this story and see what happens.

First Reading of the Text (read to the students):

Teacher reads text and invites students to make predictions and notice important details. Indicate page number(s) where students will predict or teacher will point out important details. Teacher will continuously point to the points of the illustration that she is speaking about.

Pg.2 Teacher says: Pete is not happy. The text says he has never been grumpy before. Does anyone know what grumpy means? Teacher will then give the meaning of grumpy. Class I want you to turn to someone and talk and share about the reason you think that Pete is not happy.

Pg.4 Teacher says: The story says the frog always wore a frown, can everyone show me a frown?

Teacher will also ask students do they notice anything on frog? (glasses)

Pg.8 Teacher says: How does Pete seem now, is he still sad, is he happy? Give me a character trait to describe Pete.

Pg.10 Teacher says: Everyone show me a mad face.

Pg.14 Teacher says: Is squirrel sad now class?

Pg.26 Teacher says: I notice a pattern in the events that take place in this story. Raise your hand and tell me about some of the important events that have taken place so far in this story.

Pg.28 Teacher says: Oh no! Pete broke the glasses. Turn and talk to your partner about what do you predict is going to happen next.

END OF TEXT: Teacher says: Pete did not really need those glasses to see the good in every day. Next time we read this story we will discuss that information (then teacher will break students off in small group and centers)

Connection to Independent Practice (independently and/or collaboratively with peers):

Indicate how teacher will connect this lesson to an activity in which students will apply their learning.

At a center, students will first reread the text and discuss different things they noticed in the illustrations. Then the students will practice acting out a part of the story.

While students are working, teacher will go to each center and walk the students through using a PowerPoint. Teacher will be in control and guide the students on the steps that they need to complete. At the end of the demonstration, students should be able to open the PowerPoint tool, pick a slide theme, and know how to insert a picture in the slide through the tool.-

Adoption Stage

New TIM level

Extend the Lesson:

List possible connections from this interactive read aloud to connected content standards (lessons or activities).

Students will be put in groups of three. Each group will be guided to the website tumblebooks.com. The group will be allowed to select a text that they want to read and portray in a play.  Students will put on a play to go with the online story they chose. Students will determine each role they will portray.

Each group of students will have to make their own prompts based off the illustrations from the text.

I am going to remove this part to add technology.

In the small group they will have to discuss character traits and inferences that were made about their character. Then the students will have to put on the full play using all the inference and traits they learned to help him/her brig their character alive. Now that students are aware on how to use basic tools on the PowerPoint, the students will use it independently. While doing this assignment the students will be using a PowerPoint to add a back drop to their play. They have to include at least two different settings for their play. When the students do their play, I will project their interactive backdrops made through PowerPoint - Adaptation Stage

Why I choose to modify my lesson in these ways.

In my 2nd lesson (the one that I modified), I was using a PowerPoint to display my text and then had my students incorporate Tumble books to enrich their lesson. This time I wanted to think about how I can use technology to further my lesson. In addition, I wanted to make sure that my technology used in the lesson plan climbed up the TIM matrix. I took account the technology that my students have access to, and what their level of expertise is with that tool.

In my modified lesson plan, I wanted the students use a PowerPoint themselves. I modified my lesson by taking out the craft that the students were using to make different prompts. Instead, they will be using a PowerPoint to make a setting for the background of their play. When the students put on their play, I will project their backdrop. This will not only enhance the lesson, but it will enhance their play.

Tim Levels

Adoption- Students have already been introduced to a PowerPoint. It was used during the reading of the text through the lesson. However, they have not used to PowerPoint themselves. Therefore, I moved up from Entry level to adoption level by guiding the students through the basic usage of a PP. I chose the technology they were using and I guided the students step by step on how to use it.

•Adaptation: Once I explained the basic usage for the PP, the students now had to use the technology themselves. I was there to support them, but they had control. This allowed the students to move up on the TIM level again.

Reflection

I want the thank you for this opportunity to be a part of your class. I have learned so much in this class. I have learned the meaning of all the components of the TIM matrix. I learned how to move up, or down, the levels. Whatever my lesson calls for determines what the levels are and how they are used. In addition, I learned that different levels of each TIM and the components that go with it. I learned how they are used by both the teacher and the student. When looking for technology tools to use in the classroom, there are different things that I need to look into. First I need to make sure that it is going to enhance my lesson, go with my standards, and have meaningful learning in the classroom. I need to also make sure that is it affordable.

One of my favorite parts of this class was when I was forced to look into technology that I have access to already. I have had a Mimio for the last four years and have not used it in the classroom. When I looked into the usage I saw that there is so many things that I can do with it. It is amazing, I cannot believe that I had access to this technology for so long and have not used it. I will be starting to use it this year. I will also continue to look up lesson plans that this tool can enhance.

[curlswithcreativity]

Attention - Tom Holland x Reader (Part One)

Prompt: Brittney and I like to send pictures back and forth. Sometimes in happens when I’m in class. We came to the realization that Boyfriend!Tom would almost definitely do it just for the joy of making you feel flustered. Some of the dialogue is stripped right from our conversation

A/N: I’m so sorry. It’s literally been so long since I posted that I had to look up how I formatted my fics. I’m back at school full time and it’s kicking my ass!! Also this is my first TH fic soooo... comments would be lovely! Also, this is a two parter because I didn’t like how it was turning out, so I just split off the end. I’ll post the rest tomorrow

Marvel & Marvel Cast Masterlist | Complete Writing Masterpost

Part Two

___

A tired sigh escaped your lips as you scribbled down your notes, your professor’s tangent failing to hold your attention. Your four-hour block of classes was almost done and you couldn’t wait for the short 30-minute break before the final four-hour block began. You needed to grab something to eat and quickly.

 Absent-mindedly, your hand trailed over to your phone to check the time. When the light of your screen came on, the familiar Snapchat banner that accompanied a new message derailed you. The small little red ghost icon followed by the name “Tom 🐸 💖” made you smile instinctively.

 Tom would frequently send you snaps to brighten your day and to help break up the monotony of your long lectures. The thought of a cutely framed photo of Tessa had you clicking on the banner urgently, your desire to see a cute dog in an equally cute or funny scenario incredibly strong.

Upon opening the app and message, you nearly dropped your phone in your haste to discreetly hide your screen. Tom apparently fresh from the shower had sent you a shirtless photo, his damp curls stuck to his forehead as he gave you a mischievous smirk. The towel he was wearing hung low around his hips providing ample view of his wet, well-defined abs. It was nothing you hadn’t seen before, but in the context of your lecture hall, you felt your cheeks quickly gaining a healthy flush.

 The banner that flashed across the top of your screen showed another new snap, and you twisted your hand to cover your face as you clicked on it warily. The photo showed the towel that had previously been wrapped around Tom’s hips now in his outstretched hand. The white towel was a stark contrast against the warm colours you had chosen for your bedroom, and considering Tom’s toned forearm and that damn towel were the only thing in frame, you had little else to focus on.

 This time when the small ghost appeared again at the top of your screen, first red, and then purple to indicate he had sent you a video, you turned your phone’s screen off and placed the device face down against the desk. Your face burned hotly and your heart raced as you squirmed in your seat.  You forced yourself to breathe deeply, reaching for your pen and re-entering the password to your laptop that had fallen dark in your moments of distraction.

 Right, you thought as you shook your head, focus on the Olympian Twelve. Do not think about the fact your incredibly attractive boyfriend almost definitely just sent you nudes.

 The subtle buzz of your phone against the lecture hall desk drew your attention away from the discussion regarding the nuisances of myths and legends. Your brow furrowed; you had your phone set to do not disturb, with the exception of a very select group of individuals. Ever since you had started dating Tom, your previously respectable number of notifications had skyrocketed, and the constant chime of your phone was not welcome in academic settings.

 Once more, curiosity got the better of you and you reluctantly turned over your phone to discover that although the banner was different, the sender was the same.

 TOM HOLLAND (7)

 You pulled down the notification with a swipe of your finger and quickly scanned the messages.

 “Why didn’t you open my picture 😞”

“I made you a special video, darling ;)”

“Y/N!!!”

“Love you, gorgeous xxx”

“Answerrrrr myyyyyy messagesssss”

“Do you not love me? If you did you would open my video ;)”

“Respond plz”

 You turned off your phone completely after that. There were only 20 minutes left in your lecture and he could wait that long. Maybe you would make it longer if he continued in his current vein, you thought as an email from him with the subject “LOVE, COME ON” flashed in the upper-hand corner of your laptop screen.  You didn’t bother to read the preview.

 The next 10 minutes were rather uneventful, and you hoped that Tom had finally gotten the hint. He was well aware of your schedule’s busy nature despite its stark contrast to his own. For the most part, he respected that.

 “Hey guys, it’s me, Tom Holland.”

 Your head whipped around in your seat, the sound of Tom’s voice coming through a tinny phone speaker an unexpected occurrence in your Classic Mythology lecture. The girl who was holding the phone shot you an apologetic look devoid of recognition as she lowered her volume. You sunk into your seat- despite the new sound level you could still hear the clear, familiar chatter of your boyfriend’s voice.

 “Oh, hello marj1091 and… sorry, I can’t see your usernames anymore, they’re going by too quickly.” There was the familiar sound of your creaking bed and a loud huff, which made you think that Tom had thrown himself down in his typical fashion.

 “Right.” Tom stated, a small pause following his voice as the sound of things moving flowed through the speaker. “I’m on live right now because I’m feeling incredibly ignored by a certain someone who is very dear to me.”

 You had been so distracted by his dialogue that you had missed your class dismissal. Suddenly, the seats around you were emptying and Tom’s voice was being covered by the sound of squeaking chairs and hurried steps. As you gathered your things, you stared at your phone hesitantly before turning it back on. You were intrigued now, if not still a little irritated, about what he was saying about you. Walking outside of the lecture hall, you clasped your phone tightly in your hand as you scrolled through your folders to find the multi-coloured camera icon. You cringed when you noticed you had been tagged in a photo and now had almost 1500 new notifications and mentions.

The newest addition to your tagged page had Tom’s face filling your screen, his hair much less damp than in the photos he had sent you and his muscled chest now covered by a heather grey t-shirt. He was pouting as he clutched tightly to Tess, the dog somehow managing to look forlorn as well. The caption read, “When she’s ignoring you because she’s “being responsible”… Quite sure Tess thinks she’s gone forever.”

 It would have been cute if it weren’t so blatantly manipulative.

 Your teeth ground together as you looked for a safe spot to stop that was not in the way of the ongoing foot traffic. Settling on a nearly empty bench, you sighed despite yourself; you had to admit… he did look good. And that was infuriating given your current need to focus on getting through your school day. His stream was still running, and against your better judgement you pulled it up to catch him in the middle of a conversation.

 “Look, I love that she’s going to class and learning. She’s absolutely brilliant and I’m so proud of her. But being home alone all day is rubbish. What am I supposed to do—?” Oh come on, Thomas, you thought, I’m sure you can think of something. “—Just wait? She should just stay home, it’s better for all of us.” He trailed off, his lips quirking up into a faint smile as he read through the comments, shifting in his spot as you let out a small huff. He nodded his head, reaching for something just out of frame as he spoke.

 “Right, if you’re just joining us now,” Tom said as he held up a photo to his phone’s camera. Your face, smiling brightly as he planted a kiss on your cheek, came into focus as he repositioned the photo and let out a dramatic sigh. “The live stream is dedicated to remembering my girlfriend, Y/N. She’s not dead, she’s just ignoring me because she’s in lectures all day.”

 You rolled your eyes and resisted the urge to comment, allowing others to do it for you.

 “I’M fUCKING DEAD HAHAHAHAHAHA”

“tom ur such a little baby”

“omg Y/N sucks. Who cares about school when you’re dating Tom Holland????”

“take off your shirt!!!”

“tom, you’re literally the loving boyfriend meme and its gross”

“uh, I’m pretty sure I just saw her join the stream?”

 The last comment made you pause, and you watched as Tom processed the slow feed.  He had apparently missed the notification that you had joined in his dramatic presentation, his face breaking into a beaming smile. You felt your lips lifting upwards instinctively despite your mild irritation.

 “Did she actually? That’s brilliant, I thought she would have turned off her phone. Y/N/N, are you paying attention to me now, love?”  He was smiling broadly as he clicked through the viewers before finally finding your username. “You are.”

 “I’m not.” You typed angrily while pursing your lips, chiding yourself. You had no doubt in your mind that this would only encourage him. When the comment finally made its way into his view, he let out a booming laugh.

 “You’re so stubborn.” He shifted in your bed, adjusting himself so that he could sit up more comfortably. “But since you’re here, you really should open the snap video I sent you. Maybe not in class though.” His voice had the same mischievous air to it that his texts had conveyed.

 “what snap video??”

“what’s the video?”

“video? Why are you making it seem like a sexy video? Did you send a sexy video?”

“tom why are you like this?”

“are you sexting her in class, what is this”

“puppy tom no!”

“fuckboy tom at it again”

 The request to join the Instagram live stream flashed across your phone, and you glared at it for a moment before declining. It took a second or two for your action to catch up to Tom’s device, and his face twisted into a comical pout at the rejection.

 “Aww, come on now, Y/N/N. You’re not in class now, yeah? Just-” The comments that were coming now were fast and overwhelming.

 “omg tom let the poor girl learn”

“let Y/N get a degree 2k18”

“take your shirt off!!!”

“girl drop out & be a housewife. id live off that spider man $$$”

“TOM I LOVE YOU. DATE ME INSTEAD”

 “-join for a moment so that I can see your lovely face.” He was relentless, you thought with a small shake of your head.

 You settled on a suitable response and taped it out hurriedly; you had less than 10 minutes now to get over to your new building and you would have to skip lunch, which was truly tragic. “Pictures exist for a reason, Thomas. Stop being a baby. This is a home discussion! And! I’m! Busy!” You weren’t surprised when he chose to ignore the second half of your message.

 “Well, yeah but it’s not the same, is it, love? And I’m not being a baby. Forgive me for wanting to spend time with my girlfriend.” Tom replied with a hint of a pout that was nowhere near as convincing as it could have been had it not been replaced almost immediately by a childish grin. God, he was infuriating.

 You sent “✌️👶”, a sentiment that you thought succinctly conveyed the message you wanted to get across, and rolled your eyes as you left the stream despite your boyfriend’s whines. His incessant contact had thrown you off your groove, and now it was a struggle to get where you needed to be. You grumbled to yourself as you bolted across campus. “Do I call him repeatedly when he’s on set? Does he get roped into live streams because I haven’t seen him in 5 hours?”

 The answer was a resounding no.

 Boy, was he going to have hell to pay when you got home.

___

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@thetenthdoctorscompanion @inkstainedfanfics @reid-187 @galaxies-behind-my-eyes @kkiyomizu @saint-august-8 @twilightparker @watchoutforfrostbite

[ualright]

A Look At The Project That’s Bringing Awareness To Female Scientists Through Art

But beyond the image of the two-time Nobel Prize winner bent over glowing rock, almost no stories of female achievement in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields are culturally pervasive. That’s why neuroscientist turned creative director, Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya started Beyond Curie. Initially a kickstarter campaign, Amanda raised over $32,000 for the Association For Women In Science with her kinetic, artful depictions of thirty five relatively unknown female scientists—all pioneers in their fields. Here, we chat with Amanda about why it’s important for women to be encouraged to pursue STEM careers and how the the worlds of science and art overlap more than you might think.

Like many people, after the election I was not feeling great. I wanted to get involved but was feeling overwhelmed by the number of options for how I might contribute my time or money. A friend who had worked on the Hillary campaign gave me some great advice—pick a cause you care deeply about, and support it in a way only you can. Her words led me to develop Beyond Curie, to highlight the rich history of women kicking ass in STEM fields and to show that our world was built by extraordinary women, not just men, of all backgrounds.

Today I will send 3 uncensored videos to all my beautiful Onlyfans friends!!! Do you want to receive them too? Subscribe Now!! https://t.co/xLBCiy7iuU pic.twitter.com/TfgFps15yn

— Victoria Lomba (@VictorialombaTV)

October 20, 2019

I started with women whose stories I personally had been inspired by, like Rita Levi-Montalcini, who I read about in 4th grade. Her story is one of grit, tenacity and creativity. In response to Mussolini’s 1938 ban that barred her and other Jewish people from academic and professional careers, she set up a laboratory in her bedroom and studied the growth of nerve fibers in chicken embryos, which laid the groundwork for her later research and discovery of nerve growth factor. I also wanted to ensure the series was as inclusive as possible, with representation for black, Latina, Asian and indigenous scientists as well as scientists with disabilities. I reached out to my backer community on Kickstarter for help with women to include and they introduced me to some extraordinary scientists I’d never heard of before. Each design is unique, it connects the scientists’ faces with the work they’ve achieved into a unique collage. Each design is a visual story of each scientist’s life.

We all know Marie Curie because her accomplishments are so difficult to ignore, even in a sea of accomplished male scientists who have dominated the genius label, she stands out. She was not only the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, but also she was the first person ever to win it twice, and the only person to win it in two different sciences. She was a badass, a legend, and one of the greatest scientists to have ever lived. However, when it comes to women in science, the conversation too often starts and stops with her. She is the easy choice when trying to be more inclusive with the addition a female scientist. But it’s important to look beyond Marie Curie and also celebrate all the other extraordinary women who have shaped science and changed the world.  

Certainly much can be learned from studies of visual perception that can provide depth and context for why certain designs work and others fall short. But in the moment, the craft of design, taking into consideration principles such as form, shape, composition, color, not to mention typography and storytelling is incredibly nuanced and takes years of deliberate practice to hone. There is an element of luck, magic and exploration as well. Often studies on visual perception are very controlled because they must be, but in reality, timing, uncontrolled factors and an unquantifiable number of biases can skew our perception of a design. This is why a neuroscientist who studies visual perception isn’t automatically a gifted designer. I’d say that my process from a storytelling perspective is often guided by neuroscience and psychology, and supported by visual craft and careful consideration.

$(function () { $('#WAButton').floatingWhatsApp({ phone: '0857-1038-3764', headerTitle: 'Chat with us on WhatsApp!', popupMessage: 'Hello, how can we help you?', showPopup: true, //Enables popup display buttonImage: '<img src="whatsapp.svg" />', //headerColor: 'crimson', //backgroundColor: 'crimson', position: "right" }); });

[octknight]

Who Am I?

I realize that often I message people whose tumblrs I enjoy, and then they look at my tumblr and find out that, lazily, I have never posted anything.  To instill some sense of reciprocation, I’ve posted my fetlife profile text below.  If you want a little more info, you can find me there under the same name.

-----

Who I Am:  I’m a kinky academic and gamer currently residing in Iowa, but I’ve lived in many parts of the country, so if you think you remember chatting with me when I lived in some other state, well, you’re probably right!  I’m quite intense in all elements of my life, including kink.  I’m quite fortunate to live with two wonderful, adorable and cuddly subs (including my husband of 9 years) who take very good care of me.  

I of course realize that few subs will be into everything I enjoy, and I respect that.  I individualize my Dominance to each sub I work with. With that caveat, here are a number of things I get into.   

Control:  As a SIR, my central interest is in control of all kinds.  There is almost no element of a sub’s life I don’t relish controlling, including minutia like controlling outfits and diet.  As such, I fetishize things like sets of rules, imposing structure.  I’m fond of protocols that instruct a sub both in the correct way to speak and to present himself to me physically, and I tailor these to each sub to emphasize the role I have chosen for them.  Teaching a sub to groom and position their body in exactly the way that pleases me most is deeply satisfying.  As I’ve grown more experienced, my desires in this category have only grown stronger, and my biggest fascination now is with exploring TPE slavery as a dynamic.

Discipline: Punishment and reward are natural complements to control, structure, and rules, and are an essential part of holding a sub to a high standard.  Discipline shows a sub that I really do care about and notice his behavior, and am willing to invest the time/effort in helping him improve.  Discipline is always accompanied by a lecture, where I explain what the sub did wrong, and how they can do better in the future. Discipline methods vary, but those I have found most effective include CP, wall time, and line writing.

Chastity:  The most foundational form of the control available to a Dom, and the one I very rarely work without, is chastity: the tight control of a sub’s orgasms.  Chastity devices are very sexy, and I often use them.  I am particularly fond of small devices which stop a sub from even becoming erect.  However, my key interest is in the control of orgasms, and I expect a good sub to behave whether they are locked in a device or not.  The lengths of time that I have made subs go without orgasm have varied quite a bit, from around a week at the low end to over a year and a half at the higher end.  I know that chastity is very difficult for most subs, but I enjoy supporting a sub through their journey with it, and helping them go longer than they ever thought they could.

Degradation:  It is important to me that a sub remember his place at all times, and so part of my job is to assure that a sub is reminded of his place regularly.  Simple rules such as being kept off of furniture, requiring permission to leave my presence, or being kept naked while I remain clothed make a sub feel like something distinctly less than people.  Writing on a sub’s body, making them shave their pubic hair, walk on all fours, worship my feet, swallow my spit, and eat from a dog bowl are more examples of ways I have reinforced a sub’s status as a willing inferior.  Degradation is perhaps the most complex of these broad categories, and is certainly the one that took me the longest to learn.  On the one hand, I take good care of my subs, and it is essential to me that degradation (and D/s) generally be empowering to them.  On the other hand, degradation needs to be more than roleplay to be hot, it needs to genuinely change the way a sub thinks about himself.  This is a delicate balance to maintain, but it can be incredibly fulfilling for both parties when done right.

Brainwashing:  I believe that 90% or more of D/s takes place in the mind.  Even something seemingly physical like a caning is really very much a mental exercise for the sub to willingly (and perhaps even enthusiastically) endure.  As such, it is essential for me to control a sub’s feelings and thought processes, teaching him to think about things the correct way, reinforcing his place, and adjusting his preferences to better suit me.  To accomplish this I often give a sub mantras, short expressions such as “Obedience is pleasure, SIR” that clearly and succinctly express an idea essential to their submission.  These mantras are to be recited on command, often hundreds of times to help their truth sink into the mind.  When combined with hypnosis, this simple method allows for a sub’s thinking to be slowly altered and sculpted over time.  This process is deeply erotic to me, and I love to see my words slowly altering a sub’s mind.

Sadism:  Perhaps the simplest form of control over a sub is control of his body (through bondage) and the sensations he experiences.  I’m a Sadist, and am certainly inclined to inflict many forms of pain on those subs who enjoy pain (though I fully respect that many subs don’t).   I have a large collection of spanking implements that I like to use.  I’m particularly fond of my paddle, my cane, my riding crop, and my tawse.  In addition to impact oriented pain, I have also quite enjoyed inflicting pain through nipple and ball squeezing as well as forced exercise and stress positions.

Service:  I hope I’ve communicated through this profile that D/s is about much more than sex for me, and that power exchange extends far beyond the bedroom.  I like when serving me in vanilla contexts makes a sub genuinely happy/content/satisfied.  This service can take many forms, and is usually highly personal to the sub doing the service: cooking for me, dropping me off at work, picking me up at the airport, doing my dishes, etc.  Anything like that a sub does for me is deeply meaningful, and establishes his firm commitment to serve me.  

On Consent: I used to have a list called Boy’s Bill of Rights at the bottom of my profile, but I’ve decided to go simpler this time.  It is essential to me that everything I do with a sub is done with enthusiastic consent.  I settle for nothing less.  This doesn’t mean I’m not a strict hardass, and it does not mean that I don’t frequently make subs do things they dislike, or even hate.  Indeed, I do that quite often.  But they let me do that because deep down it is what they want and need and enduring it gives them deep-seated satisfaction.  I understand that not everything I’ve described here is for every sub, and I certainly don’t expect a sub I work with to engage in every activity described above.

Who Should Contact Me:  So you read this whole thing (or skipped to the bottom), congrats!  I’m always excited to meet new people with similar interests, so please send me a message!  I’m particularly interested in chatting with fellow Doms, fellow board game geeks, video gamers, and fellow mtg cube enthusiasts.  

[killianmesmalls]

Raising Alice: Historical(ish) Headcanons and Meta

Now, everything here is based on speculation and, though I’d love to spend weeks researching this because I love history, especially the time periods this lends itself to, I’m going open this up to discourse because there’s a lot of conjecture at a certain point with fictional people, fictional realms, and timeline discrepancies. 

However, I do headcanon Killian raised Alice within both the societal ideals of Victorian to Edwardian views of child rearing and what was accessible to him, but was also highly progressive. Part of this is based on when he grew up (clearly late 18th to early 19th century-ish regardless of realm in terms of style and etiquette) and how he adapted over the years, with a key factor being the fashions and beliefs of when he took in Bae for what one can speculate to be a few months as well as how his years of piracy which allowed a high level of democracy, tolerance of different lifestyles, and distaste for stringent authority. Part of this is also based on when their books were published, so 1865-1911. 

I am going to separate my personal headcanons into different categories: toys, lessons, nutrition, and other, the last of which is a catch-all for anything I either forgot to assess or doesn’t fit within the context of the previous categories nor does it merit its own (clothing, schedules, discipline, etc). All under the cut because I feel I may ramble. 

Here is what I cannot help but headcanon about Alice: It is no coincidence her aesthetic is from the time period that first started to truly understand late childhood and adolescence were stepping stones to a human’s development. Killian Jones never got that. We can only infer what his life was like, but I highly doubt a ~10-year-old indentured servant on a late 18th century ship would have lived the sort of life today’s child is gifted with. We can only speculate the abuses he went through, but we can (I hope) all acknowledge it wasn’t a privileged life. 

Then we have Alice. Now, we know she has a lot working against her: trapped in a very tight space, no doors, no indoor plumbing, only one other voice to listen to outside of her own (until she’s almost 11, which we won’t go there...), etc. Though there were some obvious struggles, there is no doubt to me she was raised with an abundance of love. The below, to me, will detail either what we’ve been already told, what I headcanon based on history, or what I headcanon based on what I believe about Killian. 

Toys

I’m not going to lie, I’m in love with some of the toys that started to develop around the late 19th century to the beginning of the 20th. It was such an enthusiastic time of development with all sorts of new technologies, cultures intermingling thanks to trains, automobiles, steam ships, the telegraph, music, moving pictures, etc. This also gave rise to what humans are wont to do, which is protect their traditions or “their own” in the face of progression, but this was such a beautiful time of progress in some aspects. Yes, the advancements can arguably be attributed to a causing factor of WWI and, as such, WWII, but let’s stick to the positive in this case? I can discuss WWI for days, but I’d like to focus on the happy and I’ve already detracted enough from Alice and Killian, my true purpose for this. 

Let’s take a couple looks at what she has. 

I’ve discussed this before, but I feel the desire to bring it up again. I cannot begin to count her dolls, she has a parasol, a wooden ship, a baby carriage, obviously the chess set, and so on. These toys do not come cheap, nor do her dresses or nightgown. She is, as far as we can infer, financially spoiled. We can only imagine why this may be, but it’s hard (for me) to not believe Killian kept her well-stocked in toys thanks to her inability to leave her home/prison. These toys all, also, keep with the style of late Victorian pieces. All of her dolls are dressed in late 19th century fashion, circa 1880-1910 if one were to take a guess, and well-crafted. In addition, Noah’s ark toys were highly popular in late Victorian years, as were parasols, and the shape of the baby carriage she is shown pushing is also in the style of this time period. 

If, based on her clothing and other toys (more on the former later....) we’re assuming other objects of a similar time period are around, here are some of toys the I don’t doubt he’d either like to gift her with or already has and they’re stashed away somewhere: skipping ropes, marbles, spinning tops, toy soldiers (because, let’s face it, he didn’t raise her strictly according to gender roles of the time), and my current headcanon favorite, a kaleidoscope.

Why a kaleidoscope I hear you asking silently? Because now I’m just imagining her beside him, pretending it’s a spyglass of her own, playing pirate and seeing all sorts of treasure in the distance. 

Lessons

We know she understands sword fighting enough to defeat a jabberwocky with being the sole survivor in addition to us seeing her having a lesson with her father. She knows stars well enough to know the date based on their location. She’s spent years on her own, traveling realms completely by herself, and surviving based on everything we can believe she’s been taught. Basically, that girl spent almost 11 years with her father’s studious voice speaking to her, and his voice in her head urging her to read and learn different subjects since then. 

Even in her cursed persona, Alice craves the knowledge of a bookstore. She focuses thanks to chess. Everything that makes Alice happy revolves around either her most loving relationships or in academic pursuits. When Henry brings up the idea that he thinks they may actually be cursed characters from his book, she immediately starts perusing through it. 

It’s canon she studied art, there were knitting materials in her cottage when she’s older, we can infer she’s able to bake based on her having the cupcake on her birthday (unless others have the headcanon that the tower magicked it there for her, but I don’t think the tower is that nice). While many young girls stopped learning more “masculine” subjects, such as mathematics and science, as they were expected to marry and align themselves to a more homemaker role, I have many doubts that Alice was raised with this mentality, at the very least due to what was mentioned above. 

While she does see the world in a “special” way, no one can claim that Alice is in any way stupid, and I don’t doubt her curiosity would prevent her from ever being considered truly ignorant. Like her father, if there is something worth knowing, she absolutely will learn it. Again, this is mostly based on some evidence but mostly headcanon, but I have a hard time believing otherwise. 

Based on time period and on what I believe about Killian, I think she’s aware of the etiquette in different realms, knows at least one other language and maybe more, knows some military history, and knows the basics of sailing even if she’s never been. I think he also taught her about the customs and beliefs of different people, though how much this included religion considering all the mixing of religions in the show is a mystery. 

Nutrition

Food at this time period, with a primary focus in this case for Irish and English foods, was heavy in beef, potatoes, pork, eggs, bread, cheese, and, as we know of Alice, various jams. Obviously, we know a bit about Killian’s diet and his aversion to sugar/“junk food” and we know how much Alice craves orange marmalade. In addition, we know they were close enough to a port for her to consider a 48-hour trip using Enchanted Forest methods of transportation to be cause for worry, and he was able to get her various vials of sand for her birthday. So I assume they were able to get seafood easily enough without worry of it spoiling before he could either cook it or get it on ice. 

Food-borne illnesses, gout, and afflictions easily handled these days with a dose of stomach medication was still a concern during this time, so I feel like Killian would have avoided any foods that were at risk of easily going bad unless they had a way of storing it. Though they were not poor, as evidenced by how well-stocked Alice was kept in pristine clothing and toys, there were still a lot of concerns, and I feel like he would have been extremely cautious considering she was unable to go see a doctor. 

Killian likely raised her on a healthy balanced diet with marmalade as a comfort food that was both a treat but also something healthy (guarding against scurvy) and could store well (up to six months). I also love the idea that “I had no idea you could put candy on fruit” is also a carryover from Alice’s time with fruit being the primary dessert and anything high in sugar being a very rare treat, perhaps mostly in the form of sea salt toffee or, on special occasions, cupcakes. 

The trick here is we don’t know how the tower kept stocked with food, let alone how generous it may have been or how well it kept any of it, so we can only speculate how much/how often they had anything that spoiled easily. It’s still worth knowing what may have been a typical spread in the Jones home for those of us that are insane nerds about them and this time period. 

Other

Speaking of Alice’s pristine clothing, we saw at least three different outfits compared to Killian’s one. Her puffy sleeves, embroidery, the fabrics used, and colors used indicate she was dressed relatively upperclass. Her clothing, like her toys, again shows how absolutely well-cared for she was. 

However, as spoiled as she was financially, there is no way in my mind she was spoiled in terms of a schedule. At the very least, for her to know the date by the stars, I feel like she could also look at the sun to know the time, and keeps to it. That, mixed with the fact that she needs help to focus, plus the fact that Killian was shown at times to be stringent on routine, she likely veered very little from the schedule they both adapted for years. Rise at this time, breakfast by this time, lessons by this time, lunch by this time, etc. You get the point. It’s also what, by the time she’s left alone, helps her keep some level of sanity. I also, as I’m writing this, somewhat headcanon part of her mind to be the White Rabbit, fretting about being late and later selling “time pieces”, strictly telling Rogers a time to meet her and only showing late when she had news she didn’t want to give him. 

Even with all this strictness when it came to making sure a schedule was in order, Victorian and Edwardian times could still be pretty tough on some children. They were still expected to be seen and not heard, often not listened to or respected as individuals, had others’ ideals impressed upon them, and were pretty severely dealt with from time to time. With everything Killian dealt with as a child, and how much Alice grew to be an inquisitive person with little shame in how she felt or how she appeared to others, I think he was most progressive in this regard. I am not going to go into too controversial of topics, but I do believe if he were ever firm it was very few and far between. We have to remember, beyond his past abuses, that Killian is aware that he is the only person she is exposed to. While he will make mistakes as he’s only human, and he is still a product of his time period, his hands are the only hands she’s going to hold or be near for a while. I don’t believe that he’d ever risk her fearing them. She was mostly respected in terms of her autonomy and her beliefs, and we know he is shown multiple times in supporting her, building up her self-esteem, and treating her like a smart, capable individual. There may have been slips and slides, but I truly believe with the way they came out of this and how she grew into the person she is, she felt mostly pure love and respect from her father. 

In Conclusion

FFS, did you guys stay through all of this? Wow. Props, guys. 

[maiji]

Thoughts on Grasses of Remembrance (The Tale of Genji through its poetry)

Finally had some time this weekend to sit down with A Waka Anthology, Volume 2: Grasses of Remembrance Part B by Edwin A. Cranston. This book is the last in an impressive and intimidating collection translating a number of major classical poetry anthologies. It’s basically a speedrun through Tale of Genji (if such a thing were possible) filtered through all 795 waka poems written or uttered by the characters over the course of the novel.

Poetry was a Really Big Deal during the Heian era. If you were an aristocrat, not only were you expected to compose decent poetry, you had to be able to do it off-the-cuff appropriate to the occasion. AND to do this properly, you were expected to be able to recognize and respond cleverly to references to a ton of other existing classic poems from memory that people would just mention casually in conversation or writing (kinda like how people quote the Simpsons today lol). This was a prime marker of how intelligent/competent and - no joke - how sexy you were. So not surprisingly, these poems are extremely important to the development of character interactions and themes in the Tale of Genji which has a lot of romance and relationship plotlines. 

However. Translating Heian era Japanese into modern Japanese is already challenging. Rendering Heian era Japanese waka poetry into modern English is, as you might imagine, harder for a bunch of reasons. Considering how dense the actual novel already is, it’s super easy to gloss over the poetry, and some modern translations simply integrate the basic intent of the poems right into the main text/dialogue.

I was really interested in finding something specifically focusing on and analyzing the poetry, and this book appeared to fit the bill.

Short review: IT TOTALLY DOES. If you’re into Tale of Genji, Heian era, classical Japanese history, classical Japanese literature, Japanese poetry, or just love reading translators articulating eloquently while sassing characters or flailing through linguistic complexities, I RECOMMEND THIS BOOK

Long review: blah blah blah thoughts follows, including some quotes/poem for reference.

The book starts with a quick 2 page intro setting the context of the Tale of Genji, then goes straight into the poems. TBH I personally found it more flowery and redundant than necessary (it repeats a few poems that are then explained later). But it’s only 2 pages, we’ll live.

Then, the poems. For every poem (or poems, in the case of an exchange - sometimes a flurry of them with multiple characters speaking or dashing letters off to each other) there’s an intro and summary of context followed by an analysis, including notes on meaning, narrator and character intent, structure, symbols and wordplay. The original Japanese is included in romaji alongside the English translation. The commentary also flags known references to other classic poems (WITH those poems in-line! This is awesome because I don’t have the rest of these books!), and even mentions poem and folk song quotations from the rest of the novel where the characters have not composed new poetry, but are reciting other existing known pieces.

Overall, I have only three real “warnings” about Grasses of Remembrance Vol 2b:

1) It’s very academic and flowery in tone. If you’re not used to it, it can be hard to read. But then again, if you’re not willing to get past that, how are you reading Tale of Genji? lol. In any case, I personally thought the commentary was a lot of fun. Cranston definitely has opinions and can get pretty sarcastic in places, which I found hilarious. Here are a few sample quotes:

“Tamakazura has remarked to herself how superior the Emperor [Reizei] was in looks to all the courtiers in his train (It is a principle with this author that superior people be dashingly handsome or ravishingly beautiful).” 

“The ruefully witty poems exchanged between Yugiri and To no Naishi [Koremitsu’s daughter, the Gosechi Dancer] are rather more to my taste than the soggy ones Yugiri and Kumoi no Kari exchanged on their wedding night. Might it be the case that a totally sanctioned relationship is literarily uninspiring?”

“The old lady reaches for the melodramatic ultimate and dies just as Yugiri’s letter arrives.”

The overall effect is like an exceedingly well-educated, gossipy and sassy ride through the entire novel hahaha. 

2) Minor typos. I noticed some speckled throughout the text every so often (e.g., Tamakazura being rendered Takakazura, Akashi as Asashi, instances of accidental extra letters, etc.). It was pretty clear what the correct spelling was supposed to be, and TBH considering this is the last of a huge-ass series of over 1300 pages I think it’s forgiveable. Maybe a few that spell-check should have caught, but oh well.

3) This book is NOT CHEAP. As I mentioned in a previous post, not only did I not buy the entire collection, I didn’t even buy a complete Volume 2 - I only bought the last half of the second volume lmao. And the Tale of Genji translations are only HALF of this half of a book. The rest is actually the footnotes, appendices, notes to poems, glossary, bibliography and indices (including indices for every poem by author and by first line) for this beast of a translation/compilation project. This includes a lot of additional commentary and other poems and makes for pretty interesting reading itself, even without the rest of the volumes/parts. The price can definitely be scary and an issue for a lot of people, so if you’re interested in it, I suggest try checking it out at your library or on Google Books first. (In fact, Google Books is how I learned of this book in the first place.)

For me, the depth of insight for the poems was fantastic. It gave me a lot more appreciation for the scenes, including the mental state of the characters, plus a million more symbols, metaphors and ideas for my own creative works like the Genjimonogatari illustration series, North Bound and other original stuff. 

It also clarified several fuzzy translation questions I had that relied on specific knowledge of Heian culture and history/evolution of the use of the language and wasn’t easily found in Google searches or online language resources. And even if you’re already familiar with common allusions, metaphors and puns/homophones in Japanese poetry, it’s still helpful to see them all summarized. And sometimes lamented by the book’s author too. SO MANY PONIES EATING GRASS. SO MANY PINES. Especially the pines. (It IS an amazing pun though, especially because it works in both English and Japanese. Pine [tree] -> to pine, matsu/pine tree -> matsu/to wait)

In term of the actual translations themselves, you may still find them coming off a bit roundabout in some cases when comparing to the original Japanese. But overall I find Cranston’s translations more direct/flavourful than how they were rendered in the Tyler translation, partly because of how Tyler chose to juggle his set of translator’s challenges for rendering not only meaning but also more technical aspects of the poetic form. So the imagery ends up being, to me, a lot more vivid. The overall effect usually ends up more colourful, more emotional, more erotic, more cutting, more entertaining, and whatnot. 

For example, Kashiwagi’s suitor’s poem in the Kocho/Butterflies chapter. When reading the novel, I was like, uh-huh, yah, OK. When I read it here, I was like whoa, dude, that’s a little intense lol. Cranston’s translation amps up the connotation of the heat of the water based on the rest of the line. For comparison:

(The original non-romaji Japanese in the samples following are thanks to the Japanese Text Initiative from the University of Virginia Library Etext Centre and the University of Pittsburgh East Asian Library. Their Tale of Genji page has a FREAKING AMAZING side-by-side comparison of the novel in original Japanese, modern Japanese and romaji. Bless them and the people who had to organize and wrangle that text together.)

Original Japanese: 思ふとも君は知らじなわきかへり 岩漏る水に色し見えねば Omou to mo / Kimi wa shiraji na / Wakikaeri Iwa moru misu ni / Iro shi mieneba

Tyler version: You can hardly know that my thoughts are all of you, for the stealthy spring welling from the rocks leaves no colour to be seen.

Cranston version: Hardly can you know / Of the longing that I feel, / For the boiling wave / Is merely colorless water / As it drains away from the rock.

Here’s another example. Oigimi (Agemaki in the book, as Cranston used Wayley’s names for the sisters) telling Kaoru that he’s the only one who’s been actually visiting them and Kaoru is like all riiiight :Db! From Shii ga Moto / Beneath the Oak chapter:

Oigimi’s poem 雪深き山のかけはし君ならで またふみかよふ跡を見ぬかな Yuki fukaki / Yama no kakehashi / Kimi narade Mata fumikayou / Ato o minu kana

Tyler: No brush but your own has marked the steep mountain trails buried deep in snow / with footprints, while back and forth letters go across the hills.

Cranston: Over the bridges / Clinging to the cliffs along / Our deep-snow mountains / No letter-bearer leaves his trace: / Those footprints are yours alone.

Kaoru’s reply つららとぢ駒ふみしだく山川を しるべしがてらまづや渡らむ Tsurara toji / Koma fumishidaku / Yamakawa o Shirube shigatera / Mazu ya wataramu

Tyler: Then let it be I who firsts ride across these hills, though on his mission, / where ice under my horse’s hooves crackles along frozen streams.

Cranston: In the sheets of ice / Covering the mountain streams / My steed crushes / Such letters as form my reason, / My first, to cross as a guide.

In other examples, Genji’s “*throws hands in the air* I give up” poetic reply to Suetsumuhana about how she keeps using Robes of Cathay/Chinese cloak imagery in her poems in the original Japanese alongside the translation cracked me up even more. And one of my favourites is a pair of poems between the future Akashi Empress (as a child) and her birth-mother the Akashi lady. It’s really sad, sweet and cute all at the same time and completely flew under my radar when I read the novel originally.

The poetry analysis for the Uji chapters is especially intriguing. The plot pointedly pits Niou against Kaoru as opposing personalities with particular similarities and contrasts that drive their relationship with each other and with the woman they’re competing for. Especially in the latter half of the story, a lot of their poems, even ones written independently (i.e., to Ukifune), are specifically composed to highlight those attributes and play off of each other.

Finally, it’s also super interesting to see my experience with the narrative changes through the lens of the poems. Obviously, as I mentioned, some things I easily missed without paying as much attention to the poems in between the rest of the story. But also, some prominent characters have very few poems, so the narrative shifts away from them. Meanwhile, a number of otherwise very minor or usually overlooked characters stand out even more, thanks to the fineness, loveliness, resonance, and sometimes just sheer consistent presence of their poetry. This book definitely gave me a lot of additional perspective on the Tale of Genji, and enhanced my appreciation of the novel and the skill behind its crafting!