#i think ruth would work part time as a mechanic because her special interest is motor vehicles

[jitteryjive]

i was thinking about what the tooniverse characters would do as part time or volunteer jobs or just their jobs in general and it really resonates with me that blu would probably become a piano teacher. i mean they absolutely love piano even after the luxury incident and they are genuinely kind when they’re not. you know. tormenting ruth they’d teach piano to the kids living around lane parade

[welcometotheocverse]

Marvel OCs ( wip )

Name: Nico Ikol

Story:

Faceclaim: Logan Lerman

Summary: Let’s get one thing straight, Nico was absolutely not some kinda norse god Okay? Nor the reborn version of one or whatever. They were just a normal kid. 

Okay so they sorta had a knack for getting people to agree with them and fine they’ve been having dreams about a blonde man with way too long hair and lightning and then there’s the whole...powers thing.

But I mean, aside from that.

And oh yeah the guy from their dreams is at the door claiming he’s their lost long brother. 

Name: Ruth Parker

Story: tbd

Faceclaim: Rowan Blachard

Summary: Ruthie Paker has been dubbed her brother’s shadow from the first time they arrived at their aunt and uncle’s doorstep. The siblings have been together through everything; their parent’s deaths, their adoption by their aunt and uncle, their uncle’s death. It was the Parker kids against the world.

So when Peter starts acting weird Ruthie’s the first ( and it starts to dawn on her, the only one) who notices.

Name:  Astrid Odinsdotter

Story: tbd

Faceclaim: Dove Cameron

Summary: Loki wasn’t the only child stolen from a battlefield. Nor was he the only one Odin and Freya raised as their own. Astrid was raised along side her brother as the princess of Asgard unware of her parentage; but her world gets thrown into utter chaos first when her brother is exiled to Migard and then when her true parentage is brought to light.  

Name: Grace Wilder.

Story: tbd

Faceclaim: Kat Graham

Summary: tbd ( takes place in Runways) 

Name: Isabelle Nyx

Story: tbd

Faceclaim: Holland Roden

Summary: Heir apparent to Nyx Incorporated, Isabelle like all of the PRIDE kids seems to have it made. Never mind the fact that her best friend killed herself or that her friend group fell apart soon after. 

On the anniversary of Amy’s death, Isa tries reaching out to her former friends but out of everyone, Alex Wilder seems to be the only one interested in mourning Amy with her. She’s surprised when the others join them, and even more surprised by what they find out.

“Fuck our parents. How about we actually run away.”

Name: Michelle -Miche- De Santos

Story: tbd

Faceclaim: Siena Agudong.

Summary: Miche  knows the church of  the Gibberin is evil, knows that they paste on happy grins to prey on runaway kids. She knows because they killed her sister. The problem is no one believes her. It doesn’t matter though, she’s not gonna stop until she figures out how to make people see the rich assholes for the evil they are.

Except that she wasn’t planning to find the very children of the people she’s sworn vengeance against. 

And apparently, they ran away.

Name: Lucille Harkness.

Story: tbd.

Faceclaim: Amber Benson

Summary: Lucille knows about Agatha Harkness, how could she not. She grew up on stories of the witch that betrayed her coven ( Lucille’s coven) and committed the most atrocious of acts against their own during the time of the Salem trials. Agatha’s name was whispered in Lucille’s family, a warning of how reaching for forbidden knowledge could corrupt; a horror story of the witch who slaughtered her own kind without a care in the world. 

Still she never expected to find any trace of her in her lifetime, never expected Agatha to be more than whispers and campfire side stories, much less find out she’s in  a bubble of  Chaos Magic in a small town in New Jersey. 

Name: Nancy Keener

Story: The Mechanic

Faceclaim: Sadie Sink

Summary: tbd

Name: Tracey Stein.

Story: tbd

Faceclaim: Sophie Lillis

Summary: Tracey has known her dad was evil since he beat her brother over a B-. She’s also known better than to think anyone would believe her. Except for of course her brother. They both knew it, they covered for each other, protected each other and that was enough. Even when their social group expanded to include the other PRIDE kids, it had always been her and Chase against the world. When Nico’s sister died and their little friend group falls apart it’s still the two of them against the world. 

And then on the anniversary of Amy’s death the siblings find themselves at Alex Wilder’s house of all places. Turns out her dad’s not the only evil asshole in their parent’s little social club. Turns out all their parents are.

Turns out they have to runaway. 

Name: Gwendolyn -Wendy- Maximoff

Story: tbd.

Faceclaim: Millie Bobby Brown

Summary: Finding out her brother was a mutant and that the men who came to look for him when she was five years old, finding out she herself was a mutant, finding out there was a special school for mutants. Gwendolyn Maximoff thought the weirdest parts of her life were behind her. She’s starting to settle in at the institute, starting to call it home, and she has her big brother with her which is the most important night.

Then overnight Peter disappears. Months go by with Hank and the professor poring over resources and Wendy wondering when her brother might come home. When they finally find him she demands to be the one to go find him.

As it turns out she might be the only who can; and that’s how she finds herself in Westview New Jersey...on an entire different dimension. 

Name:  Kamila Maximoff

Story: ( Love ) Persevering 

Faceclaim: Malina Weissman

Summary: Kamila lives in Westview, a little town in New Jersey where nothing out of the ordinary ever happens. Kamila lives with her older sister Wanda and Wanda’s boyfriend Vision who might as well be her father for all intents and purposes. Life s simple in Westview, Kamila wakes up every day and goes to school. She helps babysit her little cousins and gets help for her advanced courses from Viz. She and Wanda are as close as ever...she thinks.

Kamila doesn’t always remember what she learned in school. Their neighbor Agnes gives her the creeps. She doesn’t remember the twins turning 1, or 2, or 3. She doesn’t know why Wanda’s the closest thing she’s had to a mother but she is. She wakes up screaming sometimes with nightmares of Vision’s body and her sister screaming and turning to dust. She feels like time isn’t passing and is passing too fast at the same time. She remembers things..things that never happened. ( why would she ever be in sci-fi YA novel looking lab? Why would Wanda?) 

Kamila lives in Westview New Jersey with her family; in a suburban little town where nothing ever seems to happen. But she’s starting to think their lives are anything but boring. 

Name: Anne Rogers

Story: tbd

Faceclaim: Sarah Michelle Gellar

Summary: Steve Roger’s genetic clone. Shield’s pet project. Avenger’s Family Member. Darcy Lewis’ girlfriend. Anne’s gone through a lot of changes throughout her existence. And a lot of loss. 

She refuses to have Darcy be one of them.

“I’m not gonna ask again assholes. Where the hell is my girlfriend?”

Might end Tyler Hayward’s entire career and existence.

Name: Audra  Ward.

Story: tbd

Faceclaim:  Zoey Deutch

Summary: Audra doesn’t remember much before her brother gained custody of her as baby. That’s what happens when your grandparents and uncle are a load of abusive assholes ( that much Grant did tell her) She doesn’t know what led to their deaths, how Grant was able to find her and gain custody when he was a teenager himself. She doesn’t know anything other that the life they build together after.  Still she has her  brother, and school,  and her life is...well not normal. One does not simply have a normal life with a brother who works for S.H.I.E.L.D but all in all her life is good. It’s her and Grant against the world, and she has a plan to graduate early and find her own calling helping to keep the world safe from H.Y.D.R.A. like her big brother does. 

Then Grant’s team finds a break in  tracking down a hacker and her life gets decidedly  more messy.  

Other Plot bunnies:https://welcometotheocverse.tumblr.com/post/651928008282816512/marvel-plot-bunnies

[newstfionline]

Why there’s no such thing as a gifted child

Wendy Berliner, The Guardian, 25 July 2017

When Maryam Mirzakhani died at the tragically early age of 40 this month, the news stories talked of her as a genius. The only woman to win the Fields Medal--the mathematical equivalent of a Nobel prize--and a Stanford professor since the age of 31, this Iranian-born academic had been on a roll since she started winning gold medals at maths Olympiads in her teens.

It would be easy to assume that someone as special as Mirzakhani must have been one of those gifted children who excel from babyhood. The ones reading Harry Potter at five or admitted to Mensa not much later. The child that takes maths GCSE while still in single figures, or a rarity such as Ruth Lawrence, who was admitted to Oxford while her contemporaries were still in primary school.

But look closer and a different story emerges. Mirzakhani was born in Tehran, one of three siblings in a middle-class family whose father was an engineer. The only part of her childhood that was out of the ordinary was the Iran-Iraq war, which made life hard for the family in her early years. Thankfully it ended around the time she went to secondary school.

Mirzakhani did go to a highly selective girls’ school but maths wasn’t her interest--reading was. She loved novels and would read anything she could lay her hands on; together with her best friend she would prowl the book stores on the way home from school for works to buy and consume.

As for maths, she did rather poorly at it for the first couple of years in her middle school, but became interested when her elder brother told her about what he’d learned. He shared a famous maths problem from a magazine that fascinated her--and she was hooked. The rest is mathematical history.

Is her background unusual? Apparently not. Most Nobel laureates were unexceptional in childhood. Einstein was slow to talk and was dubbed the dopey one by the family maid. He failed the general part of the entry test to Zurich Polytechnic--though they let him in because of high physics and maths scores. He struggled at work initially, failing to get academic posts and being passed over for promotion at the Swiss Patent Office because he wasn’t good enough at machine technology. But he kept plugging away and eventually rewrote the laws of Newtonian mechanics with his theory of relativity.

Lewis Terman, a pioneering American educational psychologist, set up a study in 1921 following 1,470 Californians, who excelled in the newly available IQ tests, throughout their lives. None ended up as the great thinkers of their age that Terman expected they would. But he did miss two future Nobel prize winners--Luis Alvarez and William Shockley, both physicists--whom he dismissed from the study as their test scores were not high enough.

There is a canon of research on high performance, built over the last century, that suggests it goes way beyond tested intelligence. On top of that, research is clear that brains are malleable, new neural pathways can be forged, and IQ isn’t fixed. Just because you can read Harry Potter at five doesn’t mean you will still be ahead of your contemporaries in your teens.

According to my colleague, Prof Deborah Eyre, with whom I’ve collaborated on the book Great Minds and How to Grow Them, the latest neuroscience and psychological research suggests most people, unless they are cognitively impaired, can reach standards of performance associated in school with the gifted and talented. However, they must be taught the right attitudes and approaches to their learning and develop the attributes of high performers--curiosity, persistence and hard work, for example--an approach Eyre calls “high performance learning”. Critically, they need the right support in developing those approaches at home as well as at school.

So, is there even such a thing as a gifted child? It is a highly contested area. Prof Anders Ericsson, an eminent education psychologist at Florida State University, is the co-author of Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. After research going back to 1980 into diverse achievements, from music to memory to sport, he doesn’t think unique and innate talents are at the heart of performance. Deliberate practice, that stretches you every step of the way, and around 10,000 hours of it, is what produces the expert. It’s not a magic number--the highest performers move on to doing a whole lot more, of course, and, like Mirzakhani, often find their own unique perspective along the way.

Ericsson’s memory research is particularly interesting because random students, trained in memory techniques for the study, went on to outperform others thought to have innately superior memories--those you might call gifted.

He got into the idea of researching the effects of deliberate practice because of an incident at school, in which he was beaten at chess by someone who used to lose to him. His opponent had clearly practised.

But it is perhaps the work of Benjamin Bloom, another distinguished American educationist working in the 1980s, that gives the most pause for thought and underscores the idea that family is intrinsically important to the concept of high performance.

Bloom’s team looked at a group of extraordinarily high achieving people in disciplines as varied as ballet, swimming, piano, tennis, maths, sculpture and neurology, and interviewed not only the individuals but their parents, too.

He found a pattern of parents encouraging and supporting their children, in particular in areas they enjoyed themselves. Bloom’s outstanding adults had worked very hard and consistently at something they had become hooked on young, and their parents all emerged as having strong work ethics themselves.

While the jury is out on giftedness being innate and other factors potentially making the difference, what is certain is that the behaviours associated with high levels of performance are replicable and most can be taught--even traits such as curiosity.

Eyre says we know how high performers learn. From that she has developed a high performing learning approach that brings together in one package what she calls the advanced cognitive characteristics, and the values, attitudes and attributes of high performance. She is working on the package with a group of pioneer schools, both in Britain and abroad.

But the system needs to be adopted by families, too, to ensure widespread success across classes and cultures. Research in Britain shows the difference parents make if they take part in simple activities pre-school in the home, supporting reading for example. That support shows through years later in better A-level results, according to the Effective Pre-School, Primary and Secondary study, conducted over 15 years by a team from Oxford and London universities.

Eye-opening spin-off research, which looked in detail at 24 of the 3,000 individuals being studied who were succeeding against the odds, found something remarkable about what was going in at home. Half were on free school meals because of poverty, more than half were living with a single parent, and four in five were living in deprived areas.

The interviews uncovered strong evidence of an adult or adults in the child’s life who valued and supported education, either in the immediate or extended family or in the child’s wider community. Children talked about the need to work hard at school and to listen in class and keep trying. They referenced key adults who had encouraged those attitudes.

Einstein, the epitome of a genius, clearly had curiosity, character and determination. He struggled against rejection in early life but was undeterred. Did he think he was a genius or even gifted? No. He once wrote: “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer. Most people say that it is the intellect which makes a great scientist. They are wrong: it is character.”

And what about Mirzakhani? Her published quotations show someone who was curious and excited by what she did and resilient. One comment sums it up. “Of course, the most rewarding part is the ‘Aha’ moment, the excitement of discovery and enjoyment of understanding something new--the feeling of being on top of a hill and having a clear view. But most of the time, doing mathematics for me is like being on a long hike with no trail and no end in sight.”

The trail took her to the heights of original research into mathematics in a cruelly short life. That sounds like unassailable character. Perhaps that was her gift.

Great Minds and How to Grow Them, by Wendy Berliner & Deborah Eyre.