#individual states should not get to chose curriculum

[secretlyofthefeywild]

lol my father is ranting abt how good trump is

it must be nice to live such a privileged life that your biggest concern abt the upcoming election is shit like the price of oil and keeping your guns. my biggest fear is a genocide against queer ppl. my biggest fear is those guns you keep becoming my cause of death. it must be nice that you can chose to ignore entire major issues bc you don't think they matter.

to you trump vs biden means political discomfort. to me it could very well mean my life.

[isadomna]

JUAN LUIS VIVES AND CATHERINE OF ARAGON

Juan Luis Vives was a Spanish humanist born in Valencia, the capital of one of the patrimonial states of the Crown of Aragon. He came from a family that had been persecuted by the Inquisition and which may have practised crypto-Judaism. Vives, who had attended the city’s newly founded university, left Spain in 1509. He did not return. He settled first in Paris and continued his studies with scholastic logic, but five years later he moved to Bruges, where he remained until 1516. It was at the court of Brussels that he met Erasmus for the first time and where the ensuing deep and enduring friendship, which became such a central feature in Vives’s life, began. Vives had taken up a position as tutor to Guillaume de Croy, bishop of Cambrai. Vives lived in Louvain, teaching at the Collegium Trilingue, until Croy’s death. By 1521 Vives was already benefitting from a small pension from Queen Catherine of Aragon, Charles V's aunt. At the insistence of his friend Erasmus, Vives prepared an elaborate commentary on Augustine's De Civitate Dei, which was published in 1522 with a dedication to Henry VIII of England.

Apparently impressed, Henry VIII invited him to come to England in 1523 and make it his “scholarly home”. Vives went on to become a popular lecturer at Oxford, “where the King and Queen went to hear him.”  When it came time to decide how Princess Mary should be educated, it was Juan Luis Vives to whom Catherine turned for help in designing a course of study. Later she would also seek the aid of Erasmus. Others humanist scholars also contributed to Mary’s education in various ways. Catherine of Aragon commissioned Vives to write De Institutione Feminae Christianae in 1523, shortly before his arrival in England. A book he dedicated to the English queen. 

Moved by the holiness of your life and your ardent zeal for sacred studies, I have endeavoured to write something for your Majesty on the education of the Christian Woman … your daughter Mary will read these recommendations and will reproduce them as she models herself on the example of your goodness and wisdom to be found within your home. She will do this assuredly, and unless she alone belies all human expectations, must of necessity be virtuous and holy as the offspring of you and Henry VIII, such a noble and honoured pair.

Queen Catherine produced money for a translation of The Education of a Christian Woman from Latin into English. The English version was reprinted eight times during the sixteenth century. Once Catherine took up the theory of female education, she did not limit herself to its reference to her daughter. She began to form around Mary a school for the daughters of noblemen, on the pattern of that for noblemen’s sons once formed around her brother Juan, and she even persuaded a number of the older ladies of the court, notably her sister-in-law, the Duchess of Suffolk, to resume the study of Latin and take up a course of serious reading. She turned over a copy of Vives’s treatise to Thomas More, whose own daughters were probably the best educated young women of their class in England, and urged him to translate it into English, or to get it translated, so that its ideas might be available to everybody who could take advantage of them.

For the next five years, Vives spent some part of every year in England, lecturing eloquently at Oxford, spending much time at court, and writing joyously on such a variety of subjects that Thomas More professed himself quite abashed before the performance of the younger man. In October 1524, Catherine commissioned Luis Vives to write a more specifc curriculum of study for her seven-year-old daughter. The resulting De Ratione Studii Puerilis (On a Plan of Study for Children) was dedicated to the young princess herself. As Mary got older, Vives advised that Catherine revise her educational program more precisely: “Time will admonish her as to more exact details, and thy singular wisdom will discover for her what they should be.”  

Additionally, Vives also often accompanied the Queen to the abbey at Syon on the west side of London of the river Thames. Syon Abbey was renowned as a place of spiritual learning and a regular meeting place of scholars, much favored by the pious Queen. Catherine found in Vives a prudent adviser, a brilliant teacher, a personal friend, and the ideal partner in long, nostalgic, confidential and spirited conversations in their native language. One of those conversations impressed Vives in some particular, mysterious way. From Oxford , on January 25, 1524, Vives wrote to Cranevelt:

At times I was able to have some philosophical talks with the Queen, one of the purest and most Christian souls I have ever seen. Thus, a couple of days ago,  on our way by barge to a certain monastery of nuns, we came to talk about adversity and prosperity in this life. The Queen said: “If I could chose between the two, I would prefer an equal share of both, neither complete adversity nor total success. And If I had to choose between extreme sorrow and extreme well-being, I think I would prefer the former to the latter, for people in disgrace need only some consolation while those who are too successful frequently lose their minds.”

In 1528 he forfeited Henry’s favour by opposing the royal divorce from Catherine of Aragon, assisting her with spoken and written advice. The king retaliated by placing Vives and a servant of Catherine under house arrest for six weeks. Both men were interrogated by Wolsey, and Vives was ordered to state his communication with the queen: after a lengthy, idealistic preamble on the sacredness of confidences between individuals, he reluctantly complied. The object of the confinement was to keep Catherine’s advisers away from court, and both she and Vives judged it prudent that he leave the country on his release. Vives returned to Bruges.

He returned to England late in 1528 with two Flemish jurists sent at Catherine’s request from her sister-in-law, Margaret of Austria. However, Vives found himself unpopular with the queen as well as the king: he offered the unpalatable advice that, since it was useless to defend her in the court at Blackfriars, it would be better if she were condemned unheard, since Henry would have difficulty justifying this. Catherine, though ultimately adopting this policy, interpreted his answer as a treacherous refusal to commit himself to her cause. As the king had done, she too stopped the pension she had granted him, and Vives left England for ever. He continued, however, to follow the proceedings, and he gave Catherine a generous encomium in his book named De Oflcio Mariti published in 1529. In the chapter dedicated to choosing a wife he referred to Queen Catherine on the following manner:

“Not in all women all imperfections are present, and in those who have them are not present to the same degree. There were in fact, and there are not in little number, some with a stronger and manlier heart than many men. Abundant amongst the gentile: Cleobulina, Hipparchia, Diotima, Lucretia, Cornelia, Porcia, Cloelia, Sulpicia. But also amongst our martyrs are many women that have bigger eloquence that Athena and more courage than Rome. And Christ wanted that in our time there was an example that will expand through posterity: the example of Catherine of Spain, Queen of England, wife of Henry VIII, about her you can say with greater truth that Valerius said about Lucretia: by an error of Nature, a woman’s body was grace with a male spirit”.

Sources:

María Dowling,  Humanist Support for Katherine of Aragon

Garrett Mattingly, Catherine of Aragon

Carlos O. Noreña, Juan Luis Vives

Anna Whitelock, Mary Tudor: Princess, Bastard, Queen

Charles Fantazzi,  A Companion to Juan Luis Vives

Leanne Croon Hickman, Katherine of Aragon: A “Pioneer of Women’s Education”? Humanism and Women’s Education in Early Sixteenth Century England.

Giles Tremlett,  CATHERINE OF ARAGON Henry’s Spanish Queen 

http://emlo-portal.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/collections/?catalogue=juan-luis-vives

[rainbhrts94writes]

Tephra 02

Hello! Here’s the next thrilling instalment, hope you enjoy the banter as much as I do! :)

POV: YN Warnings: None this chapter, mostly intro stuff Word Count: 2.2K Rating: PG

Master List

Tephra 02

When Imogen told you Prince Namjoon of Atlas had been searching for you in the mage courses by name, you nearly spit out your drink. It's not like you had forgotten about him or anything. Who could forget dimples like that? I mean, really. It was more like you didn't typically associate with people from any of the four kingdoms outside the Min family. 

"What do you think he wants?" Imogen asked you over dinner. 

"Who knows, it's not like I'm anything special." You grumbled, finishing off the food on your plate. 

"You're kidding, right? Did you forget you're the youngest addition to the Academy's guard ever?" Imogen scoffed. 

"You should stop bringing that up. The last formal training I had was when I was ten. The fact that anyone thinks I'm qualified is embarrassing." You rolled your eyes.

"So what is all my night time training to you? Chopped liver?" Imogen smiled as she spoke, spinning her fork around in the air. "Besides, who's embarrassed?"

"All of the old cranky ass guards who worked for years to hone their magical skills to defend the Academy from the invisible powers that threaten us all." You said in a mocking spooky tone. 

"You're not wrong. Did you see General Karp's face when Lady Cecilia offered to promote you to Captain of the Evening Forces?" Imogen let out a roaring laugh at her memory. 

"I'm still saying it had to be a prank. The Headmistress is an air mage by nature. Seriously, we're always out on night rounds. Just because I've caught a few shady individuals lurking around the gate doesn't mean I need to be in charge of my own task force." You poked your fork at your tablemate as you tried to make a point. 

"I don't think she was kidding. You're a great mage, YN, and you lead your peers with this weird calm I've only ever seen in TV dramas. Your skills were obvious last month."

"Are you talking about that landslide again?" You asked, exasperated, deciding not to pick fun at her terrible choice in behavioral reference. "For the last time, we didn't do anything special. The royal family of Atlas and friends already had over half the trench built by the time we got there."

"You're right, but there's no way they would have been able to hold that line alone. They also didn't think to make it deeper while it was filling up, did they? That was all you and Tessa." Imogen stated, looking snarky as she sipped on her tea.

"See, the key there is Tessa. You really think I could have blown that much earth around without focusing on projectile boulders if she and the others hadn't been there." You argued back.

"I do. Even then, you proved my point. Teamwork, you got the stuff of leaders, kid." Then she paused. "Wait, YN."

"What?" You looked up at Imogen, concerned with her tone.

"Prince Namjoon mentioned in his report of the situation that he had narrowly escaped a flying boulder!"

"Yea, and?" You pressed her, trying to find out what Imogen was so excited about.

"Was that you or Tessa?" She asked, nearly bouncing in her seat.

"So what if it was me?" 

"YN! He's been out looking for you for over a month! What if he feels indebted to you and wants to make you an offer?!" Imogen leaped up out of her seat, slamming her hands on the table. "Something to repay that debt, the people of Atlas hate debt!"

"Don't most people hate debt?" You deadpanned. "Would you stop with the wild fantasies? You're supposed to be my guardian."

"Exactly, I'm your guardian. I told your parents I'd take care of you, and if that means marrying you off to a prince of Atlas, then so be it!" Imogen's voice grew in enthusiasm as she pressed on. 

"There are so many reasons why that's not going to work, and you know it. Did my folks know you were clinically insane before they put me in your care? Does the Academy know one of their professors is straight out of the looney bin?" You asked, trying to hide the amusement in your voice. 

"Nope, nobody knows I've escaped." Imogen winked. "You're not going to tell on me, are you?"

"Not until I've graduated, I still need that free tuition." You replied, holding in a laugh.

"Is that all I am to you? A ticket to free education!" Imogen put a hand to her chest and feigned hurt as she flopped back in her chair.

"That and my pseudo-mom."

"You're not allowed to get sentimental with me after being rude." Imogen snapped at the comment, a gentle smile on her face. 

"Whatever you say." You rolled your eyes and collected your empty plates from the table. 

"So, what do you want me to do about the prince?" Imogen asked. "I can only deflect his questions for so long before he sends someone more powerful digging around."

"I don't know." You tipped your head as you put the dishes in the sink. "Find out what he wants first, I guess."

"That I can do," Imogen exclaimed. 

---

The school had a strict curfew. It was how they ensured nobody knew about your class and the inner workings of the Academy. Technically, Spiros was a refugee city, despite it's long, illustrious history. 

As the story goes, Neith the Great Mother descended from the heavens adapting to the life of human's already present on Sias. Those born of her newfound flesh and blood were known as The Children, and together they shared their knowledge and godlike powers with humanity. As time went on, The Children grew in strength and popularity, each now a god in their own right. With power came struggle, and when they fought, so did the humans who followed them. 

The conflict immediately led to a hundred-year war, resulting in the fracturing of the continent and its people. To keep the peace, Neith separated those with magic into four territories and left her home open to all seeking refuge from her children and those who sought to harm them for their perceived powerlessness. 

In the years of peace that followed, the Academy was built to educate those who resided in Spiros safely. They brought in people from all walks of life and the different territories to balance out the curriculum. This angered one of The Children, the daughter Opis who with the help o hr followers sought revenge. During the ensuing battle, Neith perished, the four kingdoms established themselves as they are now, and Spiros was taken and divided into sections to be jointly ruled and controlled. 

One could say that for the past four hundred years since the end of the original conflict, all the four Kingdoms had fought for was a place to dump the underprivileged, unwanted, and their country's political adversaries. As such, over the years Spiros had developed into an eclectic city, one that you'd always really enjoyed visiting so it wasn’t so bad living here. It was a place heavy in multiple cultures, lifestyles, and most importantly the food. 

Your parents had been sure to teach you all about the world when you were little. Spiros, in particular, had always made your dad smile. He had explained to you that nearly eighty years ago, the Adyan Empire was trusted with the duty to appoint a new Headmistress for the Academy. Fortunately, the Royal Min family chose a bishop from The Church of Shango. She was a kind and thoughtful woman who prioritized her students' wellbeing and growth before all else. Not only that, but because of the Adyan Empire's ongoing situation, the Academy's top brass bent the rules to accommodate the common folk of Spiros. 

As stated in the peace treaty, refugees and those exiled were not to participate in the use and learning of magic of any kind. You had been told by Imogen years back that the Academy read the laws and decided it didn't mean the children of those who had been exiled, since they were technically born as people of Spiros, instead of refugees of another country. For that reason, the Headmistress decided to educate the commonwealth, leaving magic training until the students of Spiros could be protected by the cover of darkness and away from prying eyes.  

When the time came to appoint a new Head, the Arabeillan Alliance chose Lady Cecilia. Not only had she figured out what the previous Headmistress had started all on her own, she found it so delightfully tricky that learning was allowed to continue uninhibited. She also did her best to make sure Spiros students were as trained in magic and combat arts as those from the four nations.

The air mages had always freaked you out. On top of never being able to see their attacks coming, they were capable of a host of inhumane magic that you had to trust they didn't use out of sheer benevolence. For that reason alone, you had joined the guard when Lady Cecilia told you to. Aside from Cecilia's wickedly psychic abilities and her probably having a reason for instating you, you didn't want the air ripped out of your lungs anytime soon, which is precisely how you found yourself here this evening. Staring at the gate, wondering why being on guard duty was so sought after. 

Seriously, you could be in class learning, but no; According to Lady Cecilia, there wasn't anything more for you to learn in the courses here. Since you couldn't get her to explain what she meant by that, you did as you were told and stood there. Technically it could be worse; the job could be exciting, which just meant it was unnecessarily dangerous, and you didn't need that, not when there were still things you needed to do.

With curfew having started only a moment ago, you waited in silence, watching the sunset. It was that perfect time of the year where you got a show of sherbet skies just as your shift started. It was excellent and made up for the monotony of your guard duties. Though maybe you shouldn't have been so concentrated on the sky since the door was now slowly creaking open, and you were not ready. 

"Halt!" You projected, "Who goes there?"

"Who goes there? What is this? A bad period movie?" You recognize that voice.

"Yoongi, seriously, what are you doing using the main door? There are much better ways to find me, yanno?" You sighed as your friend stepped towards you.

"Oh, I know, but he doesn't." Yoongi gestured to the man now standing behind him. "This the one you're looking for?"

Even though there wasn't a verbal answer, you'd recognize those dimples anywhere. "Long time no see Namjoon." 

"Interesting," Yoogi remarked.

"What, he didn't like 'Your Princeliness.'" You shrugged as you relaxed back into your position. "I'm just following orders."

"If you say so." Yoongi snickered as he turned to the second prince of Atlus. "Welp, she's all yours. I'm off."

"You're not going to stay?" Najoon asked.

"No, why? Do I need to?" Yoongi quirked an eyebrow as he crossed his arms.

"No! I just- how am I supposed to get back without getting caught?" Namjoon continued his questioning.

"That's my job now, dear. Unless you've got a problem with that?" You wondered aloud.

"No! Gods, why are you both so infuriating. You're clearly capable. I was just curious." Namjoon sighed as he rubbed the wrinkles out of his forehead. 

You stifled a laugh as you watched Namjoon work through his frustration. Once it was clear Yoongi had left, you turned your attention away from the door and out towards the town. "So, what can I do for you?"

"I uh, I wanted to say thank you." Namjoon bowed politely to you.

"You've been looking for me for this long just to say thank you?" You quirked an eyebrow.

"You knew I was looking for you?" Namjoon questioned back.

"Not really, just a hunch." You shrugged, trying not to give yourself away. "Yoongi did bring you here, which means you had to be visibly struggling for quite a while."

"That's a fair observation." Namjoon straightened himself out. "How do you know Yoongi, if you don't mind me asking?"

"We're related." You responded.

"That's a terrible joke." Namjoon sighed. "I should not have asked."

"So now that you've asked your more formal question, what do you really want?" You quirked an eyebrow.

"I'm honestly not sure?" Namjoon responded, relaxing against the looming stone wall behind him.

"That's a terrible reason to break curfew and seek out a stranger." You chuckled.

"It is, isn't it?" Namjoon laughed alongside you. "I think I wanted to be friends?"

"You think?" You raised your eyebrows, intrigued. "I'll have you know I'm a great friend. There's not much to think about."

"You shouldn't wink. It's creepy." Namjoon's lips twitched up in amusement.

"Oh? What's this now?" You leaned forward, meeting Namjoon's gaze. "I know nobody in the capital taught you to talk like that."

"You'll find that I'm very well-read." Namjoon puffed out his chest as he boasted.

"Oh my gods, you do need friends." You laughed out loud, not hiding the smile on your face. "Answer me this, though, why me."

"Why not you?" at that, you stuck out your hand.

"Touché"

[simplelittlebrowngirljae]

What being a black student at a PWI taught me

I grew up in working class family. My father was in the military and my mother was a civil servant. Neither had went to college, but they did have job training. My sister was a first generation college student of our immediate household, although I had an aunt who had her PhD and her daughter had gone to college and had her Master’s and was officer in the Air Force, we didn’t speak much about college in my family until it was time for my sister to graduate. I went along on college tours, financial aid nights and many other things associated with getting ready for the college experience. It was very exciting to see what this was all about because this was not anything we had ever experienced. My mother became ultra-educated and an advocate for my sister and wanted to get the most for our dollar and the best experience possible for my sister’s college years. My sister ultimately landed on attending Norfolk State University, and urban Historically Black College and University or HBCU for short. She also received a prestigious scholarship. When the time came, we dropped her off the short 30 minute drive and wished her well. She came home virtually every weekend or we went over there to attend events and football games and I got to see what it was like to be in college too. And I learned what things I wanted in a school and started to think about if I even wanted to attend college.

College was a foreign concept because many of my peers came from these legacies of college graduates from specific schools and that is all the spoke about, even when I was in middle school. They pretty much already knew where they were going because their parents graduated from a specific school, and their grandparents graduated from there and their great grandparents graduated as well. I was not so lucky and had to do so much research about degree programs and campuses and what I actually wanted in a school because well, college just didn’t run in my family like that. While yes my sister went to college, and I had an aunt and a cousin who attended school, we just didn’t openly discuss life after high school except that you had 3 options: get a job, go to school or join the military. I knew I couldn’t join the military because I was flat footed and had asthma so it was get a job or go to school. If I wanted any type of future, I was told going to school was the path I should take. So I started exploring colleges and then I took the SAT’s and ACT’s and school brochures started flooding my mailbox. I started making a list of schools I wanted to see because of what they offered. I attended local alumni events of schools to chat with past students and get a feel if that school could be for me.

The summer before my senior year I took a road trip to visit several schools in South Carolina and North Carolina. I loved them but then my mom broke my heart and told me if I go too far away from home I wouldn’t be able to come home like I want. So I started to factor distance into my choices. As my senior year began, I started looking at schools close to home and there was one school in particular that was just AMAZING and I fell in love with. Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) was just different. It was in an urban setting and just yelled ‘’Hello Opportunities”. I went to the campus many times, worked hard and applied. I received acceptance letters from so many schools and waited anxiously for my decision from VCU. The day it came I was beyond elated I almost hit the roof! I was ready to start this next chapter of my life.

Now, I applied to a variety of schools, to include HBCUs and PWIs or Predominantly White Institutions. I didn’t even think about if a school was an HBCU or a PWI. I just applied based on how their programs ranked. I wanted a good education. And honestly when counselors were working with us, that did not even come up and my counselor was black and graduated from an HBCU. So why does it matter? I will tell you why. In this day in age, it is almost as if you are judged about your blackness by where you went to college or the things you did while in college. HBCUs do provide a very unique experience and are the pillar of the black community, I will say that. There is a magic and wonder that is unparalleled, especially at their sporting events and homecomings. I will say I did not have that where I attended college. And HBCUs were there when White schools would not allow us to attend. I respect them. However, it was not for me. I visited several and did not feel at home. When I walked on VCU’s campus I felt at home. And that is why I chose to attend. But because I chose to attend a PWI does not mean I do not support HBCUs. I 100% do. And because I did not attend an HBCU does not mean I am any less of a black person. I am still very black, please remember that. I have been made fun of and criticized for my choices, or told I am not really black because I went to a PWI and didn’t pledge as well ( meaning join a black sorority during my time there. That is not true either. Newsflash: you can attend a PWI and be black and not join a sorority or fraternity and maintain your blackness. My choice to attend was to grow myself and learn things and well, all of that happened. Let me share what I learned during my 4 years there:

 1. I can hold a diverse conversation- While at VCU, I came across some unique individuals. And for that reason I have had to adapt and adjust my conversations and ways of talking to many situations. I am grateful to have been in an environment that allowed to experience such because it has made me more aware of the population I am engaging with and tune into sensitive to topics of conversation, in addition forcing me listen to understand and not just respond.

 2. I am very cultured – VCU is one the most diverse schools in the world. We actually have a campus in Qatar! We have so many countries represented it is just overwhelming! I remember checking into my dorm and seeing people from India, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Laos, Israel, Nigeria, Puerto Rico among other countries and it just blew my mind. Where I am from, we had some diversity, but nothing as rich as this! With so many diverse cultures I learned about different traditions, their food and other great things. Around campus we had food from these different cultures as well. I remember tasting Indian food for the first time, and then Thai and then Venezuelan. It was like “whooooaaa… what have I been missing my whole life?!?!”

 3. I know how to network- now, not saying I would not learn this at an HBCU but I had many an opportunity to attend so many events at the State Capital and with other officials which has made me learn to network and engage with others. These opportunities have been unparalleled and I am beyond grateful to have attended this institution and to have had mentors who worked hard to present these opportunities to us students.

 4. I have refined my public speaking skills- this is self-explanatory. I had to give umpteenth presentations and take God knows how many classes on public speaking, but I am thankful for the rigorous curriculum that was provided to me that made me refine these skills. With my public speaking skills also came great research skills so I am grateful for that as well.

 5. I learned about topics I would have never imagined to include veganism, Islam, Celiac’s disease, and various holidays- this is pretty self-explanatory. Being around so much diversity and around many unique persons allowed me to learn about many different things. So many things I had not been exposed to and I was beyond thankful to have been in an environment to learn, experience and understand.

 6. I met my best friend who is from a totally different county and culture than myself- my best friend is form Sudan and is Muslim. She has taught me so much it’s unreal. Like I learned about different foods, about Africa, about Islam, the Quran, and not just learned about these things but have developed a strong respect from African culture and Islamic culture. She is one of the best things to happen to me and I swear I learn so many things from her every day…yes you read that correctly, I learn something new daily from her.

 7. I was presented with many opportunities to travel and participate in conferences and events- many of my professors belonged to many organizations and would speak at many conferences, they would have spaces available to take us to conferences with them and we would get credit for it! So I was able to travel to several conferences and meet amazing people and learn about various career paths and how to integrate what we were learning into the real world. All of that was invaluable.

 8. I learned it is okay to ask for help – this was a big one. I found myself in many a situation where things were not going as planned and I was epically failing. And my pride would not let me ask for help. But then things got so bad to where I had no choice. The crazy thing is, I should have asked for help sooner because I would have been better off. Like, those who were providing the help were more than kind and more than gracious and wanted to help. So the moral of the situation, don’t let your pride stand in the way of you getting what you need.

 9. I learned that therapy is great and not a bad thing- in Black culture, therapy is shunned. And we often suffer in silence. I was very stressed out one semester and it came out as anger. So I went to the Student Counseling Center and go help. It was the best thing I ever did. At VCU, they publicize and encourage students to use counseling services. It is a beautiful thing. Never feel ashamed of needing therapy. It is there to help you, not harm you.

 10. I learned a lot about poverty and its effect on communities and America- VCU is an urban campus. The downfall of that is that there is a large homeless population that roams around the campus. Many of these persons have mental illness, and in a few of my courses we learned about whey people are homeless and how the resources for those with mental illness are almost nonexistent once they are discharged from inpatient care. We also learned how community mental health is a joke as well and many families often disown their family members who have mental illness because it becomes too much. We also learned that there are some homeless people who are actually not homeless and who have a lot of money and who just sit on the corner asking for money for fun. It was quite interesting to learn about such. On the flip side of all that we learned about the ‘working poor’ which are folks who may be working and barely providing for themselves but they live in substandard housing but cannot afford much else. We learned about the implications of such on public health and it taught me so much and guided my whole career essentially. Because of where VCU is located we actually got hands on service learning in such topics and it made our education worthwhile.

 11. I learned about drugs, alcohol, their distribution and economic impact in society – so many men would hang out on campus during the day trying to pick up women. And the sad part is, many were drug dealers and these young innocent girls did not know. After a while one would pick up on such, however we wouldn’t engage them to the point of a relationship. I would say I would engage theme enough to learn about drugs, and how they system worked and that was enough. Ladies, just know everything that glitters isn’t gold and you should respect yourself enough to walk away from situations. Know better, do better.

 12. I learned that self-care is imperative – we all take on so many things and it can get overwhelming. I learned in my 4 years it is essential to take breaks and set boundaries in order to protect your peace. People may get mad but you cannot pour from an empty bucket.

 13. I learned it is okay to not have it all figured out- college is supposed to be the best time of your life. However, as you get closer to graduation things get a bit scary. And there are some people who expect you to have it figured out. Well guess what, it is okay to not have it figured out. VCU had a great internship program and Career Services department. And it was mandatory for me to have a 700 hours of an internship to graduate and go to the Career Center 3 times before I graduated. I learned that it was okay not to have a concrete plan during these times. I learned that sometimes the plan you had will change direction because of circumstances. And that made me feel great.

14. I learned to hold my own- because there were so many races and cultures, I had to hold my own. I had to ensure my voice was heard among the other while still portraying a positive image. I broke stereotypes and learned to outshine others. I learned to be loud without saying a word. Sometimes I was the only black female in a class but I learned to be comfortable with that and how to contribute in my own way. I learned from my professors who looked like me and who didnt look like me and it made me a stronger woman...it molded me to be the woman I am today.

 15. I became comfortable in my own skin- this is the biggest lesson I learned. I have always been judged for how I look and how I talk. I have been called white girl, told I talk white criticized for how I dress among many other things. But being in this unique setting at VCU taught me it was okay to be me. There was nothing wrong with how I dressed or spoke or the music I listened to or any of that. I am fearfully and wonderfully made and all of these things make me who I am. I am no blacker because of my likes and dislikes or how I talk or because of my hobbies. And that alone is worth gold.

 Now, am I saying that I could have only learned these lessons at a PWI? No. But I know that my experiences at my school made me who I am and even made me more comfortable in being a black female in today’s world. I feel more prepared to handle certain situations because of my situations which caused me to learn certain things. My experience was amazing. Now, if giving advice to a young black student trying to choose I would tell them this: explore your options, do your research, pick the school that feels most comfortable to you. It can be an HBCU or a PWI. But don’t ever think that going to a PWI makes you less black. You are black regardless of your choice.

[bestchildcarecenters-blog]

Tips for Choosing a Daycare Centre

There are times where you will need the services of a professional and reliable daycare centre, considering if you are employed and have little kids who have no one to stay with at home. Of course, when in such a situation, finding the right daycare is the best thing you can do for them for it will not only help with babysitting but as well help in introducing them to school curriculums and school life. They will also get to know how to socialize with others and familiarize with a new world that they are about to engage in. Therefore, you have to make sure that you use proper guidelines and channel to identify the best daycare bend oregon for your children, which will guarantee you the best services improper careful them.

You have to keep in mind the fact that these are your children that we are talking about and in case you happen to select the wrong daycare for them, you will be on the losing side and will be faced with the regrets and disappointments due to the quality of services you will receive. While you are taking your children to a daycare centre, you are expecting to find friendly services and staff. I am sure you must have at some point heard of stories where are I am sure you must have at some point heard of stories where individual parents took their children to individual daycare centres and ended up disappointed due to the fact that their children were  mistreated which is not what we were expecting a little because they do not use the right channels today class before scheduling daycare centrist they chose. Therefore, to save you from such kind of situations, I will help by providing some of the essential factors and states that whoever is looking for a reliable daycare centre should use in this article.

To begin with, I will advise you to first write the names of all the daycare centrist that are operating within your area in a list which you will be analyzing until you land on the one that is capable of providing you with services of your own likes and preferences using the guidelines and tips that I will explain. But before doing so, it is also vital to consider asking for recommendations and referrals from reliable sources which in this case are friends, and family members that have been using the services of these daycare centrist considering the fact that we have the best knowledge on the quality of services that they provide, and therefore they will be sure to refer you to the best daycare centre. Click to find the best daycare bend oregon.

You should then start finding out what makes a particular daycare centre unique from the others since you are targeting to give your children the best you can find and therefore considering you are spending your own money, you have to get the best service there is. It is vital that you also get to find out from other parents who are taking their children to these daycare centres about the quality of services they receive their and any other additional information you may be interested in. Another important step you can take is to visit the daycare centres one-by-one and get to find on your own how the environment is so that you decide if it is the best one for your children.

[donnacollar1-blog]

Elewa 1.0 - “To Improve The Quality Of Education In Kenya And Beyond.”

Elewa 1.0 - “To Improve The Quality Of Education In Kenya And Beyond.”

To achieve our somewhat ambitious goal, Elewa first targetted the so called KCSE exams (the idea Mike came to me with). We chose this angle because in the Kenyan education system, a lot of problems come from the existence of standardized tests. Unlike the system we have in Belgium, in Kenya you get only one exam at the end of your secondary education. This exam basically determines the rest of your life. Score Murang'a , you’ll end up with a scholarship in the best colleges. Score low, and you have no chance on getting into university. Teachers also get paid better if they have a high scoring class compared to a low average.

All of this results into students being insanely pressured to do well on these exams. This recently took a turn for the worse when students are now being locked up in their dormitories, to study for these exams and to help avoid cheating on these exams. The lockdown is now resulting in riots and even arson.. Having the “one exam determines all”-card, leads to tremendous stress amongst students. And worse, it leads to bad and very ineffective study habits. Some students turn into the type of person I like to call “the parrot.” To study for these exams, students buy bulk past exam papers and their corresponding example answers.

It is the only way they can prepare themselves since they haven’t a clue what parts of the 4-year curriculum will be tested on KCSE. They take these papers and study the question-answers by hearth. Answer, … What happens (the so called parrot) is when you feed them a question, they can provide you with the perfect answer. Or they can give you the mathematical process to solve the equation you provided. Though the parrot can answer the KCSE-question, he/she still hasn’t a clue as to what it all means. Nor why they are thaught the matter, how they can play around with it and how they can use that knowledge to improve their every day lives. So a quick recap.

If you remember correctly, our mission statement at Elewa is “to improve the quality of education.” Also, KCSE-exams are a source of stress and pressure, undermining the quality of education in Kenya. Taking into account these two facts, we can infer that if we are able to improve the way students study for these exams, we positively affect the quality of education. One of the major problems students encounter when they face these exams, is the fact that they have no clue what to study for these exams. What we did at Elewa to tackle that problem, is we took all these exams and statistically analysed the past 15 years of KCSE exam data.

We then used that data to give feedback to students and teachers on what they had to focus. We made it explicit what the most important topics are on the KCSE exams. Though Elewa was able to help a lot of people, it is not a full blown solution yet. As a company, we constantly try to evolve our product so it fits our users needs. This gave light to what is now my masters thesis for the school year to come. To what I am currently working on, and to what I have been working on for the past six months.

Elewa 2.0, a full-blown eLearning system we hope can revolutionize the educational sector in Kenya. The road to get to this point has been long, but great also. Over the past years, I had the opportunity to discover and live a whole new world. I got to learn a lot, and ended up on a path on which I will continue doing so for the coming years. Though it might have turned out to be a long one, I do hope you enjoyed my first blog post and the journey I explained. If you have any comments, don’t hesitate to share down below or in a PM.

ARONY AMOLLO - VS - ATTORNEY GENERAL MISC. VINCENT LEMPAA - VS - KENYATTA UNIVERSITY H MISC. NO. 1118/2003. In the above three matters the courts have awarded damages after proof of breach of fundamental rights. Mr. Kurauka also urged this court to grant the orders sought which he submitted are also available against private companies like the respondent. In opposing the application, the Director of the respondent deponed that the respondent was justified in summarily dismissing the petitioners for arbitrarily withdrawing their labour. Counsel also submitted that since each of the 367 employees had individual contracts and their individual claims should be in ordinary law of contract. That there is need to adduce evidence which this court is not able to undertake.

That the suit which had been filed in the High Court Case No. 212/2004, (Mombasa) was struck out so that the petitioners could move to the Industrial Court for the remedies that they seek.. Counsel also argued that this is not a public law litigation but the petition seeks to enforce private contracts. That it is also not public interest litigation to enable the applicants to come by way of representative suit as they have done. That each petitioner has a contract which he seeks to enforce and Mr. Munga cannot purport to depone on behalf of 367 others as he cannot with certainty state what each individual is entitled to.

That the court should look at the antecedents of the petitioners who abandoned due process even after a return to work formula and reject the claims. In regard to the racial remark, it was submitted that this is a blank allegation because the petitioners were based in different hotels and can not have heard it at the same time and it amounts to hearsay. That in any event the petitioner did not specifically cite what category the allegation falls, under Section 82 of the Constitution to enable the respondents to respond. Who pays the costs of the petition. The Respondent’s Counsel raised issue whether the Petitioners had the capacity to bring a suit under S.84 of the Constitution on behalf of other parties each party having signed a contract of employment with the Respondent.

Section 84 does not envisage one person bringing a common suit on behalf of others save where one is detained only then can another apply on their behalf. There is no evidence that the other Petitioners who were not before the court were detained so that those before court could represent them. Out of the 11 Petitioners before the court, only one presented his case. The petition as presented cannot be sustained as Section 84 of the Constitution does not envisage a common claim like that before us. It is not in dispute that the petitioners’ claim arises out of alleged breach of terms of employment, The petitioners were employed by the respondent in various capacities at different times.

[unoreads]

Best Online Learning Platforms Of 2022

The best online learning platforms make it a snap for educators and trainers to manage online courses. We've compiled a list of the best online learning platforms of 2022. These platforms are in demand, easy to use, and offer great customer service. If your business wants to add an online course to their curriculum or you're looking for an easy platform to help you start your own business, check out our list of the best on-line learning platforms. Learning is a lifelong process and some of the best ways to learn are online. That's why we're making our list of best online learning platforms of 2022, to help you find or build a platform that works for your company.

Full of devices and tools that allow students to work wherever, whenever. Traditional means of education, such as classrooms and homework, have been revamped to fit the new digital landscape. The importance of online learning platforms has grown due to the nature of the population itself. A steady increase in population density has led to a drastic increase in the number of individuals living in cities, whereas in the past most have lived in rural areas. In addition, public schools are not adaptive enough to redefine themselves based on the needs and wants of modern society. For businesses, these best educational websites in india offer a way to save on the costs of travel and accommodation. Instead of having to travel to a convention in another country and put up staff, they can now conduct it online directly from the comforts of their own home.

For educators it means reaching people across borders, delivering higher quality courses due to the support provided digitally, and a greater ability to effectively manage more students online. Online learning today is one of the most exciting and immediate ways of learning. It’s flexible, it’s everywhere, and it allows for less conventional methods for students to take part. From platforms that let you learn at your own pace, to using your smartphone as a way to get connected with academic centers and specialists around the world, online learning plans are here to stay.

online learning platforms for students have become more diverse, so to learn a language, you can use language learning apps and online flashcards, and for younger ones, there are e-learning online classroom services as well. Additionally, there are coding platforms for schools as well.

How we chose the best online learning platforms

There are plenty of choices in the Unoreads is the best online learning Platform area, so there is sure to be one well suited for each organization.

The Unoreadshelps you do just that. We know that there are some competitive examinations which you must sail through, in order to get a better foothold in your career goals. You diligently prepare for such examinations throughout the year, giving up on your leisure time and social life. This Website Unoreads will help you learn Civil Service examination at home and crack the exam in the upcoming year! Unoreads is the based on self-study best online learning platforms. This is an excellent platform for students to learn, which enables students to prepare for any competitive examinations. It comprises of a variety of topics and has been divided into special chapters just to make it easier for students to do as they wish.

There are various types of homework and new additions are made from time to time. The above-stated points of this Website Unoreads will help you learn Civil Service exam at home, without the hassles of reaching a center for the class room sessions. This website is easy to use and can be accessed from any place and at any time by all students studying in schools, colleges, graduation and post graduate courses. It gives details about the syllabus and helps build your preparation method effectively till one passes the examination that he/she aims to crack. Students should start preparation well in advance so that they can get the merit marks in these exams.

[connorrenwick]

Anti Turns Discarded and Broken Umbrellas Into Desk and Table Lamps

We’ve all experienced that frustrating moment when an umbrella gets blown inside out, the force of the movement breaking the spindles and rendering it useless. The thing is that the majority of umbrellas are simply not designed to last, with an average lifespan of just six months. In order to turn this frustration into something positive, Anti takes discarded and broken umbrellas, disassembles them, and upcycles them into desk and table lamps. We spoke to UK-based founder and CEO Mark Howells to find out more.

Tell me a little bit about your childhood, education and background in terms of how you first became interested in creativity, design and sustainability.

I grew up In Hertfordshire in a working class family. My mother can draw and paint and my father is very musical; writing and performing electric and acoustic guitar-based music to this day at 70 years of age. My first exposure to design was via a foundation course in art and design at Watford in the 1990s. I was drawn towards the traditional arts as opposed to design, until I was asked by a tutor, who ran a 3D Design class, to select an object from a series of waste objects she had scavenged from a beach and produce a new product. I chose a section of a washed-up bicycle tire and made a watch strap that buttoned over the tire tread. I loved the process of learning to unsee the original utility of an object and unlocking a new purpose unseen by anyone else before. This led to an explosion of designs using waste. At the time I had a cleaning job in the evenings at a very large office and I would collect items of interest that had been discarded in bins – in particular, computer components – and repurpose them. It was these designs that secured me a place on an Industrial Design degree at Cardiff University. Although I learned a huge amount, I really had no real interest in becoming an Industrial Designer – the assembly line approach of the time was a far cry from the work I had been doing to secure my position on the degree course in the first place. This was the ’90s and sustainability wasn’t a mainstay of the curriculum. I decided to take the drafting skills I had developed and head towards engineering. I worked for various environmental consultancies, which led me to building and land surveying, eventually as a board-level director of a successful surveying practice. In this role, I gained exposure to starting new business units and small businesses – which inspired me to fulfill a long-harbored desire to return to sustainable design.

How would you describe your project/product?

Anti’s first collection is upcycled lamps made of discarded umbrellas that were otherwise destined for landfill. The collected umbrellas are disassembled into their separate materials groups (e.g. plastics, metals, nylon) and are made into desk and table lamps. Over 1 billion umbrellas are made each year but are not designed to last, with an average lifespan of just six months. Anti addresses a waste issue by designing with waste, not creating it – and the new products are easier to disassemble at end-of-life than the umbrella was in its original state. This is the first waste stream we are concentrating on, but there will be others. One of our key focuses is to design repeatable upcycled products that can be made/manufactured at scale. The more we sell, the more waste we reuse, and the more good we can do.

What inspired this project/product?

After living in London and Tokyo, I became very aware of the wastage around umbrellas. In Tokyo, umbrellas are everywhere, you see endless rows of broken umbrellas at railway stations and outside shops. On a typical rainy day in Tokyo over 3,000 umbrellas are handed in to lost property, London underground deals with a similar problem. Our research suggests as many as one billion umbrellas are broken, lost or discarded each year worldwide. Umbrellas are just one example of an everyday product that has an important utility and value, but is flawed. It solves one problem but causes another. In the case of umbrellas it keeps us dry, and is portable, cheap and available on every street corner, but is made of different material types and so it’s difficult to disassemble at the end of its life, which makes recycling at scale difficult.

What waste (and other) materials are you using, how did you select those particular materials and how do you source them?

Both lamps are made from discarded umbrellas. We have collected these over the last few years primarily from lost properties and from city streets, bins and train stations. We also use a 3D-printed recycled plastic filament for two components and several metal components that are made from recycled materials.

When did you first become interested in using waste as raw material and what motivated this decision?

The design potential of using waste has interested me since higher education, however, the first real exposure I had to the environmental impact of how we were dealing (or not dealing) with waste was when I was a junior technician at an environmental engineering consultancy. I saw how landfills were designed firsthand and even had the opportunity to see one being built. Landfills were recognized even by the landfill designers at the time to be a poor solution with many issues e.g., the plastic membranes often split or ripped leaking the toxic water (leachate) that had percolated through the waste over time and into the soil and worryingly possibly into the groundwater. To see these vast cavernous sites being built, often in areas of countryside, just felt wrong and you could really see the ‘out of sight, out of mind’ mentality we have associated with waste. The new items we purchase are made of the exact same materials we were throwing away; I have always believed that it’s our perception of what we deem as waste that needs to change. If you view any perceived waste item by its material type and form as opposed to its original utility and the stigma associated with something old or used, then it’s free to take on a new role. It’s down to us as designers to unlock this potential.

What processes do the materials have to undergo to become the finished product?

The umbrellas have to be disassembled into their individual component types and, in some cases, cleaned and repaired. The 3D-printed parts also need to be cleaned and finished. Then both lamps are primarily made through a process of assembly as opposed to manufacturing. This is also more energy-efficient.

What happens to your products at the end of their life – can they go back into the circular economy?

I encourage each customer to return our products at end of life via our Take Back scheme. We will happily take back any of the products produced at our workshop. These will be disassembled and reused as the basis for new designs or as a last resort disassembled for recycling. Having these products returned really is of great value to us. Both lamp designs are easy to disassemble, which allows us to recapture their material value very quickly.

How did you feel the first time you saw the transformation from waste material to product/prototype?

It really does feel like a kind of alchemy when you get it right. My objective Is to produce beautiful products from waste streams that at first, or even second, sight have no reference to their original purpose and utility. I know my work is done when someone suddenly realizes that what they are looking at is not what they thought, and yet it was there in front of them the whole time. To provide that surprise and joy is the best feeling.

How have people reacted to this project?

It’s been really positive so far. I think people are genuinely surprised that you can create something that looks beautiful from something that is not considered so. I’ve been particularly pleased with receiving great responses from fellow designers and sustainable designers.

How do you feel opinions towards waste as a raw material are changing?

I believe people are now more accepting of recycling and products made from recycled materials and in many cases, there’s now a demand for these. Upcycled products, however, are sometimes devalued in what people might pay for them due to the monetary tag associated with their previous life. That’s interesting because, in my opinion, the creative innovation to successfully develop an upcycled product (particularly at volume) is far more challenging, and ultimately more impressive, from both the point of view of the creative process and the end product point.

What do you think the future holds for waste as a raw material?

Ultimately, we should get to a stage where we do not see waste as rubbish. I believe circular economy principles will be the panacea to the fear and hurt we are feeling more strongly than ever towards the damage to the planet. Politicians, businesses, designers, and individuals will genuinely want to change the way we live, you can see the younger generation are already asking all the right questions and have the hunger to find the answers. Upcycling, in the sense of taking a linear lifecycle product and transforming it into a circular lifecycle product, can be a stop-gap to buy us more time until we are designing with circular principles ingrained into everything we manufacture from the outset. Developing biomimicry and biological fabrication where we can grow our products and they can safely return to the earth without the need for retrieval systems is a really exciting future. Although there is incredible progress in this area, we are, realistically, many decades from this becoming mainstream, and therefore the role of upcycling is critical to providing the time to achieve that transition.

via http://design-milk.com/

from WordPress https://connorrenwickblog.wordpress.com/2021/08/10/anti-turns-discarded-and-broken-umbrellas-into-desk-and-table-lamps/

[joselmarrero]

Interview I: A Millennial's Perspective

Interview I: For my first interview I decided to talk to someone I trust dearly. Alexus is a woman who has shown me the value of hard work and dedication. After hearing about how much work she had to go through and seeing her first hand the stress of becoming an attorney I decided to interview her. The format I chose to use was a personal, first person view of her experiences.

Bio: My name is Alexus. I am 27 years old. I studied International Business, Marketing, and Spanish at Grand Valley State University. After Grand Valley, I went to law school at Wayne State University Law School. 

Experience with Mental Health in College: 

At Grand Valley, I began going to counseling to work through some difficulties that were rooted in my family life. Grand Valley offers free counseling for their students and I wanted to take advantage of that. Other than that, Grand Valley was actually one of the phases in my life where my anxiety was at my lowest. I was studying something that I was interested in and my life was completely in my control. 

After Grand Valley, I applied to and subsequently attended Wayne State Law School. Before deciding to attend school there, I talked with family, other lawyers and at one point, I wanted to take a year off to evaluate my options before continuing with my formal education. I think because of my family, and especially my mom, there was never an option in my mind to stop my studies after getting my Bachelor’s degree. Looking back, I wish I had pushed for that time to explore things. I had initially wanted to return to college and get my science credits to allow me to apply to medical school, but my family pushed me towards law school. After a month or two after graduating, I took the LSAT and then applied to Wayne. I got in, and I believe that’s where my mental health started being the most affected by my college life. 

Law school is an entirely different beast than undergraduate studies, or that’s how it felt to me. There are pressures all around you to be the best. Not the best you can be, but the best. “If you’re not in the top 10% of the class, you won't get a job.” “If you don’t participate in these activities, you won’t get a job and won’t have a way to pay your school debt.” On top of all these things that we were told day in and day out, we were competing against each other for our grades because everything was graded on a curve. It didn’t matter if you knew it well, if someone knew something better than you did, then you would get the lower grade. There was always pressure to do more. To do better. I would study and work for 14 hours a day, never really taking a day off other than for law school events. 

Anxiety for me first manifested as a feeling of tightness in my chest that would come and go. Most of the time it would be fine, but then I’d randomly get that tightness feeling when worrying about how I performed on a test or if I would get a job. 

Q/A:

Why did you become an attorney?

My family wanted me to be one. 

Why did you want to be in the medical field?

I wanted to help people. I have this memory from when I was younger of memorizing all the bones in the human body and my pure excitement and fascination with how many bones made up our bodies. I was interested in the human body and wanted a job where I wasn't chained to a desk all day just pushing papers. 

Do you think your decision to be an attorney in school might have contributed to your anxiety and would it have been different if you chose  a different career?

Yes. I very much think that. I think one of the biggest contributing factors to my anxiety now is that I do not enjoy the job. I believe that you handle the pressures of a job differently when it is something that you enjoy. 

How do you feel your student loans affect how you live your life as a millennial?

I feel like my student loans are a ball and chain or a cage preventing me from exploring and investing in the world we live in. They hold me back from taking risks that I would take without that additional financial burden. 

Do you think school has contributed to the rise in anxiety and depression? How and what do you think is the solution?

Yes. I do think that school has contributed to the rise in anxiety and depression. There are so many pressures out there now and many schools do not do a good job of teaching students about living life after their degrees. They only teach you the curriculum. Never what to do with it or even give you any skills to apply your knowledge to different things outside of your degree. I think schools need to start teaching people that while your studies and your degree are important, they are not what define us and make us who we are. They are just one component that makes us who we are. There are so many different avenues to use the information that schools teach us, but there is not a “right” answer. There is only a right answer for that individual. 

Closing Statement: Alexus is a woman whos opinion I value very much. She put herself through fire and flame to get out the other side jaded by the education system. Her decisions remind me of myself, a person who questions what his path should be and the anxiety that carries. My next interview will be my father. Because he has COVID (he is fine),  I will not be able to post his interview tonight, but we can expect it tomorrow at the latest. Thank you.

[afrolesbikita]

Stories & interesting posts on POS Hardware & POS.

Sign up for The Brief, our daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.

In a move to create educational equity, Texas is set to offer some of its best teachers more than $100,000 annually, rewarding them for work in the state’s poorest schools where COVID-19 has devastated communities, resulting in months, if not years, of learning loss.

“We need our best teachers to be able to do this work,” said Mohammed Choudhury, associate superintendent of strategy, talent and innovation for the San Antonio Independent School District. “We need them to extend their work and their leadership beyond their classroom to not only be able to move beyond COVID-19, but to build back better.”

For the 193 teachers in San Antonio designated to lead this effort, that could mean extra days of intervention during holiday breaks throughout the school year, and tutoring after school and during the summer.

Several Texas school districts already run similar master teacher programs or similar incentives that pay teachers extra stipends tied to their performance in the classroom.

The new infusion of state funds from the Texas Education Agency’s Teacher Incentive Allotment will not only boost existing stipends, but fundamentally bend the concept of “incentive pay” toward equity using a payout structure that rewards the work done by excellent teachers in high-poverty schools.

It’s an unusual move for a state hardly known for progressivism, the fruit of an unusually cooperative Legislature in 2019. After state Democrats gained significant seats in the 2018 midterm elections, the Legislature passed House Bill 3, adding $11.6 billion to public schools. Currently, the average salary for all teachers in Texas is $57,641. The new law created the Teacher Incentive Allotment, with payouts of $3,000 to $32,000 per teacher. While incentive pay is a favorite conservative reform strategy, the stipend’s progressive structure is unusual for Texas, where Republicans control both chambers of the Legislature.

Already, Choudhury said, the potential to earn a hefty stipend is attracting new talent from other districts and allowing the district to hold onto its No. 1 asset for kids.

“It’s built on what we know, hands down,” said Choudhury. “Put aside any other frills. The adult in front of the classroom is the most important individual in that child’s life inside school.”

In San Antonio ISD, these rock-star teachers will be required to work an extra four hours each week and an extra 20 days per year. This will put them at the forefront of the district’s COVID-19 recovery efforts.

To ensure that money flows to the highest-need schools, the state is using equity-focused guardrails throughout the payout process.

First, districts must submit their proposed teacher evaluation guidelines to the Texas Education Agency. Instead of using single-year standardized test scores, which are almost always higher in wealthier schools, to measure teachers’ performance, the plans must include both growth measures and classroom observations. Growth measures can be either improvement in standardized test scores year over year or other quantitative goals set by the district. By emphasizing growth, the state is moving away from criteria that consistently favor wealthy schools and looking more toward how a teacher has brought students along over time.

So far, 82 districts and charter schools have been approved or are in process to receive funds from the Teacher Incentive Allotment.

Once the state approves the evaluation plan, the district shares a list of teachers who meet its criteria for “recognized” “exemplary” or “master” designation, along with the school where that teacher works. Each school falls into a “tier” of poverty based on a statewide scale. Teachers generate funding for the district based on their designation and the tier of the school where they teach.

The state releases allotment funds to the school district in one lump sum, with the requirement that 90% of the money must be spent on personnel at the school where it was generated. This ensures that money intended to go to poorer campuses actually gets there.

“The Teacher Incentive Allotment is not a grant. It is a commitment to shift the culture of your district,” Choudhury said. “It took the historical inequity created by segregation and concentrated poverty and turned it into, for those districts and schools, an edge to recruit the best teachers.”

Right now, the average teacher salary in San Antonio ISD is $57,000. Teachers with the highest designation at San Antonio ISD’s lowest-income schools will make an extra $26,500 this year. At the district’s highest-income schools, the largest stipend will be $18,500. With additional stipends from clubs, department leadership and athletics, some teachers will make over $100,000.

To measure teachers’ effectiveness, Texas chose to look at the academic growth of students in their classes, instead of only looking at a single year’s achievement. Popularized by Stanford researcher Sean Reardon, “growth scores” are considered to be more equitable and a better measure of the contribution of the teacher.

Standardized test scores tend to track with family income, so students hit high marks at wealthy schools. If districts add incentive pay for high test scores alone, teachers have every reason to want to work in higher-income schools where their stipends are secure. If teacher evaluation is, instead, based on how much students gain, teachers can show their effectiveness in any classroom — even when the kids come in behind.

“The growth model that the state has built looks at where you take your kids, not where they started,” Choudhury said. “Every teacher should be expected to grow their kids, whether they come in already proficient or two years behind.”

Measuring growth is helpful when students start the year in dramatically different places, academically. After a year and a half of “slide”— both summer and COVID-19 — experts predict gaps will be wider than ever next school year.

In addition to student growth, the state requires classroom observation to be included in a district’s evaluation plan so administrators can see how a teacher manages, engages and supports students. Districts can also include other criteria, like campus leadership or student feedback. Choudhury’s team consulted with more than 2,500 San Antonio ISD teachers to determine what should go into the teacher evaluations and how much each criterion should count.

For districts new to performance pay, the state guidelines are a great place to start, said Palestine ISD curriculum director Sharon Reed. For now, she said, the 3,400-student district in North Texas plans to stick with the two criteria mandated by the state — student growth and teacher observation.

Incentive programs like this (sometimes called merit or performance pay) are controversial among teachers, who say they create classes of teachers and put even more pressure on high-stakes testing. Most districts go with “steps and lanes” salary schedules based on years of experience and degrees held.

Under that model, San Antonio ISD Superintendent Pedro Martinez said, it’s impossible to reach $100,000 in most Texas districts.

“It’s a social justice issue,” Martinez said. “Our teachers right now who have been working for 20-30 years, they cap out at $65,000.”

In Longview ISD, the money that doesn’t go directly to teachers will be used to help teachers in non-testing grades earn their National Board Certification, which will then automatically qualify them for a state designation, said John York, Longview ISD chief human resources office.

“Our goal was for all of our employees to have an opportunity,” York said. “We plan to be the highest-paid district around.”

Incentive pay is part of the culture in Longview ISD, York said. This year, 11 teachers will make over $100,000. Along with several other districts, the small northeast Texas district helped design the state system, calling on the success it has had keeping high-performing teachers in its lowest-income schools.

High turnover is ubiquitous in low income-schools around the country, which makes it difficult to get the kind of traction needed to improve. Incentive pay has helped recruit talented teachers and keep them in classrooms where they are most needed, York explained. “The kids are the winners.”

The 74Million.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization focused on America’s schools, education policy and 74 million children.

The above article was first provided here.

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Who Am I? - Research

Firstly, let me just say that that is quite a personal question.  Are you sure that “who I am” is really any of your business? It makes me slightly uncomfortable that you’ve asked.  It’s just that I’m not very sure of who I am 100% of the time. By that I mean, I feel different about me as a person, depending on what kind of mood I’m in. But OK, that’s about how I feel, not who I am, right? So who I am shouldn’t really change, right? Well, no, it’s not as simple as that. I am who I am as a result of my experiences, whether these experiences were by my choice or by accident or as a result of others’ actions, deliberate or otherwise; also I am who I am as a result of my feelings and reactions to all those experiences.  So “who I am” I believe is an evolving story, a journey if you like; but not just for me, for everyone. The question is perhaps deeper than it first appears.  So, “Who am I” then?  – I’ll tell you tomorrow.

Meantime, there is research to be done and a brief to complete. So here goes.

At my yoga class (I go mainly for the physiotherapeutic effect), part of the “meditative” section invites students to investigate “Who am I?” by constantly repeating the question “Who am I?” to oneself. This hasn’t, so far, brought me any further enlightenment on that issue. But at least it keeps my recurrent sciatica at bay. (The yoga, not the constantly asking myself “Who am I?”).   I discovered early in my research that there is a website is dedicated to the “Who am I?” question, it’s called “htpps://www.who-am-i-question.com”, and it contains lots of input from spiritual leaders, ancient philosophers and inspirational people. The website first page quotes “there is no destination, only the journey”.  (I agree with the “journey” part, (I mention this in my first paragraph of this blog), but I think there are numerous mini-destinations in our lives, e.g. when you reach the end of a study course and graduate, or pass a driving test, etc.  The final destination is of course at the end of your life, when you die. No-one gets out of this life alive. And if you haven’t passed your driving test before then, well, best just forget about it.

So, if everybody is on their own individual journey, and if it can be accepted that the journey is more important than the destination, then surely it is the direction and quality of the journey that are paramount.   But this is all too philosophical, I should get back onto photography.

I discovered a really interesting web article entitled “Autobiographical Self –Portraiture” on the David Gardner Photography website where the related Exercise asks the student to reflect on the pieces of work discussed in the project and to do some further independent research.  The artists featured in the work book  are Francesca Woodman, Elina Brotherus and Gillian Wearing.  The questions the Exercise suggests could be explored include : –

How do these images make me feel?

Do you think there is an element of narcissism or self-indulgence in     focussing on your own identity in this way?

Can such images ‘work’ for an outsider without accompanying text?

I found it interesting that Francesca Woodman was included in particular, as she was one of the artists exhibited (selected works) at the National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh and recently visited by HND Photography students from City of Glasgow College. The visit was part of the curriculum under the label “Exhibitions”.  In my submitted review/blog for the visit, I stated that I found some of the images exhibited unsettling and some were very personal and that I felt as if I was invading private space by looking at them. I was therefore surprised that David Gardner also reported very similar viewpoints in the researched article. (Thus addressing question 1 of those quoted above.)

I also believe questions 2 and 3 above have a particular poignancy when applied to Francesca Woodman. I believe she was an artist who chose photography as her preferred medium to express herself, and in this respect, and given she is quoted as saying that she used self-portraiture because was always available, then I don’t think she was being self-indulgent or narcissistic in her works.  (I actually only partly believe her justification for using self-portraiture; some of the images produced are so personal, I think, that no other option than to use herself would have been acceptable to her). Given that Francesca Woodman committed suicide at the age of 22, apparently at the second attempt, the answer to question 3 would have to be “No”, I would think. If people closest to her didn’t see that coming either through her work or her actions, then how could an outsider interpret, without any kind of context, what was going on in her mind. 

However, I don’t think that the answer to questions 2 and 3 in all cases should be “No”.  Each case and each person is different and unique.

The other two artists discussed and outlined were Elina Brotherus (EB) and Gillian Wearing (GW). EB’s presented self-portraits works included nude portraits which were less abstract and also were in colour in contrast to those by Francesca Woodman.  A lot of her work also included very personal aspects of her life, and I’m not sure if by self-expressing in this way was a cathartic experience for her.  I was impressed by how she made use of mirrors in her self portraits. 

The main part of Gillian Wearing’s works presented featured her dressed up to appear as members of her family, including her father, which probably both is and isn’t a “true” self-portrait at all. Maybe.

I was keen to include research of a male self-portrait artist/photographer and considered Robert Mapplethorpe, however selected works of his were also featured at the course-visited  National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh, and I thought it maybe too much to include another artist I already described in #Exhibitions as well as Frances Woodman. I decided to include further reference to Andy Warhol, whose portrait by David Bailey I thought stunning, and which I included in my “Clean White” review.   Andy Warhol is listed as one of the artists in the article “10 Famous Photographers Whose Self-Portraits Are Much More Than Just a Selfie” by Jessica Stewart (My Moden Met, 8th May 2017).  The “My Modern Met” is I think a brilliant website, and the 10 artists of the title also include Man Ray, Frances Woodman, Robert Mapplethorpe and Cindy Sherman.

One of the more interesting passages about Andy Warhol’s self-portraits I read described that he ultimately “embraced” his mortality by including a skull on top of his own head – his “memento-mori”, or acknowledgement of his own future demise, a device used in images since medieval times.

However on seeing this image, and learning about the concept of “memento mori”, I could not ignore referring back to Robert Mapplethorpe’s own powerful memento mori self portrait, taken when he knew that he was dying of AIDS.

[trentteti]

Marshall, the film: Our Review

Thurgood Marshall: Second-ever Special Counsel to the NAACP. All-time record holder for most civil rights cases argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, where he boasted an impressive record of 29-3. The guy who successfully extended voting rights, ended racially restrictive housing covenants, desegregated law schools and grad schools. Oh, and later public schools in general in a little case called Brown v. Board of Education. A titanic figure in public interest law and impact litigation. The first African-American Supreme Court Justice, a position he used to tirelessly defend individual’s constitutional rights from the bench.

In other words, it’s crazy difficult to pick which of the many accomplishments in his long and storied legal career is his most significant. But it’s easy to pick one that probably isn’t his most significant: Thurgood Marshall has been mentioned by name on the LSAT more than any other historical figure. And really, that means there have just been a couple Reading Comprehension passages about him and a few Logical Reasoning questions that mentioned him.

Nonetheless, we at Blueprint have developed a semi-healthy obsession with him based on his semi-ubiquity on the LSAT. We use Thurgood as an example several times throughout our classroom curriculum. Our instructors sing his hosannas while we teach Reading Comprehension passages about him. We used to proudly feature a Thurgood Marshall action figure on the cover of one of our coursebooks.

So when Marshall — the new film about a case a young Thurgood tried as an attorney for the NAACP — came out, we were first in line to see it. OK, we were not actually first in line. Chance the Rapper — who bought all of the tickets to the film at a few Chicago theaters and invited fans to see it for free — was first in line. He was even more stoked than we were about the film, but that dude is positively gleeful.

Anyway, we were still very excited to get a hit of uncut Thurgood Marshall on celluloid this weekend. And I am eager to share my review: It’s a well-acted and briskly-paced courtroom drama with far too little Thurgood Marshall in it.

From the very first scene, in which Thurgood dons a freshly ironed white button-up shirt like a cape, Thurgood is a dude you want to spend time with. Throughout the film, he’s more or less presented like a legal super hero. Charismatically played by Chadwick Boseman (the guy you call when your film is about an important 20th-century African-American figure, even when the historical figure in question looks nothing like Chadwick Boseman), his young Thurgood is dapper, supremely confident, and sardonic, but with a pithy one-liner for every legal query that comes his way. Basically Tony Stark, Esq. There’s even a running joke involving Walter White, head of the NAACP, firing up the equivalent of a bat signal whenever a new case requires Thurgood.

So Chadwick is a lot of a fun getting some pre-Black Panther reps in as Thurgood the Legal Eagle. And some of the best scenes — whether it’s him at jazz club teasing quasi-rivals Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston (both of whom are also subjects of Reading Comprehension passages) or joking about the apparently-true story about the time he lost one of his, uh, Thurgoods — just involve him holding court, being funny and open and engaging. Or the little comic grace notes that find Thurgood blithely ignoring racially instilled expectations of him, whether it’s directing a white attorney to carry his bags (full of his traveling legal library) or blithely walking into the dining room of a members-only club.

But those scenes are less plentiful than they should be for a movie bearing Thurgood’s surname. Which, by the way, Marshall? Terrible title. I get that going with the much more awesome sounding Thurgood would risk confusion with the 2011 HBO film of the same name, in which Morpheus played the eponymous judge. But Marshall risks confusion with We Are Marshall, U.S. Marshals, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and Marshal Law. They may as well gone with Thurgod or ThurGREAT or That’s Some Thurgood Lawyering.

Anyway, the plot: It’s 1941 and Thurgood is the only attorney at the NAACP, which has the legal mission to represent those falsely accused of crimes because of their race. Which brings Thurgood to the case of Joseph Spell (Sterling K. Brown of This Is Us and The People vs. OJ Simpson, and the most compelling screen presence here), a black man with a checkered past who has been accused of the rape and attempted murder of Greenwich, Connecticut socialite Eleanor Strubing (Kate Hudson). You’re expecting that we’re going to get to see Thurgood dunk on some racists in the courtroom and exculpate an innocent man and, if you hold the real-life Thurgood in as high esteem as we do, you’re hyped.

Except, as a result of the wonders of state bars, Thurgood has to team up with a nebbish local attorney named Sam Friedman (Josh Gad) to represent Spell. And due to deeply ingrained institutional racism, here represented by the judge (James Cromwell, channeling the appearance and demeanor of Gregg Popovich at his grumpiest), Thurgood isn’t permitted to make arguments in the case — only offer advice and support to the decidedly less charismatic Friedman, an insurance attorney who has never tried a criminal case before.

Yes, you read that correctly. In the major motion picture about one of the greatest litigators of all time, we don’t get to see our titular protagonist litigate, really at all. Seems like an unforced error. In fact, Thurgood disappears from the movie for large stretches of run-time. Director Reginald Hudlin and screenwriters Michael and Jacob Koskoff devise a few clever work-arounds to show us how effective Thurgood was in the courtroom, but nearly the entire legal showdown in Marshall pits Friedman against the smarmy blue-blood prosecutor Lorin Willis (Dan Stevens). And the big Oscar bait-y climactic speech of the film goes to Sterling K. Brown, not Boseman.

So the movie’s biggest blunder seems to be the case it chose to serve as its subject matter. At the NAACP, Thurgood argued hundreds of cases on a near-constant basis, as this movie makes clear. The one they chose has Thurgood sitting on the sidelines. The movie could uncharitably be interpreted as not a snapshot of one of the great legal minds of our time, but as a story about a white attorney who learns to be brave and stand up for civil rights. And, while this is obviously not the filmmakers’ fault, now is maybe not the moment when Hollywood should put out a movie in which the plot turns on whether a woman accusing a man of sexual assault is lying. So there’s that, too.

But overall, the movie is an enjoyable legal drama about an early case for two legal figures, Marshall and Friedman, at various stages in their developments as civil rights attorneys. And the movie’s most interesting ideas also stem from the film’s choice of case, such as showing how the bigotry of this era was not limited to the Jim Crow South, whether its the institutional racism confronting Thurgood and Spell or the anti-Semitism facing Friedman. We could have used some more Thurgood in our Marshall, but pretty much every movie gets an expanded universe at this point, so perhaps we’ll get that in Marshall II.

159/180.

Marshall, the film: Our Review was originally published on LSAT Blog

[neras-kirneh-blog]

Israel and Zionism, pt. 2

@angrybell Okay, I’m continuing the discussion here. 

It’s a label that applies to a region. It does not denote a nationality. It does not denote an ethnicity. It does not denote a race. Its simply a label applied to a region of land by some people.

Doesn’t excuse the Nakba. 

I. The term “Palestine” has never applied to any independent state, kingdom, or other national entity in the region.

Doesn’t excuse the Nakba. Palestine would have become a state after the end of the British Mandate if not for the Zionists - just like Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon all became states right after the British and the French left. 

As far as what it was called by the various factions which have controlled the territory in question, that’s pretty well established. The place called Palestine is Israel.

No, it was always called Palestine prior to the Nakba. 

II. There Is No Historic Boundaries For An Entity Known as “Palestine”.

Yes, there are: Mandatory Palestine; borders were the Mediterranean to the west and the Jordan River to the east, and the Galilee in the north and Eilat in the south. Those are the borders. 

Funny how none of these maps match what the PLO/Fatah, Hamas, or any of the other groups seeking to destroy Israel and establish a “Palestine” claim.

Because none of them are relevant today. The only map that has been relevant since 1948 is that of Mandatory Palestine, because that is the area that has been hit by Zionist settler-colonialism and ethnic cleansing of its indigenous population for nearly 70 years. 

In fact, 75% of the area painted green in the map was actually public land, unowned by any individual.

That does not change the fact that prior to 1948, Palestinians still lived on that land. That area had a majority-Palestinian population back then; but now the area has been ethnically cleansed of most of them by Israel. Because they are not Jewish. It is not possible to have a “Jewish state” in a place where most people are not Jewish, after all. All of the prominent Zionists, including Theodor Herzl, understood this very well. 

III. The Only Historic Palestinians In What Is Now Israel Have Been Jews and Not Arabs.

Wrong: they have been Jews and Muslims and Christians - but they were nearly all Arabs; specifically, Palestinians. (There was, however, also a minority of Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jews and Ashkenazi Hasidic Jews prior to the onset of Zionism, of course.) 

“Arab” denotes the language you speak, “Jew” denotes the religion you practice. That these two identities are somehow mutually exclusive is a ridiculous Zionist fabrication, nothing more. I have already explained that Jews who historically lived in Arab countries and spoke Arabic were objectively Arabs themselves. 

The people who claim to be “Palestinians” claim that they have an ancient claim to the land. In some cases, they claim to trace their ancestry back to the Canaanites. The reality is much different. 

For example, Saeb Erekat has claimed that he is descended of Canaanites. However, his family is from the Howeitat region (an area shared by Jordan and Saudi Arabia). His family on emigrated, at the earliest, in the 7th Century CE when the Arabs overran the Byzantine controlled region.

Wow! The 7th century, you say? So they have at least 1,200-1,300 years on most of the Israelis, in other words... 

Also, it doesn’t excuse the Nakba. 

However, who was there before? That would be the Jews and other non Muslim, non Arab communities that survived in the region. 

All of whom were also Palestinians. Their descendants today are mostly Palestinians. 

Arabs in the region, prior to the 1960s, typically identified themselves as Syrians. It was only when the PLO and other terrorist groups began creating the idea of an Arab “Palestinian” as part of their effort to destroy Israel.

The difference is that Arabs living in what we know today as Syria had not been ethnically cleansed by the Zionists, but Arabs living in what we know today as Israel had. 

Starting in 1948, there has been a determined effort erase the existence of Jews in the land in favor of a myth of an Arab-only land of “Palestine”.

That has never been the goal of the Palestinian resistance. They have made it very clear, abundantly clear, that their struggle is only against the State of Israel and its political ideology of Zionism - not against Jewish people, and certainly not against the Jewish religion. Period. 

Starting in 1948, the Jordanians especially began destroying ancient Jewish synagogues. Graveyards, most significantly the Jewish graveyard at the Mount of Olives, were destroyed and Jewish headstones were used for building projects. Much of the cemetery on the Mount of Olives was cleared to build a new hotel by the Jordanians. Jews were forcibly expelled by the Arab Legion from their homes and businesses in Jerusalem.

Glass houses, angrybell: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Arab_towns_and_villages_depopulated_during_the_1948_Palestinian_exodus

It was not only the Jews who suffered under Arab rule in the post-1948 era. Determined to completely Islamicize Judea and Samaria, Jordan placed restrictions on land ownership and enforced school curriculum that would indoctrinate minorities into the Islamic faith.

And now, Israel is repressing the religious freedoms of Muslim and Christian Palestinians, both in the West Bank and inside the Green Line. They even banned the Muslim call to prayer from three Jerusalem mosques recently! 

Between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese there are no differences.

Yes, there are. 

There is no other answer I can possibly give to a statement that rhetorical and devoid of anything backing it up. But, hey! Kudos to you for writing “Palestinians” without quotation marks for once! :) 

An Arab “Palestinian” people furthermore lack any of the attributes usually ascribed to a national group. They have no distinct culture from other Arab groups other than their resistance to Israel.

Linguistically, they were and are Syrian in their dialect of Arabic.

There are no spiritual ties to the land, other than those which were fabricated once Jews in the region began to prosper. There is no distinct, common ancestry with the region.

Wrong, wrong and wrong again. They do have distinct customs, a distinct accent of Arabic, a distinct history, etc. Susan Abulhawa talked about this in her debate with Alan Dershowitz seven years back. 

Conversely, the Jews do meet the criteria as “Palestinian” if they chose to use that title.

No, they do not. Most of them had no presence on that land prior to the 1940s. No familial history, no provable ancestral history, nothing. They came there through immigration, period. 

They have a spiritual connection to the land as evidenced by the Torah and independently confirmed by contemporary third party sources.

Muslims and Christians also have a spiritual connection to the land. Not that it matters, because God is not a real estate agent. (You still haven’t responded to me pointing out the fact that Theodor Herzl, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, David Ben-Gurion etc. all were atheists, by the way.) 

They occupied and continued to occupy the land in the face of ethnic cleansing, repression, and conquest.

No, now you are describing the Palestinians, not the Israelis.

The Jews had and have a distinct culture and language, different from the general Arab culture.

Okay, now this is just straight-up fucking bullshit. A distinct culture and language? Not even in Israel do all Jews have the exact same culture and language!

Jews originate from many countries, including but not limited to: Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Germany, Lithuania, Iraq, Morocco, Algeria, Yemen, Syria, Palestine, Iran and Ethiopia; and they historically spoke many different languages, including but not limited to: Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Tat, Bukhori, Russian, Polish, German, French, Spanish, Farsi and Amharic. 

Not only that, but they wildly vary in terms of race, physical appearance, clothing style, culture, cuisine, values, etc. Jews are not a cohesive ethnic or national group, like Zionism likes to pretend they are. 

You called me a racist.

Because that’s what you are. 

Now, you make the claim that Arabs are simply a conglomeration of people who were previously conquered by the Arabs.

Not exclusively, perhaps; but yeah, pretty much. 

Now, I am not going to deny that intermarriage or conversions happened. 

Good! Then you are one step closer to realizing how things actually are. 

However, your statement is false because the Arabs made sure that those other groups, like the Jews, were governed by a separate set of law that rendered them inferior in the eyes of the Muslim state.

And?! That doesn’t change anything about what they were! Why do you keep on fucking insisting that Jews should define themselves based on how antisemites view them?! 

Zionists have a lot more in common with antisemites than you’d like to admit... 

As I noted above, it ignores that most clans which make up the “Palestinians” do not originate from the region. Many originate from Arabia. Simply because they intermarried does not mean that everyone becomes an Arab.

No, they do originate from the region, and yes, people who the Arabs conquered and intermarried with did become Arabs. Again: being an Arab only means that you are someone who speaks Arabic, and the language you speak does not determine your ethnic background or ancestral origin. Do you get me now? 

You can be Muslim, Christian or Jewish and still be an Arab, and not every Arab originates exclusively from the Arabian Peninsula. 

Your attempt to make a false equivalence using American Indians as an example fails. Native Americans have a their own language which they use for their purposes, but they also speak the lingua fraca which in this case means English. This does not mean that they lose their ethnic identity.

Right - and the fact that Palestinians speak Arabic doesn’t mean that they lose their ethnic identity! 

And white people have made a concerted effort to kill Native American languages, so many of them now do speak English as their first language. 

Just like the fact that the Jews spoke Arabic, among other languages, does not mean that they lost their Jewishness either in their own eyes or in the eyes of the Muslim overlords.

Someone who speaks Arabic is an Arab. 

Consider this, and I know you wont because it contradicts your secular religious beliefs, Gaza could be a prosperous region today.

What are “secular religious beliefs”? 

And no, Gaza could never be a prosperous region. Israel wants it to be an impoverished ghetto, and so it is. 

Hamas decided it would prioritize the destruction of Israel over the building of a prosperous state. Why? Because if people are prosperous, they don’t like to die in war. They have too much to live for.

Hamas decided that it would fight for the rights of the Palestinian people. Most Palestinians in Gaza are not from Gaza; they are refugees from the southern parts of Israel. Israel is one giant refugee camp, as well as the world’s biggest open-air prison. How could such a place ever hope to be “prosperous”?

There is no other logical conclusion for Hamas’ decision to initiate hostilities against Israel.

Really? Literally no other logical conclusion?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Palestinian_exodus

It must be nice to live in a world where everything is the Jews’ fault.

Where did I say that? Quote, please.

Also: stop equating Israel with Jews and Zionism with Judaism. Most religious Jews in the early days of Zionism hated Zionism. As did most other Jews. To this day there are still Jews who despise Zionism. Most Jews still do not live in Israel.

I do think that everything when it comes to Palestine is Israel’s fault. I do not think that everything in the world is ”the Jews’“ fault.

You seem to ignore that your argument that everything is the Jews/Israelis fault (depending on the time period) is predicated on one thing: the existence of Jews in their ancestral home.

The ancestral home of Russian Jews is Russia, the ancestral home of Polish Jews is Poland, the ancestral home of Moroccan Jews is Morocco, and the ancestral home of Yemeni Jews is Yemen. Prior to Zionism, all of those Jews would have resented anyone saying that Palestine was their “ancestral home”.

Anyway, here’s etrogim to explain why that is not the problem:

http://etrogim.tumblr.com/post/153839028927/why-do-you-think-jews-arent-indigenous-to-israel

When did the Jews begin to arm themselves? After the Arabs started massacring Jewish settlements.

Zionists massacred far more Palestinian Arab villages and towns in 1948.

Why were the Arabs killing the Jews? Because they bought land to farm.

No, because they knew they intended to colonize their land. Reminder: the violence didn’t start until after the Balfour declaration.

As happened in Hebron.

Ah, yes... Let’s talk about Hebron!

This is the account of Rabbi and eminent Jewish scholar Baruk Kaplan present at the yeshiva during the 1929 Hebron massacre. Rabbi Kaplan eventually became the principal of Beis Yaakov, one of the finest Jewish girl's religious schools in New York and is regarded within the Jewish community as an academic authority beyond reproach or accusations of misrepresentation. The following is a translation of his recorded interview made in Yiddish in 1980: 

I would like to describe the error that is spread in Jewish communities. A horrible error that accuses the Arabs in Hebron of being killers who attacked the Jews simply because the Arabs were bad people. In order to correct the record this error must be corrected. The Arabs were very friendly people and the Jews in Hebron lived very well with them and had very friendly relations with them. To take just one example I used to have the habit of walking a mile or two out of town all by myself to visit a tree which is believed to be the tree where our patriarch Abraham met the three angels as described in Genesis. I especially enjoyed visiting the tree in the summer time. Along the way I would talk to the Arabs using mostly my hands because I spoke no Arabic. Interestingly enough no one in the yeshiva every told me it was dangerous to go by myself among the Arabs. We just lived with them and got along very fine. 

I have also seen a letter by the Grand Rabbi of the Ghera Hasidim at that time Rabbi Abram Martray elder who has memory of Poland regarding his trip to the Holy Land during the days when people were talking about emigrating to Palestine. He wanted to find out what kind of people the Palestinians were in order to be able to advise people whether to move there or not. He wrote in his letter that the Arabs were a very fine and friendly people. Therefore it is necessary to set the record straight about the accusation that the Palestinians were terrible people who liked attacking Jews. This was never the situation at all. Today’s wicked Zionists are just like their predecessors who are responsible for causing terrible suffering in Palestine with their wars against the Arabs. May G-d have mercy. 

At the time in 1929 the Zionists had a slogan arguing that the western wall was a Jewish national symbol. Of course the Arabs disagreed with this idea considering that they had enjoyed control over the location for over one thousand one hundred years. However the Zionist mobs were yelling 'the wall is ours'. It's hard to understand why they felt that way considering to have no connection to the Jewish holy places whatsoever. An argument errupted in the Jewish newspapers about establishing a permanent prayer area for Jews at the wall. 

This provoked the Arabs and the Rabbi of Jerusalem at the time  Chaim Josef Sonnenfeld begged them to stop and be appreciative to the Arabs for allowing Jews to pray at the wall for so many centuries undisturbed however the Zionists wanted a permanent set up under their control. This began the conflict at the time between the Zionists and the Arabs. 

After we were studying at the yeshiva in Hebron and saw a bunch of boys in short pants carrying weapons on bicycles and motorcycles running around the streets of Hebron. We were very worried about this. What were they up to? In brief our Rabbi the supervisor of our religious academy Moshe Hetreps called them for a meeting but they refused. He was forced to go over to them and ask them what they were up to. He accused them of wanting to provoke the Arabs. They responded that they were coming to protect us. We cried out ‘woe are us, G-d have mercy.’  They didn’t want to leave town until it was too late. These arrogant cowards only ran away when the local Arab leaders called for a mass  meeting of the people from the surrounding Arab villages but it was too late. The Arabs got organised and the Mufti called upon his people to be ready Friday night when the yeshiva would be attending prayers. 

At this point the Yeshiva was alone against the Zionists but the Arabs didn’t know to distinguish between us and the Zionists. Sadly they attacked and killed some of our people including the great scholar Joshua Rosenhaus. The next morning we heard the excitement in town and even worse we heard the crying and shouting. I and a friend lived in an apartment that was a part of a three storey building  leased by a Jew from an Arab. We could hear all the noise from our apartment on the third floor.  We were terrified to let the Arabs in because we knew how angry they had become but a while later things calmed down. In total some sixty five people were killed. 

On the other side of town however the Jews were spared. Why am I telling you about this story?  It’s because I want to expose how the wicked Zionists both today and in those days were the cause of our suffering. They cooperated with the Nazis, Our religion teaches us that a person who causes someone to sin is worse than the sinner who kills. 

A state (of affairs) that killed the Judaism of the Yemenite and Moroccan Jews of many other Sephardic Jews. This is the work of these thugs and gangsters.  Everyone must know that the anger of the Arabs against us is only caused by the Zionists. The Arabs were a friendly people to us and I am a witness to it. We lived very well with them in Hebron and I will attest to this as well. It is the accursed Zionists who caused them to hate us. The Zionists dared to use their power to expel the Arabs and even today in the Lebanon they kill and butcher Arabs. They wipe out whole villages with their aeroplanes,  Everyone should know who the murderers are. The Zionists are the biggest murderers in the world who refuse to let the Jews live in peace either spiritually or physically.

So, yeah...seems pretty clear-cut to me whose fault that particular tragedy was... 

Apparently, you’ve never been through US naturalization. You are required to swear an oath of allegiance. If Lieberman wants to make “Palestinian” Arabs sign it, it would be no different because they are not citizens like Arab Israelis are.

People who are not white and Christian don’t have to swear an oath of allegiance that say the US is a white Christian country and that they don’t have as much value as white Christians. 

Also, “naturalization”? The Palestinians have lived there for generations! Centuries! Millennia! Lieberman has lived there since 1978! He wasn’t even born there!

You use it because its an easy way to slander Jews.

Nope, I use it because that’s what it is, and stop equating the State of Israel with “Jews”. 

Now you claim I use the fact that the “Palestinians” are an invented nationality/ethnic group to justify ethnic cleansing. I never made that claim. Arabs were displaced as a result of military operations, both those conducted by the Arabs and Israel. However, ethnic cleansing did not occur.

Yeah, it did. It did occur. Demonstrably so. That’s what Plan Dalet was: a plan to cleanse the land of all its Jews in order to create an artificial Jewish majority. 

No citation is needed for my statement about the use of Jewish status to confer immunity from charges of antisemitism. These quisilings, or commonly referred to as “asajews” have been the bane of our communal existence for centuries. It was they that would provide the testimony needed by the Christians and Muslims to convict the Jewish people of blood libels by stating that we use Christian blood in our ceremonies. (And because I have to with you, I categorically state that we have never used blood sacrifice in our religion).

It seems to me like you are the one here who’s anti-Jewish. You are literally saying that any Jew who does not support the racist settler state of Israel is not a real Jew. Few statements could be as antisemitic as that one. 

Anti-Zionist Jews are not any less nor any more Jewish than Zionist ones, and that is a fact. 

I’ve provided you with a link to one of those anti-Zionist Jewish Tumblr users. You can go check out any of the others at any point. Why don’t you at least try to talk to them? (Maybe don’t tell them that you think they should be executed by firing squad, though.)

And no, you do not fucking have to tell me that you have used blood sacrifice in your religion. I’m an anti-Zionist, not an anti-Semite. I hate oppression and racism, I do not hate Jews. 

You can actually just go to any of your quisling friends and look at how they treat their advocacy for the terrorist entities of Gaza and the PA and how they treat their Jewish heritage.

I already have. Now you. 

You also suffer from a fundamental misunderstanding of Zionism. It is about Jews taking control of their own safety and stopping being victims.

https://neras-kirneh.tumblr.com/post/162091864390/anarchamarxistdrowfeminism-ruthyless

Now we want to make sure that no one does it to us again.

Well, you don’t get to brutalize an entire other people in order to do that, sorry.

We have learned that the world categorically would rather see a dead Jew than a successful, proud one.

Yes, and that is bullshit - but it doesn’t justify the Nakba. 

At the core of Judaism has always been a belief that we are meant to live in the land chosen for us by G-d. That land is Eretz Israel.

I have heard many Jews claim otherwise. Jews lived in other parts of the world for thousands of years before the Zionist movement started. Only a small percentage of the world’s Jews ever permanently lived in Palestine, and even today, Israeli Jews are a minority among the world’s Jews. 

Seems to me like if that was at the core of Judaism, these things would not be the case. 

On our holiest day, we say “L’Shana Haba'ah B'Yerushalayim”. It translates to: Next year in Jerusalem. At our most important holiday, Passover, we say the same phrase. We have said those phrases for more than 2000 years.

And yet the Zionist colonization of Palestine has only gone on for about 120 years. 

Yes, Spiritual Zionism has existed ever since the Jews got banished by God. It is a spiritual journey - not a physical one - in which adherents strive to regain the grace and favour of God and be recalled to Zion - not to travel there and conquer it. This concept is known as divine redemption and political Zionism is repugnant to it. 

It is heresey by way of defying God's banishement and seeking to regain a land by force which is strictly prohibited by the faith of the Torah. Zionism is indeed a European cult and was condemned by Jews worldwide and most especially by the Palestinian Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews of the “Old Yishuv”, who despised Zionists. In response, they were murdered and silenced by the Zionists. 

Zionism is not a local liberation movement lead by Palestinian Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews. It was a regime forced on them (and on their Muslim and Christian countrymen) violently when they opposed it peacefully almost to a man.

Also, God is - once again - not a real estate agent. You don’t get to use (or in this case, misuse) your religious faith in order to justify ethnic cleansing, apartheid, war crimes and genocide. 

To be a part of the Jewish community, as opposed to someone who has been cursed with the wrong lineage, means a belief that the Jewish people will have a home of their own in Eretz Israel.

Seems to me like most Jews are happy to have “a home of their own” in the US, France, Canada, the UK, Argentina, Russia, Germany, Belgium, Australia and the rest of the world...

So its read that while he is urging a stern line be taken, its not because he wants to destroy all the Arabs. Its because compromising at that the time of the state (1923), it would hurt the Jews. He was hopeful that an agreement could worked out, but believed it would only come in the future.

What conditions did he think were necessary for that to happen? The Arabs would have to abandon their dream of expelling all the Jews from the region.

Jabotinsky was a fascist who was praised by Mussolini. He was also a racist, so I can see why you would like him. 

Look at that, your supposed bogey man actually had a plan that would have achieved what Israel eventually chose to do: have a state where Jews and Arabs had equal rights. Which is what Israel has done, contrary to your unfounded claims.

No, it is not. Palestinians with Israeli citizenship are not treated equally under Israeli law. 

Everything in the original Zionist plan was built around doing things by purchasing private property. They would encourage Arabs to leave, but they would not force them to do so. If someone refused to sell, they would just bypass them and leave them to their own life, unmolested.

If by “bypass them and leave them to their own life unmolested” you mean “brutally ethnically cleanse them according to Plan Dalet”, then yes, you’d be correct. 

Anyway...looking forward to your next piece of apologia for ethnic cleansing and settler-colonialism...