#training children

[asteroidtroglodyte]

5 years ago, I was in Rehab.

10 years ago, I was watching my Potential and Opportunities dissolve and evaporate in an ocean of cheap gin and expensive whiskey.

But 5 years ago, I was in Rehab.

One of the exercises they had us perform was to imagine ourselves happy, 5 years in the future.

Many of us in that room had forgotten how to imagine nice things happening to them. A few snorted (well, I snorted), finding the notion that we’d even still be around in 5 years grimly humorous.

For about half of us, it was the last stop on the way down.

But I indulged the therapist. I was there, after all, because I did not want to die. So, I imagined myself, 5 years hence.

Happy.

It came to me all at once; an artistic remix on Norman Rockwell’s Freedom From Want, reframed with myself placing food at the table.

Sunday Dinner At My Place, I answered, when it came my turn to share my fantasy. I was asked what food I imagined eating.

It’s not the meal itself, I said, it’s the implications framed around it. Sunday Dinner At My Place means that I have a Place. It means that I have Family that will actually speak to me and friends who actually want to see me. It means money enough not just to feed myself but others too. It means having the time to spare to take the time preparing the meal.

A lot of nodding heads all around me. A struck chord. Many people with no Place, in that place. Nowhere that would lament their leaving.

5 years hence, as I lay down to sleep in my Home, with my Wife and my Son, surrounded by my Art and my Flowers, I reflect.

It was a long road. It was hard. We lost people. So many people. There were long days and long nights and hospital stays. Angry arguments with ghosts. I changed, in ways I never hoped for, or expected. Good ways, finally, for once. Slowly, against the backdrop of a world in chaos, I found my mind.

Sometimes, My Wife wondered aloud, what she did to deserve me. After some stumbling with my feelings, I eventually settled on an answer.

I’m a Rescue.

She gave me a Home.

And, so, I gave her a Family.

It seemed fair

This Sunday, my folks, which whom I have not had a shouting match in years, will come over for dinner. We will cook and eat together. My Friend became My Wife, and she took a piece of me and with it she made Our Son. There will be many hugs, and no violence. Good Things Happened.

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but you don’t know what the future holds.

don’t give up yet, ok?

It could get good, even.

[akagi0021]

kdj has done nothing but fill me with grief

[mscaitlinb]

Slow and steady wins the race

Let’s talk about teaching philosophies.

It has taken me years of training and teaching to come into my own. If you’ve read this far, you must understand that as a young dancer growing up, I was pushed to my limit and then some. While I was training to be a professional dancer, I found myself at the end of my ropes time and time again. Overworked, burned out, and beaten down. Not to mention the psychological trauma of it all too. 

Going to college allowed me to push the reset button on my training, and therein I found a fresh start. I was supported, encouraged and enlightened to be my best version with the most efficient of practices. I didn’t have to push myself past my ceiling of mental and physical capacity. I was allowed to let out the giant exhale I had been holding in for the past 18 years of my life. This propelled me into my young career post grad, which meant teaching dance. 

As I made my way into studio environments, I saw a lot of the same red flags I had personally grown up with in dance: long hours at the studio, constant fatigue and nagging injuries. And this was all happening to children 18 years and under. I knew something had to change, for the well-being of these young dancers. 

Now under equal positive and negative influence from my instructors, I knew forcing results is not ideal. It’s important for a dancer to not only understand the basic fundamentals of their dance technique, but how to efficiently move through it as well. I developed my own curriculum within my classes to properly progress the students in class. We would go from point A to point B to point C and so on. This would mean moving the class at a measured pace. We would be working on the same steps and concepts of movement for weeks to a month at a time, sometimes longer if the class needed extra practice. This idea doesn’t sit well with some studio owners, and particularly some parents. 

Let me tell you about the first group of parents who were visibly upset and confused by my teaching methods. Let’s call them The Susans. Now The Susans were a group of moms to their  4-5 years old children. They were all competitive students and I was their Ballet teacher, who they saw twice a week. Seeing as they took about 5 other classes for technique, and outside rehearsals for their competition dances, I figured what they needed was a slower paced class to focus on the fundamentals of their technique. After all, they needed to learn not only the “what” of their dancing but also the “how”. 

We would do simple exercises in the center, very little at the barre, and work on repetitive movements rather than complex sequences. What I looked forward to the most, was the fact I was going to start with a group of dancers this young and build healthy training habits early. This elated me because the older students I worked with, we toiled to weed out the bad habits and try to start fresh while still training. That wasn’t the case with these girls. My managers and fellow coworkers could see the benefit of what I was trying to do with these kids, and would go to bat for me consistently. The only group of people who had a problem were The Susans. 

They would hover outside the classroom, stare down their children and often grimace at what we were doing in class. They would ask questions after every class, which I had no problem with. I’d rather be transparent with you to let you know my methods of teaching and how I like to manage my class, pedagogically speaking. This never seemed to be enough for them to understand though. In their eyes, they wanted to see results right away. I mean, how could you? When you watch every single class week after week, you only see the slow progress working as it should. They would go straight to my managers to complain, although no action was ever taken on me because I had the full support of this company. True helicopter dance mom fashion for The Susans.

They eventually came around and could see after a year of training, their children improved their technique and continued to grow on these quality habits. They would compliment and praise my teachings at this point. While I wished I didn’t have to go through the headache of this first year training these kids, I’m glad they could see what these children gained in these ballet classes. But this is perhaps where I see the end of my studio teaching career. 

I believe I thrive in environments where I am encouraged to teach my students the way I see fit, and I feel my philosophy just doesn’t match with a studio environment, generally speaking. While most studios have changed to be more progressive in health-conscious ways, not all of them embrace it with open arms. It will always feel like an uphill battle to me, and I’m not going to give up on my professional ethics to fit in with any dance school. I’ve not only seen great results with my pedagogical practices, but great processes too. I have the power to turn my students into hard-working, curious, intelligent and mindful dancers. 

My teaching philosophy will forever and always be: slow and steady wins the race. What’s your teaching philosophies? How have they changed your students for the better? Who influenced you for your methods of practices?

[bluerosefox]

I've been seeing a few DPxDC Dad!Damian ideas so I'd like to toss my idea into the void of the internet.

Damian is on a lead about a glowing green puppy, that can apparently change size and go through walls, and finally manages to track it down before even his father hears about it. The puppy seemed to be stealing random things too.

He was fully ready to use all the tricks in the book to get the puppy to trust him... and after a few days/weeks he manages to gain its trust.

He just wasn't expecting the puppy to drag him to abandoned warehouse and drop him in front of a few kids that were hiding out in it.

"Oh! Cujo you finally brought your new person over!" says the only red-haired one in the group, and she was holding a baby, as two almost identical toddlers ran over to the excited pupper that began to run around them.

[3liza]

I don't know how many times we have to say this but this is because the United States of America does not have public transit in any form that a European would recognize as such outside of a few very small, highly-dense municipal locations like NYC and Chicago, and having used both those systems and the U-Bahn i can firmly assert that the U-Bahn blows American subways into smithereens. we especially do not have accessible interstate passenger train service outside of that one commuter Amtrak loop in the northeast. the country is designed to force its citizens to use cars and only cars, and the government has made it policy to incentivize car ownership since the 1940s and punish any other form of transit, including just walking around. do you understand? the vast majority of roads here do not have bike lanes. when we do have bike lanes they are not protected by a curb or divider, they are just white lines painted on the asphalt. you will regularly encounter roads and streets--inside of cities and suburbs, not just in rural areas--that do not have sidewalks

[cable-salamdr]

So I started Tears Of The Kingdom (again)

I am very normal about this game (all of this is based on my own gameplay, yes, even the dick building one.)

[arachnerd-8-legs]

really disappointing that bunjywunjy had to be pestered twice just to quietly remove their reblog after using their huge platform to encourage garbage like raving about the lesbian estonian soviet flag and how 'new pride flag just dropped' so people could go 'ooh pretty' about a flag that was forced onto us by ppl who wanted our culture gone and oppressed us for about a century in total if not more.

to say nothing or not show anything of the truth about that flag and quietly remove the reblog felt more like it was done out of obligation (and you didn't agree) rather than care for the subject matter that is still a fresh wound in our country's memory. it's only been 33 years since it ended.

I'd rather you make the mistake about something you didn't know (eastern european history is easy for westeners to overlook, because we're not a big country like them, we're not england or france or spain or germany) and admit/apologize for said mistake or even just outright state that you don't actually care rather than say nothing and quietly remove something so that people would stop talking about it

[redbean-nom]

Cadets

(aka trash children, chaos children, and children who understand 98 is getting graded on this)

Inspired by @thefoundationproject! Closeups under the cut:

jesse got this pic from jangotat:

[puppetmaster13u]

Prompt 115

“Seriously old man?” the rumbling voice nearly caused Tim to jump, his eyes darting away from where Ras was sitting, the Al Ghul almost seeming to perk. It was kind of hard to miss the man… teen… being? It was kind of hard to miss the owner of the voice what with how their hair looked like it was on fire. 

They motioned around at well, everything, crimson eyes looking exasperated. “Really?” They were definitely motioning towards him, interrupting Ras when he opened his mouth to talk. “No, I don’t want to hear it, I swear- Did he kidnap you?” That was definitely aimed at him. 

“N-no?” Tim was feeling slightly unbalanced and may be on hour sixty without sleep at this point, if the hour long nap was counted. “I need help finding my not-dad who's lost in time.” 

The being let out a strangled noise that Tim could nearly swear was almost another one, but couldn’t vocalize his slurred thoughts as the dude muttered something, motioning around as though he was tempted to strangle something or someone. 

Ras cleared his throat, looking almost awkward which was how Tim knew he had to be dreaming or drugged. Probably drugged. “Jordan, how good to see you, it’s been so long-”

“Can it Pops,” the being-named-Jordan scoffed, finger pointing towards the Demon’s Head. “Moms still pissed and isn’t coming back any time soon with you still pulling this shit.” 

Tim felt his brain stall, process for a moment, then process some more over what he just heard before his mouth ran before it could catch up. “Ras is married???” 

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

M'lady, doth this harlot bother thee?

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[mikami1992]

Finally, after some missions through time, Dan has managed to be approved as "Officially Reformed", and only with some supervision from Clockwork and Danny, will he be free to return to live in the human world.

So with the help of Clockwor, Tecnus and Tuker, an identity was created for him as a Young Adult, who after a few years of traveling around the world, returns to the United States to begin his University studies.

Dante Jackson Nightingale is a Young Adult recently enrolled in Gotham University to study Business and Finance with some elective classes in Engineering, being the place chosen for the high educational level as well as the level of ecto of the city… but the Phantom of the future has other hidden intentions.

During his 10 years of rampant destruction, Dan had a period of "calm", the reason, the strange relationship he developed with Batman, a relationship that was about to bring the angry spirit back to sanity by focusing his obsession on something else…

But it all ended when a surviving and better-funded group of GIW caught Red Hood to experiment on him, so the Batfam immediately went looking for him, and at first the rescue everything went according to plan, but it was until the end where everything went off the rails with the appearance of the Joker… it was never known how it all ended with the explosion of the bat, but it ended up costing the lives of the Bat and the Clown, and some permanent damage to some of the Batkids.

The death of the Knight of Gotham City ended up reviving and fanning the flames of anger and destruction within Dan, which would cause a destruction greater than anything known before.

So, in this new reality, Dan plans to continue with his original intentions with the bat, this time proving that he was a worthy partner for the Dark Knight.

[ennnchaa]

Sky x How to Train your Dragon

[antianakin]

I hope this doesn't come off as a knock on the Jedi - because that's sure as hell not my intention - but I do sometimes wonder what could convince a parent to hand their young child over to them. Like, I get that the number of Jedi is miniscule compared to the expected population of the galaxy, and this whole ask is likely just the result of my modern, western, nuclear family-based upbringing. But there are times when I can barely see such a thing happening at all. I mean, if you're a Jedi Seeker, what the hell are you supposed to say to get a mother to willingly give you her infant child?

Again, I do hope this doesn't come off as a knock on the Jedi and their methods.

Maybe consider that the Jedi never seem to be actively going out there trying to convince people into giving up their children. They primarily seem to discover children on their own or who are in bad situations, or the parents call THEM of their own volition and the Jedi simply respond to the call.

You can also look at TPM and the way Qui-Gon handles it with Shmi. Now obviously Shmi and Anakin are in a somewhat different situation than most, given that they're both slaves, which would probably make Shmi's reaction to the offer different than those of regular parents, but Qui-Gon treats her as an equal to himself and as an authority regarding Anakin. He respects that authority by speaking to SHMI before he speaks to Anakin, by asking Shmi different questions about Anakin's past and his powers. And it's Shmi who picks up on what Qui-Gon is carefully NOT saying and asks if Anakin could become a Jedi. And that question lets Qui-Gon know that Shmi isn't against the offer being made to Anakin, so when he makes it official, he speaks to ANAKIN directly. But even after that, he still seems to respect Shmi's authority and her place in Anakin's life when Anakin turns to her more than once.

Shmi seems to primarily just want a better life for Anakin. Even without the slavery situation, she seems to recognize that Anakin's abilities mean that he has the opportunity for a specific career path if he wants it and she chooses to give him that opportunity because she never wants to hold him back. She recognizes that it would be cruel to deny him the opportunity simply to keep him with her.

So it's possible some parents probably view it the same way, that they're giving their child the opportunity for a better life than the one they can offer themselves.

Other parents, like Ahsoka's, seem to view being a Jedi as something of an honor. Even though they CAN give Ahsoka a good life, they recognize that Ahsoka has perhaps a greater destiny that they shouldn't stand in the way of and are HAPPY when Ahsoka shows signs of Force sensitivity. It's not just an honor for Ahsoka, it's an honor for her family and the entire village that she has the opportunity to become a Jedi. The other thing to take into account with this scenario is that the Jedi are sort-of seen as following a call to destiny of sorts, and there appear to be communities who understand that better than most, which means they're likely more inclined to let their child follow that call if the signs make themselves apparent. Groups with their own Force sects (like Lasat, Kel Dor, Chalacatans, etc) might be some of the ones more likely to understand this, which is why we see some of them with multiple family members in the Order at the same time.

These seem to be the most likely options for why a parent might give their child to the Jedi even if they love the child and would otherwise want to keep and raise them. There are also likely some parents who simply don't WANT a Force sensitive child for whatever reason, or parents who just take the first opportunity to offload an unwanted child when it presents itself. Not every parent is a good one, obviously.

I've seen some people argue that Force sensitivity might be something very difficult for a non-Force sensitive parent to deal with, and so they give the child away because they ultimately decide that they cannot appropriately raise a child with powers they cannot control. I don't really buy into this one because neither Luke nor Leia are raised by Force sensitive parents and there doesn't seem to be any issues with control there that we ever see or hear about. But it's POSSIBLE a parent might believe that they couldn't manage a child with Jedi powers and give them up on that assumption, even if it isn't true.

So, yeah, there could be any number of reasons a parent might choose to give their child to the Jedi, even if they love the child and would otherwise want to raise them. It isn't a choice that's going to be for everyone, obviously, and the Jedi have an entire list of people who have either said no or maybe/not yet that they keep in the Temple as a record. So some parents DO say no and choose to raise their children on their own even if the opportunity to give their child to the Jedi is made available to them. Or they simply need time to make the decision or want a little extra time WITH the child before giving them to the Jedi even if they know that that's ultimately what they're going to do.

I don't think the Jedi ever say anything to "get" a parent to give up a child they love. That's never their goal. Qui-Gon talks to Shmi about what Anakin's powers are and how they work, he tells her what her options are, and then leaves the rest of it up to her. All he does is give her more information to work with and an opportunity to act on it if she so desires. That's it. I can't imagine any other Jedi doing any more than that unless the situation between the parent and the child was particularly dangerous somehow and even then, I imagine there are lines they'd try not to cross. The whole episode where we see Cad Bane pretending to be a Jedi in order to convince the parents to give up their children shows us that the parents really DON'T expect the Jedi to do this kind of thing and feel perfectly entitled to say no when it happens.

It's not a choice every parent is going to make, and that's fine. It's not a choice that everyone even needs to UNDERSTAND, necessarily. Different people are going to have different ideas of what's best for their child and how to go about providing that. One parent might feel like giving their child away IS the best thing they can do for their child, even if they could give that child a wonderful life. Another parent might feel like that's the worst thing they could do to their child, even if their situation isn't ideal. These parents are likely to never understand the decision the other one made, but they're making decisions out of the same desire to protect and care for their child. Both are entirely valid choices and there isn't necessarily a right or wrong choice in this situation and that's what the Jedi would understand. All they're there to do is offer information and the opportunity to both parent and child, nothing more, nothing less. What the parent (and the child if they're old enough) does with that is entirely up to them.

[barksbog]

i swear i´m gonna start biting dog trainers if they don´t stop comparing dogs with behavioural issues to autistic people

[ghost-bxrd]

Prompt:

Jason never made his debut as a Crime Lord and instead only comes back to Gotham when Damian insists on training with the Batman, insistent on guarding him from the shadows.

Bruce’s headache reaches epic proportions when neither Talia nor Damian elaborate on the man’s presence other than that he’s “Damian’s older brother”.

[garussy]

Httyd series where Zephyr and Nuffink grow up and start to scare Hiccup and Astrid

Because their smart daughter is becoming a little too smart and cunning and always seems to be one step ahead of everyone

And their wild son has grown into a massive tank of a boy who follows his sister’s every order

Hiccup and Astrid getting scared because their kids are acting too much like Viggo and Ryker Grimborn