Tara Jane Art on Instagram
Jules of Nature

ellievsbear
Today's Document

if i look back, i am lost

shark vs the universe
Misplaced Lens Cap

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Kiana Khansmith
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styofa doing anything
Cosmic Funnies

JVL
AnasAbdin

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
NASA

Janaina Medeiros
🪼
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ojovivo
will byers stan first human second
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@avoidingmyrelatives
Tara Jane Art on Instagram
“This isn’t the one I wanted!”/“I’m not asleep, my mind is alive.”
Mood: the guy in the background screaming 1-2-3-4 at the top of his lungs in 'Paper Rings'
“If you look back only at your mistakes, you’d think you were an idiot. If you look back only at your wiser choices, you’d think you were infallible. But if you look back on everything, you realize you’re a human being who has been through a lot, grown a lot, is always still learning, and improving as time goes by.”
—
rest today
breathe in deeply
exhale slowly
and rest
rest in His goodness
rest in His nearness
rest in His sovereignty
rest in His glory
rest in His grace
He is waiting
rest today,
wholly in Him
"You are what you love"
It’s sad how much of what is taught in school is useless to over 99% of the population.
There are literally math concepts taught in high school and middle school that are only used in extremely specialized fields or that are even so outdated they aren’t used anymore!
I took calculus my senior year of high school, and I really liked the way our teacher framed this on the first day of class.
He asked somebody to raise their hand and ask him when we would use calculus in our everyday life. So one student rose their hand and asked, “When are we going to use this in our everyday life?”
“NEVER!!” the teacher exclaimed. “You will never use calculus in your normal, everyday life. In fact, very few of you will use it in your professional careers either.” Then he paused. “So would you like to know why should care?”
Several us nodded.
He picked out one of the varsity football players in the class. “You practice football a lot during the week, right Tim?” asked the teacher.
“Yeah,” replied Tim. “Almost every day.”
“Do you and your teammates ever lift weights during practice?”
“Yeah. Tuesdays and Thursdays we spend a lot of practice in the weight room.”
“But why?” asked the teacher. “Is there ever going to be a play your coach tells you use during a game that requires you to bench press the other team?”
“No, of course not.”
“Then why lift weights?”
“Because it makes us stronger,” said Tim.
“Bingo!!” said the teacher. “It’s the same thing with calculus. You’re not here because you’re going to use calculus in your everyday life. You’re here because calculus is weightlifting for your brain.”
And I’ve never forgotten that.
THIS.
When it’s taught right, learning math teaches you logic and how to organize your brain, how to take a problem one step at a time and make sure every step can bear weight before you move to the next one. Most adults don’t need to know integrals, but goddamn if I don’t wish everyone making arguments on the internet understood geometric proofs.
Scientific concepts broaden our understanding of how the world is put together, which does not mean that most adults ever really understand how light is refracted through a lens or why spinning copper wire creates electricity–and they don’t need to. But science classes in general are meant to teach the scientific method: how to make observations and use them to draw conclusions, how to test those conclusions, how to be wrong and grow stronger from it.
History isn’t about dates and names of battles, it’s about people, patterns, things we’ve tried before and ought to learn from. It’s about how everything is linked, how changing one circumstance can lead to changes in fifty others, cascading infinitely. Literature is about critical thinking, pattern recognition, learning to listen to what somebody is saying and decide what it means to you, how you feel about it, and what you want to do with it.
Some facts matter: every adult should know how to read a graph, how global warming works, some of the basic themes and symbols that crop up in every piece of fiction. But ultimately, content is less important later in life than context.
The good thing is, students who learn the content are likely to pick up at least some of the context, some of the patterns of thinking, even if they don’t realize it. (The unfortunate thing is how the current educational system prioritizes content so much that a lot of students, and a lot of adults, don’t see the point in learning either, and teachers are overworked and held to standardize test grading scales such that it’s hard for them to emphasize patterns of thinking over rote memorization, etc etc etc, but that is a whole different discussion.)
thank u <3
My students are up to something. They keep coming up to me and handing me pieces of fruit, and when I ask why, they just smile cryptically and say, “Don’t worry about it.”
Like, the apples I get. That’s a teacherly thing to give. But one of them just straight up handed me a grape.
I took a sick day today and sent an email to the first girl to hand me a piece of fruit, asking if I could have an explanation now.
Her response was to send me this meme:
That clarifies exactly nothing, thanks.
Walked into school today to an email from her saying: “There’s more to come, hope it doesn’t leave you *sour* (you’ll get that later).”
Ominous.
Just before my first class of the day, one of my students came floating in, a black cloak billowing behind her, hood pulled low over her eyes.
“An offering,” she said, handing me a plain white bag with a green ribbon.
Inside is this:
Life gave me a plastic lemon.
WE HAVE AN ANSWER!
Apparently this was the result of a number of my students playing Truth or Dare at a birthday party. I’m not sure which one of them came up with “I dare you to confuse Magistra by handing her a piece of fruit without explanation”, but I 100% approve of any thought process that ends with me getting free food.
That was wild until the finish.
this is the most wholesome prank. literally wholesome. full of vitamins and everything.
This is me discovering audio books on my library app
We must protect her at all costs
You're asexual? But...
“but sex is what makes us human!”
in 1916 a French officer in his twenties writes his
doctoral dissertation under
heavy mortar fire.
he sends it by mail, a page
at a time, to his wife.
a week before he’s to step up to the podium and
defend his work rather than his country
he is killed in action.
even as the bullets rip
through him he still wishes he could have become a professor
in French literature and
the university awards him a posthumous Ph.D.
sex is
a woman breaks down in tears on the phone because
a week is not enough time to
get over a breakup.
her sister drives an hour across town,
comes up the front steps with
a gallon of ice cream and some beer
and together they eat moose tracks and marathon
every
single
Godzilla movie
ever made.
sex is
she’s late for work but her car isn’t
starting and even through her coat and hat she’s cold.
she knows she can’t be late again because she’s missed
one time too many already because her
father’s nurse was sick with the flu and someone
needed to help him bathe.
the clock ticks past fifteen after and she hits
the wheel like it’s a heavy bag as though that will help
steps on the gas like the car will go
and wonders how she will pay rent
and how she will feed her father.
sex is
it takes three people to hold the predator down because
even with the cover over his head
a bleeding eye and shattered wing
he is trying to hurt them.
none of them have seen this bird before in their lives but
they bandage his wing and head and give him a painkiller and
put him in a warm place to sleep and heal because
it is right.
at first he is paralyzed and cannot
fly but soon he is taking steps
and then fluttering, and then soaring, and
six months later he is whole and healed and hunting.
once he is gone they never see him again
which means they’ve done their jobs right.
sex is
in 1969 a girl watches grey-and-white footage on her parents’ tiny television and
can’t quite believe that what she is seeing is not a movie set but
another planet.
the men on the screen look a little like
aliens with bulbous heads and no faces and fat
marshmallow arms
but they are still men.
her mother puffs on a cigarette behind her and declares that
this is progress
even if it was just a small step.
the girl grows up to be not an astronaut but a secretary
and her boss calls her ‘sweetheart’.
but sex is
a boy is taught that real men don’t cry so
he doesn’t.
when his best friend dies from a self-inflicted
gunshot wound, he locks himself
in the shower every day and sobs under scalding
water until it runs cold
so nobody will see him grieving
so nobody will see that tears are just love that
has no place left to go.
he learns to dull love rather than suppress its expression and
soon the owner of the liquor store knows him by name.
three DUIs, two evictions, and twelve steps later,
he is feeding people at a homeless shelter,
and telling them it’s all right to cry.
Sex is
the broken man tells the comedian
that he didn’t mean to step in front of the car but the rain
made it hard to see.
he seems okay but his leg
does not.
the comedian clutches a grubby receipt with the driver’s
plate number scrawled on the back
in pink pen, stands out in the rain so the broken man
can have his umbrella,
and gives him the comedy routine that ruined his career
so the man doesn’t think about the pain in his leg.
once he’s out of the hospital, the fixed man sends him a thank-you card
with kittens on it.
what makes us human
yawning is contagious,
and there is a species of bird whose young we call “pufflings”.
melodic collections of sound, spaced by silence,
can move us to tears.
the tallest building in the world is
two-thousand seven-hundred and seventeen feet tall.
in less than eighty years we went from our first powered flight
to touching the moon,
and in one-hundred from the first phone call
to instantaneous connection between thinking machines of our own creation.
we make pies out of tree organs
and let cow’s milk ferment until it hardens and then
we put them together, because apple pie with cheddar cheese isdelicious.
what makes us human is
the earliestfossils of anatomically modern humans are
two-hundred thousand years old .
we have had pet dogs
for sixteen-thousand of those years, longer
than corn
or the wheel.
the steps we take are part of
one of the most energy-efficient gaits the
animal kingdom has ever seen.
we invented the concepts of love
and hate
and justice, and mercy
and we invented the language to convey them.
we sharpened rocks, then metal, to convince other people
who don’t hold the same idea of those things as we do
because we think
it’s right.
we are two hundred millennia of love and disappointment and
sorrow and innovation and
mercy and kindness and dreams
and failure
and recovery.
“but sex is what makes us human.”
sat and read this all the way through. will reblog the shit out of this every time i see it. holy jesus. YES to all of this. just yes.
this is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever read.
I still think Moana deserved an Oscar for this part
To me, the moral of Moana is that only women can help other women heal from male violence.
The movie starts with the idea that the male god who wronged Te Fiti must be the one to heal her. This seems to make a certain sort of intuitive sense in that I think we all believe that if you do something wrong you should try to make it right. But how does he try to right it? Through more violence. Of course that failed.
It was only when another woman, Moana, saw past the “demon of earth and fire” that the traumatized Te Fiti had become (what a good metaphor for trauma, right?) and met her with love instead of violence that she was able to heal. Note that they do the forehead press before Moana restores the heart, while Te Fiti is still Te Kā. Moana doesn’t wait for her beautiful island goddess to appear in all her green splendor before greeting and treating her as someone deserving of love.
Moana is only able to restore the heart because Te Kā reveals her vulnerability and allows Moana to touch her there. Maui and his male violence could only ever have resulted in more ruin.
@i-want-cheese
This is a touching anaylisis but it’s extremely racist as not only have you completely ignored the whole point of Maui’s character, but have managed to incriminate a man of color on a tumblr wide scale.
First of all, Maui’s character does not represent male violence—it represent human greed. Maui did not take the heart because he is a man, and Te-Fiti is a woman. He took it because the humans asked him to. The humans asked Maui to do everything for them, not caring how greedy or selfish their requests were and in the end it was Maui who suffered for it. Maui is supposed to show the flaw of humanity.
This has nothing to do with sexism, it has everything to do with the fact that Maui gave and gave to the humans who could never stop being greedy. Moana giving the heart back wasn’t supposed to be her “making up” for the male violence that Maui represents. It was her making up for the greed she and her people represent. It was touching however because yes it was an important moment between two women, but you missed the point and you’ve come off racist and very disrespectful to a culture at that.
Yes, Moana is an empowering movie for women, especially women of color. But the last thing this is about is Maui being an abuser/rapist or whatever. That is not the point of Maui’s character.
And to assume so is racist. You are a white woman completely dehumanizing a man of color and ruining his image because of how you see him. And other white girls here on tumblr have happily picked up that image and interpretation and rolled with it. Maui’s character is now seen as an abuser or as someone who is violently because of white girls here on tumblr—which it doesn’t surprise me. (an in a historical context this is even MORE racist because white women would always make Maui’s people out to be savages and abusers etc., simply because of the color of their skin and their culture so yea, this is bad).
You can see the morality of the movie however you want, but do not be disrespectful toward a character and in this case a culture.
@i-want-cheese Please don’t write this off as another “butthurt comment” or “male guilt”, because this is really messed up. I see how you’re brushing off some other people’s comments and I honestly hope that you don’t see mine the same way because this is an issue I think you need to face/realize. You are being racist and brushing it off isn’t going to change that. the
@visibilityofcolor THANK YOU FOR THIS. As a Polynesian woman, reading that post and other replies painting Maui and even Tui as aggressive and violent men had me feeling some type of way, especially since White people have always regarded Polynesian men in such a manner.
I’ve thought about replying because I’m tired of seeing these kind of “Moana is a feminist movie” posts collect hundreds of notes despite the fact that these posts always conveniently fail to mention Pasifika people, but it always stressed me out, so thank you.
As an aside, Maui taking Te Fiti’s heart and Moana restoring it was symbolic of environmental preservation. Because the people who inspired Moana–Pasifika people, not just Polynesian–are always affected first when the environment is threatened. Our way of life is greatly influenced by the ocean and we believe that if you take care of the ocean, she will take care of you.
You’re very welcome.
This is insight for me as well (as I wasn’t aware that the movie also came fro the culture of the Pasifika people), and does give a very important perspective. I do agree with you, this movie is about environmental restoration, not some white fem bullshit.
I tried over and over again to explain to I-want-cheese about how she was being racist, but she responded by blocking me and other poc who called her out (even other polynesian people). People to this day are still trying to explain that she is being racist and culturally insensitive but she ignores us.
I’ve made a few posts about this, hoping that people realize how problematic it is to agree with i-want-cheese. Explaining to her racist white ass that this was problematic was like explaining to a bird. She wouldn’t listen and neither would have of her racist friends.
Sorry you’ve had to see this on your dash every so often, but I’m glad my portion of the post is starting to get around. (reblogged to the wrong blog at first lols)
dang reblogging this as a correction for the very first reblog. this why feminist analysis always needs to be intersectional
My heart just cried
the portrayal of Maui is super important here, the disney crew put a LOT of effort into getting him right because he IS a crucial figure to an entire culture- basically a cross between a central religious figure and superman so handling him poorly would be catastrophically disrespectful there are basically only two parts of Mauis legend that they flub- they only tell half of the story of when he was abandoned as a baby, and they skip over that stealing the heart of Te-Fiti so he could give it to humanity was the legend in which he dies yes, canonically Maui dies in his quest to give gifts to humanity, its an important element of why Maui is such a profound character, not just ‘man who hurt someone’ strawman it gets worse when you discover the OTHER legend they fudged, the story of his birth, reinforces this. Mauis mother had several (Hawaiians only say three, new zealand says five) sons, all named Maui, so when she had ANOTHER son she named him Maui as well, but then cast him into the sea for there was no way she could support another son. the gods did not save Maui, as Moana says, instead they return him to his mother and say she must give him a chance. to which his mother states that for her to take care of him this infant must remove the roof from her house by throwing spears at it. that is the story of Maui the skillful, abandoned as an infant and then immediately told that he must PROVE his worth, after which all he ever does is prove his worth
his brothers mocked him for being a poor fisherman, he crafts a fishook from a jawbone and proceeds to raise new islands from the sea the sky is so low the trees bend, maui raises it for everyone, then fills the new sky with wind
the sun flies so quickly there is not enough time in the day to do the labors for everyone, maui has to lay traps for each of the suns many feet, chase after it as it was slowed, and then threaten to chop its legs off if it would not slow down
he then due to the complaints of the now longer dark night creates the moon and is upset his creation will not please humanity for it does not make sufficient light, then shows it to the sun so that it may learn how to be bright maui was credited with having invented as gifts for humanity the outrigger canoe, stone tools, and seaworthy boats that had no mast or sails. he was credited with inventing tattoos as a gift to dogs, however humanity is still not content so maui descends to the land of the dead to ask the secret of creating fire from the grandmother, who kept it hidden in her fingernails. he dropped the fingernail in the water as he tried to return to the land of the living, came back for another, dropped it as well, and went through all ten fingers and toenails untill he had to then interrogate birds the grandmother had shared the secret with to tell him how
a monstrous eel tried to put the moves on his wife, and again maui had to prove his worth to reclaim her by breaking the monster eel’s spine, shoving him into the ground to create the first coconut tree, the single most useful thing for polynesian life, as a gift to humanity yet again Maui, as a mythological figure, did nothing but give from the day he was born. he gave humans tools, land, fire, boats, light, the wind, everything except life itself and he even tried to give them that- and it killed him, he was bitten in two a crucial part of Maui as a legend is that he failed, its literally part of the point, also that he was driven to prove himself endlessly to the (during his life) ungrateful. do not try and drag Maui, its disrespectful on a level i cant express thank the man, you asshole Moana succeeded where he failed, for she saw that she did not have to prove herself. the whole movie up untill then she was trying to put on a brave face (there was literally a cut song ‘warrior face’ where maui teaches her Haka), shout her courage, announce to the world at large that she WILL do the thing and fix the world and be the hero, just like Maui
its easy to miss, she stopped trying to prove who she was to anyone, there was nobody she needed to prove herself TO she just WAS herself, and that brought her peace
Oh man…this is why it’s so important to hear the perspectives of the peoples actually represented. When I was reading through this, the first part seemed to make a lot of sense on the surface, but I could *never* have imagined how racist that perspective was. It makes so much more sense now. Thank you to the folks in this thread who were willing to take the time to share their perspective so that oblivious folks like me could do a little more to chip away at our own internalized racism.
(Also the story of Maui is heckin’ sad, gosh :( )
What Slasher said. I was ready to reblog right at the first part. I never considered this. Thanks to everyone else on this post for sharing.
Dimensional Swirls Appear to Lift Off the Canvases of Painter Dragica Carlin