NASA
No title available
wallacepolsom
@theartofmadeline
PR's Tumblrdome
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he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
JVL
Claire Keane
will byers stan first human second
cherry valley forever
Cosimo Galluzzi
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
Sweet Seals For You, Always
$LAYYYTER
todays bird
noise dept.
Kiana Khansmith
occasionally subtle
seen from Türkiye
seen from Bangladesh
seen from Albania
seen from Bangladesh
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Italy
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Portugal
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Bulgaria
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
@changeling-droneco
Wild caught clownfish will be like ‘hm you see, the anemone you got me is a slightly different color and tentacle width than the one I had back home, so I will not begin hosting it. I’ll be a sort of wandering ronin for the rest of my days.’ And then a captive bred clownfish will be like ‘ok so I have this curved rock I found and I just sit above it and it take care of me 👍’
Some of my favorite clownfish hosts
Americans when we lose at soccer: "Your waffles suck!"
Egyptians when they lose at soccer: "DA JOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOS DID IT!"
Americans when faced with FIFA corruption: "Is there no appeals process? Fine, we'll speak to you in the language you understand: more corruption."
Egyptians when faced with FIFA corruption: "This is a Zionist conspiracy."
thinking about this tag on my post again. i'm saying this all the time forever
oh i'm also saying this one all the time forever
images: tags.
#nothing is above critique but also so many ppl are dogshit at criticism so here we are
#nothing is above critique and that includes your critiques
end image descriptions.
"Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.
When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.
Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.
In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.
The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.”
Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.
Why is this happening? One reason, of course, is smartphones.
I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japan’s Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.
So when a student tells me they “kept losing track” of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.
Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays — one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing — and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term “cognitive debt” for the lingering deficit.
This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brain’s engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time. When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not “free students up for higher-order work.” It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.
There is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their K–12 schooling. Whatever the standards’ original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling “evidence” from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on “finding the main idea” in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as “severe or very severe.”
In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that “thinking is becoming a luxury good.” The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text in everyday life, much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking. Her longer treatment of the subject in First Things makes the more provocative case that we are witnessing the end of print culture itself, and with it the end of the cognitive substrate on which modern liberal democracy was built.
I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week. My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded. A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a “deep work” lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.
I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a source’s claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into “this is good” and “maybe add more details” the moment I step back.
But I want to be plain about the limits of what an individual instructor can do, and all of these solutions have costs. Scaffolding a 20-page article into halves compromises the integrity of the argument I am asking students to engage, just as modeling note-taking in a credit-bearing rhetoric course is using a college slot to teach a middle-school skill. None of the syllabi I teach are designed to deliver this type of cognitive rehabilitation, and pretending otherwise has produced credential inflation. We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify.
I’m afraid I don’t have answers. I do, however, have some questions that may point us in the right direction. If higher education is going to respond to the reading crisis as a structural problem rather than a private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts, it has to stop avoiding the following questions: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?
Why are first-year writing and reading-intensive general-education courses still the most adjunctified, lowest-paid, highest-load corner of the university, at the precise moment when their work has become the most important work the institution does? What is the responsible institutional response for AI usage: Is it a syllabus statement, or a sequencing principle that requires students to demonstrate the cognitive work themselves before AI assistance is permitted?
Why are most college classrooms still phone-permissive by default? K–12 districts from Florida to California are now banning phones bell to bell; higher education has somehow lagged behind the public schools. Universities benefit from a pipeline they did not build and refuse to repair. What would it mean for a university system to invest seriously in the reading instruction happening in the high schools that feed it, rather than treating remediation as something to be quietly outsourced to first-year composition instructors?
The thing I am no longer willing to do is pretend this is a temporary adjustment period, or that “students will adapt.” They will not adapt on their own. The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models that load the reading-intensive work onto the most precarious faculty, and now the chatbots that finish students’ sentences before they’ve even begun to think of them. If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for literacy deliberately, against the grain of every incentive currently pointed the other way. I know the academy has the will to do that. It also has the obligation."
— Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Can’t Read"
The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.
I want to be very clear on this: it is not just dependence on smartphones and phones causing mental atrophy. It's that for decades we have taught Three Cueing System as a way to read, and while we are now beginning to correct, it is catching up with us. The reliance on smartphones and short form video are in part a result of illiteracy, not necessarily a cause of it, because we have failed to give students the tools to actually read but also paired it with the belief that they can read. They do not seek remedial reading help but blame the materials for being unclear or too difficult, when the fundamental problem is that the more complex the text, the less functional the three cueing system is. They are often quite literally guessing what the text says by searching for words they recognize (or think they recognize but cannot verify) and texts rapidly become impenetrable nonsense. Of course people will reach for their phones when 90% of the text they encounter in their daily lives and schooling is not accessible to them!
some of you are way too comfortable with telling people to die/kill themselves. while still thinking you’re in the right. you’re fucking crazy
that person mildly annoying you does not deserve to be suicide baited. genuinely you need to go outside and have a real conversation with somebody. if you don’t get punched it’ll be a miracle
i love sibling estrangement as horror. Only one person in the entire world has been through what youve been through and they deny it . Awesome
The blacklisting of Jewish people from practically every space for "zionism", which is just not believing Israel should just explode, is scary. It's not just Jewish celebrities. It's Jewish people in fandom spaces, it's Jewish restaurants and businesses. In the name of anti-Israel we've managed to blacklist Jews who have nothing to do with Israel.
The idea that people are born with strictly “AMAB” or “AFAB” reproductive systems and parts is itself intersexist. What the hell are we doing here?
A perfectly natural heterosexual black swan couple raising their cute fluffy babies together as God intended <3
SIKE
THEY'RE GAY
And they're not some rare exception to the rule, either!!!
About 25% of black swan couples consist of two swans of the same sex (typically, two males).
These couples will court each other, build a nest, and raise their young together in a more-or-less committed monogamous relationship.
In fact, these same-sex couples have a high success rate of 80% when raising their young to adulthood, as opposed to the 30% of their heterosexual counterparts! Two big buff papa swans are better than one when it comes to stomping on invaders of nesting territory.
"But," I hear you say, "where do their baby floofballs come from? Does mpreg exist among black swans?"
Alas, no, but there is a very elegant solution to this. The swan couple may simply temporarily associate themselves with a female swan.
Afterwards, the female swan deposits their eggs and swims off free to live her single girlie life if she wishes (or, find a boyfriend. Preferably one who isn't already committed to another boyfriend.)
So whenever someone commits the naturalistic fallacy "homosexuality bad because unnatural >:(" I like to point out not only their glaring illogicality, but also, respectfully, there is homosexuality happening in the local lake right now.
This concludes my Ted Talk on gay swans.
they dont tell you this but you carry your upset younger self in you like a parasitic twin
i think that when people call israeli bomb shelters “bunkers” it’s intentionally to conjure up associations of “wealthy privileged people being cowardly and hiding from the consequences of their harming The People” (bc that is what they believe) instead of “civilians taking shelter from war”
but they’ll call them bomb shelters again when it’s time to spin a different narrative. for example, “the israelis aren’t letting indian migrant workers into bomb shelters, so they’re sleeping in the train station!! they’re all white supremacists/jewish supremacists!!”
when, actually:
- anyone is allowed in any public bomb shelter
- the train stations are bomb shelters
- lots of white jewish israelis were sleeping there too
it’s part of a concerted effort to paint israeli civilians as the equivalent of american billionaires in the mind of americans
so when they encounter people they really cannot fit into that framework, they have to shift it, to keep israeli civilians as villains
yep. and the flip side is when they want to either fantasize about killing israelis or they want their audience to think israel is collapsing and about to fall, and so they say tel aviv was destroyed completely
BONNIE TYLER DIED IM SO FUCKING SADDDD
Tyler died "unexpectedly" in a hospital in Portugal where she was being treated for an illness, her family said Thursday in a statement on h
FUCKING MISERABLE
Hold on, this is fascinating. Reblog this and tell me in the notes how old you are and if you ever had typing lessons.
What in God’s good name is a “typing lesson”
I can’t tell if you’re being serious or not
I’m serious what is a typing lesson? What would they teach you? To type? My brother in Christ it is like writing with a pen but technically easier.
Before home computers were very common, people typically only typed for business-related things, so the only people that actually knew how to use typewriters and word processors were authors, secretaries, accountants, etc. These people would take classes for typing bc it was seen as a skill. This gradually fell out of fashion, much like teaching kids cursive
Typing is only intuitive to gen y & z bc most of us learned through computer games or had someone tell us where to rest our fingers. People who never learned to type use just their index fingers, hit one key, take a long time to find the next letter, hit it with an index finger, and repeat until finished
34 i played this:
33 and i started with Mavis Beacon
34, had typing lessons in 3rd and 4th grade and Mavis Beacon as a kid and I’ve still never used home row except when I was forced to. I type everything with my left hand. The only thing my right is for is using the shift, backspace, and enter keys.
43, first had typing lessons in 4th grade on some type of Mac, then my mother bought me a book and a manual typewriter and made me learn to touch-type, for which I am still grateful 30+ years later. I remember how excited we were when we upgraded to an electric typewriter.
Of course, I got hit by nostalgia so hard that I recently bought a manual typewriter and have been writing letters to people with it! I love it to pieces.
28 and I learned to type through Type To Learn. I have severe dysgraphia to the point where I couldn’t keep up with writing in school early on, so the summer after second grade my parents trained me intensely on all the typing programs they could get, and found ways to help me learn to type fast.
I’m so nostalgic for those games.
“It is like writing with a pen but technically easier” my brother in Christ children also take writing lessons
#LMAO yeah^#i had computer class in 2001 where we eventually had to put paper over our hands to take a test to see if we could type without looking#we also played games#i hated the paper thing at the time. i knew i just needed MORE practice. i dont think i got GOOD at typing until a few years after that#also.. when you have a pen. you can just create the letter you need. with a keyboard you have to FIND IT. and its NOT IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER#how is that easier??#but i guess i dont know any kids whove grown up with computers and could probably type before they could write….????? 😳
Modern kids can’t type before they can write. I mean, most kids understand how to use a keyboard, and pressing letters takes less coordination than writing them so can be started at a younger age for learning to spell, but I’ve worked a lot with kids in the 8-14 year age bracket and they’re usually FASCINATED by how fast I type. (My typing speed is… not impressive. If they made me take one of those speed/accuracy tests they used to do for admin or data entry jobs, I would NOT pass.) But many of the kids I’ve worked with take my comfort and familiarity with a keyboard (I’m a writer) as some impressive, magical skill, because an awful lot of them are letter-peckers.
24, learned actual touch-typing when I was maybe 4 or 5 with this, the sound effects still live rent-free in my brain:
The shift keys on our computer were broken, so up until high school I would type capitals by turning caps lock on for a single key and then back off again.
I’m 39. We had typing lessons every year throughout elementary school. I never really got good at it until I started playing mmos, though.
My kids are in 5th and 6th grade. They’ve never even seen a fingering chart. The 6th grader is expected to do nearly all of his schoolwork on a computer, and he doesn’t even know the term “home row”. I don’t know how they expect them to excel without giving them the skills they need to use the tools they have to use.
I’ve gone what I can to help them learn how to type, but I’m not a teacher.
Mid 50′s.
Typing classes were only availble to those taking the secretarial class, which was not open to boys.
It should be noted that there is a distinction between typing as it used to mean and word processing. Typewriters were unforgiving machines, not only could you not cut, paste or delete (for obvious reasons) so your spelling had to be very, VERY good, but the legibiity of each letter produced depended on how hard you hit the key (unless you went to a fancy school which had electric typewriters, which were not the norm).
Those of us who were subversive enough to learn keybaord skills through computing had a MUCH easier time of it. Though it was often offset by the shitty keyboards some computers had, and YES, I’m calling you out ZX81!
If you can’t see any depth to those keys, you are correct, they have none because the ZX81 keyboard was a damned membrane!
But believe me, if you could learn to typeat a decent speed on of these, then NOTHING could stop you, expcet for the fact that the odds were good you were typing faster than it could process input.
It’s successor, the ZX Spectrum had spongey keys, which whilst not great, were better than nothing.
Genuinely as a computing teacher in the 11-18 age group, I’m saying this now:
We need to bring back typing lessons to the curriculum. The kids will fly if you give them a tablet or smartphone but they have no clue on how to use a keyboard or keyboard shortcuts. If the senior PE class decides to be twats and pry up the keys and swap them round, I will still have 14/15 year olds unable to type because the keys are swapped. And I often don’t notice when helping them because I just.. touch type.
I legitimately broke a Higher Computing Science (so a 16 year old who had chosen to do computer stuff) by showing him how Ctrl+H let him find and replace because he’d made a consistent error in his code and I could see him going back and adding up all the time he’d spent trying to find all the incidences of a specific variable in his code and there I was showing him CTRL+F and all these things.
These kids might not pick a computer based subject after the age of 13 and half of them don’t understand file systems, version control, difference between cloud vs local storage, how to save, etc.
So many kids would just turn off the monitor and think that was the computer, usually leaving themselves logged in (to the point I locked the monitor power button and had multiple posters up reminding kids to press the spacebar on the keyboard to wake up the monitor first).
Basically, digital literacy is being fucking stolen by the appification of the digital platforms available to kids.
All of this.
I’m 37. I’ll be 38 in a couple of weeks. I learned on Mavis Beacon, like many others.
I’ve actually submitted a computer literacy panel to my home anime con under the guise of “showing prospective panelists how to use the equipment for paneling.”
You play boardgames? That's cool (as long as everyone involved in consenting)! I support consensual boardgameing! Consenting adults should be allowed to play boardgames in the privacy of their own home! I like to practice ethical boardgaming with as many partners as the game's box recommends!
CRAB (Consensual Risk Aware Boardgaming)
i wish we were able to talk about women's rights without someone mentioning how much they do or don't want to have sex with them. i don't care if you're a lesbian Stop finding worth in women purely from their perceived attractiveness
"I think women should not be expected to shave for societal respect / to avoid discrimination" "yeah🤤 i love bush" ok well that's not what we're talking about is it.
i hate how many posts about trans women deserving respect always devolve into "I love girldick" or "trans rights but I don't want to date a trans person" because that's entirely unrelated to the topic at hand. you should not respond to feminism with "YESSS I loveeee you because I see you as nothing but a sex object" you people sound like other men I get stuck talking with that end up saying "free the nipple so I can see boobies in public" and thinking they're feminists. why can't we just respect women regardless of your attraction to them or not. why does it need to be brought up in every conversation regarding their rights
I hear being kind is punk but is it ska? Is being kind ska? I don't care about being kind unless it's ska.
whenever i see someone lambast a piece of media for portraying a character getting away with bad behavior instead of getting narratively punished, i have to laugh because that’s literally the hays code. it’s not hays-code-esque or hays-code-coded, it’s just straight up the hays code.
