macklin celebrini has autism
cherry valley forever
No title available
No title available
tumblr dot com
Origami Around
Monterey Bay Aquarium
untitled
trying on a metaphor
bliss lane
tannertan36
Cosmic Funnies
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
oozey mess
Show & Tell
No title available
Jules of Nature
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
ojovivo
seen from Bangladesh
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from Australia
seen from Russia
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States
seen from Indonesia
seen from United States
seen from Vietnam
seen from Türkiye
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from India
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from India
seen from United States
@howdyfriend
Hi there! I'm Howdy, welcome to my blog!
This is a multifandom, personal blog where I keep the things I love and enjoy. I try to tag things, but I am very forgetful and things will slip through. My interests are ever changing, but some constants are liminal spaces, horror, bugs, puzzles, and pretty dresses :3
Tags:
Howdy's Art
Howdy's Ocs
Howdy's Asks
Howdy's Mutuals
HAVE YOU SEEN HER?
Now you have :)
ARTFIGHT 2026
The List:
Polycules should be able to trade people like sports teams do
Listen -- you're a good defender and your pussy is fantastic, but that's not what our team needs right now. We're trading you to Greater Boston in exchange for someone who has a car.
☆ put this star in the inbox of your favorite blogs. it’s time to spread positivity ! 💙
Sending a star right back at you!! Your presence on my dash is always a highlight of my day <3
saw a tiktok that was making good points except it was like "if you're over 23 you shouldn't even know anyone under 20 unless they're family and it's weird if you do" and I just. have you guys ever had coworkers. students. family friends. clubs. is no one going back to school for their BA/MA/PhD. what kind of isolated world are you living in where as a 23+ year old you never interact w anyone under the age of 20. this idea that even Talking to anyone younger than you is somehow predatory is absolutely insane god I hate western individualism so bad. no your best friend ever probably shouldn't be a teenager when you're a grown ass adult but we do in fact need to be in community w people younger than us
EU Fanfest is next week which means more of a look at Evercold Cinematic every one keep a cool head... ... ... ... PLACE YOUR BETS PLACE YOUR BETS! WILL THIS GARLEAN EXILED PRINCE RETURN IN EVERCOLD! YE OR NAY! PLACE YOUR BETS!
Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
Nay (Horsechefant approves)
“hey did you kiss the brick before you threw it” “prev so true” “EXACTLY!!!” “I am always saying this” “op im gonna kill myself” “dont talk to me im unwell about this” “agskhksj!!!"
anyone else find boomer comics funny in an ironic way? like, if some kid actually said this I would think it's fucking hilarious
what drugs did they put in ffxiv to make you so obsessed with your WoL. Im utterly insane about her
The Sound of Music Weekly Gpose Challenge
Starting Sunday July 19th, 2026 I will be putting out a song that I want everyone to listen to and make a gpose for every week! We will be covering a ton of different kinds of music.
Every Sunday I will be linking a song here from Spotify and YouTube, your mission, should you choose to accept, is to listen to it and think of a gpose inspired by said song.
You have from Sunday to Sunday every week to do the challenge.
Please tag the gposes #the sound of music gpose challenge 2026 or #thesoundofmusicgposechallenge2026 so I can find them and boost them!
Please look forward to the first song Sunday July 19th, 2026!
"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.
A collection, for a well loved garf
This reminds me of well-loved books; most people think that a beat up book is a sad thing, but it all depends on the way that it's beat up, as you can tell whether it got that way from being mistreated vs read so many times.
I always encourage my students to let me know if they come across a damaged book so I can fix it if possible ("You won't get in trouble for it, I just need to know so I can fix it before it gets worse"). The books they bring me are usually the really popular ones that have started disintegrating from overuse, and I always explain that things like falling pages start happening when a book has been read a lot, it's normal, and means the book has lived a good life.
pop health science is so annoying bc it'll be like "did you know? eating strawberries will give you mega cancer" and you're like pfft whatever begone influencer. but sometimes then you'll see a reasonably credible article like "Study Shows Possible Link Between Strawberries and Mega Cancer" and you're not usually the type to follow that kind of thing religiously but idk maybe you should consider not eating strawberries? but then there's another article saying "Strawberry/Mega Cancer Study Debunked" and it turns out the original study had a sample size of 3 and was funded by Big Blueberry, and strawberries may have a small connection to mega cancer but only if you are genetically predisposed to mega cancer and eat 50 strawberries every day. so you return to your strawberry eating life. but whenever you eat strawberries in public someone tells you about the mega cancer.
houugh i miss the hollow knight
can’t talk right now. im partaking in the social ritual of correct micro facial expressions
right so apparently its also weird if you do the correct micro facial expressions but then dont talk
Ragebaiting my fat dog? More like master baiting my fat hog!!!!!!!!
❗️Great Hog is displeased by this.
The kingly pig looks taken aback by this statement. "You claim to be 'baiting' our kind?.. A master of it, no less - after all the trust we hsve placed in you?"
- Your relationship with the Hog Society 🐖 is now Unfavourable.
For the past month I've been working on a huge project - an illustration for my FC's 3 year anniversary! Been working tiresly on it trying to include all our friends and some inside jokes and details into this piece, really happy with how it turned out!
