let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
Origami Around
One Nice Bug Per Day
if i look back, i am lost
sheepfilms
🩵 avery cochrane 🩵
oozey mess
Interview Vampire Daily
EXPECTATIONS
izzy's playlists!
d e v o n
pixel skylines
tumblr dot com
KIROKAZE
NASA
blake kathryn
Game of Thrones Daily
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
todays bird
No title available
seen from Indonesia
seen from Iraq
seen from United States
seen from Australia
seen from Vietnam
seen from United States
seen from Brazil
seen from Italy
seen from United States
seen from Canada
seen from Kenya
seen from United States
seen from Canada
seen from Colombia
seen from United States
seen from Ecuador
seen from Lebanon
seen from Indonesia
seen from Venezuela
seen from United States
@not-so-common-cynthia
You cannot pretend to read a book. Your eyes will give you away. So will your breathing. A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe. The house can catch alight and a reader deep in a book will not look up until the wallpaper is in flames.
Lloyd Jones (via book-pause)
It’s all messy: The hair. The bed. The words. The heart. Life…
William Leal. (via llullull)
deanandthedemonbloodprince: I was wearing my Gryffindor shirt while Christmas shopping and there was this cute boy in a Slytherin hat and we made eye contact and he looked me up and down and said “10 points to Gryffindor” and winked at me and normally I hate being hit on but damn son that’s the way to do it
Don’t settle for someone who doesn’t give you things to say. Forever is a long time to make small talk.
The Silence Goes for Miles (I Wrote This For You)
If you’re a boy writer, it’s a simple rule: you’ve gotta get used to the fact that you suck at writing women and that the worst women writer can write a better man than the best male writer can write a good woman. And it’s just the minimum. Because the thing about the sort of heteronormative masculine privilege, whether it’s in Santo Dommingo, or the United States, is you grow up your entire life being told that women aren’t human beings, and that women have no independent subjectivity. And because you grow up with this, it’s this huge surprise when you go to college and realize that, “Oh, women aren’t people who does my stuff and screws me.” And I think that this a huge challenge for boys, because they want to pretend they can write girls. Every time I’m teaching boys to write, I read their women to them, and I’m like, “Yo, you think this is good writing?” These guys attack each other over cliche lines but they won’t attack each other over these toxic representations of women that they have inherited… their sexist shorthand, they think that is observation. They think that their sexist distortions are insight. And if you’re in a writing program and you say to a guy that their characters are sexist, this guy, it’s like you said they love Hitler. They will fight tooth and nail because they want to preserve this really vicious sexism in the art because that is what they have been taught. And I think the first step is to admit that you, because of your privilege, have a very distorted sense of women’s subjectivity. And without an enormous amount of assistance, you’re not even going to get a D. I think with male writers the most that you can hope for is a D with an occasional C thrown in. Where the average women writer, when she writes men, she gets a B right off the bat, because they spent their whole life being taught that men have a subjectivity. In fact, part of the whole feminism revolution was saying, “Me too.” So women come with it built in because of the society. It’s the same way when people write about race. If you didn’t grow up being a subaltern person in the United States, you might need help writing about race. People are like ‘I got a black boy friend,’ and their writing sounds like Klan Fiction 101. The most toxic formulas in our cultures are not pass down in political practice, they’re pass down in mundane narratives. It’s our fiction where the toxic virus of sexism, racism, homophobia, where it passes from one generation to the next, and the average artist will kill you before they remove those poisons. And if you want to be a good artist, it means writing, really, about the world. And when you write cliches, whether they are sexist, racist, homophobic, classist, that is a cliche. And people will kill you for their cliches about x, but they want their cliches about their race, class, queerness. They want it in there because they feel lost without it. So for me, this has always been the great challenge. As a writer, if you’re really trying to write something new, you must figure out, with the help of a community, how can you shed these received formulas. They are received. You didn’t come up with them. And why we need fellow artists is because they help us stay on track. They tell you, “You know what? You’re a bit of a homophobe.” You can’t write about the world with these simplistic distortions. They are cliches. People know art, always, because they are uncomfortable. Art discomforts. The trangressiveness of art has to deal with confronting people with the real. And sexism is a way to avoid the real, avoiding the reality of women. Homophobia is to avoid the real, the reality of queerness. All these things are the way we hide from encountering the real. But art, art is just about that.
Junot Diaz speaking at Word Up Bookshop, 2012 (via thegirlandherbooks)
one scene per favorite film a little princess (1995)
ugh. this movie tho
Young writers should read books past bedtime and write things down in notebooks when they are supposed to be doing something else.
Lemony Snicket (via a-thousand-words)
"I tell my daughters they need a college education so that they can have a career, and not a job. Because I’ve got two jobs, and they still don’t add up to a career."
modes of persuasion
Paloma Noyola: The Face of Mexico’s Unleashed Potential
When a report emerged in September 2012 that a girl from one of Matamoros’ poorest neighborhoods had attained the highest math score in Mexico, some doubted its veracity. It must be fake, they said.
But it wasn’t fake. Her name is Paloma Noyola, and what most reports failed to mention is that almost all of her classmates also scored very high on the national math test. 10 scored in 99.99% percentile.
Paloma and her classmates also scored in the top percentile in language. Something special was happening at José Urbina López primary school in Matamoros, and Wired went to take a look.
The high test scores turned out to be the work of a young teacher who also came from humble beginnings. Sergio Juárez Correa was tired of the monotony of teaching out of a book and wanted to try something new to help engage his students when he came across the work of Sugata Mitra, a UK university professor who had innovated a new pedagogy he called SOLE, or self organized learning environments. The new approach paid off.
Although SOLE usually relies on unfettered Internet access for research, Juárez and his students had very limited access. Somehow, he still found a way to apply Mitra’s teachings and unleash their potential.
From the beginning, Paloma’s exceptional abilities were evident:
One day Juárez Correa went to his whiteboard and wrote “1 = 1.00.” Normally, at this point, he would start explaining the concept of fractions and decimals. Instead he just wrote “½ = ?” and “¼ = ?”
“Think about that for a second,” he said, and walked out of the room.
While the kids murmured, Juárez Correa went to the school cafeteria, where children could buy breakfast and lunch for small change. He borrowed about 10 pesos in coins, worth about 75 cents, and walked back to his classroom, where he distributed a peso’s worth of coins to each table. He noticed that Paloma had already written .50 and .25 on a piece of paper.
As Mr. Juárez implemented more of Mitra’s teachings in his classroom, Paloma continued to stand out as an exceptionally gifted student:
Juárez Correa was impressed. But he was even more intrigued by Paloma. During these experiments, he noticed that she almost always came up with the answer immediately. Sometimes she explained things to her tablemates, other times she kept the answer to herself. Nobody had told him that she had an unusual gift. Yet even when he gave the class difficult questions, she quickly jotted down the answers. To test her limits, he challenged the class with a problem he was sure would stump her. He told the story of Carl Friedrich Gauss, the famous German mathematician, who was born in 1777.
When Gauss was a schoolboy, one of his teachers asked the class to add up every number between 1 and 100. It was supposed to take an hour, but Gauss had the answer almost instantly.
“Does anyone know how he did this?” Juárez Correa asked.
A few students started trying to add up the numbers and soon realized it would take a long time. Paloma, working with her group, carefully wrote out a few sequences and looked at them for a moment. Then she raised her hand.
“The answer is 5,050,” she said. “There are 50 pairs of 101.”
Juárez Correa felt a chill. He’d never encountered a student with so much innate ability. He squatted next to her and asked why she hadn’t expressed much interest in math in the past, since she was clearly good at it.
“Because no one made it this interesting,” she said.
Although this Wired piece focuses mostly on Sugata Mitra, it does once again highlight the story of Paloma Noyola. Unfortunately, after a brief spurt of media attention, little on Paloma was ever mentioned and, as was pointed out by Wired, nothing was ever said of Mr. Juárez.
As with most stories in the Mexican press — and with in the middle-class — things suddenly become very important once it’s featured in a gringo publication. Which is a very sad commentary. We hope, however, that this story pushes those in the press, state and federal government to look not to the United States for validation but to Mexicans like Sergio Juárez doing good work in places like Matamoros.
The clear message in this story is that there are thousands of Paloma Noyolas going to school in Mexico who, just like her at one time, are not being challenged and therefore aren’t very interested in school. This story can, if we want it to, raise enough awareness to shift the discussion from poverty to opportunity.
Paloma truly personifies both Mexico’s challenges and unleashed potential.
Read the entire Wired story here: How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses
Editor’s note: As an addendum, Wired provided information on helping support Sugata Mitra and his School in the Clouds project, and although they donated school supplies and equipment to José Urbina López School, we’re interested in seeing if we can help set up a similar fund for Sergio Juárez, the teacher featured in this story.
Also, $9,300 was raised to help fund Paloma’s education last year. We going to follow with the economist who led the fundraising campaign to see how she’s doing. Stay tuned for updates.
Stay Connected: Twitter | Facebook
Orgullo mexicano es una sequía bien mala, en especial a nivel educativo. Esto es bellísimo!
I am LITERALLY sobbing; this is so beautiful.
-Joan Didion
"When I was 20, I made a plan to get a good job and be secure. Now I’m 35, and I need a plan to be happy."
Today as always most people go to college not to read but to be done with reading, to settle their tab with culture, after which their bookshelves consist largely of trophies from that time, travel guides and the occasional well-meaning gift.
S. Shirazi (via commonplaces-and-stuff)
this is literally me trying to get my life together…
Lord, but isn’t that the truth??
MMMMMMMMMMM, GRRRL. TESTIFY
"What’s the most frustrating part about being teacher?" "I think it’s getting increasingly difficult to convince my students that what I’m teaching is relevant to their lives. They see a world where the path to success is much more muddled, and social skills are beginning to seem more important than academics. It’s hard to instill the importance of memorization when information is so freely and instantly available."
reblogging this because it has a shitload of notes and i really can’t understand how that happened BUT YEAH
HOLY FUCK THIS IS MY FAVORITE THING ON TUMBLR
IT’S BACK
IT’S BACK
IT’S FUCKING BACK! THIS THING! I’M ALL THE TIME TRYING TO SHOW THIS TO PEOPLE WHEN THAT DAMN SONG COMES ON. AND I CAN NEVER FIND IT. BECAUSE I TUMBL TOO MUCH.
