Mil Estrellas @ph0tocynthia - Tumblr Blog

a cozy morning together

#janther #janther week 2025 #jatd #fanart #my art #mine

The linked article

so ive worked in childcare for a bit now. during the pandemic, the place i worked started a day program for kids whose parents needed to return to work. turns out the school district uses memorization and cueing, and when combined with online learning that read all the instructions to them, overwhelmingly the kids aged 5-9 just... couldnt read.

i brought in a bunch of my books from childhood, and we started having one-on-one reading lessons with the littles. then i went out and bought about fifty more books secondhand. first step was covering the pictures so the kids couldnt guess what the words said and had to actually TRY reading them first. second step was making a list of new words for each kid so we could learn about those words, what they meant, and if the kids were old enough, some of the etymology behind them (because if you can recognize latin root words, it's easier to make connections for pronunciation later on eg. unicorn -> universe).

the kids HATED this. reading was previously the easiest class and now it was really, really hard. but reading class had also previously been the most boring class; their books were ten pictures with a single sentence on the opposite page. we got through it by taking turns reading books the kids picked out from my collection- they would read one sentence or paragraph, then i would read the whole page complete with funny voices, then it would be their turn again, etc. it turns out that if kids are motivated to hear the rest of a good story or a lot of information about a topic they love, they're more willing to struggle.

the kids improved so rapidly that i honestly almost cried a few times from how proud i was. one little girl (kindergarten aged) went from being unable to sound out the whole alphabet to reading goodnight moon by herself in two months :'>

all this, though, was NOT my job. my job was to keep the kids on task during their online schooling and prevent them from killing each other or starving. i am not a teacher. the school system was failing these kids to the degree that outside individual reading lessons were necessary, and school systems across the US are still doing this!

if you are a parent or teacher or childcare worker, PLEASE check to see what your kid is being taught. ask to see examples of lesson materials. raise concerns about the importance of phonics over any other reading strategy. join the pta, go to school board meetings, send emails- just make sure your kid is actually learning to read.

#edu

songsomi

#leon kennedy #re9

inkribbonstudios

You okay?

#re #re6 #leon kennedy

not-terezi-pyrope

I feel like a lot of the discourse I hear about "all cops are bastards" or "there are no good cops" is fundamentally missing the point of what is meant by it. It's not a statement about the average, everyday moral character of individual police officers, it's making a practical observation that, when you agree to become a police officer, you are agreeing to undertake all of the contracted duties of a police officer when required, some of which are just straightforwardly morally evil.

This also is not making the claim that everything done by police is morally objectionable. In fact a lot of work that ends up being done by police departments is pretty unambiguously prosocial. But even if it were the case that most or almost all of it were, if you take a job at a food kitchen where the contract stipulates you need to shoot every 1000th client, you're still the guy who just agreed to murder a bunch of folks for your boss. "But 99.9% of it was just serving nutritious food to my community!" is not a good defense to the charge leveled especially when you could in your own time dedicate yourself to serving your community without also agreeing to wield violence against it.

For the record I don't think that the percentage of police work that is "good" is actually that high, but the point is that it is immaterial. The point is that intrinsic to the role is the use of state violence to uphold unjust structural power. That's the point; not that every cop is an asshole in an interpersonal way, or personally evil in their every day life (although many are). But I'm just as sure many are extremely personable or even typically fairly kind people who are uninformed or have bought the propaganda, to the point that they can ignore the reality of what they are doing.

Still acting as a state bastard when they help toss you in a cell for nonviolent drug crime, though. The system is evil and they have accessed to acting as its agents.

#acab

atiya-nagrano

idk alistair and zevran always seem to be set up as opposites, not just in fandom but in the game and in their conversations w each other, but i do think at least some of that anxiety — more on alistair's part than zevran's, but the reverse is there, too — is bc they do have some uncomfortable things in common, foremost amongst them a rly complicated relationship to sex.

like yes. yes, zevran has a ton of sex. it's his job to have a ton of sex. when he tells the warden that his mother died giving birth to him, thus making her his 'first victim, as it were', while some of that is abt trying to make you feel sorry for him so you super won't kill him or kick him out........................................that's just kind of fucked, right?

and is that not how alistair feels? is that not essentially what goldanna tells him?

alistair and zevran are both described as bastards. alistair has more reason to have negative associations w his father, bc his father lived longer, but i don't think there's any reason why zevran shouldn't have ambivalent feelings towards a man who eloped w a woman who, as a result of leaving her community and support system, largely had no one to help her when that man died and ended up dead in a brothel herself. he calls it, 'the oldest tale in the book'.

i think they both have rly thorny and tangled relationships w sex bc they both have significant reasons to identify it as a site of power and coercion and ruin, it's just that zevran was told that was what he was good at and what he was going to do for the rest of his life, and alistair was sent off to be raised in an environment that reinforced the idea that sex is bad, sex is dirty, sex is forbidden, sex is smth you should not want to have.

idk alistair in their banters seems p determined to let zevran know that he doesn't think zevran is a v good crow or assassin, that he's not sure zevran is up to the task.................which feels like projection. but gradually it becomes a fascination that borders on fixation w zevran's presentation of himself and his masculinity. zevran, for his part, just keeps up his facade. and i think at least part of that has to be bc he's looking at alistair, who is a royal bastard, and doing his best not to think abt rinna.

#da #dao