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Stranger Things
Andulka
izzy's playlists!
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
Keni
sheepfilms
Product Placement
AnasAbdin
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
titsay
hello vonnie
★
Sade Olutola
JVL
🪼
YOU ARE THE REASON
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
Origami Around
Discoholic 🪩
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
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seen from United States
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seen from Singapore
seen from Morocco
seen from Germany
seen from India
seen from United States
seen from Libya
@pythagorean-space-telescope
Adulting tip: if your household doesn't go through bread quickly and it goes stale or moldy before you can finish it, keep it in the freezer. Bread tends to reheat well so when you want a slice, throw it in the microwave/toaster/air fryer/toaster oven for a little bit. (In the microwave be sure to only do it a little at a time so it doesn't get tough)
Adulting tip: if your household doesn't go through bread quickly and it goes stale or moldy before you can finish it, keep it in the freezer. Bread tends to reheat well so when you want a slice, throw it in the microwave/toaster/air fryer/toaster oven for a little bit. (In the microwave be sure to only do it a little at a time so it doesn't get tough)
beep beep sometimes when you have been in survival mode for a long time the parts of you dedicated to Wanting Things atrophy and you forget how to envision a future that feels rewarding because you are busy with the business of staying alive, and it can seem like your life must be pointless because you can’t imagine any long term goals. sometimes even when you leave survival mode you can’t remember how to Want Things. that doesn’t mean you need to give up on having a good and fulfilling life, it just means that Wanting Things is a muscle you need to gradually strengthen. the part of you that has dreams and aspirations is still there, it just fell asleep, but if you wiggle it enough it can and will regain feeling. it’s okay to start small
i’ve been in recovery from this for almost two years now… like, i stopped being super depressed but it didn’t mean i remembered how to feel joy or excitement etc. It’s a process, and sometimes it seems like you’re wiggling as much as you can and you’re not getting any feeling back, but keep at it.
find anything. does warm water feel good? stand in the shower and carefully hold that warm water feeling, feel as much of that feels good feeling as you can, memorize its face, remember it later, look forward to it next time. Anything, the sweetness of a peice of candy, the salty taste of a french fry, the softness of a fleece blanket, the relief from taking off shoes at the end of a long day..
anything that feels even a tiny bit good for even a second; try to cup that feeling in your hands, breathe into it like a tiny flame you are trying to catch back into a proper fire. Keep at it
Happy New Year!
The weather is absolutely beautiful today.
I started getting into the habit of my goals for the new year over the last two weeks so I'm ready to hit the ground running! My big daily goals are
Do yoga (gonna do Yoga With Adriene for January and I also use the app Down Dog)
Go for a walk or run (unless it's raining-I HATE rain)
Read something (currently reading The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue for a staff book club at work)
Spend less than an hour on social media
Eat at home
Each month if I've met my goals every single day, I'm giving myself a prize. I have a list of things I want that are $100 or less (an accuquilt, some CDs, etc) and each month I'm taking some of the money I would normally spend eating out and saving it for the prize.
I feel so optimistic! About my health, about my relationships, about my job. I'm ready 2023!!
Is there any community out there for the studyblr girlies who graduated and now have a full time job? I miss the vibes fr
2023 Bujo!
Earlier this year I read "The Bullet Journal Method" by Ryder Carroll and found it really simplified how I approached Journaling.
After graduating college, I struggled to find a method of keeping track of my schedule and to dos and such that worked because the demands on my time and attention were so different.
Now I have a work journal (I'm a middle school teacher) and a personal bujo to keep track of myself, and here's my personal one I'm starting for the new year. My roommate/best friend gave me the journal and the calligraphy pens for christmas (and the tie dye it's sitting on top of is a quilt I'm working on!)
My work journal is my source of sanity haha. I don't follow the traditional "spread" method or maintain an index, but I do a monthly calendar, I do calendars for my unit plans/lesson plans, and I do a daily to do. I also use the bullet method (dots, xs, circles, etc) and rewrite my to do list every day before I go home so I know what's up for the next day. (I'm never going to post that one because I do reference students in it and I ain't f'in with FERPA).
My personal one is closer to the OG method and here's my year at a glance. Today I plan to do some spreads for my goals and trackers.
I keep my bujo very simple with minimal ornamentation. I'm not very artsy and it just distracts me. So if you've considered bujo-ing but have been intimidated by masterpieces other people post, I'm proof you can have a simple, functional bujo and make it work for you.
The meeting went off the rails when I got a text and an email from one of the early elementary teachers. The managers were lying to our face
Posted on September 2, 2022 by Rybyn Z.
The meeting went off the rails when I got a text and an email from one of the early elementary teachers. The managers were lying to our faces. Everyone must have gotten the same messages, because my coworkers’ voices started to rise, their tone grew angry, and they stopped respecting management’s “meeting norms.”
Our in-person school year had ended a week before, but management insisted on a virtual “follow-up” meeting. So, everyone dutifully logged on at 9:00 am. The regional director and his crony were waiting patiently. In an act worthy of Broadway, the DMV regional director, with a too-bad-so-sad tone, announced that our principal and assistant principal had “left to pursue other opportunities.” There was no one to replace them yet.
I work at a neighborhood charter school in Washington DC. Most students come from low-income or middle-income Black and Latinx families. Just a few months before I started working there, the board that owns the school switched charter management companies to a renowned national charter “turnaround” company based on the notorious Mind Trust’s model. Often credited as creating the blueprint for privatizing urban education, it helped spawn the company that now oversees my school. Mismanagement, exploitation, and hypocrisy were in the company’s DNA. Originally founded in Indianapolis (like the Mind Trust), the company grew until it spread all the way to Washington DC, where a charter market already thrives.
Staff, students, and families were already reeling from a traumatic year. So the announcement about the administration team blindsided us. While many of us did not like the principal and assistant principal—or, like myself, believe we could do without them altogether— we all agreed that they cared for the school community.
Meanwhile, the company had nearly run the school into the ground through mismanagement and financial profiteering schemes. They fired teachers while we were desperately understaffed, revoked already-earned bonuses for changing jobs, and did shady things to raise test scores. These were only the most glaring of a whole host of issues threatening to overwhelm and destroy the school.
So, we were all a little more than suspicious. The atmosphere was tense. A few staff members pressed the regional director for firm answers about our former leadership team—and received dodgy replies. One of the workers then asked, “Were they let go, or did they choose to leave?” over and over again. Eventually, the regional director paused for a few seconds, then—finally—said, “They chose to leave.”
That’s when I, and nearly everyone else, got the text message from the early elementary teacher. It was just an image thumbnail. Inside was the principal’s termination letter, sent by the director hosting the meeting.
It was too much. Under unbearable pressure, we exploded.
One of the teachers opened with a salvo about the terrible, contradictory communication and chaos. She ended with, “The 4:30 dismissal time has got to go.”
Our “offer letters” (we don’t have contracts) specified our roles and hours. We all got paid for eight hours a day while the company enforced nine-hour days—and most teachers worked longer to barely keep up with the crushing workload. All year, the workers had expressed disgust with these policies. Several times, workers took direct action against them. Most of the time, teachers just refused to do the bullshit busy work admin gave out, and the company couldn’t do much about it. Thanks, Great Resignation.
Another worker, an English Language Learner specialist, demanded to know if support staff who’d been thrown into different roles, sometimes multiple times a day, would be paid for their extra work. The director kept sidestepping our questions. He said to get paid, they needed to pull the records from the overflowing staff group chat, where people begged for classroom coverage all year. Several workers then pointed out that this group chat, owned by the former principal, was deleted. He had no answer for us, and we knew it. Even though we were on Zoom, I could feel the rage bubbling up. The school’s social worker then cut the higher-up off, “You all have come into a community dealing with immense trauma without thinking about what the community needs at all. Where is the support from this company? We only see y’all once a month!”
This had been something that agitated everyone on the shop floor all year: the company flew a couple of rich white people into DC for two days each month, then straight back home. She laid into them for five more minutes.
As she talked, and as several teachers came off mute to support her and launch into their own tirades, I realized this was an opportunity to unite the staff and build power. I’d built up a committee in the first few months of the school year that took some direct actions. But without a proper formalized structure beyond a group chat, the committee only represented my immediate coworkers, and ultimately dissipated as understaffing at our school got worse and worse. It had felt like many workers at the school were content to take it on the chin and keep moving. That was incorrect. A deep rage extended across every grade band and role.
The task I’d struggled with was building a formal committee that met outside work hours. With the help of two external organizers from the IWW’s DC, Maryland, and Virginia Education Workers Organizing Committee and the Southern Coordinating Committee throughout the year, I accumulated the knowledge and skills I needed to do that. Here was an opportunity to apply that knowledge.
I noticed that several people had replied to the email the early elementary teacher sent, expressing anger and betrayal.
I hopped into the thread and sent a message venting my own feelings and asking if anyone wanted to form a group chat to discuss how to make a change in the workplace. Along with that, I whipped up a google form asking for contact info and platform preference—about ten people filled it out.
Workers were still on the meeting yelling at the regional director, by the way. The meeting was supposed to end by 10:00 am. It was now 10:30. Our office assistant took the mic.
“The old logo is still on the building, the same color scheme from before, too. How is this company going to support rebranding?”
The director shifted a little bit, seemingly uncomfortable with giving us information about how the company works, “the operations team helps, but really it’s up to the school board.”
The worker shot back, “We need an action item here. You said operations, does that mean the school leadership, the board, or the company makes that decision? I’m leaving so someone else needs to connect those dots.”
She received vocal and written support from staff, and kept pressing her demand until management caved and agreed to weekly meetings with worker input.
Soon, staff members turned to berate management for abandoning us. No counselor, no substitutes, and a stream of overworked, underpaid staff members running for the door had taken their toll. Our social worker spoke out again, “We desperately need a counselor. Why do we not have a counselor?”
“It all depends on enrollment, I’m sorry to say. That’s where the funding comes from, and with the school in a deficit, we can’t afford to backfill positions.”
One of the teachers—a 20-plus-year teaching veteran not to be played around with—took her turn to criticize not just the company, but the invisible board who hired them.
“I see where they’re all coming from. We felt like the stepchild of the company, like we were never a part of it as a school community. And it feels like that with the board, too. I feel like they never see the work teachers are doing in the building. We need to let the community back into the building to see what’s going on. We need a commitment to a counselor.”
“It all depends on enrollment…”
Meanwhile, I was setting up our committee’s group chat and collaborating with coworkers to set up the infrastructure to keep ourselves together over the summer. I gathered non-work contacts.
The same teacher responded to the director’s vague answers: “We don’t know where any of this information comes from! Why is there no money? Are we non-profit or for-profit? I know y’all probably came into DC thinking this was a hot money-making market for you with all the charter schools. But you don’t seem to realize that these other charter companies at least offer more resources. Two Rivers, DC Prep, and Friendship do that, why not y’all?”
I called the company out for doing nothing to cover the school’s deficit. Enrollment numbers had dropped over the pandemic, meaning less funding from the DC government while expenses rose. The higher-up and I got into an exchange where he tried to evade my questions, and I kept bringing up the same points. He fell back to the same “it’s up to the board, government, and enrollment,” line, so I went back on mute to allow others to speak.
Two more staff members aired grievances about being thrown into different positions with no warning. At that point, it was 11:00, and the regional director claimed he had another meeting he had to join. I wonder what he said about us afterward.
There are a couple of lessons to draw from this experience. One is that having a formal committee that represents the workplace is essential. Two, spontaneous direct actions by workers can win gains and catalyze a solid organizing committee.
During the 2021-2022 school year, my coworkers and I were able to win certain concessions from management through loosely coordinated direct actions. For example, our ex-principal imposed an attendance policy that collectively punished the staff for the late arrivals of only a few (and those workers were only late consistently because of terrible conditions). Throughout the next day, groups of workers would go down to the office to protest—spurred on by everyone else cheering them on. We won.
Even so, most of the tangible organizing only happened in my department—the 3-5th grade instructional team. Within our own circle, we were strongly critical of the principal. Eventually, one of the 3rd-grade teachers even lead us in writing up a formal complaint against them. But after consolidating a committee representing K-2, 3-5, para-educators, and food service staff, I discovered there was a significant minority of staff who loved our principal and assistant principal. The two of them being fired was what agitated them enough to take action and join the committee in the first place. Without a formal workplace-wide committee, we couldn’t see that. I had to readjust my perspective.
Our spontaneous actions made a difference. This year, we have an official eight-hour workday, more robust curriculum support, and a seemingly much more competent leadership team. Less concretely, management has tread a lot more lightly around us. It’s obvious they want to do more to control and discipline their human capital stock, but can’t because they know we might bite back, and hard.
Not only that, but the committee I formed survived the summer, has a meeting schedule, and is actively gathering contacts in preparation for one-on-one conversations as I write this. Summer whittled us down from ten to five, but I had my first one-on-one just the other day, and management has started to act like their old selves again, so I’m predicting that will change soon.
Contact the IWW today if you want to start organizing at your job. Click here to read more about Rybin Z., the author and organizer.
I made this Pre-pandemic for a "Starting plants from the grocery store" class I was teaching, here it is edited down for anyone interested.
For saving seeds, the fruit should be fully mature for the seeds to be fully mature. Therefore, you can use seeds from a winter squash but not a baby zucchini, and the likelihood that the seeds of a tomato (or red bell pepper) will grow are much higher than for a green bell pepper. Unfortunately, many are either going to be poorly suited for your conditions, or hybrid, which we'll touch on later.
Stem cuttings are a great way to start many common culinary herbs! Especially basil!
Some tubers to consider starting from are sweet potatoes and actual potatoes.
And then of course, the bulbs! Green onions and garlic are your best bets!
These are outdoor plants and thus are Somewhat Fussy if you're going to grow indoors. Do not overwater them (eg, letting them sit in a tray of water for days) nor let them dry out completely. Try to keep them evenly moist, with thorough waterings that then pour out the bottom of the pot unimpeded.
Given that they are outdoor plants, a south-facing window (assuming you’re in the northern hemisphere) or grow lights are your best bet. If they don’t get enough light, they will turn pale and stretch towards their light source. They won’t grow as quickly or as healthfully as they would with sufficient light.
Examples:
Tomatoes & peppers! Tomatoes are the one that actually inspired me to make this because I saw this clip on starting plants from kitchen scraps, and they buried the whole dang half of a tomato! Don’t do that! What a waste of a tomato half! EAT your tomato! Take the seeds out!
If you’re intending to grow these outdoors, start them about 6 weeks before your last frost. If you have not grown plants from seed before, here’s some information from another class I taught: https://tinyurl.com/seedstarting2020
If you’re intending to grow them indoors the whole time, you will likely need grow lights for both tomatoes and peppers, and they like it if you keep your house on the warm side. I would suggest growing them outdoors and buying seeds for a dwarf tomato if you really want to grow indoors.
The down side is that most are hybrid, so when you grow out the seed, it's not necessarily going to grow well, be productive, or taste good. Even if it is open pollinated, it's probably been bred to thrive in conditions unlike those you can provide. If you need a successful crop, I highly suggest buying seed, or swapping with a reputable source. Although if you like and can find yellow pear tomatoes, those are an exception to this entire paragraph.
Basil! Basil is a great one to do stem cuttings of, get it started indoors, and then plant out once night time temperatures stay above 50f (10c). I prefer to start them straight into soil, and seem to have a higher success rate this way. To do this, remove all leaves except the top bud, and bury the stem in soil up to just beneath that bud and firm gently. Keep the soil moist and the pot above 60f, and you should have a good success rate. This method works for mint, lemon balm, rosemary, sage, etc, as well.
Green onions- really easy, put the bottom inch or so in soil and they’ll grow very well for you. I prefer soil over water because a) the water gets stinky, and b) they grow better and stronger in soil.
AND MORE:
Sage, rosemary, and thyme (also any stemmed herb): just like basil
Lettuce, carrots, beets: you get the tops, but usually they’ll try to bolt. Easier just to buy seeds. If you want, I usually start in shallow water and then plant as soon as I see roots growing. Again, keep the soil moist, and for these ones, keep them in a cooler part of your house. But really, they almost always bolt in my experience.
Sweet potatoes: Get them in the fall, it takes months for them to start growing (unless you're somewhere warm apparently? ). They will sprout, grow roots, take slips to plant outdoors once night time temperatures study above 50f (10c)
Garlic, just grab a clove and plant in the fall. Boom. GARLIC.
Squash- you don’t know what you’ll get, because they might be cross pollinated with another variety or hybrids. If you do grow it out and it’s bitter, don’t eat it, it’s poisonous. If you want to know more, search “toxic squash syndrome”
Ginger: Plant the rhizome in summer, harvest before frost, or overwinter indoors with a lot of light.
Pineapple: Doable, but it takes three years to get a harvest. Plant in well draining soil, and give it as much heat and light as you can.
Just for fun: (Unless you’re in the tropics or have a lot of patience.)
Mango, avocado, citrus. Take years, and a different climate than I have to fruit. If you’re in the tropics, go for it, but know that avocado pollination can apparently be tricky. I am not in the tropics, so I do not have direct experience with this. Citrus I think I've read also don't come true from seed.
Apples, pears: take years, and don’t come true to type. You do not know what you’ll get, and you’ll probably get something that is not worth eating (but would work for cider). These do need a cold dormancy period in the winter to do well. Of course, you could plant them and then top graft if it does turn out they don’t taste good.
Plums, peaches, apricots: take years, often do come true from seed, but peaches and nectarines are very susceptible to peach leaf curl, so may just die depending on where you are.
[grabs your shirt] listen. listen to me. the practical is holy. the everyday is sacred. the simple act of surviving is divine. do you get it? sanctity begins at home, in the hands that build and the lives we live and the deaths we die and the worms that eat our bodies. if making something by hand is not worthy of veneration then nothing is.
— Laura Gilpin, The Hocus-Pocus of the Universe (1977)
“I hope you live without the need to dominate, and without the need to be dominated. I hope you are never victims, but I hope you have no power over other people. And when you fail, and are defeated, and in pain, and in the dark, then I hope you will remember that darkness is your country, where you live, where no wars are fought and no wars are won, but where the future is. Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing — instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there. Not in the sky full of orbiting spy-eyes and weaponry, but in the earth we have looked down upon. Not from above, but from below. Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls.”
—
Ursula K. Le Guin, “A Left-Handed Commencement Address” (Mills College, 1983)
this passage planted itself in my consciousness when i was 24, and 10 years later, it informs so much of my approach to living, thinking, creating.
So the other night during D&D, I had the sudden thoughts that:
1) Binary files are 1s and 0s
2) Knitting has knit stitches and purl stitches
You could represent binary data in knitting, as a pattern of knits and purls…
You can knit Doom.
However, after crunching some more numbers:
The compressed Doom installer binary is 2.93 MB. Assuming you are using sock weight yarn, with 7 stitches per inch, results in knitted doom being…
3322 square feet
Factoring it out…302 people, each knitting a relatively reasonable 11 square feet, could knit Doom.
Hi fun fact!!
The idea of a “binary code” was originally developed in the textile industry in pretty much this exact form. Remember punch cards? Probably not! They were a precursor to the floppy disc, and were used to store information in the same sort of binary code that we still use:
Here’s Mary Jackson (c.late 1950s) at a computer. If you look closely in the yellow box, you’ll see a stack of blank punch cards that she will use to store her calculations.
This is what a card might look like once punched. Note that the written numbers on the card are for human reference, and not understood by the computer.
But what does it have to do with textiles? Almost exactly what OP suggested. Now even though machine knitting is old as balls, I feel that there are few people outside of the industry or craft communities who have ever seen a knitting machine.
Here’s a flatbed knitting machine (as opposed to a round or tube machine), which honestly looks pretty damn similar to the ones that were first invented in the sixteenth century, and here’s a nice little diagram explaining how it works:
But what if you don’t just want a plain stocking stitch sweater? What if you want a multi-color design, or lace, or the like? You can quite easily add in another color and integrate it into your design, but for, say, a consistent intarsia (two-color repeating pattern), human error is too likely. Plus, it takes too long for a knitter in an industrial setting. This is where the binary comes in!
Here’s an intarsia swatch I made in my knitwear class last year. As you can see, the front of the swatch is the inverse of the back. When knitting this, I put a punch card in the reader,
and as you can see, the holes (or 0′s) told the machine not to knit the ground color (1′s) and the machine was set up in such a way that the second color would come through when the first color was told not to knit.
tl;dr the textiles industry is more important than people give it credit for, and I would suggest using a machine if you were going to try to knit almost 3 megabytes of information.
@we-are-threadmage
Someone port Doom to a blanket
I really love tumblr for this 🙌
It goes beyond this. Every computer out there has memory. The kind of memory you might call RAM. The earliest kind of memory was magnetic core memory. It looked like this:
Wires going through magnets. This is how all of the important early digital computers stored information temporarily. Each magnetic core could store a single bit - a 0 or a 1. Here’s a picture of a variation of this, called rope core memory, from one NASA’s Apollo guidance computers:
You may think this looks incredibly handmade, and that’s because it is. But these are also extreme close-ups. Here’s the scale of the individual cores:
The only people who had the skills necessary to thread all of these cores precisely enough were textile and garment workers. Little old ladies would literally thread the wires by hand.
And thanks to them, we were able to land on the moon. This is also why memory in early computers was so expensive. It had to be hand-crafted, and took a lot of time.
(little old ladies sewed the space suits, too)
Fun fact: one nickname for it was LOL Memory, for “little old lady memory.”
I mean let’s also touch on the Jacquard Loom, if you want to get all Textiles In Sciencey. It was officially created in 1801 or 1804 depending on who you ask (although you can see it in proto-form as early as 1725) and used a literal chain of punch cards to tell the loom which warps to raise on hooks before passing the weft through. It replaced the “weaver yelling at Draw Boy” technique, in which the weaver would call to the kid manning the heddles “raise these and these, lower these!” and hope that he got it right.
With a Jacquard loom instead of painstakingly picking up every little thread by hand to weave in a pattern, which is what folks used to do for brocades in Ye Olde Times, this basically automated that. Essentially all you have to do to weave here is advance the punch cards and throw the shuttle. SO EASY.
ALSO, it’s not just “little old ladies sewed the first spacesuits,” it’s “the women from the Playtex Corp were the only ones who could sew within the tolerances needed.” Yes, THAT Playtex Corp, the one who makes bras. Bra-makers sent us to the moon.
And the cool thing with them was that they did it all WITHOUT PINS, WITHOUT SEAM RIPPING and in ONE TRY. You couldn’t use pins or re-sew seams because the spacesuits had to be airtight, so any additional holes in them were NO GOOD. They were also sewing to some STUPID tight tolerances-in our costume shop if you’re within an eighth of an inch of being on the line, you’re usually good. The Playtex ladies were working on tolerances of 1/32nd of an inch. 1/32nd. AND IN 21 LAYERS OF FABRIC.
The women who made the spacesuits were BADASSES. (and yes, I’ve tried to get Space-X to hire me more than once. They don’t seem interested these days)
This is fascinating. I knew there was a correlation between binary and weaving but this just takes it to a whole nother level.
I’m in Venice, Italy several times a year (lucky me!) and last year I went on a private tour of the Luigi Bevilacqua factory. Founded in 1875, they still use their original jacquard looms to hand make velvet. Here are the looms:
Here are the punch cards:
Some of these looms take up to 1600 spools. That is necessary to make their many different patterns. Here are some patterns:
How many punchcards per pattern?
This many:
Modern computing owes its very life to textiles - And to women. From antiquity weaving has been the domain of women. Sure, we remember Ada Lovelace and Hedy Lamarr, but while Joseph Marie Jacquard gets all the credit for his loom, the operators and designers were for the most part women.
I’ve seen this cross my dash a few times, but I’ve never watched the video before. Maybe I just didn’t pay attention when I was a kid, but I don’t remember ever seeing just how the Jacquard loom works. I just knew that the punch cards controlled which threads were raised. It’s cool to see the how, not just the what.
Don’t hide this in the tags, @drylime :D
I am never not amused by the overlap of textiles and technology. Also the fact that a huge number of fiber arts people I know are either in tech or math themselves or their partner is (myself included - husband is a programmer).
What is Permaculture & The 12 Principles of Permaculture
Graphics by Mirranda Burton, Information from Milkwood’s Online Permaculture Living Course
How does one make Internet friends? I would love nothing more to have some Blorbos From My Phone.
watched this for the first time when i was 14 i think? it saved me
Knew what this was before I clicked and had to watch the whole thing again.
If you haven’t seen it, now’s your chance!
Every so often when I'm sort of 'what is the point of All This,' I am reminded that, if not the entire point, things like this have to be at least one of the points.
@filmnoirsbian
today at summer school a kid came up and asked if he could call me jack instead of mr. jack since we're not in school, and i said we are, we're in summer school, and he said no, it's summer academy, and i was like what's the difference between an academy and a school? and he goes "an academy is where they train superheroes and shit".
it's heavily contextual, but here are a few things I do (sometimes multiple at once):
1. "Rewind" (i do this with slurs most often), where I refuse to let the conversation continue and they get to say the same sentence again but with a different word for what they actually mean. The amount of times my students say anti-gay slurs decreased dramatically over the year because every single time they did it, I told them to say what they actually meant until it became habit.
2. Use it as a teaching moment for targeted language, i.e. calling someone something or directing language at a person is more severe than an exclamation. Using it on a student and using it on a teacher carry the same weight to me, as in I treat them both seriously. Sometimes I'll pull them aside and ask if has someone doing that to them ever actually helped them do better, to describe what they're feeling so we can find a solution instead of being frustrated, and offering alternative vocabulary.
3. Holding a conversation about code-switching. not everything needs to be corrected, but they need to be aware of who their audience is, where they are, how we can be understood, and how we can ensure we have a voice. I talk about this a lot in situations where a teacher thinks a phrase is negative because of certain words/connotations of their own and teach the kids how to navigate situations where teachers get defensive over things they don't understand so they can communicate better and vice versa.
4. Nothing. Not every swear needs to be corrected. My students spent 2+ years with limited engagement over zoom outside the classroom, a lot of those kids live in situations where swearing is normal and expected and if I corrected or addressed every single one I would never be able to build relationships with them. A lot of them are just now after a year of work learning to control their language in class more than they do in the hallway. I swore as a kid, I swear now, but learning that there are times where swearing didn't help me was a lot of work and it doesn't happen overnight.
5. Making it a conversation, not necessarily a punishment. My kids know that they can easily get kicked out of certain classes (which they prefer because their relationship to school is damaged) by swearing because it becomes a big deal. Holding them accountable doesn't have to look punitive, it can be restorative.
That's just off the top of my head. This situation, I didn't correct because it was funny, school hadn't started yet and kids chat with me when they come in for breakfast, I have a mutually respectful relationship with the student and know by now that he's aware enough to read the room, and it wasn't directed at anyone. Definitely look into some restorative practice models for consequences! I've learned a lot of tools through that.
"Dragon," poem assembled using quotations from Wikipedia articles
