Thoughts in Chaos @sarathelion - Tumblr Blog

discardingimages

False Prophet (Revelation 16:13)

Beatus of Liébana, Commentaria in Apocalypsin (the ‘Beatus of Saint-Sever’), Saint-Sever before 1072

BnF, Latin 8878, fol. 184v

sarathelion

Same, buddy.

grimdark

i may not be beautiful but at least i know a lot of useless information

Is This a Panic Attack, or Am I Dehydrated

A Play in Three Acts

#anxiety #self care struggles

buttonpoetry

“When they call you a bitch, say thank you, thank you very much”

Olivia Gatwood has gone viral again, with her book climbing to the top 5 of all poetry books!!! Check out her incredible poem in the video, and get your copy of New American Best Friend now.

sarathelion

My home isn’t all bad...

#long island #poetry

cribbagematch-deactivated201601

one time in sixth grade i did my math homework and then because i was excited that i had grasped the lesson so well, i did the next day’s homework too

the next day in class i told my teacher, and she looked constipated for a second, and then said dismissively, “well, then you’re not very good at following directions, are you.”

seekingwillow

#I identify strongly with this#I got reprimanded on multiple ocasions for reading ahead and/or already having knowledge

Cause tags are truth. Maaan ,that one time a teacher stole my encyclopedia cause it proved her wrong.

elodieunderglass

when I was eight and in public school, we could do a report based on any historical character who had a book about them in the school library.

I picked Harriet Tubman because Harriet Tubman, and I wrote about how her master had thrown an anvil at her head, leaving her with a permanent dent in her forehead. I know that the anvil part was definitely in the school library book.

My teacher circled the word “anvil” and took off points.

“I HAVE SPELLED ANVIL CORRECTLY,” I roared in tiny confrontation.

“No,” she said, and it transpired that she didn’t know or care that “anvil” is a word or that “anvils” are a thing.

And so despite my helpful attempts to explain what anvils were, including references to blacksmiths and the Roadrunner, I had points taken off OH MY GOD.

YES, I AM STILL MAD ABOUT THIS TWENTY YEARS LATER. FUCK YOU, LADY. YOU ARE DOUBTLESSLY DEAD BY NOW AND I HOPE YOU KNOW YOUR STUDENTS STILL HATE YOU.

ANVILS ARE A THING.

lookatallthosereblogs-deactivat

From “Daring Greatly” by Brene Browne:

“…85 percent of the men and women we interviewed for the shame research could recall a school incident from their childhood that was so shaming, it changed how they thought of themselves as learners.”

I think about this quote a lot when I think of school.

elodieunderglass

Sometimes you just see a combination of posts that really crystallizes something for you. thank you spcsnaptags for putting these thoughts together this way.

ceruleancynic

In second grade I used the word “boon” in a composition and my teacher marked it wrong because, she said, it was not a word.

I brought in the Chambers English Dictionary the next day to show her.

That was the same school where even after I had demonstrated to them that I could read by READING A PAGE OF A BOOK OUT LOUD IN FRONT OF THEM, I was judged to be in the somethingth percentile for learning to read. Boy, was that a fun two years in the American public school system.

strangerdarkerbetter

In 7th grade we had to write a term paper. I chose migraines as my subject as it was something I was experiencing at the time.

I wrote an excellent paper that utilized medical language far beyond my grade level but I understood everything I wrote.

When I got the paper back I had gotten a C because the teacher didn’t understand the science in my paper. Like what the hell?

13faeinapenguinsuit

What’s scary is that this pretty much describes American public education. Like, these stories aren’t unique. This is a universal truth in our school system. I starts in preschool and lasts through high school. I was dealing with this shit right up until college.

l-e-g-i-o-n-losh

And then if you point out the way you’re being disrespected you have a “problem with authority” and get singled out for worse treatment and told YOU’RE the ungrateful good-for-nothing for talking back to your teachers. Yeah, I’m not grateful. They DIDN’T DO ANYTHING for me to be grateful for!! I don’t hate teachers because they’re teachers, I hate when they refuse to DO THEIR JOBS AND TEACH.

serinos-kitt

I went into first grade with a second grade reading level I left with a kindergarten reading level because my teacher didn’t know how to teach an advanced student and refused to learn

kateinator

Ok quick rant.

My AP ES Teacher????? Fucking sucks

(Present tense bc I’m still taking the class) The shorthand of it is that she doesn’t actually teach us-she lectures and repeats what’s on the board which she doesn’t leave up long enough to copy down.

She tells us HALFWAY THROUGH THE YEAR that this is a very “textbook heavy course” like lady you could’ve told us that earlier?????

One point she asked us questions based on something that wasn’t even in the textbook. And like the person earlier in the post, I used the word ‘boon’ in a current events paper, and it was circled and marked as wrong.

But the worst thing was this one quiz. It was based on the cycles of matter, right? I’m in a class of about 16 kids.

WE ALL FAILED.

And the teacher condescended to giving us a requiz, all the while going “you guys should’ve come to extra help :) :) :)”

LIKE LADY WHEN WE ALL FAILED AT THAT POINT EXTRA HELP WONT DO SHIT.

And earlier this month, we were handed a sheet with questions on a unit we haven’t even started yet (because we have to teach it to ourselves over break). Understandably, I get annoyed and a bit confrontational, asking why we were getting questions on this. She started off with giving a bullshit answer about how we should be looking at the chapters already and I replied, rationally but a bit testy and she told me to basically back down. Like, forgive me for being upset that we’re getting questions on a subject that we haven’t even LEARNED yet.

I’ve been telling other students in my school to not even take the class. It’s not worth it.

sarathelion

This is all so relatable! My second and third grade teachers were amazing, and got most of their students far above their expected progress level across subjects by doing their jobs exceptionally well, and compassionately. Second grade made reading fun for all of us, and our third grade teacher taught each of us at our own levels, with the goal of having us all make our own unique progress.

Then swoops in my fourth grade teacher, who was not so exceptional. One day, she hands us one of those puzzles where you look at a long phrase or string of letters and find all the words in it that you can. There were only “supposed” to be 20 words scrambled in there, but I found 23, one of them being ‘orb.’ I was furious when she handed me back my homework with points off, claiming that ‘orb’ was not, in fact, a word. My mother and I each wrote her an explanation of the word, and how her inability to check a dictionary shouldn’t be a detriment to my grade, but it was to no avail. Years later, I found out that this happened with at least one student each year, and that she never believed the other kids either.

My school district was usually pretty good about providing appropriate resources for kids who learned quickly or differently, or who just had more background knowledge, so this was a rare case for us...

And then I get to college, and there’s this adjunct who’s giving the rest of them a bad name. He’s teaching Theatre History from Shakespeare and Marlowe through the mid-20th century, and he doesn’t know a thing about what he’s teaching - at one point, he said that Columbus thought the world was flat (he clearly didn’t, since he was trying to sail around it to India), and he tried to tell us that Elizabethan women wore waist trainers to achieve an hourglass figure, while pointing at sketches and other artistic depictions of women who were clearly not doing that. My friends and I initially called him out on it (one even wore her Elizabethan reproduction corset to class to prove her point), but then he just stopped allowing us to speak in class. He’d teach one thing, but another thing would be the “correct” answer on the next test, and neither of those things would actually be the truth. He flat-out told me not to speak in class ever again, because I “don’t count anymore.” This was someone our college hired and trusted, and he almost failed graduating seniors for not being able to sift through this nonsense. It wasn’t until we had a few full powwows with our department head that we were able to get him off our campus, and that same department head stepped in the next semester to do an actual good job teaching it.

weavemama

LET KARMA BITE THEM IN THE ASS

weavemama

btw here is a list of senators who took BRIBES from Betsy Devils. these monsters chose money over the academic futures of millions:

weavemama

Marco Rubio was really tryna get them coins 😂😂😂😂

the-wolfbats

POS Rubio absolutely fucking would.

fangirlasplosian

FUUUUUUUUUUUCK YOUUUUUUUU RON JOHNSON!!!!!!!!!!

MR INBOX ALWAYS FULL! LIKE YOU’RE LISTENING TO YOUR FUCKING CONSTITUENTS YOU ASSWIPE.

GOD I WISH WE HAD RUSS BACK JFC!

sarathelion

I’m lucky, in a way - my senators (Schumer and Gillibrand) voted no. I just want to point out one name on that list, though... Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) has received $43,200 in campaign donations from the DeVos family, and she still voted no on DeVos for Education Secretary.

If she left her donor list at home for the vote, they all could have. So, Republican majority, what’s your excuse?

The Library!

Friends: We are entering an anti-information age in US policy. Between Betsy DeVos, the communication blackouts on science and agriculture, and the gaslighting-like tactics used by the White House to try to get you to doubt your own eyes and ears, it’s only a matter of time before literature (fiction and non-fiction, scholarly and otherwise) comes under attack.

In light of this, I’m collecting e-books! If you have a Word doc, PDF, or .epub that you think the Trump administration would find objectionable, please consider sending it my way! If it comes to this (and dear god, I hope it doesn’t), I will protect this digital library of mine with everything I have. Message me if you want to throw something on that drive!