Bee Kind @snailor-bee - Tumblr Blog

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Hello there! Call me Bee. Originally I was using this blog as my xReader-only blog but since Twitter is kinda... dying, I'm going to see about possibly switching this into a main blog. All my xReader stuff it's still linked below!

This is an 18+ blog so minors, please don’t interact.

#bee personal #masterlist

kelenia

girl-shiqingxuan

I actually love yin yu so much. Specifically I love the way that his canon appearance is described as "plain"

I think there aren't enough ordinary and average people in stories. Of course we have the radiantly beautiful, or the strikingly unique, or the grotesquely ugly...... But what about the plain? The normal? The average? The unmemorable?

Because he is plain. He is ordinary– in looks and in ability. His hard work is the most "outstanding" thing about him.

But he's still important. Ghost city seems to run with his effort as the sole grease in the wheels. Quan Yizhen, with all his heaven-shaking ability, only got to ascend because yin yu recognized and nurtured his potential. And of course, yin yu is also special, not because of his looks or ability but just because yizhen loves him.

7-inches-of-satanic-panic

alienfuckers on Erid after learning that the only alien on their planet is asexual

merimedefeauseaux-blog

I am relieved that I'd left my room tidy

Goodbye

salmon-n-hazel

Dwarf jewel nasturtium

razzmothazz

still caring about internet friends you lost touch with years ago is so embarrassing. yeah i had a deam we met up irl recently. the last time we spoke was maybe 7-8 years ago. i still wear the laces we randomly decided was a sign of our friendship. i dont know what any of your socials are or if youre even active on any. sometimes i see someones art resemble yours and i wonder for hours. do you still go by that name you chose? whenever i see it i wonder if its you. we couldve passed each other in this vastness a thousand times and not have a clue.

razzmothazz

we were lonely kids having fun together. do you remember?

pixelarttenten

ゲームボーイ。

inkskinned

it is tiring, being endless political just as someone existing. my teacher asks me if i’m writing more of that “feminist poetry.” a lot of it is just talking about me, being a woman, being afraid in the city. i write about walking a line, about how i am expected to choose between home and work, how each comes with a slew of its own insults; how it feels when i am wearing shorts and there are too many men outside. these are just facts of my life. someone in the comments says, “where are woman even coming up with these crazy generalizations in their feminism?”

i hold hands with the prettiest girl i’ve ever seen and someone sighs when they see me. “do they have to make everything gay?” she asks her friend, loudly, “like, do you have to force those views in my face all the time?” i can’t stop blushing. my girlfriend holds my fingers tighter, tighter, tighter, until my knuckles are white, and i let her. somehow, this is us, protesting.

my father’s cuban blood stains my skin, i think. when i am honored with a position in the dean’s private council, a boy sneers, “you only got in because you’re hispanic.” did i? i spend the rest of our meetings wondering if i was selected for my stellar academic record, for the multiple recommendations, for the clubs i lead - or if i was just a move the dean made, to make use of me. when we all take a picture, the dean brings me in the front. in the first three we take, i am not smiling.

it is odd. “i exist.” i say, “i deserve to exist.”

“oh my god,” he groans, “we get it, you’re a feminist.”

bumblebeebats

How is it that you can a music library of like 1,200+ absolute bangers but as soon as you put it on shuffle in a group setting it's like. anime opening you added in 2010. homestuck parody song. musical artist who was cancelled last year for kidnapping and eating children in his basement. Hamilton

bumblebeebats

I can't believe some people are actually reblogging this like "Tch. Omg, so embarrassing OP, I can't believe you would ever admit to liking Hamilton 😏 " like ok, first of all congratulations for hatching as a fully formed adult in 2022 from the pure white egg of a virgin swan i guess. Raised in a cave on a diet consisting solely of nuts and berries and leftist twitter clapbacks. "ooooooh, I've never had a complicated relationship with a piece of art that was phenomenally well-received at the time but aged like milk as later reflection revealed the fundamental flaws in its premise that were in fact present from its inception but which I didn't notice because I was 17 and hadn't heard of neoliberalism yet" Should we throw a party? Should we invite Anthony Fantano? Anyway second of all. you draw the line at Lin Manuel Miranda but you're fine with basement guy?

tenowls

wretched beginning, wretched end

pg5-ish-deactivated20260526

As Catedrais, (Playa de las Catedrales) one of the most beautiful beaches in the world, known as beach Augasantas in the area. Galicia, Spain.

leontocephagaina

"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.

bowditch

I want to be very clear on this: it is not just dependence on smartphones and phones causing mental atrophy. It's that for decades we have taught Three Cueing System as a way to read, and while we are now beginning to correct, it is catching up with us. The reliance on smartphones and short form video are in part a result of illiteracy, not necessarily a cause of it, because we have failed to give students the tools to actually read but also paired it with the belief that they can read. They do not seek remedial reading help but blame the materials for being unclear or too difficult, when the fundamental problem is that the more complex the text, the less functional the three cueing system is. They are often quite literally guessing what the text says by searching for words they recognize (or think they recognize but cannot verify) and texts rapidly become impenetrable nonsense. Of course people will reach for their phones when 90% of the text they encounter in their daily lives and schooling is not accessible to them!