Nothing To See Here

changed from that-gay-person i really like plants,, he/they || 20 || disabled i go by hal and 200 other names

[gothslut]

[ampervadasz]

[pinkmistle06]

MANS WAS PREPARING FOR THIS HIS WHOLE DAMN CAREER BRO

[commandtower-solring-go]

This happened to him during his first week and we vowed never be so unprepared

[lightblueminecraftorchid]

Quick fun fact I learned in ASL class:

Babies can begin signing as early as a few months old. You don’t have to wait until they’re 9-12 months to start communicating verbally; the parts of the brain that process and use language develop before a baby is able to speak intelligibly with their mouth. Teaching your kid sign language early means that they can communicate effectively months ahead of schedule, when compared to peers that only speak a spoken language.

Additional fun fact: this jumpstart in language is thought to be a possible way to avoid the “Terrible Twos”; that phase of a toddler’s life is thought to be largely due to a toddler being unable to effectively communicate their needs. If a two year old has already been speaking for a year and a half, they’re far more able to communicate to you what’s wrong. Heck, they might also start reading earlier; languages with a fingerspelling component, like ASL, mean that any speaker needs to be able to spell unfamiliar words and ask about them. This can jumpstart a toddler’s ability to recognize letters as components of a word, and teach them to spell, read, and eventually write these letters to communicate.

Which, of course, lends absolutely zero credence to the theory that ASL will inherently stunt someone’s spoken language skills. If anything, sign language fluency makes acquiring any language, spoken or not, easier rather than harder.

[lesb0]

This explains so much about why 20 somethings are just unable to read to any level of complexity beyond a tweet. The miserable failure of US pedagogy

[lesb0]

They didn’t teach children phonics for TWENTY YEARS because they just hoped this “balanced literacy” bs would magically work out???

[lesb0]

this still kills me. 20 years. that’s nearly every public school gen z kid in the US

[iirulancorrino]

There’s a really good five-part podcast series about this that recently came out from American Public Media called Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went so Wrong. It does a great job of explaining this issue and goes into the political situation and profit motives that kept balanced literacy going for so long even when there was, this can’t be emphasized enough, *zero research* to back it up.

One of my personal big takeways from listening to this was the danger of turning facets of education policy into politicized issues along left/right lines–according to this podcast one of the reasons for why phonics didn’t catch on earlier is because it was being promoted by the second Bush administration, which led to teachers unions and other left-of-center people to be suspicious of it. I think that’s really unfortunate and sadly we saw that same dynamic play out during the pandemic, when in so many school districts how to handle public education became a culture war battle more than anything else.

Obviously everything is political in some way and it’s always worth analyzing who is promoting which ideas–but I think when aspects of public health/science/medicine/education become polarized we all lose out because the issue becomes so much harder to analyze on their merits. And it’s especially awful when the people most impacted are children who are still developing the basic skills needed to think critically for themselves.

[lesb0]

oh that sounds worth a listen

[tikkunolamorgtfo]

I’m fucking gobsmacked. Firstly, here’s the link to the full article for anybody who wants to read the entire thing, or can’t view the image text:

The Rise and Fall of Vibes-Based Literacy

Is a controversial curriculum, entrenched in New York City’s public schools for two decades, finally coming undone?

Secondly, I’m just… is this not basically the gist of the scam in The Music Man? Y'know, where Harold Hill—who can’t play of note of music—passes himself off as a band leader, telling everyone he has a “revolutionary new method called The Think System where you don’t bother with notes,” and says ““If you want to play the Minuet in G, think the Minuet in G”? Like sure, context is helpful for reading, but having it be the basis is… WILD. I’m so sorry Gen Z 😭

[idk-my-aesthetic]

Guys. Guys is this not how you learned to read. Bc this is how I learned to read.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

NO THIS IS NOT HOW WE LEARNED TO READ WHAT THE FUCK

In the rest of the English-speaking world, children are taught to read phonically. There are multiple systems for this, from “winging it based on usage” to structured, tiered systems like Jolly Phonics. They’re taught the sounds that letters make, then the sounds that dipthongs and unusual combinations (like “magic E vowels”) make, and they are taught how to string the sounds together to sound out the words. Common words with unusual spellings/rules (or just really common words that the kid needs to know before they know the relevant rules, like “the” and “should”) are taught as “sight words” and expected to be memorised rote (although research suggests that children don’t memorise these words, but memorise whatever the tricky part is as an exception and read them normally, by phonically sounding them out in their head). This is so that children can get to reading common sentences and simple stories as quickly as possible, providing them with valuable practice and motivation.

As children get practice reading over many years, the most common words get memorised via repetition, and new words are sounded out and memorised if they come up enough. (This is why it’s common for people who read more than they watch tv/converse to mispronounce words for many years – I was over 20 before I knew the correct pronunciation of ‘misled’ or ‘rendezvous’.)

We certainly weren’t taught to check the first letter and then guess based on vibes. If you read like that then there’s no point in the rest of the word being written down. How would you learn new words and advance your skill that way?

[headspace-hotel]

Well, this explains a lot about how people in my notes process my posts.

[unitydruid]

I was taught to read using Saxon Phonics, which teaches you how to associate letters with sounds, chunk words into phonetic segments, and then string them together.

I can read, write, and speak much better than most of my peers, and I’m sure this is why. I actually learned how to extract information from letters, rather than trying to recognize each word as a symbol for a concept. Phonics are essential for reading comprehension.

[drtanner]

I’m a Bri'ish, so not an American but certainly an English speaker, and I was taught to read and write via a host of stuff like this:

We had whole educational series that were explicitly intended to teach us reading and writing skills. I remember this one being shown to us in school and I loved the shit out of it; there were a bunch like it but Through the Dragon’s Eye was always my favourite.

All of this stuff is, as you see, available on YouTube. It’s not the ideal solution, but at the very least it’s there to be watched and enjoyed if your local schools aren’t doing the job. ( b ._.)b

[that-enby-person]

Wait is this why everyone in my classes always struggled so hard with reading?? I never paid attention during the reading lessons because I knew how to read before I joined kindergarten. The books my mother started me on were the phonics “I See Sam” series. She only taught me using the first few, and I just picked the rest of them up on my own just about. In reading I tested in kindergarten at a high school level and sometime in 1st-3rd at a college level.

[metalgearsolid2]

i love how delusional some articles of clothing are, like you read the tag and its like “hand wash only/tumble dry on low” son you are a cotton tshirt. youre going in the warsh and whatever happens in there is in gods hands

[cloudyishdays]

my forensics class has an arson project for our final so my group decided to recreate the gavle goat

[kuuranen]

Get well soon

[chibird]

Small egg yolk chibird is proud you made it this far. 💛

Chibird store | Positive pin club | Webtoon

[guerrillatech]

[esoomris]

Wow.... so you’re telling me you took an action that resulted in the death of one person...... to save the lives of many people.... who would have died if you did nothing??? that sounds so familiar

[anonbeadraws]

Character sheet of Shelter and Answer for @chaoticbooklesbian , look at these tender tiefs! 💖 commission info in the source below!

[beardedmrbean]

never ever underestimate the capacity rural folks have for coming up with creative solutions

[ulysseus]

But if it’s weight triggered on both ends, what does it actually stop?

[uncle-cazador]

Cows

[ulysseus]

But cows are heavy, surely they’d lift the gate

[uncle-cazador]

See those little slats? Cows recognize early on not to step on them or their legs go through.

If you ever seen one of these on a rural road thats why they are there. To keep cows in one area. They don’t have the coordination to cross it. Sometimes you can just paint the lines on the road if cows are used to these cattle guards and they won’t attempt to cross.

That gate up there is very heavy. A cow would have to step on the proper slats with all of its weight for it to open, once it moves it comes back down. 99% unlikely for a cow to get through it

[fxlthyangxl-deactivated20240122]

okay now that i’ve calmed down what am i going to buy myself as a treat for enduring this suffering

[homunculus-argument]

The thing about being a profoundly weird person is that it doesn't happen overnight. The kind of people who'll do shit that nobody else would actually genuinely do by pure accident already have an accumulation of low-level layers of weird but harmless choices that nobody else would make, which sometimes just happen to align in ways that wouldn't happen to someone else.

Genuinely, profoundly weird people don't go out of their way to do profoundly weird shit. They don't think "ok what is the quirkiest way I could respond in this situation?", it's just that their environment is already set up for weird things to happen, because of those minor, insignificant weird choices they've already made.

They're simply the kind of people who would unexpectedly find out that you can just buy medical label stickers online, immediately order a bunch, and then forget all about them for several months. Not supremely baffling, but also not something a regular person would do for shits and giggles.

And then only remember the stickers seven months later when they run out of regular clear tape while wrapping gifts, and figuring out that they can totally just use the stickers instead of having to run off to the store just to buy one tiny roll of scotch tape and nothing else. Again, perhaps not the solution that most people would make, but not completely unreasonable one.

That is the kind of a person who would take enjoyment in matching the cool bright-coloured stickers into the wrapping papers by complimentary colours, completely forget to consider what the labels themselves say, and therefore be the only person who could somehow accidentally use stickers that say "CAUTION: DO NOT INSERT INTO MOUTH OR ANUS" while gift-wrapping a cactus.

[kurtbrussels]

no webcomic will ever be as funny as this strip from oglaf

[maruti-bitamin]

(❁-❁ ⌇)⌇“don’t eat me”

[rlanyon]

[tonysopranobignaturals-deactiva]

the phrase "tolerant left" pisses me off because technically i'm left but i'm NOT tolerant. if you say dumb shit i'm not gonna be like "uwu you're entitled to your opinion, peace is the best option" i'm fuckimg DESTROYING you. think before you say private healthcare has good incentives

[tonysopranobignaturals-deactiva]

"so much for the tolerant left" not everyone is a pussy. some of us want to rob you

[virgo-disaster]

i have a degree in political science and i’m here to inform you that the idea of the “tolerant left” is a myth that the right made up all by themselves to gaslight progressives for telling them they couldn’t call marginalized people slurs anymore

[tonysopranobignaturals-deactiva]

I have a degree in sexiness and agree