That Bloody Countess @thatbloodycountess - Tumblr Blog

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nonetoon

I made this in reference to comic/game stuff but I’m glad to see this one’s going over well with all the writers

sarroora

Reblog to give your followers and mutuals the strength to continue

jusjuiceboxbox

Welcome to being an adult! Featuring such injury causing events as

- sneezed wrong

- turned your neck a little too fast

- slept weird

- took the trash out to the curb and stepped at a slightly different angle than usual

- breathed

- failed to breathe properly

- breathed in the wrong stuff. Allergy time

- looked too hard at something too far away

- knees

threeofswords

i don’t want to go to school tomorrow 🗣️🗣️🗣️

thatbloodycountess

Same.

beardedmrbean

thatbloodycountess

I love this scene so much. The Golden Girls are on Hulu, so if you have it, then you have comedic gold!

#betty white #bea arthur #rue mcclanahan #golden girls

slowtovvn

This map is the most up to date version as of 3-4-2023 and takes into account all recent movement on anti-trans legislation

goverment-agency-bracket

Yeah, I am going to signal boost this rq

ccosmiccookiess

This map has since been updated, as of 26-8-2023 this is the most current version

glennnui

Updated map for March 2025.

thechanelmuse

I was today years old. That is disgusting.

No Child Left Behind is one of the worst things to ever be incentivized in schools. It was signed into law when I was 14. Reading Rainbow was my show as a kid. LeVar Burton played a big part in why I became an avid reader to date. The joy of it. It's an adventure around the globe and through different time periods without stepping on a plane or time machine.

Children parrot behavior. In grade school, I always wanted to read the same amount of books as my teachers (50 books) and managed to double that each year. Before No Child Left Behind, book fairs and Scholastic catalogs were a serious matter like your grandma's Fingerhut catalogs. Libraries were (and still are) a wonderland.

Reading comprehension and proficiency in schools has been declining for decades. A crisis. The joy of books isn't pushed anymore and I'm always saddened by it. It's one of the reasons why I post my book reviews and recommendations on here, as well as posts from others to encourage reading and (novel) writing. Kids will parrot your behavior while the education system sadly fails to return as that example.

mysteryteacup

For those of us who aren't from the states, what - apart from apparently a shitty law - is that?

kethsposy

A law passed by Bush that cut funding to public schools whose students didn't improve every year on a set of standardized tests- meaning not that each student was supposed to improve during their time in school, but that this year's first graders had to do better on the tests than last year's first graders, and next year's had to do better still. Obviously this was really difficult over the short term and completely impossible over the long term.

This concentrated schools and other education programs entirely on those tests, especially schools with students who were already struggling, at the cost of art and music programs, home economics and shop type programs, and any in depth exploration of pretty much anything that wasn't on the test, which were pretty narrowly focused. Reading Rainbow was a relaxed encouragement to be imaginative and curious. It didn't teach kids the answers to questions on the test. So it didn't make the cut.

The program also incentivized schools to cut their losses on struggling students, expelling or encouraging them to drop out to bring the test averages up instead of being able to spend the effort to actually help them.

anyroads

No Child Left Behind was an absolute disaster for education, poorly hidden behind an insidious name. The real goal of it was not just to defund education (in order to reallocate those funds to appease Republican lobbyists), but to stop teaching critical thinking. Not only did struggling students get left behind, but by prioritizing students who did well on standardized tests, the focus shifted entirely to teaching students memorization without understanding context, and how to guess their best on a test in order to pass. The focus became passing tests, not actual learning. In the process, students were taught that they don't need to understand the material, they just need to know how to follow directions and give the answers deemed correct by the school boards. They were deprived of agency in their own educations.

This widened the gap between public and private school educations significantly, because students in public schools learned mostly how to regurgitate information, while students in private schools learned how to understand it, analyze it, think critically about it, and apply it - in short, if you could afford to go to private school, you still got to have agency over your education. And sure, many public school teachers were dedicated and still taught their students more than the curriculum demanded, but they were under a lot of pressure and scrutiny and their hands were often tied. Many of them couldn't sustain the effort it took (and how little they got paid) and changed careers. Meanwhile basic necessarily skills disappeared when arts and non-academic budgets were slashed into oblivion - you used to be able to learn how to sew, mend, cook, budget, do woodworking, fix a car (hell, build one), paint, draw, do pottery, and so much more in elective classes. What's mostly remained is performing arts programs, which struggle to continue existing, but since you can charge admission to performances they've had a better chance than shop class and home ec.

You have no idea what it's like to have watched all that happen under the Bush administration and now see the second emerging generation of young people who were deprived of the education they deserve and don't understand critical thought or media analysis. Those of us who are old enough to remember the Bush era are frustrated, but not at all surprised to see how reductive and binary fandom discourse is, or that critical media analysis has diminished significantly and turned into fandom discourse instead (ie. that being a child during the "what you feel is more valid than facts" Bush administration has led to the second emerging generation of people who struggle to separate their personal feelings about a piece of media from the idea that fiction is social commentary, who struggle to understand nuance and are more concerned about judging others for their even slightly divergent political views than about what makes for effective activism, or that fandom has become a way for people to judge and condemn others).

You have no idea how terrifying it is to have watched No Child Left Behind unfold in your early 20s and have thought "this is going to lead to generations of kids who will be ripe for manipulation by propaganda" and to now watch how hard it is to get Gen Z and Alpha to understand the ways they're being manipulated by fascists. Believe me when I say the very real purpose of forcing education to focus on tests instead of knowledge was to create generations of people whose brains are trained at an early age to accept information unquestioningly. That's what I see when people reblog screenshots without sources and base their political opinions on tumblr funnymen.

No Child Left Behind was devastating. We knew it then and we see it now.

razzleberryjam

Its even worse now that they stopped teaching phonics while prioritizing "sight words"

Theyre literally teaching kids to recognize words they want them to know while preventing them from ever learning how to read, which means you can't learn new words, you can't sound it out and ask someone what it means - the kids can't fucking read. Gen alpha can't fucking read. They can only read "approved sight words"

dgcatanisiri

The best description I've ever seen of No Child Left Behind is that it is "a masterpiece of Orwellian language that says that no child shall advance faster than the slowest."

thatbloodycountess

More students are in intensive reading classes than in previous generations because they can’t read. I have had students reading at a 2nd grade level in the 6th grade and some reading at a 5th grade level in the 8th grade. I even had a kid reading at a kinder level in the 8th grade this past year! Parents even have the option to opt their kid out of intensive reading.

To make matters worse, budget cuts are causing the number of students being put into reading classes to be reduced. The lowest kids will still be in reading, but those Tier 2 kids (whose skills are better than the lowest kids, but still struggle with reading) won’t be in reading anymore. The responsibility of helping those kids learn to read will fall on the English teachers. As if we don’t have enough to teach them.

Reading curriculum is so bad too. Kids are put into front of a computer program. There is no active instruction. Plus, the reading curriculum that has been pushed the past two decades was just proven to be ineffective. Yet, schools are forced to use it.

It’s not getting better and I doubt it ever will.

katal0gue

The way that we learn about Helen Keller in school is an absolute outrage. We read “The Miracle Worker”- the miracle worker referring to her teacher; she’s not even the title character in her own story. The narrative about disabled people that we are comfortable with follows this format- “overcoming” disability. Disabled people as children. Helen Keller as an adult, though? She was a radical socialist, a fierce disability advocate, and a suffragette. There’s no reason she should not be considered a feminist icon, btw, and the fact that she isn’t is pure ableism- while other white feminists of that time were blatent racists, she was speaking out against Woodrew Wilson because of his vehement racism. She supported woman’s suffrage and birth control. She was an anti-war speaker. She was an initial donor to the NAACP. She spoke out about the causes of blindness- often disease caused by poverty and poor working conditions. She was so brave and outspoken that the FBI had a file on her because of all the trouble she caused.

Yet when we talk about her, it’s either the boring, inspiration porn story of her as a child and her heroic teacher, or as the punchline of ableist, misogynistic jokes. It’s not just offensive, it’s downright disgusting.

roachpatrol

the reason the story stops once hellen keller learns to talk is no one wanted to listen to what she had to say

how’s that for a fucking punchline

cookinguptales

Another part of the story that is often conveniently omitted is that Anne Sullivan, the “miracle worker” in question, was also a visually impaired woman (and abolitionist) who faced her own struggles finding accessible education. That was why she was able to teach Helen Keller and connect her with resources that would allow her to flourish in academia. When Helen Keller was railing against poverty-induced diseases that caused blindness, she was talking about things like trachoma which was what had caused her friend’s vision loss.

The fact that Sullivan is often portrayed as able-bodied in retellings of their story is indicative of the narrative that is most comfortable for an ableist society: that accessibility and equality are gifts bestowed upon the disabled by able-bodied heroes. Disabled children are never taught that they have the power to lift each other up, and that’s a crying shame.

thatbloodycountess

I had to set the record straight on Helen Keller with some of my students this year. They couldn’t fathom that a woman who was blind and deaf could be as educated as she was and support the causes she did. They are middle schoolers sure, but to them, someone who is deaf and blind shouldn’t be able to do these things.

This is a huge contrast for me because I idolized Helen Keller. She was the reason I wanted to learn ASL and I thought it was cool that a woman with disabilities was able to accomplish so much.

It’s true that students with disabilities aren’t taught that they can accomplish things and support one another. I try to show them they can. But the parents, and society, must do their part.

#helen keller

halfmachinegirl

vaspider

let's play in the snow with Mama

#with mama

shamebats

asingularcanadian

You are not safe from this. You, the person reading this, are not safe from this. No matter how educated or open minded you think you are, you are not safe from this. The moment you think you are safe from it is the moment you become the most susceptible.

Its similar to why you cannot put bad people in a class of their own. The moment you do that you stop being able to see the bad things that the people closest to you do a la "my best friend couldn't have said that racist thing, they're not evil."

The moment you think you are immune from this type of backslide into right wing nonsense is the moment you stop questioning yourself enough to keep yourself from backsliding into right wing nonsense a la "I mean im not antiscience, im vaccinated, I just think that fluoride in our water supply is imparting children's ability to learn as fast as they otherwise could without it."

Remember, being progressive means progressing, its about always moving forward. The moment you rest on your laurels and stop putting in effort to keep the progression is the moment you start becoming left behind.

thestuckylibrary

#I'm a millenial and I have caught myself saying things#it can and will happen to you#the trick is to notice#the trick it to keep being curious#the trick is to resist calcifying your brain#keep thinking and keep moving#nothing made by humans is perfect#we can always improve#that perfect plan you thought would fix it all when you were 20#will age like everything else#and the goalposts do move because there will always be bad actors#reinventing all the old evils so they look new and harmless again

kedreeva

3 things i want to add, because there are definitely folks that I've had to teach this stuff to: keeping an open mind is not going to be enough, with how misinformation is spreading these days.

Take the example: "I just think fluoride in the water does X"

Thoughts /like this/ don't come from nowhere. When you have "I just think" thought, or "maybe" thoughts, or you notice yourself learning or having a new opinion from one you've previously had, this can OFTEN be mistaken as growth, as improving.

So, #1: Determine where you got that new opinion/fact. Did it come from a reliable source? Can you even ID where you got the idea from or did you just sort of "absorb" it from hearing it around? (an example: there are PLENTY of 'old wives tales' type bits of information floating around. One of the more common ones I see in chicken keeping is people recommending apple cider vinegar for everything, despite a complete lack of scientific evidence that apple cider does.... well, anything, aside from slightly inflame the GI tract due to acidity. The info doesn't come from science, it comes from one person saying it and others playing Telephone until "everyone knows" except no one actually does know)

#2: if it didn't come from a reliable source, is there a reliable source that actually backs it up? Is there more than one? Are there any extenuating circumstances or conflicts of interest evident? Does the "news headline" of the story match what the source material actually says or did it sensationalize it? (an example: I OFTEN hear people quoting that opossums eat 5000 ticks in a season. This isn't true. Opossums eat no ticks. There was ONE poorly done study that "found" they groomed them off and ate them, compared to 28 other studies that found zero tick parts in stomach contents or fecal matter from opossums. Which is a more reliable "fact" in this instance? I'm going with 28 studies that found opossums don't eat ticks).

And perhaps most important to not finding yourself calcifying propaganda or false info: #3 How do you KNOW the source is reliable? where did the source get their info/how was that info acquired? Were there any conflicts of interest? Has the info been corroborated by anyone else? How long ago was the info generated? Is there anything that might pressure this source into being unreliable? When was the last time you checked who runs the source and how? (example: chicken world again, there was a pretty well known chicken blogger who was releasing medical info on birds, particularly nutritional info, and recommending diets to people, as well as food additives. Even slightly scratching the surface revealed she was heavily recommending Purina products not because they were actually good [they are NOT, Purina is one of the worst for fowl feeds], but because her blog was sponsored by Purina... not exactly unbiased opinions being given)

Part of questioning information is questioning the sources for your information, not just the info itself.

That is one of the huge reasons FOX news has managed to get its hooks into people like my parents; the moment they decided that FOX news was a completely reliable source and stopped questioning where FOX got their info (and whether THAT source was reliable), they started going down the rabbit hole of mind calcification and falling for propaganda, to the point where my mother - a woman who worked for like 40 years in a research lab specifically for respiratory illness research - got angry with my sister during early COVID times when my sister insisted they get vaxxed/had to wear PPE before they were allowed to visit their vulnerable newborn grandkid.

So yes, examine the beliefs/opinions/"facts" you know, but remember that part of that is examining the sources of those things.

thatbloodycountess

My parents accused me of indoctrinating kids and teaching them to be gay or trans simply because I’m a teacher. My mother parrots the talking points that civics isn’t taught in school anymore. I told her civics is a requirement in middle school (I’m a middle school teacher FYI) in our state. Kids can’t go onto high school without passing the course and the end of course exam. Her response? “They don’t teach it the way they used to.” She doesn’t even know what the curriculum looks like, yet she can make that assessment.

My parents have always been staunch Republicans before Fox News, but the network has warped any form of critical thinking they had.