Lose one friend. Lose all friends. Lose yourself.

Eric Matthews

To #education and colleagues: we need to remember why we’re here

tomesawayfromhome:

There’s been a lot of discussion of late about how the #education page has gone downhill and girlwithalessonplan sent out a great question earlier in the week asking what people would like to see, and things seemed to turn a corner, and then it all fell apart again.

I am fairly new to the page, and newish to an editor’s role (and feel like somewhat of an outsider since you’ve been friends long before I came along…kind of like being the new girl at school), and at the risk of engaging in a futile argument about what’s promo-worthy and what’s not, and who did what and who didn’t, a few thoughts have been bumping around in my brain. Maybe if I get them down here, I’ll be able to sleep:

• I don’t think anyone wakes up in the morning, rubs the sleep out of their eyes, and says, “How can I infuriate the #education community today?” and then sets out to do so.
• I don’t think anyone is brewing a conspiracy to bring down the tone or content of the #education page. 
• If you’re not happy with what’s shown at #education, spend some time composing stories, lesson plans, or other things to share that can get promoted. The quality of what is curated is entirely in the hands of the participants. Isn’t that a nice thing? In between all the weirdness on the “education everything” page, there’s a lot of good stuff too. Let’s work on making it even better.
• Maybe we’ve had enough of the TED videos. And the long rambling posts with corporate connections and agendas. And repetitive posts and reposts of posts about the kid who solved the Newtonian problem. Let’s keep it real, shall we? It’s in that real-ness that we’ll find value, I think. There’s no law that says the editors have to use all 10 stars a day; let’s use them to start real conversations.
• Above all, we should remember that it is what we do in our classrooms with our students that matters the most. I think as soon as we begin to take our online personas this seriously, as if we’re somebody, that things begin to fall apart. In the end, I believe that as a teacher my purpose is to help point and guide others to a higher end, not be all about me. I fail sometimes, but I’m working on it.

A solution or two:

• It would be really nice if we could promote and annotate what we promote so that people can understand why we chose what we did. For instance, I think I inadvertently angered librariesandlemonade today by promoting a story that GWALP posted about leaving a party when a former student showed up. With an annotation feature, I could have explained that I thought this was useful since if you teach at the same school and live in a town long enough, you’re bound to run into former students all the time (for instance, one of my students tweeted about seeing me at the grocery store this weekend, and told all his followers where I lived; so for me, it hit home). I thought it was interesting and timely, and after the objection was made, I removed it from the #education page. In hindsight, I wish I had left it. 
• Let’s read (and write, and promote) with compassion and empathy. Let’s treat each other the way we teach our kids to treat each other. This shouldn’t be the thing that keeps us up at night (though I’ll admit that I’m probably taking things much too seriously by half…that’s my nature).

Life was tough enough when we were in high school. Let’s not turn the tumblr #education page into another version of that nightmare. We’re on the other side of the desk (and wow, it’s wonderful here, isn’t it?), now. Can’t we find a way to work together?

→Gregory & the Hawk - Come, Now (2012) Available now on Bandcamp

SO, Meredith released Come, Now several days ahead of schedule.

Just finished processing my order.

Maybe we should have all the #education editors come together and discuss things?

revolutionizeed:

positivelypersistentteach:

revolutionizeed:

Maybe in a chat or something?  Then we could bicker over what types of things should be shared.  Maybe we could split things up into categories or something…

I enjoy being an editor and I would love for our current editors to grow and learn from each other and learn what types of things people want to read.  Couldn’t we find a way to do that?  I would certainly prefer this over seeing complaining all over my dashboard (it was said earlier, “if you want good content, post good content).  Besides, I hear enough complaining while at school!  

PS: My students normally respond with “you are complaining about complaining.”

I don’t mind getting together for a chat at all.  However, I disagree about not discussing this in public.  I get that complaining is no fun.  I was hesitant to post about the current issues (again) and told GWALP so.  She then asked what people like to see promoted.  The thing about #education is that it is more than just a tag.  It is a professional tag.  It is a community.  It belongs to all of us — not just the editors.  In my mind, posts should be beneficial to community members and if we don’t discuss what is helpful, and what is being overdone, then the community is a hierarchy.   I want to be willing to ideas suggestions to improve the tag, and help the community become stronger.  There will be problems along the way, and we need to flesh them out and work to resolve them.

But now instead of our followers seeing amazing posts by some amazing educators like us (that could possibly be shared in #education), they are seeing complaining and complaining back and forth.  We could be talking about all of this as a team of editors and working to provide better posts for our followers and our tag followers!

Not an editor, but I do follow the #Education tag closely, and as a lay member of the community, I would like to offer my perspective on this issue.

What I have seen from your public discussions on these matters is not something I would consider complaining, nor public shaming, nor anything short of criticisms taken against actions and behaviors which, ultimately, affect the Education community as a whole. I know that both teachers and students alike value #Education as an informational resource and forum for discussion, full of content concerning everything from education policy to instructional methods, from student sob stories to difficulties with parents. There’s some legitimacy to your fear, that such public discussion of issues among the editors—issues that, at times, may be personally charged—could get in the way of more meaningful content, especially in the event that this does turn into complaining.

But what I see in all this is an opportunity to more closely understand how various educators disagree, and why they disagree, and an opening of those disagreements to a concerned community that can both offer feedback and more thoroughly develop their own opinions. Whatever goes on between you editors will ultimately, inevitably come back to affect the community at large—and so I cannot help but agree with PPT: As long as these discussions stay civil and constructive, there ought to be some transparency.

That said and done, there’s something to be said for the instantaneity and privacy of a chat-room environment. Language used in IMs more closely resembles spoken language, and often communicates intent more clearly and directly than blog posts would. Moreover, if there are elements of these issues that are more personal than professional, you’ll be able to sort them out without the interference of an audience.

#2cents

If only it were that simple

diversitycommittee:

“Hey, I just met you
Don’t say Wo Ai Ni
I don’t speak Chinese
So please just spare me!”

Wellesley students casually breaking down stereotypes in an AMAZING video set to the tune of “Call Me Maybe”. So much applause for Nicole T, Meliora Gadfly, and everyone else who participated in the making of this video!

→Young People in the Recession

Nobody ever talks about generational conflict. Who wants to bring up that the old are eating the young at the dinner table? How are you going to mention that to your boss? If you’re a politician, how are you going to tell your donors? Even the Occupy Wall Street crowd, while rejecting the modes and rhetoric and institutional support of Boomer progressives, shied away from articulating the fundamental distinction that fills their spaces with crowds: young against old.

[…]

Government, academia, the professions, corporations, unions, and both political parties — all continue to mine the vulnerability of youth in service of the needs of their aging power base. Separately, each of these cases would amount to a minor scandal, but taken together they point to a broader and more significant alteration to the way of the world. From every corner of the institutional spectrum, the whole of American society has been rearranged so that the limits of vision coincide exactly with the death of the Boomers.

Nobody wants this. The Boomers did not set out to screw over their kids. The wind just seemed to blow them that way. But no matter what their motivations, a painful truth grows truer with every passing year: Through its refusal to act, the generation in power is willing to do what other generations before them would not — sell their children’s birthright for a mess of their own pottage.

An excellent piece on the growing disparity between the world’s youth and its elderly, subsuming race/sexuality/gender issues.

Mandolin Fund

$78/200

I’m thinking I may just use some of my grant money to grab one while I’m in Bucharest.

I could become a lăutar and join a taraf.

→Reflection on The Upside of Autism published by The Wall Street Journal

oppressionisyucky:

I really liked the point about separating normality from abnormality, I think that happens with a lot of mental health disorders, particularly with Axis II disorders which, being pervasive through the lifespan can feel to many people to be a more integral part of who they are and more of a difference to be accepted rather than a difference to be pathologized.

I think that particularly within the context of diagnosis of an autism spectrum disorder in adulthood, there is a strong argument for the statement, “it represents an alternate way of making sense of the world, a cognitive difference that, in many instances, comes with unexpected benefits” I do wonder, particularly when looking at the study that the author cited, the degree to which those benefits assist people who society is less set up for, like people who are nonverbal or have other significant communication barriers. I think that it is fantastic to point out that things that are pathologized are not all bad but I think that making broad statements about autism as a whole, without acknowledgement of the spectrum involved is dangerous.

I think an argument could be made against the stigmatization of pathologized behaviors as a whole as well, since I think this article points to the ways in which people participating in society with things like dyslexia and ADHD can also contribute uniquely to the world. I would argue that destigmatizing these pathologies, would lead to even greater contribution from people who are experiencing and working through the world in different ways and I would argue that can be true across the spectrums of many neuroatypicalities.  

Great article w/ even better commentary

Wolf-spider, crouch in your funnel nest.
If I knew you, once,
now I know you less.
In the sinking sand,
where we’ve come to rest,
have I had a hand in your loneliness?

When you leave me alone
in this old palace of yours,
it starts to get to me. I take to walking.
What a woman does is open doors.
And it is not a question of locking
or unlocking.

Hey, guys. Check out this new blog.

crowbegottenbatman:

theriverflow:

My good friends collectively called Skype team (click for our totes cool blog), host of the blog Shit Skype Team Says, has made a new blog! 

Check it out here. It’s an advice blog, where each member will be giving you advice.

(Skype team is a group of elitist douchebags from some writer’s forum on the interwebz. We’re totes cool.) 

All of y’all should ask us questions because we’re fucking hilarious.

—and hilariously fucked.

“Walking Home from Oak-Head” by Mary Oliver

There is something
about the snow-laden sky
in winter
in the late afternoon

that brings to the heart elation
and the lovely meaninglessness
of time.
Whenever I get home - whenever - 

somebody loves me there.
Meanwhile
I stand in the same dark peace
as any pine tree, 

or wander on slowly
like the still unhurried wind,
waiting,
as for a gift, 

for the snow to begin
which it does
at first casually,
then, irrepressibly.

Wherever else I live -
in music, in words,
in the fires of the heart,
I abide just as deeply

in this nameless, indivisible place,
this world,
which is falling apart now,
which is white and wild,

which is faithful beyond all our expressions of faith,
our deepest prayers.
Don’t worry, sooner or later I’ll be home.
Red-cheeked from the roused wind,

I’ll stand in the doorway
stamping my boots and slapping my hands,
my shoulders
covered with stars.

So I made an artblog.

artiarts:

“Art” having a very loose definition here. 

I want to really improve this summer, so rather than spam my personal tumblr or any of the other blogs I run, I’m going ahead and creating a blog specifically for my art. Here you’ll find stuff related to the writing projects I’m working on, as well as fan art for things I’m obsessed with, such as The Avengers or Legend of Korra.

That’s basically it - carry on.

Expecting good things from this blog.

June 5, 2012

When they made love
Geryon liked to touch in slow succession each of the bones of Herakles’ back
as it arched away from him into who knows what dark dream of its own, running both hands all the way down
from the base of the neck
to the end of the spine which he can cause to shiver like a root in the rain.

Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red (via proustitute)