ALL THE SHINY THINGS

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Tue, 18 Jun 2013 19:09:06 -0400

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 19:08:38 -0400

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Tue, 18 Jun 2013 18:55:24 -0400

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Tue, 18 Jun 2013 18:50:17 -0400

lighttheleolf: scratchman: simplyessentials: 450 square feet,...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 18:33:29 -0400

lighttheleolf:

scratchman:

simplyessentials:

450 square feet, WOW! - specht harpman

cabinets and cuboards the game

This is awesome ^~^

chaz-gelf: thefrogman: [source] [h/t:...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 18:27:54 -0400

chaz-gelf:

thefrogman:

[source] [h/t: goodpicturesthatilike]

Can bunny therapy be a thing

I would like some bunny therapy

acorginamedollie: tastefullyoffensive: Lawyer Dog Corgi Photo...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 18:26:06 -0400

acorginamedollie:

tastefullyoffensive:

Lawyer Dog

Corgi Photo Challenge Day 18: Favorite Corgi Meme

Lawyer Corgi is obviously the best corgi meme there is.

nightquill: Hey, guys, can you do me a favor? Reblog this if you’d rather wait longer for a more...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 16:42:38 -0400

nightquill:

Hey, guys, can you do me a favor? Reblog this if you’d rather wait longer for a more polished, finished game than have them hurry through production so you can have it now.

toasterspasm: The Pudu: World’s smallest deer. They live in...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 16:13:46 -0400

toasterspasm:

The Pudu: World’s smallest deer.
They live in bamboo thickets to hide from predators, and can weigh up to 12 kilograms (26 pounds).

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Tue, 18 Jun 2013 15:49:40 -0400

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Tue, 18 Jun 2013 15:38:26 -0400

did-you-kno: Source

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 15:15:23 -0400

did-you-kno:

Source

"In one recent study, more than 100 university psychologists were asked to rate the CVs of Dr. Karen..."

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 15:14:18 -0400

““In one recent study, more than 100 university psychologists were asked to rate the CVs of Dr. Karen Miller or Dr. Brian Miller, fictitious applicants for an academic tenure-track job. The CVs were identical, apart from the name. Yet strangely, the male Dr. Miller was perceived (by both male and female reviewers) to have better research, teaching, and service experience than the luckless female Dr. Miller. Overall, about three-quarters of the psychologists thought that Dr. Brian was hirable, while only just under half had the same confidence in Dr. Karen. The same researchers also sent out applications for the position of tenured professor, again identical but for the male and female name at the top. This time, the application was so strong that most of the raters thought that tenure was deserved, regardless of sex. However, the endorsement of Karen’s application was four times more likely to be accompanied by cautionary caveats scrawled in the margins of the questionnaire: such as, ‘I would need to see evidence that she had gotten these grants and publications on her own’ and ‘We would have to see her job talk.’””

- Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference (via cockchomp)

THIS IS REALLY FUCKING IMPORTANT AND INCREDIBLE

(via beloquacious)

Oh hey, just in case you think academia is a haven of progressivism and open-mindedness. Women also have a much harder time obtaining tenure if they are trying to raise a family, while men who have children are more likely to be awarded it.

When I was in graduate school, I attended a “Junior Women Scholars and the Profession’-type mini conference, at which one of the senior scholars told us that, if we wanted to have kids, it was better to do it while we were finishing our degrees. Because then you could prove you were able to handle a baby + research and it would be better to take a semester off as a grad student than a semester off as junior faculty.

All of this is despite the fact that, in the US, hiring committees are not legally allowed to take into account your family status. They aren’t even allowed to ask if you’re married, if you have kids, or what your plans are for kids in the future. It usually comes up somewhat awkwardly during campus visits, where they have to disclose benefits and how the tenure process works.

Like most of the rest of the US, universities and colleges tend to lag woefully behind the rest of the world in offering women choices other than “rock” or “hard place,” and also do not accord men time off for paternity leave, thus ensuring that academic women have to shoulder the weight of those choices. So yay, institutionalized sexism!

(via theletteraesc)

I am very glad this got made into a gifset so fast.

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 15:14:10 -0400

I am very glad this got made into a gifset so fast.

niknak79: The Bad dad more looks fun

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 15:13:12 -0400

niknak79:

The Bad dad more looks fun

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Tue, 18 Jun 2013 15:13:02 -0400

latviia: michaxl: do she got shiduuuuuuu

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 15:12:46 -0400

latviia:

michaxl:

do she got

shiduuuuuuu

"The complexity of texts students are being assigned to read has declined by about three grade levels..."

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 15:12:11 -0400

““The complexity of texts students are being assigned to read has declined by about three grade levels over the past 100 years. A century ago, students were being assigned books with the complexity of around the ninth- or 10th-grade level. But in 2012, the average was around the sixth-grade level.””

- What Kids Are Reading, In School And Out

Walk into any bookstore or library, and you’ll find shelves and shelves of hugely popular novels and book series for kids. But research shows that as young readers get older, they are not moving to more complex books. High-schoolers are reading books written for younger kids, and teachers aren’t assigning difficult classics as much as they once did.

Children are reading significantly less challenging material in school every year. Read more or listen to the full report at NPR.

(via pacificstand)

I assigned a fairly classic anthropology text to my students in a Four-Year University and received a chorus of “This was too hard.” When I countered with, “I read this exact same book my Freshman year,” a student said, “Yeah, but you like this shit.”

(via praxjarvin)

I think there are genuine issues with college students being less prepared to work hard or engage with complex material. I just wish this article didn’t conflate that problem with, “Because they’re reading young adult fiction.” I’d venture to say kids who actively read for pleasure are not the ones causing problems in college. And teachers assigning complex ‘classics’ is no guarantee of the students reading them; if anything, ‘classics’ are easier to cheat with because Cliff-notes type study aids are so readily available.

(via madmarvelgirl)

Boo hoo. What percentage of the U.S. population do you s’pose completes a high school education, compared to 100 years ago? What aptitudes do they expect every one of these kids to possess? Which KINDS of intelligence does the system value? The answer, post-…well, Enlightenment, tbh, is, “the ability to close-read Western literature, and memorize a bunch of facts and STEM formulas,” and not much else. How many straight-A English students do you know who are incapable of drawing a box, panic at the sight of Ikea flat-packs, are mortifyingly awful at reading social situations, have never once dunked a basketball, couldn’t wire a lamp if their lives depended on it, can’t memorize a ten-item grocery list, and would die if left alone in the woods for two weeks? I’m not saying everybody should have all those abilities — quite the opposite. I’m saying high school probably at some point made your genius bike mechanic believe she was stupid because she never grokked King Lear.

Here, have a whiteboard animation:

[RSA Animate: Changing Education Paradigms]

(via stultiloquentia)

Also, to what purpose was the “challenging” material being put? Kids in my classes were being assigned King Lear and Siddharta and pretty much doing shit with it. It didn’t enlighten them, it didn’t instill in them a love of reading or practical reasoning, it did sweet fuck all except, bluntly, make them hate their class.

As someone with a degree in English Lit, as someone who actually was reading “challenging material” for pleasure and as someone who regularly gets, from strangers she’s struck up a conversation about a book with, “Wow. You should TEACH. Suddenly everything about this is six times more meaningful - why didn’t they teach this to me this way in school?”, I’ll tell you right now that you can make more use of Harry Potter to teach about literature, literary history, literary conventions, critical thinking, textual deconstruction and liking to read fucking books to a class of kids who have some interest in Harry Potter and can actually see what the fucking point is, than handing out Jane Eyre with a bunch of worksheets and a lecture to a class whose eyes glaze over at Victorian sentence structure.

Which, I don’t blame them. I’m perfectly capable of reading Victorian sentence structure, but I am also perfectly capable of reading Freud: it doesn’t mean either of them enlighten me, or are something I’d do for pleasure.

(To be fair, I am not sure this is what’s being done by any means, but that’s not the point - the point is “challenging texts” is a fucking bullshit metric, and also, ffs, CS Lewis had a character complaining in bewilderment about how twelve year olds were no longer taught Plato. FOR INSTANCE.

(via tygermama)

Why are those texts complex?? Because they’re old?? Keep in mind, most of the things on assigned reading lists were written in a bygone era where people talked and thought differently than they do today. They were also written by educated adults FOR educated adults. Not adolescents in the process of obtaining an education. This can make the cultural differences, the historical difference and the language differences impenetrable to today’s youth without a massive, MASSIVE history lesson first. It also makes the characters and the text entirely unrelatable to anything the young adult has experienced thus far in life. While they may have been relevant to adults, or young adults when they were published, they offer little to today’s kids. And lastly—assigned reading lists of days of yore were filled to the brim with dead white European males. Is it so tragic to get other voices into a reading list? Things not by dead white or British dudes? Seriously? Basically they’re saying it aint good if it was written by a minority or a woman. Only the finest in dead white dudes will do for our children. Those books may have been thought of as the height of education by our parents and grandparents, but they’re just furthering the Dead White Dude agenda now days.

(via deducecanoe)

All the commentary on this is super important.

(via sonneillonv)

I am an intelligent person.

I was a student that achieved high grades, was liked by teachers, and who coasted through English class because I was good at making up symbolism and pretending I read the texts.

I hated every single book I was ever assigned in my entire school life, except one.

The book ‘I’m 15 and I Don’t Want to Die’ was assigned to me as a mid-level book during my middle school unit on war. It was given to me because my teacher knew I had great comprehension skills, but would never be able to finish the Diary of Anne Frank in the allotted time (I’m a very slow reader). The smart kids in class told me I was stupid for being assigned this book instead. So, my teacher made a decision based on my own personal skills, and adapted the curriculum so that I would be able to succeed instead of forcing me to read something because someone decided it would be good for me, complex, or a ‘classic’.

Had I been forced to read Anne Frank, I would have struggled, speed-read, and skipped parts. I would have learned to hate the book. I never would have learned the important messages, nor would I have learned to love to read. Instead, I read an ‘easy’ book that almost no one I know has ever heard of, and I wept in bed while I read it. I learned beautiful things about this girl, and myself, because I wasn’t reading an “academically complex” book, but because I was reading a book with important themes, no matter it’s grade-level.

The most influential books in my entire life were ones that were read to me by passionate teachers; all of Roald Dahl’s books were ones I had read to me, and then I read myself. The Outsiders is another example. And above all, Shel Silverstein. Because of these poets and authors (I consider Dahl to be a poet in many ways), I developed a taste for reading I never would have gotten from being forced to read “complex books”. I also learned “complex skills” such as rhythm, cadence, wordplay, discernment (Dahl’s use of made-up words, much like Seuss, provokes discernments skills; “is that real? Have I read that before somewhere else?”), phonetics, and so many other reading skills. But above all, I learned to enjoy reading.

Without the pull of loving to read; no mater how complex the texts are, no matter how succinct the tests are, children will never learn anything from reading. They will only learn to read.
(via achangingaltar)

niknak79: Worth a try

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 15:11:35 -0400

niknak79:

Worth a try

beatonna: There’s something wonderful about Marvin Bileck’s...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 15:11:25 -0400

beatonna:

There’s something wonderful about Marvin Bileck’s minimal illustrations for All About the Stars.