kalatcademia - Tumblr blog

[kalatcademia]

anyone else's brain feel like a dried out raisin

[kalatcademia]

Terfs really think they have a monopoly on any material critiques of the patriarchy. They really think they pioneered and created that and some of you are dumb enough to validate it.

[kalatcademia]

That strange feeling of longing when you are at a train station, in a 24/7 open market, when you are buying a coke from a vending machine, watching the city lights glow from your window, when you're walking aimlessly on a busy street after 5 pm, that feeling as if something is missing in your life and it will never come back although it was never there in the first place; that inexplicable urban sadness.

[kalatcademia]

A reminder that turning in assignments for partial credit is better than not turning them in at all. It is. Even if you think you’ve done a bad job and are ashamed of your work, or it’s way overdue, you take whatever you can get. Partial credit dramatically improves your grade over a zero, and I’m always astounded by how often even the smartest kids don’t really comprehend that. 60% is worlds better than 0%. Even 10% is going to help you. Letter grades are misleading and are not created equal. “F"s are mathematically valuable. Turn that late assignment in.

[kalatcademia]

that’s enough emotions for a whole year. ciao

[kalatcademia]

one thing i have learned this year reading a lot of old-timey diaries is that they straight up did not know anything about medicine. i mean less than nothing. sylvia plath writes in her journal that she’s got a bad cold but fortunately the doctor has prescribed her some cocaine drops so she should be okay. louisa may alcott is like well i am in horrible pain for no apparent reason (after being treated with mercury for the fever she developed working as a nurse in a civil war hospital) but fortunately i am able to sleep pretty well at night thanks to this opium i’ve been prescribed. franz kafka is totally fine all spring and summer just writing about going out for coffee and seeing plays with his friends and then november hits and he’s like “i am in agony life is meaningless i am a worm upon the earth” and it truly is like franz buy a sun lamp king

[kalatcademia]

My favorite thing is that Europe is spooky because it’s old and America is spooky because it’s big

[kalatcademia]

these are the *bee’s knees* OP

they are here to cause chaos among mortals

[kalatcademia]

i hate how reward systems never work for me like i can’t just say “if i finish this assignment i can have a cookie” bc my brain is like “…..or u could just have one right now” and i can’t argue with that logic

[kalatcademia]

it is so interesting to me the “gen z humour” is obviously sooo influenced by tumblr despite most of gen z probably being too young to have spent much time on tumblr at its peak. like it’s known that 2020 twitter is literally 2015 tumblr but like 2020 tiktok is also 2015 tumblr the world is literally just stuck at 2015 tumblr

[kalatcademia]

i’m cryin i love this, fuck elitism

A story that may have relevance for others, or then again, maybe not:

When I was in college, about ten or so years ago, I was a history major. I wanted to learn to dance, so I joined a swing dance club on campus. To my surprise, this club had about twice as many men as women (in high school, the last time I’d tried dancing, the ratio had gone the other way–lots of girls, and boys only that you could drag by their ears).

But apparently, there had been some kind of word spread specifically to the STEM guys that dance was a way that they could meet girls.

So anyway. I joined the swing dance club, and met a few guys. And at one point, when socializing with the guys outside of dance class, one of them asked me what my research was on. (I had already established that I was an honors history student doing a thesis, just as he had established that he was an honors… I’m not sure if he was CS or Math, but it was one of those.)

So I gave him the thumbnail sketch of my research. Now, to be clear, an honors senior thesis, while nothing like what a graduate student would do, was still fairly in-depth. I had to translate primary sources from the original late-Classical Latin. (My professor said, basically, that while there were plenty of translations of my source material, that I’d only be able to comfortably trust them if I had at least made a stab at a translation of my own. And he was right.) And there was so much secondary material, often contradictory, that I had been carefully sorting through.

But I was able to sift it into a three-sentence summary of my senior thesis work, you know, as one does.

So I gave him that summary, and then asked–since he was also an undergraduate senior doing an honors thesis–what his research was on.

“Oh,” he said, “you wouldn’t understand it.”

Reader, I went home in a frothing rage. Because I had thought we were playing one game–a game of ‘let’s talk about what we’re passionate about!’– and he had been playing another game, which was, one-upsmanship. I had done my best to give a basically understandable brief of my research–and he had used that against me. As if my research, my painstaking translation, my digging through archives and ILLs of esoteric works, my reading of ten thousand articles in Speculum (yes, the pre-eminent medievalist journal in North America is called Speculum, I’m sorry, it’s hilarious/sad but also true), and then my effort to sum it up for him, was nothing. Because his research into some kind of algorithm or other was just too complex for my tiny brain to conceive of. Because I just couldn’t possibly understand his work.

Now, the important note here is that the person I went home to was my senior year roommate. She was a graduate student–normally undergrads and graduate students couldn’t be roommates, but we’d been friends for years, and the tenured faculty-in-residence used his powers for good and permitted us to be roommates that year. Anyway. My senior year roommate was basically… in retrospect I think possibly an avatar of Athena. She was six feet tall, blonde, attractive in a muscular athletic way, a rock climber and racquetball player, sweet but sharp, extremely socially awkward, exceptionally kind even when it cost her to be kind, and an incredibly brilliant computer science major who spent most of her time working on extremely complicated mathematical algorithms. (Yes, I was a little in love with her, why do you ask? But she was as straight as a length of rope, and is now happily married, and so am I, so it worked out.)

(Still, yes, she is my mental image of Athena, to this day.)

Anyway, I came home in a frothing rage to my roommate, the Athena avatar. And I said, “He made me feel like such an idiot, that I could sum up my research to him but his research was just too smart for stupid little me.”

And she shut her book, and smiled at me, with her dark eyes and her high cheekbones and her bright hair, and said, “If he can’t explain his research to you, then he’s not nearly as smart as he thinks he is.”

Now I hesitated, because I’d be in college long enough to have sort of bought into the ridiculous idea that if you couldn’t dazzle them with your brilliance, you should baffle them with your bullshit. But she said, “Look, I’ve been doing work on computer science algorithms that have significantly complicated mathematical underpinnings. What do I do?”

And I said, “Genetic algorithms–that is, self-optimizing algorithms–for prioritization, specifically for scheduling.”

“Right,” she said. “You couldn’t code them because you’re not a computer scientist or a mathematician. But you can understand what I do. If someone can’t explain it like that, it isn’t a problem with you as a person. It’s a problem with them. They either don’t understand it as well as they think they do–or they want to make you feel inferior. And neither is a positive thing.”

So. There.

If you are looking into something and have a question, and someone treats you like an idiot for not understanding right away… here is what I have to say: maybe it isn’t you who is the idiot.

[kalatcademia]

the solution, of course, is to put the children to work.

[kalatcademia]

not so gentle reminder that academia belongs to the queer, the weary, the women, the people of color, the poor, the ill just as much as it does the rich, the white, the privileged. if your academia isn't accessible, i don't want it.

[kalatcademia]

i am just mommy (2019) - heather kurut

[kalatcademia]

Light academia, grey academia or any other variations of dark academia aren't magical words that erase the issues of class and race within da, yes they have mild aesthetic differences, but too often when I see people talk about issues in da someone reply with "just go to light/grey/romantic/chaotic academia" as if it's not the same house different paint, a name change is not a substitute for critical thinking or discussion.

[kalatcademia]

[kalatcademia]

flowers of the night moodboard