librarynpc

[librarynpc]

the moment i first understood the myth of meritocracy i think was when i read the "Eragon" books as a teenager, and it said on the back that the author had started writing them at 15 and it became a bestseller. this stressed me out so much, I also wanted that kind of success in writing at such a young age & kept thinking I should also be able to do it, that I must be doing something wrong – and then YEARS later i found out his parents had a publishing company and financed him touring through the whole U.S before the books became successful

[librarynpc]

barbra streisand photographed by cecil beaton, 1970

[librarynpc]

what i like about airports is that once youre in there theres no going back. I mean youre there until they let you out

[librarynpc]

I've heard that the shift away from teaching phonics have made people functionally illiterate. Like kids have been taught to basically guess what a word is by sight reading, instead of being able to sound them out. This led to people getting stuck when they encounter an unfamiliar word, and taking guesses at what the word is instead of stopping to see what the letters are actually spelling out. For example, they might see the word "Imperative", but only take in the [imp] and [ive] and guess that the word is "Impressive"

yeah, that's for sure a part of it. this article does a good job of describing the recent controversy with phonics, which is i think what you're remembering

in general i'm not a big believer in, like... magic bullet pedagogy techniques that perfectly download information into brains, and though that isn't exactly how phonics is billed, for similar reasons i'm skeptical that it's the whole story. i don't think illiteracy is simply the result of bad pedagogy (though it is a part). rather, it's the result of systemic underfunding of public schools -- which makes bad pedagogy a tempting shortcut, among other knock-on effects. (to wit, teaching a kid phonics requires a lot more effort than telling them to "guess what the word means through context clues." after decades of making teaching a painful and no-longer-laudatory profession, teachers are more and more likely to do the latter.)

i had a professor in uni who told me that, over the course of her 30 year career thus far, had had to massively narrow her required reading lists. the worst year for it came in the mid-10s, when the first generation of students educated entirely under No Child Left Behind matriculated. these students couldn't read long texts anymore. well, Columbia University Teaching College's guess-context methods were only used in about 20% of schools nationally. it's not entirely to blame for that downtick in competence.

and neither are the damn phones, to be clear. a part of the problem, sure, but when i was taught to analyze a text in high school, i was taught to read the essay question first and read the text in light of it. a lot of students were. this of course makes for poor readers, and is a direct result of NCLB's emphasis on standardized testing. to put that in a more general way, it's the result of education being rationed like a commodity, rather than shared as a public good. as long as our politicians insist on tests and slashed budgets, illiteracy will persist

[librarynpc]

these beds crack me up because I know the recliner on the side is a massage chair/for fuckin’ but I also imagine that it’s where you have your buddy/most trusted advisor/overly-familiar-but-not-too-familiar jester lounge for movie night while you and your consort spoon in bed

[librarynpc]

[librarynpc]

like ten years ago, i made a silly post about my leopard gecko and someone reblogged it and added their very long and graphic undertale incest mpreg oviposition fanfiction to it while saying my pet had inspired it.

when i told them i found that really disturbing, they freaked out and went on a months' long campaign where they kept trying to suicide bait me.

like three years ago, i posted a stupid text exchange my partner and i had shared and someone reblogged it and added their graphic our flag means death first-time-anal fanfiction to it while saying my relationship inspired it.

when i told them i found that really inappropriate and weird they freaked out then sent multiple people to angrily tell me to delete my reply because they couldn't have known that was weird. then they nuked their blog.

there's no moral to this story. it's just weird that it happened twice.

[librarynpc]

Once I was three margaritas deep to the wind at a beach club in Cozumel on my “day off” (in quotes because I’m always lookin n lurkin), and I saw a Pygmy raccoon grabbing an enchilada or something from an unsecured garbage bin and I was so upset. SO upset. And I’m just sitting there in my beach chair next to him (I deliberately choose to sit near the garbage) like “Hello? Sir? Do you know you’re endangered? Dont eat that!” And there were some other tourists who were now looking at me funny and I was MORTIFIED. So embarrassed. Because, and I quote, “I’m an idiot. He doesn’t speak English.” And then turned back to the raccoon and desperately went “Señor Mapache! Sabe que está en peligro de extinción? No coma!” In my very southern accent a la Peggy Hill.

Anyway, here is a picture of him I drew.

Pygmy Raccoon (Procyon pygmaeus)

[librarynpc]

Attempting to get my students to fucking come to class

[librarynpc]

so nice you see him twice

[librarynpc]

[librarynpc]

"came back wrong" but it's more explicitly + intentionally about medical and/or caregiver abuse

[librarynpc]

got high and almost started crying about the platonic ideal shape of Library

[librarynpc]

[librarynpc]

DWP stiffed me on disability benefits; no ETA on when they're fixing it

so, the DWP thinks i'm still a student, so i only got £770 out of slightly over £1.5k of my monthly payment, despite no longer receiving student loans. i've notified them that they've made a mistake, but i have no idea when (or even if) they're going to fix it.

right now, i cannot afford rent or bills. i have no other sources of income and i'm estranged from family.

Tumblr has helped me get through prior benefit nonsense, including when DWP stopped my benefits entirely for like four months while they calculated how much they owed me taking into account student loans, and i am frankly terrified rn. i don't know what i'm going to do, i'm already in debt to the council with rent (due to being switched from legacy benefits to Universal Credit, and the resulting 3-week gap in receiving any welfare payments at all).

i'm looking to try and raise £800 to get me through the coming month, since that's about what DWP owe me.

i am not joking when i say that DWP could take months to fix this, and i have no idea when i'll be getting the full monthly payment. i've already contacted them, but again — in the past, it's taken months to sort things out.

£0/£800

thank you.

[librarynpc]

Judaism is many things, but one of those things is a mesh network which spans the entire Earth

[librarynpc]

also this is another reason you should love and fight for libraries. functionally illiterate ppl, ppl who don't know how to use technology (who vary in age from 30 to 90), and many more rely on library workers for their information needs. without libraries, many people wouldn't know where to go for the information you consider trivially easy to access - like car resale value, geneological records, accurate news, etc etc

the cyclical ´everyone is illiterate' discourse kind of scalds my yams bc at the library i DO meet people who aren't very literate and they are invariably the working poor who need my help to use their phones to print important documents or fill out paperwork. like functional illiteracy IS a massive problem but it's downright dishonest to say the way it manifests is ppl writing bad fanfic or whatever