#Education initiatives

[rbcorpfoundation]

Catalysts of Change: RB Charity Foundation's Impactful Initiatives

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[brownrice03]

Teaches Youth Responsible Decision-Making Skills

Following his virtual graduation, the economics degree holder and Hatboro-Horsham High School class of 2016 graduate was at a standstill pondering his career in a world that, for the moment, had seemed to stop spinning.

Luke Gehlhaus - Scholarship Winner (etcfoundation34.org)

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Happy Halloween and Wei Wuxian day!

[raincitygirl76]

For anyone getting excited over Hillerska being shut down by the school inspectorate, hold your glee. Lundsberg Skola is the Swedish boarding school Hillerska seems to based on. After years and years of warnings and fines re bullying and hazing, Lundsbergs was shut down by the school inspectorate on August 28, 2013.

It was supposed to stay shut down for a minimum of 6 months. Instead the school hired expensive lawyers, appealed, and were allowed to reopen on September 6, 2013. So it only took 9 days before they found a loophole. One can assume Hillerska will do likewise and everybody (except the third years) will be back in class in the second half of August when the new school year starts.

At Lundsbergs, the headmaster was fired and the entire board of governors resigned after the shut down. But they soon regrouped, hired a new headmaster, appointed new alumni and parents to the board, and debuted a shiny new anti-bullying policy. Whether it actually worked is unlikely. But the parents are mostly alumni themselves. They would’ve gone through the same brutal hazings and wouldn’t think they’d be such a big deal.

Here’s the Wikipedia page, scroll down to the Controversy section for the details on the abuse and bullying that the school was turning a blind eye to. The final investigation, the one that triggered the (temporary) shutdown, was when the younger boys were burned with hot irons by older boys at an initiation. One boy was burned so badly he needed to be hospitalized. The hospital called the local police, who called the school inspectorate. Note: that boy’s parents were not the ones to notify either the police or the school inspectorate.

Also scroll down to the Alumni section for a look at all the rich, influential and famous people (including multiple Swedish royals across many generations) who went there.

[somecunttookmyurl]

wild to me that people are actually trying to defend that classification system cause my reaction whenever i see poor curation is the unshakeable urge to go get a qualification in curation just to be able to storm back in and smack everyone's hands away so i can do it properly this time (yes i know it would never be that easy, but a woman can dream)

even if it would make sense at all ever to group them all together like that (it wouldn't! if for no other reason than they aren't ordinarily labelled like that and so the natural reaction is at least some degree of confusion) there are still... literal factural inaccuracies everywhere?

It's Just Bad, Man

[nothorses]

Hi I have a question/discussion? about public schools and ik this is your area of expertise so I thought I'd ask your opinion. When I ponder the problems of schooling, I think about things like: how we value grades more than actual learning and information retention; how late work policies aren't representative of how the real world works and needlessly puts extra stress on students; how we don't give students that need it the additional support they require to succeed; how we overemphasize success on the first try rather than allowing multiple attempts, which isn't reflective of how to appropriately navigate life; how we require students to be unnaturally quiet, still, and non-disruptive, which is genuinely difficult for a lot of kids, especially younger ones, and can impact their ability to learn; how we give them too much work for too many subjects at once...

And it genuinely feels like the root of a lot of these problems, aside from teaching philosophy, is a simple lack of manpower- we don't have enough competent teachers for the amount of kids we have in public schools. A lot of these problems, in my opinion, don't result from teachers or administrators who have a meanspirited or incorrect philosophy about teaching, but from the fact that it is impossible to manage an ideal classroom environment in a room of 30 kids to 1 adult (or 2 adults if the teacher's lucky enough to have an assistant). We require kids to be silent and still because in a room of 30 children if all of them got to fidget and move around, no one would be able to focus on the lesson or even hear it. We have late work policies because the teacher needs to be able to get a move on on the curriculum and can't spend forever on a few students for one topic. Etc etc

I struggled immensely in public schools, so much so that continuing to go to school there irreparably damaged my mental health. I was lucky enough to get transferred to a private school with a max of 4 kids per class after being hospitalized when I became a danger to myself. The learning environment there was so much better and it pretty much solved every single issue I ever had with school; I was able to build a personal relationship with all my teachers and I learned more effectively there than I had anywhere else. The teachers also had room to diverge from the curriculum as needed and move as quickly or as slowly as the class required, so we could spend more time on important, interesting, and difficult topics and skip past the easy ones within a week. My history teacher was able to make his own unit on greek philosophical history just because he wanted to and we were all interested in it. I really think the small class sizes was what made all the difference.

How accurate is that assessment? And is there really a solution other than simply more people going into teaching so we can have smaller classes?

That's a huge chunk of it, yeah- large class sizes cause a lot of those problems, and smaller class sizes create a lot of flexibility for teachers that we currently lack in the public ed system.

The thing about it, though, is that those policies are often not even up to the individual teacher. They do usually have control over late work policies, accommodations they can personally offer, and how much fidgeting they'll allow; but they often don't get a say in things like curriculum, the physical classroom they teach in, school policy, and certainly not in standardized testing and the prep that comes along with it.

Education as a whole is designed to be "optimized", in a way, in order to run as effectively as possible on a shoestring budget.

You'll often see that schools in wealthier areas tend to have smaller class sizes and better learning environments on the whole, and that's because school funding is partially local property taxes, and they have the money to hire more teachers, reduce class sizes, fund classroom furniture and accommodation tools, and give them more control.

But even then, they still have to follow district- and state-mandated curriculum requirements, they will definitely still have to go through standardized testing, and their schools will still be limited by the larger, system-wide roots in that sort of "optimization".

How many students can we educate? Where can we best put our money to support learning? is that gonna be 24-32 new exercise ball chairs and a box of fidget toys, or is it gonna be new learning materials with updated content, informed by modern learning science?

These aren't obvious choices, these are genuinely difficult questions to answer. A lot of people spend a lot of time doing research and writing papers and having discussions in attempts to answer them.

A lot of future-teacher education that I've been through has talked about what we as teachers can do with the tools we're given, and less: democratic classroom environments, anti-racist and culturally-responsive teaching practices, trauma-informed care of students and classroom culture, critical literacy and student empowerment, and removing unnecessary access barriers (late work, testing, etc.).

As a student teacher, I worked with my teacher to redesign his whole grading structure to be more equitable- all according to what I had been learning at my university. But according to the school, I still had to take attendance, mark tardies and absences, and make sure only one of my (high school!!!) students was out of the room at a time. And I felt like a fucking warden.

It's not just that we need more people to go into teaching; I assure you, lots of people want to teach. Lots of people love teaching. And there are things we need to address to enable them to teach: teachers usually go into debt in order to get their degrees and certifications, and the whole field pays so little that they are extremely unlikely to ever pay off that debt without significant outside help. You have to be able to afford to teach.

Not to mention it's an extremely emotionally intensive- even traumatizing- job, and access to mental health support is reliant upon income that, again, does not exist.

We need to pay teachers more; not because They Deserve It (they do, and so does everyone else on the fucking planet), but because if we don't, we won't have teachers. They will leave the profession, they won't enter it in the first place (I'm getting higher degrees partially so I can go into education in a better-paying position), or they'll burn out, undergo trauma, won't have the care they need- and that impacts the health, wellness, and safety of students, too. And that means more funding toward education.

The other piece of it is, again, school culture; schools being run on these shoestring budgets means they have to answer these difficult catch-22 "what's more important" questions, and those answers will never be good enough. It will never be "good" to choose better text books over fidgets, or to choose engaging readings over experiential learning opportunities.

Schools- not districts, not higher-ups in the system- should have enough money that they can run the way they want to run, that their students need them to run, without having to worry about whether this field trip to a science museum is going to deprive other students of filling, nutritious school lunches.

I know "fund education" isn't the most controversial take here, but I do think it's important to emphasize just how much of an impact that has on the system overall: not just the day-to-day decisions, not even just the teachers, but the culture and the fundamental structure of our schooling.

[scrawnytreedemon]

People are headcanoning Sephiroth as illiterate now. As in. The fucking reason he took so long in that basement was because he had to finger-read every single fucking book.

I'm putting Sheltered Sephiroth on the top shelf until you goons stop veering into outright ableism. For fuck's sake.

[obsidiannebula]

I didn't watch Danny Phantom as a kid and I like, really don't know anything about it, but I keep seeing the occasional meta and a lot of fic of it on my dash, especially crossing over with DC/Batfam and I just have to say

You're all doing amazing. This shit is so good keep it coming. You're all so creative and passionate. Idk what's going on all the time but you guys have the coolest ideas I love you

[communistkenobi]

actually I just need to trick someone into giving me a professorship so I can assemble a class reading list of all the shit I want to read

[moki-dokie]

how to make 19 year old boy who came of age during the pandemic and never had a real real job before now realize he needs to Chill The Fuck Out and be Less eagar about working for free holy shit he is impossible to wrangle

[asinglesock]

up late reading about whether or not Second Temple Alexandrian Jewish boys went to gym class

[garadinervi]

Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans. A History, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, NY, 1971, pp. 320-321. From: Eileen Southern and the Music of Black Americans, (digital exhibit), Eileen Southern Initiative, Harvard University Department of Music / Harvard Library / Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 2019-on going

[hella1975]

hella idk what to send to you for aftg im either bored or annoyed and I don't wanna just say bad things about it 😭 like that's just rude and yall obviously like it I DONT WANNA BE SOME DEBBY DOWNER MDMWKEM

I looked at the anti aftg tag too to see if I could intermingle there and last I checked it was a mix of fans obsessed with the series and haters being just a tad harsh imo, so i couldn't even do that RIP. I'm so lonesome in what is maybe a whole group of people gaslighting me 😔👊

honestly ive said this before and i always have to tread a very fine line with it because this isn't me saying it's OKAY or like. promotable. but i do think to an extent that aftg's problematicness is actually an aspect of what draws people in a lot. like the characters and their reactions to things feel real for who they are, what they've been through and the environments they were raised in if that makes sense? and then you go in the anti-aftg tag and it's just again and again 'they said THIS thing and acted THIS way in response to THIS scenario and it was PROBLEMATIC' and like. yeah. outside of the internet bubble you're in people do actually do that. like that behaviour exists. it IS problematic, well done. you pointed at a wall and called it a wall. but like? in real life people - PARTICULARLY deprived, traumatised people that typically don't ever get therapy or community or someone telling them why something is bad - DO act this way. ive said half of my love for andrew is literally just because he took an awful backstory and let it make him a complete cunt and ive NEVER seen a character do it as shamelessly as him before. and yeah there's the argument for how it's never resolved in the book where nora ties it with a bow and points at the bad behaviour so the readers can go 'see, this is wrong' and we all clap, but idk it just for me feels that when people point at the aftg characters and go problematic! problematic! problematic! it's like they're missing the point a bit.

the point being? that we need to be putting WAY more heat on the author. i really dislike her and a lot of her writing choices and her insistance of using slurs that aren't hers to reclaim and just because it happened to make the characters feel just that bit more authentic i can still acknowledge that she CLEARLY wrote it without characterisation in mind and just added all that problematic shit anyway. like i never get why there's so little focus on nora's writing decisions and thousands of posts just fucking CRUCIFYING the characters themselves and 'let's explain in detail why this behaviour is Morally Reprehensible and they should be Locked Up Forever'. like if u want to focus on the characters so bad and pretend they're the sole reason why aftg is Problematic and Bad then why is it so hard to acknowledge that someone raised the way they were might have some misinformed, ignorant beliefs. idk lol

[delicatelysublimeforester]

The Urgency of National Wildlife Week: A Call to Action for Biodiversity Preservation

[theheartchoice]

[chikoyama]

(( Edited the about me page and added a few points that I think are important to note when seeing me skipping about or talking to me! You can read what I added under the cut if you don’t feel like navigating to the mun page. ))

Be warned that my humor and behaviour might borderline on absurdity (entitlement, arrogance, excessive flirting, general brattiness, playful teasing, straight-forwardness, provocations by the challenge of assumptions or appearing oblivious, having an enabler mentality, adulation, creepiness — anything considered unhinged or degenerate by societal standards, lol, but of course within reason), discussing meta in terms of self-awareness and what is considered ‘the norm’, chaotically jumping from one irrelevant topic to another, abstract forms of analysing and theorising, and posing ‘what if’ questions, sometimes on philosophical levels in regards to morality and how it speaks to society and (human) nature. Anyway, my intentions are usually to educate through prodding and thought-provoking behaviours, or just for own entertainment. I can switch very fast, often with no clear indication of whether I'm being serious or not — so, just tell me to slow down or ask me to elaborate if you ever experience that! Though, really, this kind of behaviour is reserved for friends who I know can handle this.

If you witness me being inappropriately silly, then it’s because they’re my close friend. If I end up behaving like this with you, and you find it too much, please tell me, and we can discuss it together! I’ll never respond negatively to such a thing. If I feel even the sligthest tension between us, I’ll become insecure and might stop talking to you.