#first time drawing a rabbit from memory like that wao...

[karver518]

Dreamweaver y/n riding the bunny as a horse around the spire and saying: YEEHAW

MAYBE A BIT TOO SILLY...

They're on their way to explore the spire with their newly acquired companion (they're having fun)

[daemonmatthias]

"Get to know me" meme! 1, 65, 69, 91

1. What images do you have set for your desktop/cell phone wallpapers?

Well, my desktop is set to rotate between several images that represent my nerdy interests. I’ve got 2-3 Beauty and the Beast ones, 2-3 Kingdom hearts ones (and there is one overlap between those two), some Harry Potter/Hufflepuff ones, and 1-2 Studio Ghibli ones.

My cell phone lock screen is My Neighbor Totoro, and my wallpaper is Belle and The Beast dancing (from the new movie).

65. Which do you use more often, the dictionary or the thesaurus?

Definitely the dictionary. I can do the thesaurus stuff in my head, but sometimes I have to check the connotation of the word to make sure the synonym I’m thinking of works in the same way. Also, I have to google words to see what phrasing my students are going to find when they look up a word so that I can make sure my answer choices are not too far off from or too close to what google tells them.

69.  What’s the most memorable class you’ve ever taken?

You know what? That’s actually a really hard question…. I knew by my junior year of high school that I wanted to be a teacher, so that perspective has always caused me to focus more on the teacher than the class itself when it comes to memories…. and I’ve had a LOT of memorable teachers over the years. Here are just a few…

There was the professor I took two classes with in college. He was a Doctor Who nerd since like the 60′s/70′s and would slip in references (like “wibbly wobbly timey wimey” while talking about a book not in chronological order) even though I was the only one in the class who knew what he was talking about. His Literary Theory class changed my whole perspective on life/literature in the best way possible, and he fucking tore every paper we wrote to shreds to make us better writers. (He made it up grade-wise with stupidly easy reading quizzes with tons of bonus point opportunities- like fill-in-the-blanks for his favorite joke, which was “a skeleton walks into a bar and orders a beer and a mop”, btw- and we could keep turning in the essays for better grades as many times as we wanted.) I worked my ASS off on his last paper and got a B on the first try. I have never been prouder. I also took his American Novel class where I read some of the best and absolute worst books I have ever read. Rabbit Run was the WOOORST, but I never ever would have read Winter’s Tale or The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao without that class. And, I certainly never would have read Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chaing without him. It’s something I never would have found/noticed on my own, and I loved every single word of those stories. I still haven’t found another writer that can mix science/math, literature, and psychology in the same ways. I’m currently re-reading the entire collection, as I’ve been wanting to since I heard Arrival was coming out.Side note: You should have seen me when I first heard of Arrival. I hadn’t heard anything about it until the trailer came on while we were watching TV. Poor Robert. I cocked my head to the side like a dog and started to say, “Why does this seem so much like that story I read?”, but only got as far as “Why does-” before BASED ON THE STORY BY TED CHAING flashed across the screen and I just fucking lost it. “IT IS, ROBERT, IT IS!!!” “Is what?” “THAT WAS MY FAVORITE ONE IN THE WHOLE BOOK!!” He was so confused and I had to backtrack and explain because that class was like the first or second semester we knew each other and this was the first time I had been remotely excited by anything in months.

There was also that Short Story class where the prof told us she wanted it to be a discussion class even though she’s terrible at discussion classes (her own words). That whole class was a hot mess. We discussed things so thoroughly that she couldn’t figure out how to write tests because she wanted them to be over what we hadn’t discussed about the story. We once had an essay test that asked us about “male enlightenment in Kate Chopin’s “The Storm”.” She started passing them out and everyone was like, “typo?? female??” “No. Male. Like the boy characters.” And we were just like…. uhhhhh ok then….” and when we left three of us got barely out of earshot before one asked us, “so what shit did you make up???” (I had bs-ed something about becoming enlightened to the fact that if mamma ain’t happy ain’t nobody happy.) The entire class pretty much bonded with mutual sarcasm over how awful the class was. It was a very unique environment because we all did actually enjoy discussing the stories with each other and we really got to know each other because the bond made us share more than we usually would with strangers. 

In high school I had the same teacher for AP Psych and APUSH. He was exactly my kind of sarcasm. I kept a “quote book” in high school, which was about 10% inside jokes and stupid shit we said, and about 90% Mr. A quotes. It was stuff like, “So we had the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente. What does “entente” mean? Alliance. So we had the Triple Alliance and the Triple Alliance- BUT IN FRENCH.” I had both classes with him the same year, and he always connected the two by drawing on historical people for examples in Psych and mentioning (or using!) the Psych to teach us history. It helped me a lot in both classes. We also had to watch Phillip Zimbardo videos in Psych and we complained every single time because “He looks like SATAN and he scares us!!!!!” 

The was also the AP English teacher my junior year who most people hated because she was mean. (My friend who knew a bunch of upperclassmen said, “Oooh, you got The Wass. I’m sorry.” when he saw my schedule.) Only I got in the class period with the like 10 most sarcastic people in the entire grade and it seems like we were the only class to figure out that she wasn’t really mean- she was just one of the most deadpan sarcastic people I’ve ever met. We had a lot of fun because we realized she was really just sarcastic and would be sarcastic back. She asked us one day, a test day, after absolutely refusing to tell us how she was going to test us since we all read different books, “Do y’all wanna… draw a picture or do an interpretive dance for your test?” One kid immediately jumped up saying, “I wanna do an interpretive dance!!” and doing some kind of weird wiggle-dance. Her response was simply, “Too bad; you’re drawing a picture.” (And we really were.)

My senior English teacher was also pretty awesome. He completely scratched the normal AP Lit reading list and made a new one. It was full of awesome literature that I probably never would have read on my own and I loved most of it (especially The Tempest). He was also sarcastic and I’ll never forget how he would let us explore the literature as a class. I’ll also never ever forget his first poetry lesson. It was early in the year. He passed out copies of John Donne’s “The Flea” and read it to us. Then he goes, “what does this mean?” *Silence* “What is it about?” about half us are like ?????? while the other half are like uhhhhhhhh. He goes, “It’s ok, you can say it…” so one kid finally goes “….Sex?” “YES! Now how did you know that?” and the half that hadn’t been confused started pointing to certain lines, which he used to make us backtrack until he could give us a name of a device or explain about rhyme scheme or whatever. John Donne became my favorite poet because of his class. (We also read several of his holy sonnets later in the year and watched clips of Wit in class.) There was also the day he gave instructions for a timed write and then said, “OK? And while you do that, I’m gonna keep looking for a care bear costume that isn’t sexy.” We all laughed except one kid who goes, “How do you have a sexy care bear costume????” We all just looked at him until my teacher finally said, “…you know, it’s like lingerie with bear ears?” He also taught me the limited value of page minimums in writing. I didn’t quite make the page minimum once and got like and 85 on the paper or something. When we conferenced he walked me though all his comments about my organization and whatnot. I asked, “Ok, and just for my own reference, how many of these points were taken off for not meeting the page requirement?” He said, “Huh? Oh, none. None! You covered everything effectively and I don’t want to read the extra half-page of fluff.” Absolutely changed my perspective on writing papers and I aspire to make my teaching style much like his (when I’m teaching somewhere that can handle class discussions anyway…).

(Sorry, not sorry. You had to know that one was gonna be long! lol.)

91. What is your favorite word?

I think my favorite word is “persnickety”. It’s fun to say and applies to soooo many situations in the education world. I learned it from A Series of Unfortunate Events and have loved it ever since. :)