#good teachers are the most important

[impossibleyousay]

Like Rosin, Part 4

To talk about Division IV that fall, I have to back up.

I started taking at the school when I was four years old,. I grew up in the dressing room, the hallway, and the three studios.

When I was eight, I started taking jazz, mostly because Ms. Elena told me that it would be good for my dancing. I don’t remember if this was something she said to everyone or if she thought it would be particularly good for me, but at that point it seemed silly to not dance as much as I could.

I am always identifiable as ballet-trained. The younger girls at Turning Pointe the summer before college—and by younger I mean eleven to thirteen or so, the only ones I could keep up with when we turned—called me a ballet dancer, and I corrected them to ballet-trained. It feels silly in retrospect, but I didn’t identify with ballet at that point. I was taking it again, even pointe, and I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t where I felt most like myself.

That’s even more true now. I can’t shake my ballet sensibilities, the early way it shaped what feels correct to me. But jazz and modern take me gendered as I am, and they build me up instead of pressing me in. They always have. I was a ballet dancer first, but jazz taught me everything: my hips, my core, my turns, my leaps, my joy. And very, very belatedly, my gender.

Modern taught me Leah. Later on, it taught me to breathe.

Nazrin moved back to the city from Nashville in the summer that I was eleven. When she arrived, she had a broken foot, and none of us had any idea who she was. But she was a good teacher; that was what mattered. We all liked Nazrin, that one technique class per week, and when she showed us barre combinations, she did all the releves on one foot.

I was a snob, then, and didn’t take summer jazz. I wish I had, a little, because it was in jazz and modern that I came to love Nazrin.

Promotions between divisions at semester were unsurprising but always few. The next spring, there were five of us who were new to Division IV: Sydney, Addison, Marie, Katrina, and me. Sydney had been in Division III for two and a half years and had been working really hard to move up. Addison had improved so much over the past year. Marie had recently come over from gymnastics and had just needed a semester to figure out ballet and pointe. I honestly don’t remember what I thought about Katrina. But me? I was excited, but I didn’t understand.

Kristi was a better dancer, and Bella. So why me? I didn’t look like a ballet dancer, I wasn’t that good, and I hated pointe with a passion.

But I moved up, and that meant I was in Division IV for Recital. For Division III, Ms. Elena choreographed a very pretty, classical piece in white. I’m sure I would have enjoyed it; I like Ms. Elena’s choreography.

But.

For Division IV, Nazrin choreographed a more lyrical piece to “Out of My League” by Stephen Speaks, and I’ve never loved a ballet Recital dance so much. Our class section had to be en pointe because our dance wasn’t, and Division IV is a pointe division, but it was okay. It meant we got “Out of My League.”

Nazrin divided the seven of us into two groups. One group, made up of Marie, Katrina, Sydney, and Addison, she called ‘the leapers’ because they did a lot of sauts de chat in the dance. The other group – Danielle, Mia, and me – she called ‘the turners,’ because we did pique turns en dedans and en dehors.

It’s been fifteen years. I don’t have all of that dance, but when I listed to “Out of My League,” I get snatches.

That year, Nazrin not only choreographed my favorite ballet Recital piece ever; she choreographed my favorite jazz Recital piece ever, too: “Gone Daddy Gone.” There were four of us in jazz that year: Kaylee, Meg, a younger girl named Rae, and me. I was a head taller than the others and had done jazz for two years longer than Meg, who had a year more experience than Kaylee or Rae. It was a playful, joyful class, I loved them dearly, and one part of “Gone Daddy Gone” looked like a mother duck with ducklings. It was a perfect dance, making all of us, despite diverse abilities and heights, look good and have fun.

Nazrin was incredible at bringing out the best in us.

Once, I told Leah that I was late to her first fall class with Nazrin, and she thought that maybe she remembered. But it turns out I was off by a year. I was late to my first class with Nazrin the fall before. When I came in a couple of minutes late, while I was putting on my shoes, Nazrin asked me my name. I was a little hurt, I remember, because I’d had her that summer. It wasn’t a fair feeling – think of how many names she’d had to learn, and it had been more than a month since summer session ended! – but I wanted her to remember me.

I had no idea.

[luck-of-the-drawings]

[<==PREV PAGES] [NEXT PAGE==>(not out yet.wait a year.or maybe more.imagine.]

saw alot of comments on prev pages; saying 'i HATE that mean teacher! im gonna FIGHT HIM!!' & i LOVE the energy!! it WOULD be nice. to have that catharsis. but the story of young tidestrider is Not one of catharsis. it is a story of being so small and so special and sucking so bad.

[leatherface-headspace]

lassie can hear the high pitched frequency that lights and electronics make

[lord-squiggletits]

Between TF and my other fandoms like BG3 and TES, I keep finding myself making OCs that have some element of "battle hardened hero who is actually good and righteous, but so traumatized by the toll of war that even after the war ends they feel empty/wrecked and can't enjoy the fruits of victory" and I'm not sure if it's bc I gravitate to a certain type of media where such OCs fit in best, or bc I have a specific character archetype I like and gravitate towards media that contains those things.

[bibleofficial]

obsessed w gen alpha

[avatar-aaang]

oh okay so she can send out an email about staff birthdays but not the fucking schedule. got it. Priorities.

[lenskij]

cello purchase update: so I've almost decided on which cello I'm going to buy when a luthier I've forgotten I've even emailed suddenly replies with "yeah I've got a ⅞ cello for [within my budget] you're welcome to come to try it!" and since his shop is nearby I thought, might as well try it, what if I like it? and OH GOD it's a beautiful instrument like I got so flustered I couldn't even think straight.

[bumbleblurr]

I gotta hold myself accountable to when I'm making content that's not really based on canon at all, so I remain self aware & whatnot, but I still occasionally think things like "but blurr should be arcee's number one fan 🥺.... bc i said so........"

[dogin8]

something about how personal importance is a unique unpredictable subjective experience that has no indicating or deciding factors

You could have a thousand page epic, with incredible mastery of language, discussing themes I have struggled with personally, that took somebody YEARS to write, and it could mean nothing to me

but a tumblr post, with 10 words and 5 notes might make me pause or bring me to tears

You could have a perfect piece of art, immense technical skill, a true masterpiece of dedication and undersanding of the medium, in a famous gallery, the product of a lifetime of honed craft, and I could look over it for just a moment before moving on, feeling nothing

but a friend's sketch, with jagged lines and little imperfections, might find a place for itself in my phone case for years

[little-flame-prince]

POV: This is your third school in as many years. At least you aren't homeless anymore. You haven't slept most of the night because you woke up to find a strange and terrible god staring at you, and besides, you had homework to do. You cover the dark circles around your eyes with cosmetic dark circles - cheap burgundy eyeshadow and thick black eyeliner. You got beat up in the locker room at least once a week, but it's whatever. People also keep touching your hair because it's "so long" or something, and you're starting to be an asshole to them about it. You think you might have some Severe Mental Health Issues, and also you're pretty sure you're a man, but those are things to wait until college to worry about. You subsist entirely on carrot sticks, celery, grapefruit juice, Russian Caravan, and hot sauce. You got into several Ivy-Leagues but you can't afford to go so you've already resigned yourself to community college. You once fell through the kitchen floor and sprained your ankle and had to walk several miles to the doctor on it. You only take cold showers and boil water over the stove to wash dishes because your house hasn't had heat in years. More popular girls in your history class are surprised and impressed to discover you're more sexually experienced than they are, and the boys like that you've got the proportions of Jessica Rabbit. You're either a teachers pet or the teachers cannot stand you, there is no in between. You have a tenuous grip on reality and are starting to suspect you're a changeling, or something else inhuman. You pull out a battered second-hand iPod and listen to these songs on the long walk home from Chess Club. AKA "Songs Arin Was Really Weird About In High School"

[lunimy]

on one hand i shouldn’t feel bad for cutting off my friends who started defending a misogynistic classmate on the other i know they’re guys and they simply will not understand why the shit he says has a lot of context that makes his statements misogynistic on the third hand i should not be the one explaining that to them

[perereiii]

[name] I swear to god

[reasonsforhope]

Kamala Harris just announced that her vice president will be Minnesota governor Tim Walz. Based on the coverage so far I'm really reassured by this decision.

The Washington Post did an obviously great job of making a prepared article for each option, considering how long an article they had up 7 minutes after the announcement.

((Okay technically it's not an official announcement yet it's "according to three people familiar with the pick, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a decision that is not yet public." But listen. I am 99% sure this is a weather balloon. (Meaning: a deliberate leak to gauge reaction.) Because the sheer weakness or incompetence on the part of the Harris campaign that it would take for three people to all confirm that within a few hours hours of each other and the planned announcement it is massive.))

-via The Washington Post, August 6, 2024

Honestly this decision, from everything I've read and can tell, looks like it's brilliant politics.

Important Context: The vice president(ial candidates)'s job in an election is not to be similar to the president. The vice president's job on the ballot is very, very much specifically to be different from the president. Why? So they can cover each others' weaknesses. Especially regionally.

(Sidenote: I feel a bit ridiculous saying this. But genuinely if you want to get a stronger understanding of how US elections really work. Go watch seasons 6 and 7 of The West Wing. Genuinely, a lot of politicians have said - especially back in its day - that that was the most accurate depiction of an election they'd ever seen. Also specifically features an entire arc about a contested Democratic primary convention, so also very good if you're interested in understanding weird nominating convention shenanigans.)

From the article:

"Harris’s choice for a running mate was among the most closely watched decisions of her fledgling campaign, as she sought to bolster the ticket’s prospects for victory in November and rapidly find someone who could be a governing partner. In picking Walz, she has selected a seasoned politician with executive governing experience and signaled the importance of Midwestern battleground states such as Wisconsin and Michigan.

Walz’s foray into politics came later in life: He spent more than two decades as a public school teacher and football coach, and as a member of the Army National Guard, before running for Congress in his 40s. In 2006, he defeated a Republican to win Minnesota’s 1st Congressional District--a rural, conservative area--and won reelection five times before leaving Congress to run for governor.

Walz was first elected governor in 2018 and handily won reelection in 2022. Though little-known outside his state, Walz emerged publicly as one of the earliest names mentioned as a possible running mate for Harris, and in the ensuing days he made the rounds on television as an outspoken surrogate for the vice president...

“These are weird people on the other side. They want to take books away, they want to be in your exam room. … They are bad on foreign policy, they are bad on the environment, they certainly have no health care plan, and they keep talking about the middle-class,” Walz told MSNBC in July. “As I said, a robber baron real estate guy and a venture capitalist trying to tell us they understand who we are? They don’t know who we are.”

Walz also has faced criticism from Republicans that his policies as governor were too liberal, including legalizing recreational marijuana for adults, protecting abortion rights, expanding LGBTQ protections, implementing tuition-free college for low-income Minnesotans and providing free breakfast and lunch for schoolchildren in the state.

But many of those initiatives are broadly popular. Walz also signed an executive order removing the college-degree requirement for 75 percent of Minnesota’s state jobs, a move that garnered bipartisan support and that several other states have also adopted.

“What a monster. Kids are eating and having full bellies, so they can go learn, and women are making their own health-care decisions,” Walz said sarcastically in a July 28 interview with CNN when questioned whether such policies would be fodder for conservative attacks, later adding: “If that’s where they want to label me, I’m more than happy to take the [liberal] label.”

Walz also spoke at a kickoff event in St. Paul for a Democratic canvassing effort, casting Trump as a “bully.”

“Don’t lift these guys up like they’re some kind of heroes. Everybody in this room knows--I know it as a teacher--a bully has no self-confidence. A bully has no strength. They have nothing,” Walz said at the event, sporting a camouflage hunting hat and T-shirt.

Walz has explained that he felt some Democrats’ practice of calling Trump an existential threat to democracy was giving him too much credit, which prompted his decision to denounce the GOP nominee instead as being “weird.”

“I do believe all those things are a real possibility, but it gives him way too much power," Walz said on CNN’s “State of the Union” regarding the Democrats’ rhetoric. “Listen to the guy. He’s talking about Hannibal Lecter, shocking sharks, and just whatever crazy thing pops into his mind.”

If Walz is elected vice president, under state law, Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan (D) would assume the governorship for the rest of his term. Minnesota Senate president Bobby Joe Champion, a Democrat, would become lieutenant governor."

-via The Washington Post, August 6, 2024

--

This guy. Sounds like. fucking Moderate swing-state/rural/Midwestern/southern/"heartland"/working class white voter catnip. He sounds like he's also a very smart politician and strong campaigner. And he's apparently genuinely a good guy with a good record, too.

He sounds like he's going to do a really good job of appealing to voters in several of the big deal swing states without being from any of them specifically. Which means it doesn't feel like pandering to one of the states involved (and thereby spurning the others), which is also great.

(Also he was the one who started "weird" @ conservatives and I think we should take that seriously as a very good political instinct/move. Judging in large part by how it has so clearly hit an actual nerve with conservatives like so little else. Also hugely relevant: that post going around about how part of why conservatives are so upset about "weird" is because in the Midwest, "weird" specifically also implies anti-social or harmful behavior.)

Officially feeling more optimistic about Trump not winning in November

[eightw]

the problem with like half of the discourse surrounding both education and literature on here is that 90% of you can't fathom that there's a reason to write essays in english class beyond telling the teacher something they already know about a book

[valeriehalla]

actual writing advice

1. Use the passive voice.

What? What are you talking about, “don’t use the passive voice”? Are you feeling okay? Who told you that? Come on, let’s you and me go to their house and beat them with golf clubs. It’s just grammar. English is full of grammar: you should go ahead and use all of it whenever you want, on account of English is the language you’re writing in.

2. Use adverbs.

Now hang on. What are you even saying to me? Don’t use adverbs? My guy, that is an entire part of speech. That’s, like—that’s gotta be at least 20% of the dictionary. I don’t know who told you not to use adverbs, but you should definitely throw them into the Columbia river.

3. There’s no such thing as “filler”.

Buddy, “filler” is what we called the episodes of Dragon Ball Z where Goku wasn’t blasting Frieza because the anime was in production before Akira Toriyama had written the part where Goku blasts Frieza. Outside of this extremely specific context, “filler” does not exist. Just because a scene wouldn’t make it into the Wikipedia synopsis of your story’s plot doesn’t mean it isn’t important to your story. This is why “plot” and “story” are different words!

4. okay, now that I’ve snared you in my trap—and I know you don’t want to hear this—but orthography actually does kind of matter

First of all, a lot of what you think of as “grammar” is actually orthography. Should I put a comma here? How do I spell this word in this context? These are questions of orthography (which is a fancy Greek word meaning “correct-writing”). In fact, most of the “grammar questions” you’ll see posted online pertain to orthography; this number probably doubles in spaces for writers specifically.

If you’re a native speaker of English, your grammar is probably flawless and unremarkable for the purposes of writing prose. Instead, orthography refers to the set rules governing spelling, punctuation, and whitespace. There are a few things you should know about orthography:

English has no single orthography. You already know spelling and punctuation differ from country to country, but did you know it can even differ from publisher to publisher? Some newspapers will set parenthetical statements apart with em dashes—like this, with no spaces—while others will use slightly shorter dashes – like this, with spaces – to name just one example.

Orthography is boring, and nobody cares about it or knows what it is. For most readers, orthography is “invisible”. Readers pay attention to the words on a page, not the paper itself; in much the same way, readers pay attention to the meaning of a text and not the orthography, which exists only to convey that meaning.

That doesn’t mean it’s not important. Actually, that means it’s of the utmost importance. Because orthography can only be invisible if it meets the reader’s expectations.

You need to learn how to format dialogue into paragraphs. You need to learn when to end a quote with a comma versus a period. You need to learn how to use apostrophes, colons and semicolons. You need to learn these things not so you can win meaningless brownie points from your English teacher for having “Good Grammar”, but so that your prose looks like other prose the reader has consumed.

If you printed a novel on purple paper, you’d have the reader wondering: why purple? Then they’d be focusing on the paper and not the words on it. And you probably don’t want that! So it goes with orthography: whenever you deviate from standard practices, you force the reader to work out in their head whether that deviation was intentional or a mistake. Too much of that can destroy the flow of reading and prevent the reader from getting immersed.

You may chafe at this idea. You may think these “rules” are confusing and arbitrary. You’re correct to think that. They’re made the fuck up! What matters is that they were made the fuck up collaboratively, by thousands of writers over hundreds of years. Whether you like it or not, you are part of that collaboration: you’re not the first person to write prose, and you can’t expect yours to be the first prose your readers have ever read.

That doesn’t mean “never break the rules”, mind you. Once you’ve gotten comfortable with English orthography, then you are free to break it as you please. Knowing what’s expected gives you the power to do unexpected things on purpose. And that’s the really cool shit.

5. You’re allowed to say the boobs were big if the story is about how big the boobs were

Nobody is saying this. Only I am brave enough to say it.

Well, bye!

[tashid4]

Bakugo would definitely wear the "I <3 my girlfriend" shirt.

He's the kind of boyfriend that hates everyone but you, you're his special little baby. He hates physical touch but he would hug you, hold you, kiss you, every change he gets.

He's really protective but not possessive. He doesn't tell you what you should wear or not. Fristly because he trust you, but also because he knows how to fight...

He would cook for you. The whole class probably have begged him to cook for them. And he probably said no everytime. But he would prepare breakfast for you, and give you a piece of every meal he cooks.

He buys you flowers. And no only basic roses. No the man has taste. He would buy the most beautiful flowers because anything's good enough for his baby.

His hero training and school are really important for him. He's always focus on what the teacher's saying but that doesn't prevent him from holding your hand under the desk.

It's no secret that Bakugo has anger issues. But he would never dare getting mad at you. Not once he has yelled at you.

He's the perfect boyfriend. I don't make the rules. <3