#id be so on board to read this textbook and learn this shit if i didnt have to take those GODDAMN MOTHERFUCKING NASTY-ASS NOTES. FUCK.

[wabblebees]

assigning me homework is cruel and unusual, actually

[life-gave-me-oranges]

important

All cbse india students

remember ranga's marriage chapter???????????

yes. its shit. so i wrote this email and sent it to like 6 ids i found.

I WANT YOU ALL TO SEND IT TOO. ASK YOUR FRIENDS ASK EVERYONE.

pleaseeeeeeeeee guys lets spam the ncert mail. i dunno if they read them or not. but at least we can try.

below is the email

Greetings

To whom this now concerns, I write this email to bring to your attention, an extremely problematic chapter in then English Coursebook for 11th standard recommended by CBSE.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I firmly believe that child marriage in India is illegal according to the prohibition of child marriage act of 2006. Should you further require information about this act, I would recommend you to visit this page and learn about the topic. Coming back to the purpose of this email, I must object upon the chapter 3, Ranga's Marriage by Masti Venkatesha Iyengar in Snapshot (supplementary reader in English) for class 11th. The chapter narrates a tale of an 11-year-old girl ending up marrying an adult. Now, if I must boldly state this, I will, that we consider an 11-year-old girl to be, all over the world, a minor. A minor is someone below the age of 18, and someone who should not get married. Also, a minor is not ready, physically or mentally, to bear children or support a family. I will not attach any sources for my previous statements, but should you require any, please ask me in your answer. I would me more than grateful to provide you with multiple sources. Along with child marriage, the chapter poses some other issues as well and I would consider it rather absurd. Having read hundreds of classical short stories, I will go as far as to say, that this chapter is not up to the mark. It also contains the action of mentally manipulating someone, namely Ranga, into committing a morally evil crime. Having read it twice now, I have not once have come upon something that explains that this story is set when crimes like child marriage and other older traditions were considered holy and important. The chapter clearly promotes pedophilia, sexism, patriarchal beliefs and provocativeness, none of which are fit for the modern world. I am not afraid to say that this chapters pollutes the mind of anyone who reads it, and along with that, it poisons the book, Snapshot, which could have been a collection of decent and enjoyable stories. Looking online for answers to various question given in the chapter, I found multiple answers stating 'In the end, Ranga agrees to marry Ratna (the minor) and started a family with her. Thus, the chapter had a happy ending.' To my limited knowledge, I do not see in any way how marrying an 11-year-old leads to a happy ending. Upon further research, I discovered this story has been in NCERT curriculum for over 10 years now. If this story has caused a reader to learn bad morals because of this story, I would have no one left to blame other than you. I also found articles regarding the absurdity of this chapter and a petition to remove it from the curriculum. Thus, I can firmly say that I am not the only one to be disturbed by this chapter in my textbook. I look forward to a solution from you regarding how we can avoid such mistakes in the future. Awaiting you reply, Thousands of students of CBSE Board who have had the misfortune to read this chapter.

[freebooter4ever]

programmer rant under cut

“For someone like Angela, learning all of this in 24 hours is next to impossible”

FUCKING. BULL. SHIT. And the fact that they gave this line to a WOMAN? Saying it to DARLENE (I LOVE darlene precisely because her profile doesn’t fit the typical coder. like ME when i was in that phase of life)? I’m gonna fight someone. I swear 90% of the time I love this show and then they do shit like this and it reminds me why I would have crying breakdowns on the regular in school. Because when you’re slamming up against a glass wall of people laughing at your attempts, it can feel ‘impossible’.  Like, ok the Sam Seppial alias is born in 1988 and Elliot claims to have started programming with web design and view source, so before flash became a big thing, so probably late 90′s, so middle school age, so his timeline for learning how to code and being introduced to this world matches mine almost exactly. And it was better than in the 80′s when literally my school had more ‘dave’s than women, but still I ran up against a lot of sexist bullshit. The only women who were immune to comments were the ones who blended in well with male geek culture, dressed that way, talked that way, just tried to completely erase the fact that they were different. Trenton is very different, her hijab sometimes has sparkles in it (I love the sparkles!), she likes feminine things like Darlene’s scarf! She has cares beyond the narrow minded programmer world, what with her speech about what fsociety means to her. No way did she never have some man look at her, sneer, and say ‘YOU are a programmer?’. I spent seven years in CSE, and I was STILL getting male assholes coming up to me and expecting me to be a ‘booth babe’ at conventions rather than a legit programmer (and they would grill me with questions and I’d have to smile and take it cause if you don’t they get even more mad). 

And to have Trenton rag on another woman who is trying to learn how to code???????? Fuck off with that crap. Especially when Angela is smart, resourceful, and worked at a cyber security company for a number of years even if it was on the public relations end, so she isn’t some computer illiterate grandma. Just watching the mobli dude try to show her how to do something was painful. already when she gets it wrong he’s like ‘ok lets do it again’ with a heavy sigh like its angela’s fault. like angela needs to know how exhausting it is being forced to teach someone like HER. when hey, maybe instead of repeating what isn’t working over and over, try to come up with a way of explaining that she gets? 

I’ve told this story before: where during the very first official computer science class I ever took I sat there while the professor put up preliminary courses and ‘cumulative final grades’ on the white board based on department. The CS department had an “A” average, the math dept had a “B”, the engineering dept a “C”, some bio class had a “D”, and then the lone art class had an “F” average. And he presented this like it was a joke. It was the first time the art department had ever offered a preliminary programming course. He had the whole class laughing at the idea that these dumb artists were going to try to be like us smart computer scientists in this class. And then he asked everyone to raise their hands and took count of the number of computer science kids in the class, the number who came from the math class...and so on. I think he wanted to prove that no one from the bio or art classes moved on to the next level. Because they didn’t have what it takes to be a Real Computer Scientist. And when he finally got to ‘art’ I remember raising my hand, in the very front row of the class, and smiling straight at him, dead serious no laughing. Everyone around me was laughing though, except for the professor. I think he honestly didn’t expect someone like me to be there. It was the most humiliating moment of my college career. Even just remembering it has me shaking like a leaf.

Later I went to the professor’s office hours, sat down one on one with him, informed him that while the art class average was an “F” I did in fact get a 100% “A”, and sweetly asked him what I needed to do to make sure I caught up to the class fast. He gave me a textbook (he was one of the good ones, if you tried, he really did care), and I read it cover to cover, and got a nearly 100% A in his class. Which given that this particular professor was known as a hard ass and well loved by the entire SCS for it, that A was BIG. then I met Sanjeev through my math concepts buddy. Sanjeev was one of the ‘math’ kids who also wanted to double in math and CS and who also got laughed out of the SCS dean’s office when he asked how to do this (his solution was to figure out what courses he needed, take them without permission, and then go to the SCS dean on his senior year and be like ‘give me my degree, i took all the classes’). Sanjeev and I then took every single one of that professor’s classes we could because he was the most difficult, most well respected professor in the entire university and if we made it there we could make it anywhere, got A’s on nearly all of my programming labs (the malloc lab being an exception which I am still bitter over and sanjeev thought was hilarious because its the only lab on which he got a better score than me despite me being a complete NERD for memory allocation). And STILL I had to repeatedly fight like hell to get spots in the SCS classes I needed to graduate. But by the end I was one of that professor’s favorite students, and sanjeev probably would have been too if he didn’t fall asleep in class so often. I like to think that me refusing to back down when the ‘real’ computer science kids tried so hard to belittle me and people like me, made it easier for that professor to be accepting of nontraditional students who came after me.

THIS is why my research project at my university was so important. We were trying to demystify learning to code, to make programming more accessible. To cut down that gap between who gets told that they’d be ‘good’ at programming and who gets told that it’s beyond their intellectual acumen. Trying to make programming literacy universal. It’s why we fought so hard to get more computer science classes in public schools, why we translated our IDE into so many different languages. All because one day in the 90′s my director was working at a public school in new york, and realized kids were struggling with a particular math concept, and that she had this program at her fingertips that could represent math visually, and that some of the kids learned a lot better when they had a visual goal to complete, like making a virtual ball bounce, rather than a long list of equations to solve. and then she took that idea to the king of VR during that time, and they started our project, which he would later go on to claim as his legacy because he too saw the importance of fighting for making computer science welcoming to ALL, not just the Elliots of the world. It’s kinda a different way of looking at revolution. fsociety wanted to take the power away from the white business men who held it, by using power thats been consolidated to people who had the time/resources/proper encouragement to learn coding and in a way / with a language that is as much about gatekeeping as the original source of power. but in recent years we’ve seen that these tech ‘geniuses’ can be equally as evil once they come into that power (doesn’t tyrell kinda make that point?). Education can broaden this knowledge and take away the reach of that power. thats why our current administration is so damn afraid of it and gives control over it to people like that dvos lady. 

If you tell a kid ‘you can do this’ they just might. If you tell a kid ‘this will be impossible for you’ they most likely will not. I would think the people in fsociety, ESPECIALLY Trenton, would understand that. 

[burningalight]

my binders/locker in grade school were stuffed with so much shit i couldnt find anything...always crumpled up papers, trash etc

chewed pencils/pens, broke them taking them apart in class, lost them, often didn’t have one, frequently borrowing them and forgetting to give them back to the point that certain people wouldn’t give me pencils

could comprehend reading i liked very well, but when we’d have reading groups with boring books id always be lost,  or when the teachers would have one on ones and have u read something short and ask questions after to assess ur reading level, they’d often have to tell me to read it again bc they knew how much i remembered didnt add up to my intelligence and reading speed 

moms college friend gave me an unoffical iq test and i did much worse than i know i shouldve on the reading portion bc she’d play a story and then ask me after to list every detail i could remember and i couldn’t remember anything. but when she played 10 numbers and asked me to say them out loud backwards i scored extremely high ?

couldnt do projects, would be in tears, last minute every time, parents mad bc i need a poster board RIGHT NOW ITS DUE TOMORROW . hated assigned reading, horrible at essays even when they helped us plan them. 

i remember my 7th grade social studies teacher assigning a paper, i wrote extremely detailed and well in the first paragraph or 2, and the following ones got shorter and shorter and were completely bullshit bc i got bored. she told me ‘really strong first paragraph.’ and gave me a B  

talk too got damn fast. customers constantly telling me to slow down bc they cant understand me

my mom always says she had to challenge me as a kid bc i would get bored and get in trouble. i was acting out bc i was understimulated, i happened to like learning (esp numbers and puzzles) bc smart so that’s what i could fixate on and felt stimulated by

lunch detention frequently in 8th grade in my first highschool class, algebra, bc i wouldnt do my homework, at one point he just stopped giving lunch detention for that bc i wouldnt do it. i hated that class bc the math was boring and i never paid attention but would somehow pull off a’s and b’s on tests so i ended up with a B. my first B, and i had brought that up from a D (told my mom it was almost a C, he gave a really hard test and we all did bad etc, when she had to sign a paper about my low grade) at the end of the year, during the exam i was so confused the whole time, it was my first highschool exam and i didn’t know ANYTHING. i ended up with a 92 from guessing, and a curve, and every one of my friends got at least a 93 or better and i felt so stupid bc i was supposed to be the best at math

i would take every highschool class in honors but not one english class bc it required more essays and summer reading and i knew i wouldnt do the reading and would cry over the essays

the only other class i didnt take honors was chemistry bc i knew the honors teacher had a lot of projects and i would be stressing over them. i ended up with an A in the standard chem class even tho i never finished any work in class and didnt do homework, but i was still the smartest in the class and did the best overall

lunch detention for forgetting to get papers signed like report cards. they weren’t even bad grades i just couldnt remember. one time i got actual detention for forging my moms signature bc i got lunch detention for several days straight bc i kept forgetting to get the paper signed 

often had permission slips waiting to be signed the day before the field trip, or told my mom it was picture day the day before or morning of. one time i totally forgot it was picture day and didnt dress up

acting out and not thinking ab the consequences, many referrals.. many more times that my teachers let me get away with acting out when someone else doing the same thing would’ve been punished. one time anna and i left in the middle of class to go with emma to the library, only emma had permission, and my teacher had anna and i do wall sits instead of going to the office. in gym in middle school i would never dress out. i hated the clothes and hated gym bc i was awkward and if we didnt dress out we had to copy pages out of the health textbook the entire time and i would barely write 2 paragraphs bc i was so bored and my hand hurt and he never did anything ab it. i wouldnt dress out at least twice per week if not more. told my mom I had a C bc he had it out for me but i was the problem

in elementary school if we didn’t come to gym day wearing the right shoes we had to go into the back and pick out a pair of sneakers that fit out of a box of shoes, and also borrow socks if necessary. i had to do this frequently bc i never remembered to wear the right shoes

i would extremely often forget my library books and have to sit on the couch waiting for everyone to pick out their books for half an hour

when we were even younger we’d have story time and you had to sit in the middle of the floor inside a big circle of chairs where everyone else was if you forgot your library books. i lost one at one point for months and my parents didnt just pay for it so i had to sit in the middle every time. we found the book on a shelf somewhere in the house 

my chorus teacher never liked me bc i talked too much and i always felt like the worst singer, not bc of my singing but bc she wasn’t ever nice to me

in 7th grade science we learned latin root words and every day we’d play a game where we all stood up and one by one he’d ask for a root and we’d give it. if you got it wrong on the first round you’d have to write it on a piece of paper x amount of times and turn it in. if you were the last person left you were allowed to sit on your desk for the rest of the year, during these games while everyone else had to stand up. i wanted so badly to sit on my desk, esp bc i was fidgety and couldnt stand still, but i would never study them bc i’d forget or not want to if i did remember, even tho i really wanted to know them and sit on my desk. that teacher had a huge soft spot for me and one day i just started sitting on my desk during those. everyone knew i was smart, and it was all the smart kids who got to sit on their desks, so no one questioned it. im not sure if he knew i wasnt supposed to and just let me, or didnt realize i hadnt won bc i was smart. 

hyperlexia? mom said i could practically read before i was taught. i’ve always obsessively air written, ie writing words out w my finger in the air, on my leg etc. 

esp during lectures i doodle excessively to the point that my papers margins have always been covered with random scribbly overlapped words, or song lyrics. the words are usually something someone in the class said. ive started keeping an extra sheet of paper just for scribbling when im taking notes or listening in class. when we finished end of year tests in school i would write down full lyrics to songs on my scrap paper so i wouldnt be so bored. my hand cramps up so much but it was better than staring or trying to sleep with the lights on 

doing things and forgetting to turn them in

hyperfixating on books to cope w boredom and social anxiety, at one point read one per day, i was definitely one of the most frequent people in the library 

‘ The way I see it is if I can get information into my mind, I can do a lot with it but getting it in there in the first place is the really difficult part.’ - not mine

none of my teachers ever told my mom any of this i dont think, bc i was the smartest and i always got good grades, most had a soft spot for me BUT COULDNT SEE I HAD ADHD like damn. one time my fourth grade teacher whom i liked a lot was mad at us and indirectly calling people out, and referred to the fact that some of us never stopped talking , then made direct eye contact with me and i felt rly embarrassed bc i didnt realize i did that until she mentioned it

i often had to move seats if i was near friends bc i wouldnt stop instigating talking

at big lots when i had to run the register i was so painfully bored , fidgety, had to sneak my phone soo much bc i was so bored. when i was on the floor i would put away the go backs very quickly and then take upon myself a project like going through the entire wall of individual drinks and pulling out all the expired ones, it was like 5 carts full. my manager put me in charge of organizing the entire makeup section and all the gross clearance makeup bc she knew id do it the best and fastest 

when bosses have me do inventory i can count the products super fast and efficiently, but then when they have me put them into a spreadsheet i stare at it for hours getting nothing done bc distracted and its boring. ammar told me if i’d just get off my phone i could get it done bc he’d been asking for it for weeks, i wasnt trying to ignore it 

when im trying to do something at work that needs more concentration, i want to cry with frustration whenever i hear the door chime and have to get up and help customers and break my focus