#session 32

[threewaysdivided]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Dan Jones and Dragons Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Content Warnings: Emotional/spiritual abuse. Implied child abuse. References to canonical child-murder

Summary: Faced with a choice, Morenthal leaves.

It was raining lightly by the time they made the town proper.

The main street emptied as they passed through, residents hurrying for the cover of their doors while vendors closed shops and stalls early in anticipation of the coming storm.  Despite the thinning crowd, a lifetime of habit sent his eyes sweeping each rooftop and alley, automatically appraising each passerby as he followed quietly in the footsteps of the older man.

He knew the town by sight, if not by name.  (He suspected he had been told it once, but in their business some things were safer forgotten).  A cross-point, located at one of the forks in the main road passing southeast of Riverleaf.  Not so far from the Shard Coast as to be unreachable, but far enough that travelling there from any of their fixed rendezvous points required several days of deliberate detour.   Home to an even mix of Humans and Elves, a Gnome here and there, the occasional caravan passing through to the druid city.  Simple folk living simple lives.  Ordinary.  Unremarkable.

(The perfect place to hide something no-one expected to look for.)

Keep reading

[reconcavo]

And you say you know what love is But I swear you never seen it in your life

[babybluesquid]

"The First War never ended..."

[swaggatsby4]

Wrote this song for my friend from her perspective on relationships hope y’all enjoy

[hiphopvibe1]

Summer Walker - “Session 32 (Live From London’s 2022 Wireless Festival)

Continue reading Summer Walker – “Session 32 (Live From London’s 2022 Wireless Festival)

[raestoned]

Still

[artem1sc0re]

I find it kind of interesting that out of all the things Nicole could beat Aiden at, it was chess; Which requires a lot of thinking, analysis and foresight into the opponent’s strategy. (There’s a deleted scene on YouTube where Nicole reveals that the one thing she was better than Aiden at was at chess. timestamp 4:33)

Do you think Nicole knew more about Aiden than Aiden himself thought she did? Because I mean the game itself is strictly in Aiden’s perspective, meaning that we’re seeing things from Aiden’s viewpoint. Jordi isn’t intimidating but is comedic, although from the perspective of Marcus, he is intimidating asf, Damien is underestimated until the very end.

Nicole is smart as hell and I absolutely love her for that. How she knew Aiden enough to know that he was on a revenge spree and immediately told him to stop going after them otherwise she will cut him off with no hesitation? How she immediately got defence practices for her and Jackson after cutting off Aiden, how they were able to find an alternative way to healing that isn’t murder or revenge?

RAGHGHGHGHGH i wish there was more Jackson and Nicole content in bloodline, ESPECIALLY from Jackson’s perspective, because THERE’S BARELY ANYTHINGGG. I don’t want it from aidens perspective since we know how much of a nut job he is at times, I WANT IT FROM THEIR PERSPECTIVE. (Just imagine me slamming my fist on a table through each syllable, that’s how I feel rn)

[simplydm]

Hellish creature

[finnycore]

i sat downn to draw blacked out for an hour and then woke up and found this in front of me

[worthless-weight-in-gold]

you know ive had a dnd session where only 1 thing i had planned actually happened as imagined but nothing was off the rails. like a completely reasonable session but everything they did made me scramble and improv, and now i have a ton of worldbuilding to do before next session

[velvetstreets]

I want to see : reboot ur happiness :)

reboot ur happiness :) !!:

[absentia-misere]

Six hours is an all-nighter now?

Like, I'm really not trying to be a pompous ass, but..

Requested by @driver270

[prettyboysdontlookatexplosions]

i appreciated this study: "They Can't Read Very Well: A Study of the Reading Comprehension Skills Of English Majors At Two Midwestern Universities"

[ETA: if you are somehow finding your way here pls note some - not exhaustive!!!! - follow up notes in this reblog. sorry again i mixed up megalodons and megalosaurs]

essentially, a pair of professors set out to test their intuitive sense that students at the college level were struggling with complex text. they recruited 85 students, a mix of english majors and english education majors - so, theoretically, people focusing on literature, and people preparing to teach adolescents how to read literature - and had them read-while-summarizing the first seven paragraphs of dickens's bleak house (or as much as they made it through in the 20 minute session). they provided dictionaries and also said students could use their phones to look up whatever they wanted, including any unfamiliar words or references. they found that the majority of the students - 58%, or 49 out of the 85 students - functionally could not understand dickens at all, and only 5% - a mere 4 out of the 85 students - proved themselves proficient readers (leaving the remaining 38%, or 32 students, as what the study authors deemed "competent" students, most of whom could understand about half the literal meaning - pretty low bar for competence - although a few of whom, they note, did much better than the rest in this group if not quite well enough to be considered proficient).

what i really appreciated about this study was its qualitative descriptions of the challenges and reading behaviors of what the authors call "problematic readers" (that bottom 58%), which resonated strongly with my own experiences of students who struggle with reading. here's their blunt big picture overview of these 49 students:

The majority of these subjects could understand very little of Bleak House and did not have effective reading tactics. All had so much trouble comprehending concrete detail in consecutive clauses and phrases that they could not link the meaning of one sentence to the next. Although it was clear that these subjects did try to use various tactics while they read the passage, they were not able to use those tactics successfully. For example, 43 percent of the problematic readers tried to look up words they did not understand, but only five percent were able to look up the meaning of a word and place it back correctly into a sentence. The subjects frequently looked up a word they did not know, realized that they did not understand the sentence the word had come from, and skipped translating the sentence altogether.

the idea that they had so much trouble with every small piece of a text that they could not connect ideas on a sentence by sentence basis is very familiar to me from teaching and tutoring, as was the habit of thought seen in the example of the student who gloms on to the word "whiskers" in a sea of confusion and guesses incorrectly that a cat is present - struggling readers, in my experience, seem to use familiar nouns as stepping stones in a flood of overwhelm, hopping as best they can from one seemingly familiar image to the next. so was this observation, building off the example of a student who misses the fact that dickens is being figurative when he imagines a megalodon stalking the streets of london:

She first guesses that the dinosaur is just “bones” and then is stuck stating that the bones are “waddling, um, all up the hill” because she can see that Dickens has the dinosaur moving. Because she cannot logically tie the ideas together, she just leaves her interpretation as is and goes on to the next sentence. Like this subject, most of the problematic readers were not concerned if their literal translations of Bleak House were not coherent, so obvious logical errors never seemed to affect them. In fact, none of the readers in this category ever questioned their own interpretations of figures of speech, no matter how irrational the results. Worse, their inability to understand figurative language was constant, even though most of the subjects had spent at least two years in literature classes that discussed figures of speech. Some could correctly identify a figure of speech, and even explain its use in a sentence, but correct responses were inconsistent and haphazard. None of the problematic readers showed any evidence that they could read recursively or fix previous errors in comprehension. They would stick to their reading tactics even if they were unhappy with the results.

i have seen this repeatedly, too - actually i was particularly taken with how similar this is to the behavior of struggling readers at much younger ages - and would summarize the hypothesis i have forged over time as: struggling readers do not expect what they read to make sense. my hypothesis for why this is the case is that their reading deficits were not attended to or remediated adequately early enough, and so, in their formative years - the early to mid elementary grades - they spent a lot of time "reading" things that did not make sense to them - in fact they spent much more time doing this than they ever did reading things that did make sense to them - and so they did not internalize a meaningful subjective sense of what it feels like to actually read things.

like, i've said this before, but the year i taught third grade i had multiple students who told me they loved reading and then when i asked them about a book they were reading revealed that they had absolutely no idea what was going on - on a really basic literal level like "didn't know who said which lines of dialogue" and "couldn't identify which things or characters given pronouns referred to" - and were as best as i could tell sort of constructing their own story along the way using these little bits of things they thought they understood. that's what "reading" was, in their heads. and they were, in the curriculum/model that we used at the private school where i taught, receiving basically no support to clarify that that was not what reading was, nor any instruction that would actually help them with what they needed to do to improve (understand sentences) - and i realized over the course of that year that the master's program that had certified me in teaching elementary school had provided me with very little understanding of how to help these kids (with perhaps the sole exception of the class i took on communications disorders, not because these kids had communications disorders but because that was the only class where we ever talked, even briefly, about things like sentence structures that students may need instruction in and practice with to comprehend independently). when it comes to the literal, basic understanding of a text, the model of reading pedagogy i was taught has about 6 million little "tools" that all boil down to telling kids who functionally can't read to try harder to read. this is not productive, in my experience and opinion, for kids whose maximum effort persistently yields confusion. but things are so dysfunctional all the way up and down the ladder that you can be a senior in college majoring in english without anyone but a pair of professors with a strong work ethic noticing that you can't actually read.

couple other notes:

obviously it's a small study but i'm not sure i see a reason to believe these are particularly outlierish results (ACT scores - an imperfect metric but not a meritless one IMO for reading specifically, where the task mostly really is to read a set of texts written for the educated layperson and answer factual questions about them - were a little bit above the national average)

the study was published last year, but the research was conducted january to april 2015. so there's no pandemic influence, no AI issue - these are millennials who now would span roughly ages 28-32 (i guess it's possible one of the four first-year students was one of the very first members of gen z lol). if you're in your late 20s or early 30s, we are talking about people your age, and whatever the culprit is here, it was happening when you were in school.

i think some people might want to blame this on NCLB but i find this unconvincing for a variety of reasons. first of all, NCLB did not pass because everyone in 2001 agreed that education was super hunky-dory; in fact, the sold a story podcast outlines how an explicit goal of NCLB was to train teachers in systematic phonics instruction, because that was not the norm when NCLB was passed, and an unfortunate outcome was that phonics became politicized in ed world. second, anyone who understands anything about reading should need about ten minutes max to spend some time on standardized test prep and recognize that if your goal is truly to maximize scores... then the vast majority of your instructional time should be spent on improving actual reading skills because you actually can't meaningfully game these tests by "practicing main idea questions" (timothy shanahan addresses this briefly near the top of this post). so i find it very difficult to believe that any school that pivoted to multiple choice drill time in an attempt to boost reading scores was teaching reading effectively pre-NCLB, because no set of competent literacy professionals would think that would work even for the goal of raising test scores. third, NCLB mandated yearly testing in grades 3-8 but only one test year in high school; kansas set its reading and math test year in high school as tenth grade. so theoretically these kids all had two years of sweet sweet freedom from NCLB in which their teachers could have done whatever the fuck they wanted to teach these kids to actually read. the fact that they didn't suggests perhaps there were other problems afoot. fourth, and maybe most saliently for this particular study, the sample text was the first seven paragraphs of a novel - in other words, the exact kind of short incomplete text that NCLB allegedly demanded excessive time spent on. i'm not really sure what universe it makes sense in that students who can't read the first seven paragraphs of a novel would have become much better reader if everything else had been the same but they had been making completely wack associations based on nonsense guesses for all 300 pages instead. (if you read the study it's really clear that for problematic readers, things go off the rails immediately, in a way that a good program targeted at teaching mastery of text of 500 words or less would have done something about.)

all but 3 of the students reported A's and B's in their english classes and, again, 69% of them are juniors and seniors, so like... i mean idk kudos to these professors for being like "hold up can these kids actually read?" but clearly something is wack at the college level too [in 2015] if you can make your way through nearly an entire english major without being able to read the first seven paragraphs of a dickens novel. (once again i really do encourage you to look at the qualitative samples in the study, lest you think i am being uncharitable by summarizing understandable misunderstandings or areas of confusion that may resolve themselves with further exposure to the text as "can't read.") not to mention the fact that most students could not what they had learned in previous or current english classes and when asked to name british and american authors and/or works of the nineteenth century, roughly half the sample at each college could name at most one.

the authors of the study are struck by the fact that students who cannot parse the first 3 sentences of bleak house feel very confident about their ability to read the entire novel, and discover that this seeming disconnect is resolved by the fact that these students seem to conceptualize "reading" as "skimming and then reading sparknotes." i think it's really tempting to Kids These Days this phenomenon (although again these are people who in some cases have now been in the workforce for a decade) and categorize it as laziness or a lack of effort, but i think that there is, as i described above, a real and sincere confusion over what "reading" is in which this makes a certain logical sense because it's not like they have some store of actual reading experiences to compare it to. i also think it's pretty obvious looking at just how wildly severed from actual textual comprehension their readings are that these are not - or at least not entirely - students who could just work harder and master the entirety of bleak house all on their own. like i don't think you get from "charles dickens is describing a bunch of dinosaur bones actually walking the streets of london" to comfortably reading nineteenth century literature by just trying harder. i really just don't (and i say that acknowledging i personally have had students who like... were good readers if i was forcing them to work at it constantly... but i have also had students, including ones getting ready to enter college, who were clearly giving me everything they had and what they had was at the present moment insufficient). i think that speaks to a missing skillset that they don't know are missing, because they don't have any other experience of "reading" to compare it to.

just wanna highlight again that although they don't give the breakdown some of these students are not just english majors but english education majors a.k.a. the high school english teachers of tomorrow. some of them may be teaching high school english right now, in case anyone wishes to consider whether "maybe some high school english teachers can't read the first seven paragraphs of bleak house?" should be kept in mind when we discuss present-day educational ills.

[zemnarihah]

this whole semester my profs have been like "augh woe is me it is such TORTURE that we can only let 16 students into the bfa course but alas we MUST make sure that theres room for everyone to take the classes they need...." MEANWHILE im accepted into the bfa and i can't even register until tomorrow and all the classes I need are already full! what was the point!

[emotigonecreative]

Kalor session 32-

In which the party takes a short rest in the temple, believing themselves safe, only to find themselves in combat once more as the Nightwalker rips the portal open once more in an attempt to take Aventius. The party manage to defeat it but not before Victor is trapped on the wrong side of the portal as it closes once more.

Unable to find a way to open the portal the remaining party leaves the temple to confer with the golden suns, and are caught off guard when Aknadin teleports in with a Toran army demanding the party return what they stole, publicly accusing Soldara and that any other action they take will be considered an act of war. The party refuses and the Golden Suns surge to meet his army. Vanth aims for the kill, rage at Aknadin's betrayal guiding her arrows and nearly killing him in one hit. Aknadin, wounded, holds up a purple stone and the party watches in horror as the Golden Sun's eyes begin to glow purple, the army turning in waves to face the Party instead. They flee the desert and make their way to Soldara.

Meanwhile Victor, stuck in the Shadow plane, is attacked and wounded- poison from the shadow creatures rendering his right arm useless. He decides to make the best of the situation and investigates the city, finding the missing Luminarch dead. He locks himself in a closed chamber to avoid threats as his health wanes, and when he desperately pleas to the Lady of Sword and Shadows to help him, a strange shadowy figure appears instead introducing himself as the Smiling Lord and telling Victor he will help- on the condition Victor free him.