#student fragility

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Chris Hastings

Published: Jun 25, 2023

Is this a case of crazy wokery I see before me? Actors ridicule university trigger warnings over blood in Macbeth

Queen University Belfast has issued a warning to students studying Shakespeare

It stressed Macbeth 'could cause offence' due to its depictions of 'bloodshed'  

Similar warnings have been applied to the Twelfth Night and Titus Andronicus

It is Shakespeare's most violent play – a bloody saga packed with stabbing, strangling and poisoning that reaches a grisly climax with a beheading.

And for more than 400 years audiences have been enthralled – if a little disturbed – by the butchery of Macbeth.

But now one of the UK's top universities stands accused of 'infantilising' students after it warned them they might be 'offended' by the 'bloodshed' in the play.

Queen's University Belfast has issued the warning to undergraduates studying a module called Further Adventures in Shakespeare on its BA English course.

'You are advised that this play could cause offence as it references and / or deals with issues and depictions relating to bloodshed,' the warning, a copy of which has been obtained by this newspaper under Freedom of Information laws, states.

The university has also applied similar warnings to the Bard's Richard III, Twelfth Night and Titus Andronicus.

Some of Britain's biggest theatrical stars last night branded the warnings counterproductive and unnecessary. They point out that Macbeth, which was first performed in 1606, is particularly popular with schoolchildren.

Sir Ian McKellen, who starred opposite Dame Judi Dench in Sir Trevor Nunn's landmark 1976 RSC production, said warnings such as this could undermine the dramatic impact of the piece.

He said: 'My sister (a teacher) used to show Sir Trevor Nunn's TV version of the 1976 Macbeth to her teenage students.

'She'd pull down the blinds, start the video and then leave the classroom and count the minutes till she heard the first scream from within. Had the youngsters had trigger warnings in advance, the effect of the play would have been considerably diminished.'

He added: 'I remember talking to a priest who saw a number of performances of the stage production at the Stratford Other Place.

'He would hold out his crucifix throughout the performance, to protect the audience from the devilry conjured by the cast. I suppose these triggers are something similar.'

Call The Midwife star Jenny Agutter, who has acted in Shakespeare's The Tempest, King Lear and Love's Labour's Lost, said: 'I don't understand why anyone should feel warnings are necessary for Shakespeare's plays. Unless we need to be constantly warned that depicting human nature might cause offence.'

Sir Richard Eyre, the former Director of the National Theatre who has directed productions of Hamlet, Richard III and King Lear, said: 'It's completely fatuous and totalitarian to try to police people's minds with these absurd warnings. Ridiculous, contemptible, infantilising.

Presumably the people putting out the trigger warnings feel they are able to cope with the content of these plays, but weaker, younger, less intelligent people aren't.' Doctor Who star David Tennant and The Good Wife actress Cush Jumbo are due to star in a new production of Macbeth which opens in London in December. It is one of four major productions of the play set to open in the UK.

Queen's Belfast's trigger warning for Twelfth Night centres on what it calls the 'depictions relating to sexuality or gender. Warnings for Richard III and Titus Andronicus relate to depictions of disability in the former and 'race and or racism' in the latter. A spokesperson for Queen's University Belfast declined to comment.

==

'[A priest] would hold out his crucifix throughout the performance, to protect the audience from the devilry conjured by the cast. I suppose these triggers are something similar.'

Very apt. It's magical thinking. Especially considering they've not only been shown to not work, they've been shown to make things worse.

Also: Spoiler, much?

[fluffypotatey]

no, your honor, you don’t understand. i need this specific scene to breathe. your honor, listen, listen, please, they’re everything to me, please, you have to understand—

[fatuismooches]

heyyy basically

i’m feeling absolutely shit rn bc i’ve worked myself into an utter state (god i’m praying i don’t faint after my exam and nullify it) so like what better to do than to come up with a brainrot

just imagine, it’s fragile! reader and they’ve got an upcoming assessment, biggest of the semester but fuck they just can’t study. their headaches are debilitating and constant but they push through anyways because god they need to get that score. they can’t fall behind now. and dottores been watching you all day, he knows he can’t get in your way, you were practically unstoppable; it was one of the things that drew him to you in the first place. but rn? god rn seeing you like this planted a strange feeling in his cold excuse of a heart and he knew he couldn’t just leave you like this. without a word, he saunters over, and gently pries the quill from your hands, you protest but you haven’t the energy for much more really and so you let him. you let him guide you to the bed and you let him lay you down and slip in next to you. he wasn’t a man who thought much of ‘cuddles’ or whatever the hell you called it. yet he wraps his arms around you, gentle yet so firm you’d think a breeze could snatch you away. yet he cradles a hand behind your head and runs his fingers through your tresses, combing out knots, combing out stress. yet he presses you against him and lets the unspoken reassurances flow onto you through the way he pulls you under his sanctity. ‘don’t break yourself’ whispered his fingers as they traced meaningless alchemical symbols on your skin. ‘you’re perfect the way you are, you don’t need to do this’ reassured the proximity between the two of you. the only word that was vocalised between in the quiet sanctuary was your name. there it hung, palpable and present in the air. and nothing more was needed to be said

LOL SORRY THAT WAS SO LONG, can u tell i’m dying for comfort rn 😭

HOPE THAG MAKES IP FOR MY ABSENCE LMAOO

-🌕💗

🌕 ANON?? THAT FIRST SENTENCE IS VERY ALARMING PLEASE REST??? Studying and working are important but you and your wellbeing are more important 💖 Balance is key, please make sure to relax 😔 But the brain rot? *chef kiss*

If you had the energy to, you'd laugh at how poor your situation was. This... mysterious illness of yours just had to appear when finals were right around the corner. If it was just a cold or a slight fever, you could have worked through it, just as you had many times before, but this pain was unlike any you ever had endured. But anyway, surely you could get through this. It was only a few more days, and you absolutely had to do good. Especially since this professor was notorious for his long and complicated exams. Especially because you couldn't bear to think what would happen if you fell behind. What Zandik would think of you.

You could always tell when Zandik was looking at you because anyone really could feel the piercing stare he gave off. You two studied in the same room but in different spaces for maximum concentration and organization. You used to ask him questions and such but you've been far too quiet now for his liking after since you became sick. And while he does admire how perseverant you are to knowledge, he does not enjoy forcing you to go to sleep or watching you barely touch your food while studying. Even he has to acknowledge the limitations of humanity. No human can properly function like this.

The silence he used to crave becomes unsettling, and he shall tolerate it no more. You don't even notice him coming up behind you, thinking he's too focused on his own stuff, so when your pen is plucked from you rather easily you're surprised for a good few seconds. You're opening your mouth to protest but the words don't come out when you see the expression on your lover's face. Zandik gives you a look that you have only seen a few times but understands well - the one where he will have his way, he won't take no for an answer.

So when he pulls you from your desk and lays you on the bed, you can't help but mutter some grumbles as to how you were perfectly fine, and he did this kind of stuff before so why couldn't you do it, which he promptly shuts you up with a flick to the forehead and soft blankets. He doesn't verbalize it but it's because you are clearly tired and sick. You are sick with something he doesn't understand for once in his life and he cannot seem to find any kind of information or research or anything whether it was from hundreds of years ago to a few. And you are pushing yourself through it with no knowledge of the consequences, and no knowledge means no predictability. And then means there is uncertainty which he does not like when it comes to you. For once, he is unsure. Zandik does not enjoy that feeling.

When he initiates the act of cuddling you are surprised but do not question or tease him for once, as comfort was what you desired the most now. Your senses were all hazy from the onslaught of illness and studying and he was being so un-Zandik-like but you lived for moments like these. Your brain had trouble processing his movements but he was doing all the things you enjoyed, fuzziness and heat warming your body. You could make out the lines being drawn on your body, a habit he tended to do unconsciously. The rubbing of your skin in the sore places from studying nonstop. No words needed to be said. Zandik wasn't very adept with flowery words anyway, and you preferred it that way. This meant more than words could convey, and you fell asleep quickly in your beloved's arms.

Zandik looked at you, completely knocked out with not-so-subtle eyebags. Your painfully weak grasp on his shirt. You were far smarter than what a test said anyway. He himself knew that for sure. Maybe that final of yours will be postponed. Better yet, canceled. He'll see what he can do.

Whenever I'm in Sumeru I'm always reminded of how I'd NEVER EVER join the Akademiya because of how hellish it seems, so much work and years to graduate, too much thinking, way too many smart people there who would talk circles around me, uniform, studying, failing, no sleep, and then there are students like Layla barely surviving 😭 I have no talent but sign me up for theater 🙏

Anyway... I appreciate all short and long brain rots, they're so 🥰 I wish I could provide more comfort but... *hugs you* <33

[bisexualfbiagents]

THE X FILES | Rush (7.05)

[itspileofgoodthings]

one of my favorite, favorite things about teaching is the way that it’s just the perfect hiding place for love. and I do mean hiding place. I can love a student so much, never say it, never even really say anything personal, only talk about books and homework, but they feel it anyway.

[chaoswillcalmusdown]

my job interview today lasted like 50 minutes which apparently is long ?? so let's all hope that's a good sign bc i really got a good feeling from the principals

[astriiformes]

Talked about this with the counselor I've been seeing at school earlier today but my intense, desperate need to leave a mark on the world (not even in a fame way, in like a "I need to leave this place better than I found it in a big, tangible way" one) and the fact that I only value myself when I feel like I'm adding good to it paired with the fact that I've been an insane perfectionist since I was a very young child and tear myself to shreds and lose all my confidence over tiny mistakes is literally going to kill me some day

[widevibratobitch]

therapy sessions with your voice teacher just hit different

[blossompoet]

I love doing my silly little art projects and showing them to people and they be like "cool! are you crazy tho?"

makes me feel so seen

[administer-distractions]

.

[pepprs]

hi update things are fucking terrible and my eyes hurt from sobbing. lol

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Brooke Allen

Published: Mar 5, 2023

Many of us who care deeply about education in the humanities can only feel despair at the state of our institutions of “higher” learning. Enrollment in these subjects is plummeting, and students who take literature and history classes often come in with rudimentary ideas about the disciplines. Interviewed in a recent New Yorker article, Prof. James Shapiro of Columbia said teaching “Middlemarch” to today’s college students is like landing a 747 on a rural airstrip. Technology such as messaging apps, digital crib sheets and ChatGPT, which will write essays on demand, has created a culture of casual cheating.

Never have I been more grateful to teach where I do: at a men’s maximum-security prison. My students there, enrolled in a for-credit college program, provide a sharp contrast with contemporary undergraduates. These men are highly motivated and hard-working. They tend to read each assignment two or three times before coming to class and take notes as well. Some of them have been incarcerated for 20 or 30 years and have been reading books all that time. They would hold their own in any graduate seminar. That they have had rough experiences out in the real world means they are less liable to fall prey to facile ideologies. A large proportion of them are black and Latino, and while they may not like David Hume’s or Thomas Jefferson’s ideas on race, they want to read those authors anyway. They want, in short, to be a part of the centuries-long conversation that makes up our civilization. The classes are often the most interesting part of these men’s prison lives. In some cases, they are the only interesting part.

Best of all from my selfish point of view as an educator, these students have no access to cellphones or the internet. Cyber-cheating, even assuming they wanted to indulge in it, is impossible. But more important, they have retained their attention spans, while those of modern college students have been destroyed by their dependence on smartphones. My friends who teach at Harvard tell me administrators have advised them to change topics or activities several times in each class meeting because the students simply can’t focus for that long.

My students at the prison sit through a 2½-hour class without any loss of focus. They don’t yawn or take bathroom breaks. I have taught classes on the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, Romanticism, George Orwell, South Asian fiction. We’ve done seminars on Adam Smith and Alexis de Tocqueville. Together we have read Montaigne, Rousseau, Keats, Erasmus, Locke, Montesquieu, Wollstonecraft, Byron, Goethe, Petrarch, Rabelais, Saadat Hasan Manto, Rohinton Mistry. The students write essays in longhand; during the pandemic I taught a correspondence class via snail mail. Some of them do read “Middlemarch,” and their teacher finds the experience far more gratifying than trying to land a 747 on a rural airstrip. We encourage them to treat different societies in history as experiments in time travel, where they try to understand the mores of particular eras as though from the inside. They are very open to that approach, unlike university students, who tend see the past only as one long undifferentiated era of grievous unenlightenment: not just one damn thing after another, but one damn oppressive thing after another.

Like students at elite institutions, most of my incarcerated scholars are politically liberal. Unlike them, many are religious, and that proves surprisingly enriching in studying these authors, who would have been amazed to know they would one day be read by classrooms full of atheists. One of my more devout students, a Protestant who converted to Islam, was so distressed by Voltaire’s disrespect for established creeds that he had to be comforted by other class members. They informed him that he was exactly the sort of person Voltaire was aiming his polemic at, and therefore he could understand the force of it in a way his irreligious peers couldn’t.

My hours at the prison are rich in such moments. In many ways, it is the Platonic ideal of teaching, what teaching once was. No faculty meetings, no soul-deadening committee work, no bloated and overbearing administration. No electronics, no students whining about grades. Quite a few of our students are serving life sentences and will never be able to make use of their hard-won college credits. No student debt, no ideological intolerance, no religious tests—whoops, I mean mandatory “diversity” statements. And in our courteous, laughter-filled classroom there is none of the “toxic environment” that my friends in the academy complain about, and that I experienced during my own college teaching career.

If prison inmates, many of whom have committed violent crimes, can pay close attention for a couple of hours, put aside their political and personal differences, support one another’s academic efforts, write eloquent essays without the aid of technology and get through a school year without cheating, is it too much to ask university students to do the same? Or ask professors to try to create an atmosphere where these habits can prevail? Perhaps prison education can serve as a model of how to return to true learning and intellectual exchange.

[ Via: https://archive.ph/5YRih ]

==

The state of things.

[salsflore]

ummmm

[fatuismooches]

fragile reader who was pals with faruzan, I know this doesn’t line up with the lore’s time (faruzan for like 100 years with reader beings like 400 year coma if we’re with Dottore) but i just think it’d be nice for them to be visiting the Akedemiya with Dottore and seeing her again

also I hc reader as having to use crutches because of how long they’ve been in a coma and not moving, or a wheelchair (even if Dottore can whip something up much better)

YES I APPROVE OF THIS, WE CAN IGNORE THE LORE FOR A BIT. DIVERGE INTO SOME ALTERNATE AU. Though I imagine she still has no clue you're with Dottore or the kind of things you've done, because otherwise... well obviously she wouldn't be friends with you anymore 😃 I imagine she taught you a lot of little tricks regarding machinery and puzzles in ruins, which you put to good use when exploring with Zandik 😌 You two would definitely go on about how much the world's changed too! Speaking of, I've been thinking for a while of potential friends fragile reader could have in general, of course always hiding their identity in public. Them interacting with the Sumeru cast brings lots of brainrot to my mind. Dehya telling you all about the latest trends, Kaveh ranting to you about his struggles, some of which you relate to. Just hope you don't run into a man with a large hat... you may not remember him, but he sure does remember you... 😛

YES THAT IS A GREAT HC!!! Your whole body was probably like jelly and you could barely control it yourself after being asleep for centuries. Relearning so many things was super difficult, walking especially as you had to have a support system for a long time before you managed to walk by yourself. Even then you were wobbly and had to cling to someone or the walls to keep yourself steady. It's a lot.

[unnamedelement]

If you’re in academia, do you ever have those days when you just [want to burn it down] / [want to be invisible] / [want to—once again—burn it down]?

Because my god, sometimes it just all feels so inane.

[nerdie-faerie]

Been trying to move my stuff out of my friend's flat since Monday and have had no such luck. We were hoping to finally get it sorted today but that doesn't seem possible so now we gotta try wait until Saturday unless we want to carry on moving everything box by box on the buses