#teacher tools

[rugrats-curious-minds]

Nurturing Young Minds: The Importance of Yoga and Mindfulness Practice for Children

In today's fast-paced world, children are facing increasing amounts of stress and pressure. As parents, it's essential to equip them with tools to navigate these challenges and promote their overall well-being. One such invaluable tool is the practice of yoga and mindfulness. In this article, we will explore why introducing yoga and mindfulness to children is so important and how it can positively impact their physical, mental, and emotional development.

Physical Well-being

Yoga is renowned for its physical benefits, and these advantages extend to children as well. It promotes flexibility, balance, and coordination. As children grow, their bodies are constantly changing, and yoga can help them adapt to these changes more gracefully. The gentle stretching and strengthening exercises in yoga can contribute to better posture, reduced risk of injury, and improved overall physical health.

Stress Reduction

Children, like adults, experience stress in various forms. Academic pressures, social challenges, and extracurricular activities can take a toll on their emotional well-being. Mindfulness practices, often incorporated into yoga, can help children manage stress more effectively. Techniques such as deep breathing, meditation, and body awareness can empower them to stay calm and centered in the face of stressors.

Emotional Regulation

Yoga and mindfulness provide children with tools to understand and manage their emotions. Through these practices, children learn to identify their feelings, acknowledge them without judgment, and respond in a healthy way. This emotional regulation is crucial for their personal development, as it enables them to navigate relationships and handle difficult situations with greater ease.

Improved Focus and Concentration

In our digital age, children are constantly bombarded with distractions. Yoga and mindfulness can enhance their ability to focus and concentrate. Mindfulness exercises, in particular, encourage children to be present in the moment, which can improve their attention span both in the classroom and in their daily activities.

Enhanced Self-esteem and Confidence

Yoga and mindfulness provide a safe space for children to explore their capabilities and build self-esteem. As they progress in their practice, they gain a sense of accomplishment and self-confidence. This newfound self-assuredness can positively influence their interactions with peers and boost their overall self-esteem.

Better Sleep

Many children struggle with sleep-related issues, which can impact their mood, behavior, and performance at school. Yoga and mindfulness practices can help children relax and unwind, making it easier for them to fall asleep and stay asleep throughout the night. The calming effects of these practices can significantly improve the quality of their sleep.

Social and Communication Skills

Yoga classes often involve group activities and partner poses, fostering a sense of community and cooperation among children. These interactions help improve their social and communication skills. Children learn to listen, cooperate, and communicate effectively with their peers, building essential life skills in the process.

Resilience and Coping Skills

Life is full of challenges, and learning how to bounce back from setbacks is a valuable skill for children. Yoga and mindfulness teach children resilience by emphasizing the importance of self-care and self-compassion. They learn that it's okay to make mistakes and that they can always start again.

In a world filled with constant stimuli and pressures, introducing children to yoga and mindfulness practices is a gift that keeps on giving. These practices offer a holistic approach to nurturing their physical, mental, and emotional well-being. By incorporating yoga and mindfulness into their daily lives, parents and caregivers empower children with tools to navigate life's challenges, build resilience, and foster a lifelong commitment to self-care and self-awareness. Ultimately, these practices lay the foundation for happier, healthier, and more balanced individuals, ready to face the world with confidence and grace.

[beneathsilverstars]

the shit siffrin said in act 5 isn't even that bad 😭 they were mean one time!! very precisely mean but like. their friends aren't that fragile. i woulda forgiven them even if they weren't going through timeloop hell. sometimes you're feeling shitty and don't know how to handle it so you fuck up and what matters is that you recognize that and do your best to take steps to prevent it from happening again!

[leafyloveslaughing]

[megatraven]

ALEX X MC X HYDRA ICON BE UPON YE!!!!!

[nonstandardrepertoire]

as a Jewish transsexual, the Jewish ethno-nationalist¹ sales pitch has always left me cold.² over and over again, i've heard people plugging the State of Israel offer some form of the following: "history teaches that we can never fully trust non-Jews with political power to protect Jews; the only way to make sure Jewish people are always safe is to create and maintain a state where Jewish people have the political power, so we can look out for ourselves"

but the thing is, the worst transphobic harassment i've experienced in my life has come from Jews. i don't think this says anything about the relative transphobia of Jews vs non-Jews, anymore than the fact that most of my birthday presents come from New Yorkers says anything about the relative generosity of Californians, but still. the people who followed me out of the subway filming me while yelling transphobic abuse were Jewish. two of the most relentless boosters of the current wave of transphobia in the US — Ben Shapiro and Chaya Raichik — are Jewish. i should be safe in a state run by such people?

and the obvious response is to say that, well, this is about keeping me safe as a Jew, not necessarily as an anything else. it's a bulwark against anti-Jewish violence, not every other -ism under the sun.³ but the thing is, i'm not a potato-head person. you can't just snap off the trans part of me and the Jewish part of me and say the latter part is safe even when the first isn't. i'm 100% Jewish and 100% trans; if i'm not safe as a transsexual, i'm not safe as a Jew. and if i'm going to be having to fight transphobia anyway, what difference does it make if the people passing bills stripping my rights are Jews or not?⁴

if you really lean into the logic at play here — "no one outside a vulnerable demographic can be trusted to care about people in that demographic" — it's easy to wind up in absurdity. because if i can't trust goyim to have my back as a Jew and also can't trust cis people to have my back as a transsexual, perhaps i need a state run by and for Jewish transsexuals. but wait! white Jewish transsexuals are certainly regularly horrible to, eg, Black Jewish transsexuals, so we probably shouldn't be in the same state together, to say nothing of separating out the poor, the disabled, those without college degrees . . . and before you know it, you're committed to the idea that the only just world is one where we're each a state unto ourselves, perfectly safe in absolute isolation from one another — no society, no coming together across difference to lighten the burden of living, just infinite atomization, the perfect unending unwinnable war of all against all

and this, i think, reveals the fundamental futility of the project. as a transsexual, i don't think my safety will ultimately come from removing myself from people not like me. safety, i think, comes not from cutting ties, but from building them. i will only really be safe in a society that accepts difference, multiplicity, strangeness, variety. i will only be truly safe in a society where we come together — across the gulfs that separate us — to take care of one another

i think there are illuminating parallels with feminist/lesbian separatism here. in its most extreme versions, such separatism abandons the demand that women be safe around men and instead attempts the task of building a space without men for women to inhabit. similarly, it seems to me that Jewish ethno-nationalism abandons the demand that Jewish people be safe around goyim and instead attempts to build a space without goyim for Jewish people to inhabit.⁵ i think Jews can and must be safe among goyim. i think women can and must be safe among men. i think trans people can and must be safe among cis people. that is the kind of world i am committed to fighting for, not one where we give in to fear and retreat into gardens walled by suspicion and hostility⁶

i'm not going to pretend that that's an easy world to build.⁷ i'm not going to pretend i can point to a bunch of stable, just, pluralistic societies and go "eh, just do what they did!" (altho there's no shortage of societies i can point to that went the "this place is for us and only us" route and wound up producing dystopian nightmares⁸). i'm not even going to pretend that i think building a just world from where we are now is inevitable, or even that i always think it is possible. there are days it is very hard to believe. but i always think it's worth striving for. if a just world that guarantees a good life to all isn't worth striving for, what is? if we are to suffer defeat, let it be a slow defeat, a long defeat, a fighting defeat. i am not willing to give up on my neighbors. i am not willing to abandon the charge of seeking the good for those not like me. i am not willing to abandon the hope that will seek the good for me despite my strangeness to them. and i reject any philosophy or politics that asks me to do so

_________________________________________________

¹i'm using "Jewish ethno-nationalist" here because i think it's been subject to less semantic dilution than "Zionist", and i want to avoid semantic arguments here as much as possible. whatever prescriptivist arguments you want to marshal that this or that term should mean X, i think it's clear that the descriptivist ship has long since set sail when it comes to "Zionism". (when pushed for specifics, i've seen self-professed Zionists and anti-Zionists outline essentially identical political programs, which certainly makes it seem to me that these terms are of minimal utility at best)

²obviously, what's happening on the ground is very bad. but critiquing what's happening on the ground often runs into severe questions of evidential reliability and can also leave the impression that Jewish ethno-nationalism is a good idea implemented badly, which is why i want to take aim at this level here

³given the European origins of this movement in its modern incarnation, i think it's unsurprising who gets imagined as "just a Jew" and not any other marked category. and from there, i think it's also unsurprising (if depressing) how various Jews who do exist in other marked categories have been and are treated by the "Jewish State" — the promised safety turns out to be predicated on all the usual axes of whiteness, wealth, ability, and so on

⁴indeed, i have often found that groups predicated on the idea that "we're all in alignment here" are often much more resistant to acknowledging members' various bigotries than groups not predicated on that assumption

⁵and, similarly, this attempt to cleave the world along one axis of hierarchy invariably reveals the inadequacy of one-identity-only frameworks for tackling the full complexity of the world. among other things, feminist/lesbian separatism has come under sustained critique from Black feminists like Barbara Smith for sundering ties of solidarity that are critical for fighting racism. victimhood and oppression are not fixed, ontological states, but fluid, shifting, contextual relationships. we cannot undo the snarlingly intertwined systems of oppression by replicating them in miniature

⁶the fear is certainly a real emotion; it is one i have felt at times myself. sometimes it is even based on an accurate perception of the world! but also: sometimes not. my fear of kitchen knives spontaneously levitating and flying around the room certainly feels real to me, but it's not a thing that can actually happen. one of the really hard things to do in the world, i've found, is parsing out the fears that are just feelings i'm having from the fears that tell me actual actionable information about the world and then striking a livable balance between reasonable precaution and paranoia. precautions against danger often come with their own set of risks: locking a door to keep out potential thieves ups the odds of being trapped in a building fire; using a different complex password for every site raises the risk of forgetting one and having a critical account shut down; the medications that drastically cut the frequency of debilitating migraines can raise the likelihood of other adverse health effects. more broadly, viewing neighbors with suspicion, fear, and distrust has a corrosive effect on the social fabric, and makes it harder to structure society to make sure everyone has food, clothes, housing, healthcare — all the things a society is supposed to do. (it's hard to convince people to take care of people they're afraid of, especially if they believe (rightly or wrongly) that they will have to give up something they care about (usually money, but also convenience, prestige, power) for that to happen.) and that corrosive effect can get very extreme — when fascism wants to recruit you to its cause, the sales pitch is usually less "hey, do you want to unleash horrific violence against those folks over there?" and more "hey, aren't you tired of being ~afraid~? don't you want to feel ~safe~? isn't it about time you had all the wealth, respect, and power that's rightfully yours and that's been kept from you for so long?". fear isn't the only way that horrors get unleashed, but it's a very potent one. (i don't think there's a formula for striking the right balance here. as with so many balancing acts, too much comes down to context and the specifics of all those involved, not least because the scale and nature of threats can vary so wildly. i believe that everyone deserves to be safe (insofar as any of us mostly hairless apes clinging to a thin crust of dirt on an iron ball whirling thru the cosmic void around a sphere of nuclear fire can be safe from loss, grief, accident, disaster, or misfortune...), but being and feeling are different matters, and pursuing the feeling of safety without limit can easily lead to logics of annihilation.) (and indeed, i am not the first to be struck by the fact that in many ways it is in the interests of the State of Israel, as a state, if Jews feel unsafe in the rest of the world, because that feeling of unsafety is so easily leveraged to both increase political support for the State of Israel and encourage Jewish people to leave the Diaspora and move to the State of Israel. which, unnervingly, is where you sometimes find the State of Israel and its agents taking the position that Jews don't belong anywhere that isn't the immediate environs of Jerusalem, a position that is ultimately indistinguishable from any number of dime-store Judeophobias)

⁷indeed, i think this is one of many places where it's easier to identify the problem than it is to solve it. many middle schoolers can explain the problem of Fermat's Last Theorem; barely a handful of professional mathematicians in the world could explain the proof. my cat can figure out how to break a vase even tho he can't reliably find a toy he's just been playing with when he's sitting directly on top of it (it's fine, he doesn't follow me on here, i can say that about him); in some cases, a skilled artisan can repair the vase so it functions again; no one in the world can turn back time so that the vase was never broken to begin with. it's easy to invent chessboard solutions to entrenched societal conflicts — move this border here, enact this constitution there, change this societal attitude for all involved, and hey presto!, utopia. but the world is not a game of chess. education, advocacy, activism, political organization, even wildcat direct action — these are all slow, effortful, uncertain processes, and everyone with a different vision of the future is also exercising their agency to change the course of events. i think societies are easy to break and hard to repair. in many cases, i don't really know how we go from here, the real world as it actually is with all its shattered bones and aching wounds and long-festering resentments, to there, a world of true justice. but i think it's worth trying. i think it's worth imagining. i hope you do too

⁸like, idk what even to say if "Germany for the Germans" doesn't set off alarm bells. even if they raised up a brand new continent from the ocean floor, i still think i'd be wary of the political project of building a ~Jewish state for the Jews~. i don't trust nationalism of any flavor. i think the Diasporic notion of feeling kinship with and responsibility for people all around the world regardless of borders, flags, kings, bureaucracies is beautiful and worth cherishing and protecting. i don't dream of finally being on top of the hierarchy; i dream of there not being a hierarchy to begin with

[bombusbombus]

Clark deserves to have lots of little hearts around his head. Bruce deserves little clawses.

[asteria-argo]

🌹🌷🌼🌸🌺🥀🪻🌾🌻💐🌼🌸🌹🌷🌺🪷💐🌾🪻🌻

I'm suffering and distracting myself with writing, enjoy a snippet on the beautiful and the damned of it all!

“What book?” Skye asks, brow furrowed in curiosity. Jamie sighs, shaking his head out like it might get rid of the fuzzy edges of anger that have settled between his ears. “It was this thing he did when he first came to coach us all yeah?” He explains, tired all of a sudden. He hadn’t felt much of anything, the first time he read the book, to focused on just fucking finishing it to think much about why Ted had actually given it too him. It wasn’t until his third time reading it that it clicked, and Jamie had gotten this sudden rush of shame-anger-horror that still settled heavy in his throat every time he picked the book up again. “Gave everyone books that reminded him of them, or that he wanted us to learn a lesson from or something. He gave me The Beautiful and The Damned, guess I was supposed to be a stand in for Anthony fucking Patch.” “Excuse me?” Skye asked, blinking at Jamie in shock with a deceptively light voice considering the wave of absolute outrage that had overtaken her face. She looked downright murderous, in a way Jamie had only witnessed once before, when McKay had tried to pull one of her students up for being dressed inappropriately because their school dress was ‘too short’ and ‘distracting the boys’. “you're telling me that he’s the one who gave you that stupid fucking book?”

[waitineedaname]

reading the novel, i love how blatantly indulgent of the juniors lan wangji is. when he was their age, he was duelling wei wuxian over broken rules and lived his life by behaving as precisely as what was expected of him, and now as an adult, he's basically letting the juniors do whatever they want as long as it isn't unsafe and generally letting the kids act like kids

which leaves wei wuxian to have to be the one playing bad cop. wei "has never followed anyone else's rules in his life" "bane of lan qiren's existence" "public enemy number one" wuxian has to be the one being like "oh my god don't burn money on someone else's doorstep, don't you know that's rude. you kids need to focus on your studies more, why isn't anyone teaching you anything useful, do i have to do everything myself around here"

[guideaus]

literally not a single thing worked itself out in this series

[green4allseasons]

I love the fanon (canon?) belief that Jason Todd is an Austen girly just as much as the next person... but I also think he’d just as equally love 1800s lit that was considered more controversial for its time. 

Like this man would ramble on and on about the literary genius of Austen’s more satirical approach to the mailability of class/status in Pride & Prejudice and then within the same breath start discussing how it contrasts with Emily Brontë’s accurate, if more insidious, view of how upward social change was harder won for marginalized communities as depicted in Wuthering Heights... 

And meanwhile, Tim and Stephanie, who’d been caught for 15 minutes into said rant mid-stakeout just wondered why the man didn’t become an English teacher already?

[heartshapedtrap]

oh brother gojo’s corpse is being weaponized as a tool… group suicide in ten minutes

[hazelkjt]

"A warrior's weapon is her life. A basic life lesson my father never missed an opportunity to dig into my mind. And I'll forever be thankful to him for it."

[mossywizard]

Hey you heard the good news? *present book of rotting knights and cursed gods*

[empty-blog-for-lurking]

You know what annoys me most about the entire Yagi and Inko bashing? Canonically EVERY adult has failed Izuku, every single one of them, (even Aizawa, especially Aizawa). However it's only Yagi and Inko who realized their own mistakes and tried to make amends and yet it's them who get most hated meanwhile Aizawa did fuck all for Izuku and yet the fandom treats him like a sagely perfect teacher because muhmuhm he expels kids to give them fear of death

[knbposting]

thinking of making a reader + kagami but instead of being insane and weird, it's just insane, and i, the reader, am one of his teachers when he was so so so sad in america when he first moved and i'm trying to give him opportunities to make friends in class and helping him with his english as best as i can given that i don't speak any japanese. but i get on google translate and i TRY because i'm a teacher and this is what i do

[poorlittleyaoyao]

I hate defending wwx, he has a lot of fans! But, in the iron extra wwx and jl were talking about the jin sect and wwx was asking how things were going. jl said that he wanted to help people (just how jgy did!) even if the elders didn't respect him enough. And wwx said something like :why don't you ask jc? And jl was like :"he is not a jin". The antis interpret it as him cutting his relationship with jc, but no, jl is trying to protect jc! jc had already dirtied his reputation going around with Zidian at hand to ensure jl's position, jl doesn't want to put a huge x behind his uncle back! And wwx hit jl saying "your uncle would be even sadder if you cut him off". You shouldn't hit kid! But, wwx there is showing growth! He is saying to us and jl that cutting jc off helping him, is going to hurt jc! jl needs to lean on his uncle for help! It's wwx saying that he has thought about the past and maybe he is a little sorry about how he didn't let jc help him!

Again, hitting kids is WRONG. But, mdzs isn't about people doing right things or at least, doing things in the best way.

Also yes jl shows still fear when lwj's name is made. When jl was making a fuss after being hit (because that is embarrassing, and not even his uncle has hit him before!), wwx says : do you want me to call lz? And jl stops. He fears lwj as a kid who was silenced in the past lol. Also, even ljy shows fear of lz sometime, when he says something he shouldn't say and he fears punishment. Maybe we shouldn't take it too seriously, idk what was mxtx editorial intentions. Still, I hope people don't take mdzs as a book about healthy parenting!

(Since it has been MANY hours since this Ask was sent, the extra in question is the one described in the post here.)

Ohhh, that is much much better in that context! It does show growth for WWX, and I like the full circle of going from "lmao why are you calling your uncle for help?" at their first meeting to "why AREN'T you calling your uncle for help?" at this point. (Also, going "well OBVIOUSLY you should do [thing I should also do but Will Not Do Under Any Circumstances], any reasonable person would!" is just. peak Yunmeng Shuangjie behavior.) It's also another instance of Jin Ling, age 13, fiercely deciding that it's his job to protect his uncle, just as he does when he tries to keep Wangxian from barging in to JGY's quarters early in the novel.

Still side-eyeing him threatening JL with LWJ yet again, though. In the other situation (situations plural?) earlier in the story, WWX wants/needs JL to immediately cease whatever behavior he's doing, so an abrupt threat to summon LWJ is, while not ideal, at least going to accomplish his goal. Here, JL isn't actually doing anything wrong. He's not breaking any rules. If anything, he's doing exactly what is socially expected of him, and is acting in a way that is politically sound (even though WWX is right that JC would want to know and help). "Stop pursuing your altruistic political goals that involve nobody but your clan in a way I don't like or else my scary boyfriend from a whole other sect will punish you!" is. Wild. Especially since JL as a whole entire sect leader is the highest-ranking person present!