#we also spoke about religion (based opinions) and shes honestly just so good in general

[bromantically]

i went to the rheumatologist today and got prescribed PT and Stay On Otezla and i told my dr abt the kind clinic, where i get my trans care, and i told her about all the really awesome stuff they do and how affordable they are and she got so excited about that kind of resource that she started tearing up and wrote it down to share with her other trans patients

[mothergamerwriter]

Wicked Saints (Something Dark and Holy #1) by Emily A. Duncan | Blog Tour Review & Excerpt

      Hello bookland! Welcome to Mother/Gamer/Writer for the Wicked Saints Blog Tour. For today’s tour stop, please enjoy my review of this magically delicious and bloody tale, an excerpt from the novel, and an awesome pronunciation guide!

      I received this book for free from the mentioned source in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book nor the content of my review.

Wicked Saints by Emily A. Duncan Series: Something Dark and Holy #1 Published by: Wednesday Books on April 2nd 2019 Genres: Fantasy, Magic, YA, Romance Pages: 400 Format: ARC Source: ARC From Publisher, Blog Tour View on: Goodreads Grab it: Amazon Review Score:

About the Book:

When Nadya prays to the gods, they listen, and magic flows through her veins. For nearly a century the Kalyazi have been locked in a deadly holy war with Tranavian heretics, and her power is the only thing that is a match for the enemy’s blood magic. But when the Travanian High Prince, and his army invade the monastery she is hiding in, instead of saving her people, Nadya is forced to flee the only home she’s ever known, leaving it in flames behind her, and vengeance in her heart.

As night falls, she chooses to defy her gods and forge a dangerous alliance with a pair of refugees and their Tranavian blood mage leader, a beautiful, broken boy who deserted his homeland after witnessing his blood cult commit unthinkable monstrosities. The plan? Assassinate the king and stop the war.

But when they discover a nefarious conspiracy that goes beyond their two countries, everything Nadya believes is thrown into question, including her budding feelings for her new partner. Someone has been harvesting blood mages for a dark purpose, experimenting with combining Tranavian blood magic with the Kalyazi’s divine one. In order to save her people, Nadya must now decide whether to trust the High Prince – her country’s enemy – or the beautiful boy with powers that may ignite something far worse than the war they’re trying to end.

        “You could be exactly what these countries need to stop their fighting,” he said. He dropped his hand and she was colder for its absence. “Or you could rip them apart at the seams.”

    Magical, dark, and wicked, Wicked Saints is a courageous novel set in a Russian inspired land where nothing is as it seems.

  Nadya is a cleric, raised in the old ways and able to communicate with not only one god, but all gods. Her magic is deadly powerful and just as difficult to control as the gods she speaks with through her prayer beads who guide and protect the world. Within the first few pages, we are launched into the brutal attack on the monastery where Nadya was raised. Her people are dying at the hands of Crown Prince Serefin, a vicious blood mage and war general sent to capture her and her power. Nadya along with Anna, an ordained priestess, flees the chaos only to run into a group of rebels who have secrets of their own. Among them, Nadya finds their leader Malachiasz is also a blood mage who defected from his group of Vultures, sinister monsters who destroy everything in their path. After their meeting, it becomes a wicked game life or death and maybe love.

  Wicked Saints was easy to devour. Honestly, I was seventy percent through the book before I realized I had become immersed in the tale. Emily A. Duncan charms readers with her lush imagination. Her descriptions of snow and ice and stone make it easy for one to lose themselves in Nadya’s world. The religious war at the helm of it all inspires readers to question right and wrong, what they are taught versus what is and what can be. Personally, I loved the combination of religion and religion based magic. It made what happened to Nadya all the more real and personal. With such a complex magical system, Duncan does a great job of blurring the gray area between the two. Is blood magic all bad? Is using the god’s gifts all good? You will have to read Wicked Saints to find out!

  Overall, I recommend it for fans of diverse characters, those that love awe-inspiring worlds, and those that crave something a little dark and bloody in their reading pile.

    My Rating

                  4 N A D E Z H D A L A P T E V A

    Horz stole the stars and the heavens out from underneath Myesta’s control, and for that she has never forgiven him. For where can the moons rest if not the heavens?

—Codex of the Divine, 5:26

    “It’s certainly not my fault you chose a child who sleeps so deeply. If she dies it will very much be your fault, not mine.”

Startled by bickering gods was not Nadya’s preferred method of being woken up. She rolled to her feet in the dark, moving automatically. It took her eyes a few seconds to catch up with the rest of her body.

Shut up!

It wasn’t wise to tell the gods to shut up, but it was too late now. A feeling of amused disdain flowed through her, but neither of the gods spoke again. She realized it was Horz, the god of the heavens and the stars, who had woken her. He had a tendency to be obnoxious but generally left Nadya alone, as a rule.

Usually only a single god communed with their chosen cleric. There once had been a cleric named Kseniya Mirokhina who was gifted with unnatural marksmanship by Devonya, the goddess of the hunt. And Veceslav had chosen a cleric of his own, long ago, but their name was lost to history, and he re- fused to talk about them. The recorded histories never spoke of clerics who could hear more than one god. That Nadya communed with the entire pantheon was a rarity the priests who trained her could not explain.

There was a chance older, more primordial gods existed, ones that had long since given up watch of the world and left it in the care of the others. But no one knew for sure. Of the twenty known gods, however, carvings and paintings depicted their human forms, though no one knew what they actually looked like. No cleric throughout history had ever looked upon the faces of the gods. No saint, nor priest.

Each had their own power and magic they could bestow upon Nadya, and while some were forthcoming, others were not. She had never spoken to the goddess of the moons, Myesta. She wasn’t even sure what manner of power the goddess would give, if she so chose.

And though she could commune with many gods, it was impossible to forget just who had chosen her for this fate: Marzenya, the goddess of death and magic, who expected complete dedication.

Indistinct voices murmured in the dark. She and Anna had found a secluded place within a copse of thick pine trees to set up their tent, but it no longer felt safe. Nadya slid a voryen from underneath her bedroll and nudged Anna awake.

She moved to the mouth of the tent, grasping at her beads, a prayer already forming on her lips, smoky symbols trailing from her mouth. She could see the blurry impressions of figures in the darkness, far off in the distance. It was hard to judge the number, two? Five? Ten? Her heart sped at the possibility that a company of Tranavians were already on her trail.

Anna drew up beside her. Nadya’s grip on her voryen tightened, but she kept still. If they hadn’t seen their tent yet, she could keep them from noticing it entirely.

But Anna’s hand clasped her forearm.

“Wait,” she whispered, her breath frosting out before her in the cold. She pointed to a dark spot just off to the side of the group.

Nadya pressed her thumb against Bozidarka’s bead and her eyesight sharpened until she could see as clearly as if it were day. It took effort to shove aside the immediate, paralyzing fear as her suspicions were confirmed and Tranavian uniforms be- came clear. It wasn’t a full company. In fact, they looked rather ragged. Perhaps they had split off and lost their way.

More interesting, though, was the boy with a crossbow silently aiming into the heart of the group.

“We can get away before they notice,” Anna said.

Nadya almost agreed, almost slipped her voryen back into its sheath, but just then, the boy fired and the trees erupted into chaos. Nadya wasn’t willing to use an innocent’s life as a distraction for her own cowardice. Not again.

Even as Anna protested, Nadya let a prayer form fully in her mind, hand clutching at Horz’s bead on her necklace and its constellation of stars. Symbols fell from her lips like glowing glimmers of smoke and every star in the sky winked out.

Well, that was more extreme than I intended, Nadya thought with a wince. I should’ve known better than to ask Horz for any- thing.

She could hear cursing as the world plunged into darkness.

Anna sighed in exasperation beside her.

“Just stay back,” she hissed as she moved confidently through the dark.

“Nadya . . .” Anna’s groan was soft.

It took more focus to send a third prayer to Bozetjeh. It was hard to catch Bozetjeh on a good day; the god of speed was notoriously slow to answer prayers. But she managed to snag his attention and received a spell allowing her to move as fast as the vicious Kalyazin wind.

Her initial count had been wrong; there were six Tranavians now scattering into the forest. The boy dropped his crossbow with a bewildered look up into the sky, startling when Nadya touched his shoulder.

There was no way he could see in this darkness, but she could. When he whirled, a curved sword in his hand, Nadya sidestepped. His swing went wide and she shoved him in the direction of a fleeing Tranavian, anticipating their collision.

“Find the rest,” Marzenya hissed. “Kill them all.” Complete and total dedication.

She caught up to one of the figures, stabbing her voryen into his skull just underneath his ear.

Not so difficult this time, she thought. But the knowledge was a distant thing.

Blood sprayed, splattering a second Tranavian, who cried out in alarm. Before the second man could figure out what had happened to his companion, she lashed out her heel, catching him squarely on the jaw and knocking him off his feet. She slit his throat.

Three more. They couldn’t have moved far. Nadya took up Bozidarka’s bead again. The goddess of vision revealed where the last Tranavians were located. The boy with the sword had managed to kill two in the dark. Nadya couldn’t actually see the last one, just felt him nearby, very much alive.

Something slammed into Nadya’s back and suddenly the chilling bite of a blade was pressed against her throat. The boy appeared in front of her, his crossbow back in his hands, thank- fully not pointed at Nadya. It was clear he could only barely see her. He wasn’t Kalyazi, but Akolan.

A fair number of Akolans had taken advantage of the war between their neighbors, hiring out their swords for profit on both sides. They were known for favoring Tranavia simply because of the warmer climate. It was rare to find a creature of the desert willingly stumbling through Kalyazin’s snow.

He spoke a fluid string of words she didn’t understand. His posture was languid, as if he hadn’t nearly been torn to pieces by blood mages. The blade against Nadya’s throat pressed harder. A colder voice responded to him, the foreign language scratched uncomfortably at her ears.

Nadya only knew the three primary languages of Kalyazin and passing Tranavian. If she wasn’t going to be able to communicate with them . . .

The boy said something else and Nadya heard the girl sigh before she felt the blade slip away. “What’s a little Kalyazi assassin doing out in the middle of the mountains?” he asked, switching to perfect Kalyazi.

Nadya was very aware of the boy’s friend at her back. “I could ask the same of you.”

She shifted Bozidarka’s spell, sharpening her vision further. The boy had skin like molten bronze and long hair with gold chains threaded through his loose curls.

He grinned.

    Wicked Saints (Something Dark and Holy #1) by Emily A. Duncan | Blog Tour Review & Excerpt was originally published on Mother/Gamer/Writer

[maddydenniswrt255-blog]

Public vs. Private...YOU Decide!

What is education? What does it mean to be properly educated in today's day in age? Education is  defined as the process of facilitating learning or of acquiring knowledge, skills, values, beliefs and habits. The topic of education is important because the education system is constantly changing, and this impacts everyone. The education systems in our society affects parents, students and teachers, which basically includes an entire community of people. On the one hand, public schools must adhere to state standards regarding curriculum content, teaching practices and expectations for student success, but on the other hand, private schools are able to disregard some of these standards, and present information in less regulated ways. The rate of public school students graduating high school has constantly been increasing since 2005, and it is currently at 82%, and on average about 66% of these students end up going to college. The rate of students from private schools who attend college is typically 95% (GreatSchoolsStaff, 2017). Also, according to NCES data, minority students who attend a private high school are more likely to attend college than minority students who attend public school (Berliner, 1996). However, this difference between private school and public school outcomes for college attendance partly happens because private schools can be more selective when accepting students into their programs in the first place. Further, it has often been acknowledged that the quality of a public school is based on its location (Berliner, 1996).

In my case, I was fortunate enough to be able to attend both private and public schools in good locations before coming to Syracuse University, and I realize that this was a very rare and unique educational experience. Since I have been part of both of these types of academic environments, I can easily say that I have had first-hand experience about the topic of education, and I that I am in a good position to be able to assert that the stereotype of private schools being better than public schools is truly unfair.

I am a college student who grew up in New York City, and many people feel that the only option there for accessing a good quality education is to attend private school. The private school system in Manhattan is extremely elite and prestigious, however, and getting your child into one of these schools is seen as comparable to applying into a college. Most children that attend these elite private schools end up attending an Ivy League colleges. A private school only accepts students according to their academic standards. Private schools tend to conduct standardized entrance tests, as well as one on one interviews, in which each student meets with an admissions representative.

I attended one of these private schools on the Upper East Side. All the girls in my all-girls school looked and dressed the same, our courses were always challenging, and the expectations were very rigorous. I spent most of my days taking different classes, but I felt that most of my classes moved quite quickly, because the teachers were also expected to be quite ambitious. Most courses I took were more exam based, and because I was not a strong test taker, I was put into a resource room class for students with disabilities. The goal of this class was to provide students with extra help, and to help them focus more effectively on English and Grammar, but after I was placed into this program, I began to doubt my abilities has a student even more, and my tendency to constantly second guess myself actually got worse. Overall, I felt that this private school was not the right place for me - because I was not learning the skills that I needed to meet my potential. By sixth grade, I knew that I didn’t want to continue at my private school for my high school years. I was planning on transferring, but then, after seventh grade, my family decided to move to Westchester, NY, which, fortunately, created more academic options for me.

We settled into a small town called Briarcliff Manor, which is only forty-five minutes outside of the city, and I transferred to a co-ed public school, which was centrally located in our town. This experience was totally different in terms of the classroom setup and style. Most of my classes were project and essay based, which I liked so much more, and I felt that I had found a new sense of creativity. I was no longer treated as a student with a disability, or someone who was behind, and I was put in honors and AP classes throughout the course of my high school career. I was no longer underestimated by my teachers and peers. I no longer felt judged when raising my hand and answering a question, and I no longer received eye rolls from other students when getting a question wrong.

In the fall of my freshmen year, I won Student of the Month, which is a highly recognized award, given by the principal. This honor is only given to students who have shown remarkable work both inside and outside the classroom and who always bring a positive attitude to learning. My photo was taken and hung up in the lobby and all I could think of was “if only my private school teachers could see me now.”  I find that the assumption is that public schools are out of control, the classes are too big, and the learning curve is slower, but in my experience these claims were all false.

There were never more than 25-30 students in any of my classes. It is assumed that by reducing class size can typically lead to an increase in student achievement. Researchers have not been able to find or prove this theory to be true, but most of the research shows that when there are reduced classes in the primary grades, kindergarten through the third grade, most student achievement rises as class size drops. In addition, I noticed that students treated the teachers with respect, just like we had done in private school, but the difference was that within my public school experience, I felt that students had more room to grow. My small public school in Westchester, NY gave me the confidence to speak my mind and to articulate my own unique thoughts within a classroom setting. Briarcliff High School became my favorite place, and I felt like I was constantly able to grow and thrive.

As is the case for many people in New York, private school is viewed in most states as the best education option for young people. This education system is generally seen as more traditional in terms of the roles and relationships between students and teachers (Cloud, 2007). Some private schools are based on religion, and they provide regular religious classes to students. The stereotype is that religious or not, creating a school with more traditional values inspires students to uphold certain beliefs, to follow rules and to respect not only the faculty and administration, but other students as well. Discipline in private schools is usually a lot stricter, if children disrupt class or ignore rules they are most likely to get punished for their actions.

Private schools are also often regarded as having a more challenging and rigorous academic curriculum, thus they better prepare students for college. Research has found that a class size of no more than eighteen students per teacher is required to produce the greatest benefits (Cloud, 2007), and the ratio of teachers to students in private schools is, on average, 1:9 (Cloud, 2007).  Research has also shown that most private school students come out ahead academically in comparison to public school students. This analysis considered the fact that the students attending private schools are coming from “more advantaged” or “well-off” socio-economic backgrounds (Cloud 2007). Children that attend private schools often have a more established network after school through alumni association. Lastly, private schools encourage parents to participate in the educational system because parents are usually the direct fund to the schools, thus giving the administration incentive to listen to the parent union. Overall, there is a certain belief is that private school education is expensive, but many claim that due to the high academic and behavioral expectations, and the high rate of college admissions, it is worth every penny.

When I surveyed both students and parents of students, however, I found that there were mixed reviews of both public and private school systems. One of the students I interviewed, who, like me, had attended both systems, said that in her opinion, “private schools [may] give more support, but public schools are more diverse and give a more realistic outlook on the world.” In her experience, she had not felt excluded for being “behind,” and when she caught up, she felt well-prepared to make the switch to public. I also interviewed a family friend who lives in Westchester, and who has sent all of his kids through the public school system - they have now all graduated college and have joined the workforce: “Honestly, public/private - it's all the same thing, but living in Westchester, NY we are fortunate enough to get a ‘private school experience’ in our small town public school.” After hearing this statement, I realized I couldn’t have agreed more with him. When talking to other parents, I found that in general, the reason that they chose to send their children to either private or public school was based on their location, and that public schools in better neighborhoods are seen as being more “worth the risk.”

When I spoke to my own parents, who had both attended private school as children, they reinforced that yes, it is all about location and the right environment. My mom loved my private school when we lived in Manhattan because when we had originally visited the elementary school, she felt that it was filled with endless opportunities for me to grow not only as a student, but as an individual. When I started middle school in New York City, however, she began to notice my growing discomfort with school, and she knew it was time for our family to make a change. I think that hearing all of these different perspectives was very beneficial to me in terms of understanding not only the realities - as opposed to the stereotypes - about the education system, but I was able to reflect on how different families make major life decisions.  In terms of the various people that I interviewed, most students and parents were in favor of the public school system. Overall, I found that there are different factors that influence a family's decisions about whether to send their children to public or private school, but the main factor for many people has to do with location.

Although parents who can afford private school for their children and teenagers are sometimes vulnerable to the emotional appeals that private schools make about giving the very best of everything to their kids, the reality is that many public schools have all of the benefits of private schools, and that they are evolving as the future of education changes. Based on my own experience, and on the research I have done throughout this project, there are  many well-located public schools in the US and they offer the same opportunities as private schools.

The major issues with private school are that not only is it expensive, but there is a lot of pressure for students to perform well in private school because of the expense to the student’s family. Further, the private school system does not have an edge on discipline, they just typically have smaller classes compared to public school. Because private schools have such traditional and rigid rules, they are not as willing to change and modernize as easily as public schools must do. If students get punished for their actions in private school, or if they are simply expected to follow rules that they did not participate in making, that does not really help them in terms of learning coping skills and problem solving skills for the future. High school should be a time to make mistakes and learn from them, but if students can’t explore their own limits, they may not learn experientially from their mistakes.

Studies show that the more sheltered a student is in high school, the bigger the adjustment there will be for them in college, when they are away from the support of their family for the first time. Lastly, in terms of parent involvement, parents can be involved as much as they want to be in the public school system. Most public schools have a PTA board and have weekly meetings to go over the budget, current events within the community, and teacher/student problems. While I was in high school, my parents were very involved with some of the major decisions in terms of the school budget etc., and not only do I think that it's a great way for families to get involved, and not only does it provide good modelling for students like me about community action, but it is also a way to help shape the future of our local public education systems.

In conclusion,  living in a small town community like my current one, I would definitely send my children to public school, because of the more realistic experience for future students, the access to a more diverse population, and the opportunity for parent involvement. Further, by doing so, I would be able to save money for the expenses of my kids’ college tuition for their future. While people without the means to choose between public and private, or those who live in neighborhoods where the local schools are not well-funded, and are also at an educational disadvantage - because of their socioeconomic status - people who are in this position of choice should not blindly buy into the negative stereotypes of public schools, or the positive stereotypes about private schools. In terms of my reflection on my own unique experience, I think that I can safely say that a public school education can effectively teach the core values of the society at large, and can prepare people for both college, and the “real world” beyond.