#teaching

ladyhistory:

just a reminder that the most wonderful thing you can give a teacher is a handwritten note/card/letter

I promise you, we treasure those things like gold and we take them out and read them over and over again, especially on bad days, just to remind ourselves that we’re making a difference to somebody.

so if you had a teacher this year whose class you enjoyed, write them a note and let them know because it will seriously make their YEAR

… To announce that I will no longer be posting on this blog. It’s certainly the end of an era for me, as you’ve all followed me on the journey throughout my three years at University, graduation, and into the real world.

As I wrote on an earlier blog post, I quit my job a few months ago. Since then, or perhaps slightly before then, I’ve been unsure as to what I want to do with my life. I hate feeling as if I’m ‘wasting time’ by doing something I don’t enjoy, and teaching has been a profession that has taken my interest as of late. So in the next couple of weeks, I will be flying from London to China, to be a primary school English teacher over there.

It has been a struggle for the past few months trying to find the time to get on here and create postings with the amount of training, packing, organising etc. I was doing in preparation for this trip! I’ll be really busy out there anyway and don’t particularly want to spend a lot of time on the internet, so rather than letting my blog dwindle with activity, I am just going to stop posting altogether.

I’m going to leave the blog up though, so it won’t be deleted- but as this blog was my creation, I don’t want to pass on the 'admin duties’ to anyone else! 

When I started this blog, I truly had no idea it would ascend into such popularity. The heights that this blog has reached has been a delight; I was just bored one afternoon at University and wanted to post about my passion; the classical world. I was going through my I-Love-Socrates phase too and remember one of my first postings being about him. The amount of likes, reblogs, and followers this blog has attained has been more than I could’ve ever imagined and I’d like to THANK YOU ALL so much for ALL your support, I truly didn’t realise how much interest there still was in the Classical world. What a wonderful thing!

Best of luck to you all for the future, and who knows, perhaps I’ll be back another time in the future!

P.S: Here are the final statistics:

Total followers: 2,381
Total postings: 1,244

Goodbye, and thank-you for the past few years… lots of love, A x

Classroom management at Hogwarts is a bit of a mixed bag, owing mostly to the fact that none of the teaching positions require educational training or experience.

Many of the teachers, most notably Sprout and Flitwick, keep students attention by keeping their classes interactive, with students engaged in hands-on activities. Some teachers leave the students to do what they will, leaving the onus of learning on them rather than on themselves. Professor Binns and Professor Vector in Arithmancy are guilty of this type of teaching.

For more the more serious – and potentially dangerous - subjects, Potions and Transfiguration, Professors McGonagall and Snape go for an authoritarian approach to classroom discipline. They establish themselves as absolute rulers within the four walls of their respective classrooms, with rigorous coursework outweighing any potential for silliness or deviation.

The difference between them, the reason McGonagall’s classes are remembered fondly and Snape’s with leftover uneasiness or derision, is a fundamental difference in the way the two teachers see their students. McGonagall looks at hers with respect, always assuming that they want to learn what she teaches them. She’s firm and strict, but gives them the benefit of the doubt, and her underlying caring shows through her gruff manner. Snape, meanwhile, uses the same strict rules, but with a contempt rather than caring. He does not have his students’ best interest at heart the way McGonagall seems to, and his pushing is never to help a student succeed.

Ode to Teaching and Learning Online

If teaching online

Could enrich young minds

I’d front line it

If Zoom morning meetings

Could beat in-person greetings

I’d co-sign it

If novel studies in G-Suite

Could light mind fires like Hot Seat

I’d design it

If blurry faces in gallery view

Could bring joy and love like hugs do

I’d refine it.

If “3 Quick Tips” in weekly office hours 

Could beat a…

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overall student report on the AP exam:

it felt easy bc i beat the crap outta them so much in class

the books i read this school year i have a really hard time sitting down to read even though i love to do it. all through high school and college i doubt i read as many books as i read just this year. ever since i started giving 20 minutes of reading time to students at the beginning of each block period, i’ve been reading so much more. a lot of the kids tell me it’s the only time they’ve managed to finish a book since middle school.

anyway my #1 book for this year was circe, followed by dune messiah and klara and the sun.

we-could-have-danced-all-night:

queerenby:

filisexual:

royalpancake:

a short poem:

do teachers
understand
that you take
other classes

another short poem:

yes but see
they are all
required
by the district
or state
to assign a
certain amount
of gradable
material per
semester so
they can get
paid and earn
raises and bonuses
and keep
their jobs and
funding

a revised short poem:

does the district
or state
understand
that you take
other classes

another short poem:

no

Sinsations BDSM Play Party

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Rope workshops teaching Shibari bondage in Washington 2012

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Twisted Leprechaun (Dublin 2011) Shibari bondage performance by WykD Dave and Clover

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Well Friday was a bit different to the usual.

Took Clover down to London for a shoot. Having dropped her off I had a couple of hours to kill so called up Hedwig who’s suffering with an essay and asked if she fancied some lunch.

Nice lunch was had just off Brick Lane. It was a lovely day and beautifully sunny. It was a shame to let the conviviality end so we thought maybe we would sort out a pick-nick for the afternoon. (Mainly Hedwig’s idea.)

A few phone calls later and we planned to pick up the girl from the shoot, collect Will and Ella and meet at Wimbledon Common. Clover meanwhile has changed into her schoolgirl uniform and got ID’d in Tesco while we were buying supplies. Had a good pick-nick, a good laugh and then wouldn’t you know it, off into the woods for some Alfresco bondage.

Few nice outdoor suspensions, much talk and laughter and an incident with a Dalmatian later and time to head off as the day cooled down.

Dropped of Hedwig and then headed back up to Derbyshire.

Tired but happy. A good day. Looking forward to getting some pictures of the outdoor rope.
Pictures came! See the small gallery below.

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London festival of Japanese bondage – performance (London 2011)

It seems so long ago now that this shibari show took place. We’ve come a long way and if we didn’t have a video I wouldn’t be able to tell you what happened in the show. Our style and everything has changed since this but here it is warts and all.

I have to say that I’m not normally nervous performing. I really look forward to it and the rush of doing bondage with clover on stage.

London was the…

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grison-in-space:

headspace-hotel:

headspace-hotel:

I want to talk real quick about something really important to me:

When you have something important to say on the internet that you care about, you will be most successful at changing people’s minds if you take care to state your ideas in an understanding, non-aggressive, and non-accusing manner.

There has been a conversation a while back about how people of color should not need to be “nice” and “polite” when they are resisting being dehumanized and abused. This is true and I 100% agree with it.

However, it seems like some people have taken from that a principle that “if you really care about the truth, you should be willing to accept it even if the person saying it is not ‘nice’ or polite” and applied it to everything.

This is not good.

Emotional discomfort at being nice to someone who disagrees with you on a topic you are very emotionally invested in is not the same as the dehumanizing and demeaning experience of being “nice” in response to oppression and prejudice from people who think your life and the lives of people you love don’t have value.

What I’m saying is, if you are talking about why spiders are important to the ecosystem, why cats should be kept inside, or why public transportation is a good idea, it will not hurt you to be patient and kind.

You may not feel like the person arguing with you deserves kindness. You may not think that being kind will help them get their stubborn opinion unstuck. But not only is understanding and patience much, much more persuasive, it makes people comfortable enough to ask questions. If they don’t ask questions they will never get past their misconceptions.

People that would otherwise say “huh, I didn’t think about it like that but now I see what you mean” get defensive when people present new ideas to them like an attack.

I have done it. You have done it. When someone on the internet is making what feels like nasty, rude accusations about you, demeaning you for not knowing a piece of information, or haughtily proclaiming how Right and Correct they are, your instinct is to get defensive.

So put your ego up on a high shelf and show grace and kindness to people who are ignorant. This is just how persuasion works.

The indoor cats debate is the biggest and worst example of this I’ve seen recently.

People feel like they have to defend themselves when they are called an animal abuser that doesn’t care about their pets. Most people love their pets a lot, and most people think of “animal abuser” as an unspeakably evil category of people.

I get defensive about the indoor cats thing, because I had outdoor cats as a kid and bad things happened to many of them, and I used to feel incredible guilt about that even though I couldn’t have done anythingbecauseI was a kid.

The main things that people are actually getting stuck on with the concept of indoor cats are:

1. they grew up with outdoor cats, everyone around them growing up considered keeping cats outside normal and harmless, and it’s just weird to have a Literal Stranger expect you to accept that literally every person that ever loved you or who was kind to you growing up is an Animal Abuser
2. they think that cats, as a species, literally need to roam around outside or they will not be having their needs met.
3. These people are not at all wrong to worry about how to provide enrichment to an indoor cat!!! Cat furniture and puzzle toys and ipad apps with fish swimming around for your cat to paw at are not known to everybody. There’s also a persistent myth that cats cannot be trained and therefore training one to walk on a leash or play fetch is absurd.
4. (It also at least deserves mentioning that there are public outdoor spaces, activities and sports events meant for dogs.)
5. It has literally never occurred to many people that cats are an invasive species. They don’t know where cats are native to. They don’t know that there were no cats in their area before humans brought them there. It seems strange, I know, but you are ignorant about something that seems obvious to someone else, so please stay humble.
6. When you describe cats as “cold-blooded serial killers of native wildlife” or things like that, it really does sound like you are moralizing an animal being a predator. Cat lovers grew up suffocated in cutesy animal books, shows, and cartoons that demonized cats and other carnivores for being carnivores. Assigning morals to animals goes all the way back to Aesop’s fables and Pliny the Elder. You have to make sure it’s clear you’re not doing that. 

I write this because I wrote something about the harms of outdoor cats in a reply one time and went back and read the tags on that post later, and the sheer number of people who had written that my post specifically had changed their mind because it was the first post they had seen on the subject that wasn’t needlessly hateful and aggressive blew my mind.

Educating effectively requires you to think about the effects of your words. You can’t just say things you Know are right and consider your job done.

Here is another truth: the most effective tactics to create social change are not necessarily the easiest to sustain. If you can’t sustain being mild and approachable and patient while people ask the most frustrating, repetitive questions…

that is a sign that you need a break, or that you need to consider devoting yourself to a different kind of trying to do good in the world for a while, or that you need to rest. You do not have to be a teacher at all times. This is good, I say (as a teacher) because being a teacher takes work and skill and hard emotional control, especially when you are trying to teach people about something that you care very intensely about. Teaching is skilled labor, but it is always labor.

Speaking as someone who has done that work on the marginalization end as well as on the animal welfare end, on the science literacy end, on a lot of things I’m very earnest about: you have to set limits on education, and you have to be extremely clear with yourself about what is teaching work and what is self-protection from things that make your soul ache. When you’re teaching, starting from a non-confrontational place and encouraging people to view you as a trustworthy, safe figure who won’t judge them is absolutely crucial when it comes to establishing the basic safety necessary to consider changing our beliefs. The moment you make it an Us Vs Them fight, you lose the game. Doing it the hard way takes time and it takes effort and patience, and not everyone is suited to that work and no one is suited to it all the time.

When you’re trying to just keep the space from punching you in the soul on a deep bruise one more time, though, you have other goals. You don’t act from the desire to change the hearts and minds of the people you’re talking to; you’re acting from a desire to just get that crappy thing away from me. And sometimes we can orchestrate that within our social spaces, depending on who is watching and what our relative positions are, and sometimes we can’t.

The danger, the riptide that will drag you under, is calling yourself a teacher when you are acting like someone trying to preserve the comfort of a community for yourself and other people like you. That second goal isn’t necessarily a bad one to have! Sometimes we all have to engage in that kind of social behavior, because everyone needs a space in which they can feel safe to relax sometimes, even if that is a space that only a few kinds of people are allowed to come into. But lying to yourself that this kind of behavior is teaching, and that you are engaging in a higher form of moral wossname by doing so–when you don’t have the bandwidth to do that properly–that can really get you into trouble. First, it can get you into trouble by encouraging you to frame picking certain fights as a public service rather than an act of survival, which can cause you to overweight the possible successes of starting a conflict and underweight the possible consequences. Second, it lets you frame behavior that can be really quite bad for the overall project of changing minds in the general public as effective activism, even to yourself, which leads you to forget that activist initiatives should be measured in terms of efficacy rather than in terms of how they make you feel at the end.

Now, I’ve seen the scars from people who always focus on efficacy over being able to feel safe and to rest. I have those scars. People with the best intentions and the highest moral goals have thrown one another into a meat grinder of yearning for a better world that way. I’m not saying you always have to drop everything and be a teacher.

I’m just saying that you should keep your tactics distinct, your short term goals clear in your mind, and above all else, figure out where you can find a place to rest.

1)And it is exhausting.

The polite, patient, open, understanding attitude is one that comes to me quite easily and isn’t even a full mask… but it is still exhausting and you cannotsustain it constantly. Beyond teachers, ask anyone in customer service, even in pleasant environments. It’s not a hypothetical “sometimes you might want to consider” – no, you need to take breaks and recuperate from that labour, and to have periods in which you are free of the expectation and pressure that comes with tone-policing, even if it is self-inflicted.

(And perhaps that might require finding/making a safe space in which you canlet out the steam and be mean and bitch about how ignorant/cruel people are with like-minded friends, in private.)

2) To return to the original post’s point, beyond your own efficiency as an activist/educator/etc. and regardless of your sympathy for your interlocutor, when trying to convince people you are working against a bunch of obstacles hard-wired into people’s brain, in particular the boomerang effect (link), as well as belief perseverance or conceptual conservatism (link)andconfirmation bias (link).

Basically, it is a known, documented, proven thing that people are spiteful and tend to believe the opposite of what they are told, and this is only truer the more aggressively the contradicting information is delivered.

In conclusion: tone-policing in activism is a complicated issue that makes no one happy, but ultimately, when being aggressive, you are doing more harm than good to your cause and to yourself. If you think the person doesn’t deserve politeness, or the energy you would put in being polite… then don’t, but it’s probably better overall to not reply at all and to take a self-care break instead. Confronting them aggressively would only comfort them in their opposing belief.