As You May Be Aware We Had To Close Our DMs Due To The Uncontrolled Abuse We Were Receiving. I Am So

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ALL 👏🏾 OF 👏🏾 THEM 👏🏾

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Haters gonna hate; in other news, Taylor Swift saves the world 🌈💕🌈

my favorite criticism of taylor so far is “she’s only pushing *insert political issue here* for the publicity/because it benefits her” like??? y’all??? do you really think taylor needs to do anything more than step outside for publicity???? she could breathe and get a thinkpiece written about it. she doesn’t need throw massive amounts of support towards lgbt+ issues to get publicity. she can do that on her own.

A Twitter Thread from David Bowles:

[Text transcript at the end of the screenshots]

I'll let you in on a secret. I have a doctorate in education, but the field’s basically just a 100 years old. We don’t really know what we’re doing. Our scholarly understanding of how learning happens is like astronomy 2000 years ago.

Most classroom practice is astrology.

Before the late 19th century, no human society had ever attempted to formally educate the entire populace. It was either aristocracy, meritocracy, or a blend. And always male.

We’re still smack-dab in the middle of the largest experiment on children ever done.

Most teachers perpetuate the “banking” model (Freire) used on them by their teachers, who likewise inherited it from theirs, etc.

Thus the elite “Lyceum” style of instruction continues even though it’s ineffectual with most kids.

What’s worse, the key strategies we’ve discovered, driven by cognitive science & child psychology, are quite regularly dismissed by pencil-pushing, test-driven administrators. Much like Trump ignores science, the majority of principals & superintendents I’ve known flout research.

Some definitions:

Banking model --> kids are like piggy banks: empty till you fill them with knowledge that you're the expert in.

Lyceum --> originally Aristotle's school, where the sons of land-owning citizens learned through lectures and research.

Things we (scholars) DO know:

-Homework doesn't really help, especially younger kids.

-Students don't learn a thing from testing. Most teachers don't either (it's supposed to help them tweak instruction, but that rarely happens).

-Spending too much time on weak subjects HURTS.

Do you want kids to learn? Here's something we've discovered: kids learn things that matter to them, either because the knowledge and skills are "cool," or because .... they give the kids tools to liberate themselves and their communities.

Maintaining the status quo? Nope.

Kids are acutely aware of injustice and by nature rebellious against the systems of authority that keep autonomy away from them.

If you're perpetuating those systems, teachers, you've already freaking lost.

They won't be learning much from you. Except what not to become. Sure, you can wear them down. That's what happened to most of you, isn't it? You saw the hideous flaw in the world and wanted to heal it. But year after numbing year, they made you learn their dogma by rote.

And now many of you are breaking the souls of children, too.

For what?

It's all smoke and mirrors. All the carefully crafted objectives, units and exams.

WE. DON'T. KNOW. HOW. PEOPLE. LEARN.

We barely understand the physical mechanisms behind MEMORY. But we DO know kids aren't empty piggy banks. They are BRIMMING with thought.

The last and most disgusting reality? The thing I hear in classroom after freaking classroom?

Education is all about capitalism.

"You need to learn these skills to get a good job." To be a good laborer. To help the wealthy generate more wealth, while you get scraps.

THAT is why modern education is a failure.

Its basic premise is monstrous.

"Why should I learn to read, Dr. Bowles?"

Because reading is magical. It makes life worth living. And being able to read, you can decode the strategies of your oppressors & stop them w/ their own words.

SOUND ON 🐶

the best tiktok ever made

when two musicians sing into the same microphone and lean in very close to each other… like omg are you guys gonna kiss now to relieve the homoerotic tension?😳

This is monstrous. What she is proposing is a literal crime against humanity.

No exaggeration. No hyperbole. One of the justices of the Supreme Court is proposing that the country should violate human rights en masse.

I’ve seen the Ursula K LeGuin quote about capitalism going around, but to really appreciate it you have to know the context.

The year is 2014. She has been given a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Awards. Neil Gaiman puts it on her neck in front of a crowd of booksellers who bankrolled the event, and it’s time to make a standard “thank you for this award, insert story here, something about diversity, blah blah blah” speech. She starts off doing just that, thanking her friends and fellow authors. All is well.

Then this old lady from Oregon looks her audience of executives dead in the eye, and says “Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.”

She rails against the reduction of her art to a commodity produced only for profit. She denounces publishers who overcharge libraries for their products and censor writers in favor of something “more profitable”. She specifically denounces Amazon and its business practices, knowing full well that her audience is filled with Amazon employees. And to cap it off, she warns them: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”

Ursula K LeGuin got up in front of an audience of some of the most powerful people in publishing, was expected to give a trite and politically safe argument about literature, and instead told them directly “Your empire will fall. And I will help it along.”

Taylor the Machine Swift.

She’s just like Dolly. Nobody will see them without the wig. Nobody knew Dolly. Same for Taylor. She paints her lip and sways her hip…don’t fucking let the fans know anything actually intimate. Dangerous.

Dolly was a big gay, so is Tay.

Don’t care, just saying 🤡🤷🏻‍♀️

Young gorillas seen dismantling poachers' traps for the first time

Days after a poacher’s trap killed a young mountain gorilla in Rwanda's Volcanoes National Park, researchers have spotted something remarkable: two four-year old gorillas working together to dismantle similar snares in the area.

Some conservationists were approaching a poacher’s gorilla trap to destroy it when an actual gorilla stopped them and warned them off while two other gorillas came by and took the trap apart. They had to have thought the humans were going to get caught in it

Also they know what these traps are and are fighting back themselves

So my immediate thought when watching the interview with Colbert, is that I feel like the bit about “hey Stephen” being about him, and there being all this evidence (as a bit) and her denying it, is like a parallel to all of the gaylor/kaylor evidence and then everyone (including Taylor via her pr narrative) denying it.

She says to him that if she were going to write a song about him she wouldn’t name it after him, that would be too obvious. She says songwriting “is in the details”. She even lists things that she would say about him like him being on tv, on the daily show, being 5’11” etc. when she said “I love you on the tv” it immediately made me think of “you’re a queen selling dreams, selling make up and magazines”.

At another point she describes where his exact location is in New York, which immediately made me think of “you’re the west village”. Another detail that shows the truth of a song.

The basic take away of too-obvious titles, and the truth being in the details of the song, is so LOUD. It reinforces the falseness of all of the anachronisms that we’ve been pointing out in her last four albums. Songs said to be about toe, but whose details only actually work with Karlie. Or songs that are said to be about straight relationships, but whose details seem to clearly suggest a wlw relationship. For instance, Cardigan referencing “high heels on cobblestones” and James in Betty singing “I was walking home on broken cobblestones”. The truth is in the details

Also the comment about too-obvious titles vs details made me cackle about London Boy 😂 it really is Blank Space 2.0

God there are so many other examples... “looking out the window like I’m not your favorite town/I’m New York City/I still do it for you baby” when joe has stated New York is definitely not his favorite city, but a certain lady loves it. “I’m so mystified by how this city screams your name”, etc.

She keeps giving us entire albums that are the equivalent of lyrical mood boards, covered in photos of Karlie (plus some of Emily and Sue, and other sapphic icons/characters) and then says “no I don’t know what you’re talking about, it’s from a male perspective”. And it’s so obvious that it’s a joke, just like this bit. It also stood out to me that there was audible laughter from the crew members in the studio(s). Which felt like it echoed all of us, watching Taylor pull gayer and gayer songs, themes, imagery with each album, then saying “where?” with a semi straight face, just redirecting the gps attention. And us sitting back in astonishment and delirious laughter asking “how can they not see it??”