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Jan. 1st, 2011 01:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwydion* Petition to declare something some folks may find triggery a hate crime: http://www.change.org/petitions/view/south_africa_declare_corrective_rape_a_hate-crime
* RIP the woman who was the model for the Rosy the riveter poster: http://news.ninemsn.com.au/world/8190510/Iconic-face-of-Rosie-the-Riveter-poster-dies
* A discussion on one of the BPAL reminded me of something back from my first year teaching for money. To me clear, this did not happen during SSR time. I was a stickler for complete silence during SSR time. We'd been doing a project in the library, and people who finished early were to read. We let them read newspapers and magazines as well as books, with certain restrictions on the magazines. (Basically, they needed to have a reasonable amount of text.) Technically, the readers were to be silent, but I generally allowed educational conversation, IE: they could discuss what they were reading if the conversation had educational merit. I'd shut it down if it was just chit chat. I was sheep dogging, like I generally did during work time and was checking on a table of boys to see if there conversation was educational. I was good at being unobtrusive, and listening without looking like i was listening while keeping enough distance that it looked like I was monitoring someone else. It's the upside of having filtering issues and was part of my "eyes in the back of the head" teacher thing. It was one of the most fascinating conversation I'd ever seen a group of 8th grade boys have spontaneously.
Three of the boys had a selection of ordinary magazines you'd expect boys of that age to pick off a wrack in a library, gender normative stuff. The four guy had picked one of the teen magazines girls read, and the boys were talking about the images they saw therein. The exact world's are lost to me a decade on, but the thrust of the thing was, that the boys were pointing out how unrealistic the images were and the empathizing with the pressure that bombardment of images put on the girls in their class and by extension other girls their age. One of the boys then admitted he felt pressure to take steroids or at least try harder to bulk up because of the men he saw in action movies. Two of the others agreed and added some things about feeling inadequate compared to the guys they saw on TV and in the movies. They came to no conclusions on how to fix things, but I can't think of any way to fix things either. Still, that level of self awareness and compassion for what the girls go through seemed to me pretty impressive for a group of middle school guys. It sounded pretty educational to me, so I glided away.
For the record, this was the same class as the kid who told another guy who claimed none of his classmates were gay so he could say all the homophobic stuff he wanted, "They wouldn't tell you, would they. Everyone knows you're a homophobe." Neither of those kids were at that table. Weirdly, this was the same group that routinely broke subs and were a handful for the contract teachers, but loved me. There was this odd mix of courageousness and self awareness that created an amazing contrast. I'd also have laid odds of a majority of them failing to pass a drug test if anyone had thought to administer them.
* At least the neighbor thugs waited until near dark to start exploding things, and there's usally an hour or more between bursts. Still, I wish they wouldn't shoot mortars at our building. Hector panicked at the second mortar and decamped for under the bed. Everyone else stuck it out with me, until the midnight set went off, luckily not aimed at the apartment and mostly of reasonable size. At that point, the junior beasties had had enough and decamped for a nice bed to cower under. Mache, being fearless and seeing I was calm, stuck it out.
* I'd had plans, but they fell through, and honestly, I'm still recovering from yesterday, so I wasn't much motivated for hunting up other plans.
* Every now and then, I'll turn on the TV, and I'll catch a couple moments of Tosh 2.0 before I can change the channel. Similarly, sometimes, I'll turn the channel early so I won't miss the next show or be flipping through and catch a few sound bites. Somehow, he's always saying something virulently misogynistic in these tiny samples. I have to wonder if it's a coincidence, or if the misogyny is so thick on the ground over there, it's hard to miss. I hate that show and I can't stand the comic as a comic either. I wish he and his show would just go away. I feel dirty every time i catch a line or two of his poison before I can grab the remote.
* So true: http://www.asofterworld.com/clean/learn.jpg
* RIP the woman who was the model for the Rosy the riveter poster: http://news.ninemsn.com.au/world/8190510/Iconic-face-of-Rosie-the-Riveter-poster-dies
* A discussion on one of the BPAL reminded me of something back from my first year teaching for money. To me clear, this did not happen during SSR time. I was a stickler for complete silence during SSR time. We'd been doing a project in the library, and people who finished early were to read. We let them read newspapers and magazines as well as books, with certain restrictions on the magazines. (Basically, they needed to have a reasonable amount of text.) Technically, the readers were to be silent, but I generally allowed educational conversation, IE: they could discuss what they were reading if the conversation had educational merit. I'd shut it down if it was just chit chat. I was sheep dogging, like I generally did during work time and was checking on a table of boys to see if there conversation was educational. I was good at being unobtrusive, and listening without looking like i was listening while keeping enough distance that it looked like I was monitoring someone else. It's the upside of having filtering issues and was part of my "eyes in the back of the head" teacher thing. It was one of the most fascinating conversation I'd ever seen a group of 8th grade boys have spontaneously.
Three of the boys had a selection of ordinary magazines you'd expect boys of that age to pick off a wrack in a library, gender normative stuff. The four guy had picked one of the teen magazines girls read, and the boys were talking about the images they saw therein. The exact world's are lost to me a decade on, but the thrust of the thing was, that the boys were pointing out how unrealistic the images were and the empathizing with the pressure that bombardment of images put on the girls in their class and by extension other girls their age. One of the boys then admitted he felt pressure to take steroids or at least try harder to bulk up because of the men he saw in action movies. Two of the others agreed and added some things about feeling inadequate compared to the guys they saw on TV and in the movies. They came to no conclusions on how to fix things, but I can't think of any way to fix things either. Still, that level of self awareness and compassion for what the girls go through seemed to me pretty impressive for a group of middle school guys. It sounded pretty educational to me, so I glided away.
For the record, this was the same class as the kid who told another guy who claimed none of his classmates were gay so he could say all the homophobic stuff he wanted, "They wouldn't tell you, would they. Everyone knows you're a homophobe." Neither of those kids were at that table. Weirdly, this was the same group that routinely broke subs and were a handful for the contract teachers, but loved me. There was this odd mix of courageousness and self awareness that created an amazing contrast. I'd also have laid odds of a majority of them failing to pass a drug test if anyone had thought to administer them.
* At least the neighbor thugs waited until near dark to start exploding things, and there's usally an hour or more between bursts. Still, I wish they wouldn't shoot mortars at our building. Hector panicked at the second mortar and decamped for under the bed. Everyone else stuck it out with me, until the midnight set went off, luckily not aimed at the apartment and mostly of reasonable size. At that point, the junior beasties had had enough and decamped for a nice bed to cower under. Mache, being fearless and seeing I was calm, stuck it out.
* I'd had plans, but they fell through, and honestly, I'm still recovering from yesterday, so I wasn't much motivated for hunting up other plans.
* Every now and then, I'll turn on the TV, and I'll catch a couple moments of Tosh 2.0 before I can change the channel. Similarly, sometimes, I'll turn the channel early so I won't miss the next show or be flipping through and catch a few sound bites. Somehow, he's always saying something virulently misogynistic in these tiny samples. I have to wonder if it's a coincidence, or if the misogyny is so thick on the ground over there, it's hard to miss. I hate that show and I can't stand the comic as a comic either. I wish he and his show would just go away. I feel dirty every time i catch a line or two of his poison before I can grab the remote.
* So true: http://www.asofterworld.com/clean/learn.jpg
