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scintfms · 4 years

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hi kids ! wow , we’re already at opening and that’s so crazy ! i’m kofi , your co - admin , and i’m so excited that you guys are here ! i’m 23 , from the est tz , prefer she / they pronouns and i graduate from college in a little more than seven months ... yikes . that being said , i’m ready to introduce you guys to my latest muse , who may have huge development changes as we go on because of him being brand new , mr . saint moon ! he’s um ... something of a mess and idk if i love or hate him yet , but i’m happy to plot with ya’ll on my d.iscord @ 𝐡𝐲𝐮𝐧𝐣𝐢𝐧 𝐬𝐮𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐦𝐚𝐜𝐲.#4090 !

( lee juyeon , 22 , cis male , he / him ) * fun fact about me ? okay , let’s see . . . an injury stopped my promising olympic career . crazy , right ? i’m saint moon , i live in the contemporary new build with a three thousand square foot outdoor patio on ocean lane in key biscayne , & not to brag , but my family’s worth around $740 million . pretty decent for real estate and construction developers , huh ? we’ve been around for some time , but in town , everyone’s always associated me with the gatsbys ; but it’s not like that’s my whole identity , or anything . while filming for key biscayne , it was surprising when i’d get dragged on twitter for being “ errant , impetuous , & rancorous , ” but the cameras don’t see everything , & my real fans know that i’m nothing but coolheaded , venturesome , & enamoring . i’m not too bothered by it though , because since the series ended , i’ve opened a highly successful café in south korea and planning to expand to the states . follow me on instagram @SNT.MN to keep up .

name : saint moon .

nickname(s) : none .

age + date of birth : 22 + july 19th , 1998 .

astrological sign : cancer .

myers - briggs personality type : infj .

enneagram type : the individualist .

moral alignment : chaotic neutral .

gender + pronouns : cis man + he / him / his .

place of birth : gangnam , south korea .

place of residence : key biscayne , florida .

sexual orientation : bisexual .

romantic orientation : biromantic .

occupation : former reality star / instagram influencer / café owner .

nationality : korean .

ethnicity : korean .

language(s) spoken : korean , english , japanese , and learning mandarin .

social media handle : @SNT.MN

THE BACKSTORY .

saint’s story starts when his parents , moon ji - ho and park soo - ah went on their first date . in truth , it had been a rare instance of love at first sight when they bumped into each other at ji - ho’s office in seoul , and the date was only used to solidify their feelings . you see , ji - ho and soo - ah were fairly well known with ji - ho being the second heir to moon industries alongside his sister , moon eun - ha . moon industries was founded in the 1940s , and is known primarily for their real estate and construction business . the company was founded in seoul , and originally started out by purchasing and renovating beautiful homes and condominiums within the city . after thirty years in the business , ji - ho and eun - ha’s father was one of the�� first in south korea to reach the status of billionaire .

ji - ho and soo -ah were looking to forge their own path , though . although they were lucky enough to have wealthy parents , both of them have always liked the idea of working for themselves and getting their hands dirty . so , they refused ji - ho’s father’s investment and decided to start their own real estate firm . they went through the process of obtaining their real estate license in both south korea and the united states , specifically in florida . after studying hard , they were able to open moon real estate , and it was a hassle for them . they initially ‘ struggled ’ seeing as though they were their only employees , and soon , soo - ah discovered that she was pregnant with their son .

for four years , they worked hard with their bumbling baby boy , saint , crawling at their feet and curiously looking at home or building buyers . for a long time , they considered saint to be their closer as he was the selling point and allowed people to hold him while looking at the home . usually , soo - ah would use saint as a marketing ploy whenever they were trying to sell to young couples , and it always worked . the moons became known for saint syndrome , where those same young couples would typically call to say that they were expecting within a year of buying their home . it only took a few years , but the moons were soon raking in their own money without the help of ji - ho’s father .

when saint was six , his family relocated to key biscayne , florida . life was easy living on the water , and his parents continued to sell gorgeous homes both in seoul and in the wealthy neighborhoods of florida . with such a lifestyle , it wasn’t unheard of for saint to excel at his private school , where he was known for his academic prowess as well as his ability to play both the piano and the cello . saint was a fairly popular student while growing up , and it showed when the moons would host their annual christmas party .

he was fourteen when he finally started to understand the rivalry between thoroughbreds and gatsbys . originally , he put off like he didn’t care , but in reality he was trying to figure it out . the moons were a special case , considering that ji - ho was clearly an heir to a billion dollar fortune , but also had become wealthy in his own right thanks to his business with his wife . saint never understood that jabs and jeers that he would receive from thoroughbreds , because to him , they were all rich so what the hell did it matter ? he eventually began to side more with the gatsbys , never understanding why the thoroughbreds felt as though they needed to stick their noses up in the air at them .

within two years , though , saint seems to have changed for the worse . while his grades may be good , he begins to spend more time with new friends in miami . while there , he surrounds himself with fast cars and short nights , but he thinks it’s his parents’ fault for buying him a 488 spider for his sixteenth birthday . saint began to get into trouble , often pulled over for speeding and reckless driving to impress his friends . like always , a star is meant to fall , and it all came crashing down for saint when he thought that drag racing on u.s. route 1 was a good idea . he assumed that he could lose the cops , but he was stupid for ever thinking so -- he totaled the $1.3m dollar car , and after being treated for minor injuries , he was booked in the county jail .

having rich parents seems to be all fun and games considering they were barely able to get him out with a slap on the wrist , but that very same night they sent him away on a business plane to live with his no - nonsense grandparents . for the first year , saint pouted and argued , screamed and kicked over being trapped in seoul . he tried to escape the fortress of a house in pyeongchang , attempted to ditch his security guards when he went out in public , but he eventually realized that there was no getting out of this . so , he made the most out of it : he finished school , and during his senior year with the help of his grandparents , saint opened goodnight moon , a late night café that appealed to college students and late workers in need of a coffee and pastry pick me up . the café went viral , and so did the handsome owner .

he returned home when he was twenty , and discovered that key biscayne was filming . as the resident who suddenly disappeared , saint was sought after by the producers and was introduced mid - way through the second season .

THE SHOW .

saint and his family were not introduced on key biscayne until midway through season two . he was introduced as most table shakers would be , with a flurry of local headlines ranging from KEY BISCAYNE TEEN ARRESTED FOR DRAG RACING and HOW MONEY GETS YOU OUT OF A JAIL SENTENCE . his parents didn’t like the idea of being on a reality series , so they weren’t featured although there were a few scenes with them .

he was the reality show villain and you can’t tell me otherwise ! showed up with an air of what the fUCk ever and despite the air around him since he was arrested and shipped back to south korea , he never let that stop him ? like ofc he’s a rich boy who got away with something bc he’s rich , but it’s not that he doesn’t acknowledge it , he just chooses not to talk about it .

was definitely the subject of show cliffhangers , probably nearly got kicked off the show because of his short temperament and despite all that would still be invited to the reunions because he would always start some shit . he was very vocal about who he didn’t like on the show , and probably had good chemistry with a cast mate and fans of the show always pushed for them to become a thing ( a wc ... mayhaps 👀 ) but they were never anything more than friends .

by the end of the show , saint was that cast member that fans love to hate . he was employee of the month , and that’s on period ! gave what he was supposed to gave and was highkey problematic ( not in a bad way , but in a way where he was always the one in the middle of some shit ) and when people would question him about it ofc he didn’t care KFNDSJBFS .

THE PERSONALITY .

a little shit . that’s it . that’s all you need to know . although he’s standoffish , still has his insecurities because he’s not the ‘ perfect ’ son that his parents pushed for him to be . very much so the black sheep of the family , and is deemed as a lost cause by his thespian of a mother , so he figures that he might as well live up to that name . comes across as someone who genuinely doesn’t care , and he doesn’t KFDBJSFSD . sometimes only looks out for himself which adds more sand into the asshole bin , and he hates being asked ‘ dumb ’ questions . it’s a pet peeve that his mom thinks he picked up from his father .

THE HEADCANONS .

he does not want to be your friend KFNDSFUS . he can be very standoffish just to get that point across , and he doesn’t interact with people outside of a chosen few .

can be wildly off putting and while someone else may be afraid of confrontation , he isn’t ! might be the subject of bar brawls and minor scraps because he genuinely does not know how to shut the hell up .

hates walnuts ; idk why that’s important but it is . serve him something with walnuts in it and he’ll never talk to you again .

romantically and emotionally stunted , therefore he bides his time with casual sex and noncommittal acts of romance . can be found slipping out of beds in the middle of the night , never returns texts , and at times will pretend that he doesn’t know who the other person is ( ew ! ) .

a chaotic boy with a heart of gold , he just doesn’t show it and has mastered the art of being fake .

despite his repulsion of romance and relationships , he’ll flirt with anyone that has a pair of legs , and he quite honestly might call someone daddy just for the hell of it KNFDH .

probably posts those outfit thirst traps on instagram reels or tik tok bc he’s annoying .

THE CONNECTIONS .

an angsty ex boyf 👀 if i have to BEG for it i will ! and i promise to make you cry xD

a best friend pls ! someone who has been friends with him since before he was shipped back to korea for a few years so when he came back and was on the show , they were THE dynamic duo .

i’ve been really into his plot but someone he works out with ? maybe they don’t work out together per say , but they’re somehow always at the community gym at the same time .

something soft ? something so sweet that it would make my teeth rot ? could either be a boyfriend or girlfriend thing or tbh i don’t know but i’m literally looking for something that’s all fluff and all marshmallows and if i don’t get it then i’ll cry .

a plot where they full on hate each other . none of that cute shit KNFDNFHSD . no lingering feelings , no moments of hate lapse -- they hate each other and it’s a spicy hate ship that literally gets your blood pumping .

SKINNY LOVE ARE YOU THERE ?

his hoodrat friends NFDJNHFBD i’m kidding but i’m thinking like ... a billionaire boys club type of thing ? perhaps the five of them get together and ppl try to penetrate the group or they have these instances where ppl straight up hate them for no reason ? they were probably the TALK of the show bc thought they were assholes KNFDJBFBD idk either way , my hand is out . ( 1 of 4 spots filled )

a one night stand with some substance ? like yeah , they fuck around and they have their fun together but they don’t pretend to not know each other in public ( unless this person is a thoroughbred and i oop , chile ) so they probs tend to be a little like confidants at times but also have a tendency of shutting each other up with sex .

#biscayne.intro #this is really long i do apologize KNFDNSHF

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silent-era-of-cinema · 4 years

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Bessie Love (born Juanita Horton; September 10, 1898 – April 26, 1986) was an American-British actress who achieved prominence playing innocent, young girls and wholesome leading ladies in silent and early sound films. Her acting career spanned eight decades—from silent film to sound film, including theatre, radio, and television—and her performance in The Broadway Melody (1929) earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress.

Love was born Juanita Horton in Midland, Texas, to John Cross Horton and Emma Jane Horton ( Savage). Her father was a cowboy and bartender, while her mother worked in and managed restaurants. She attended school in Midland until she was in the eighth grade, when her family moved to Arizona, New Mexico, and then to California, where they settled in Hollywood. When in Hollywood, her father became a chiropractor, and her mother worked at the Jantzen's Knitwear and Bathing Suits factory.

In June 1915, while a student at Los Angeles High School, Horton went to the set of a film to meet with actor Tom Mix, who had recommended that she visit him if she wanted to "get into pictures". However, when Mix was unavailable, she was advised to meet with pioneering film director D. W. Griffith, who put her under personal contract. When it was decided that her given name was too long for theater marquees and too difficult to pronounce, Griffith's associate Frank Woods gave Horton the stage name Bessie Love: "Bessie, because any child can pronounce it. And Love, because we want everyone to love her!" Love dropped out of high school to pursue her film career, but she completed her diploma in 1919.

Griffith gave her a small role in his Intolerance (1916). Although Intolerance was her first performance to be filmed, it was her ninth film to be released. The first films Love made were with Griffith's Fine Arts company, yet Intolerance was the only film that he formally directed.

Her "first role of importance" —in the second of her films to be released—was in The Flying Torpedo (1916). She later appeared opposite William S. Hart in The Aryan and with Douglas Fairbanks in The Good Bad-Man, Reggie Mixes In, and The Mystery of the Leaping Fish (all 1916). This string of appearances and supporting roles led to her first starring role, in A Sister of Six (1916). In her early career, she was likened to Mary Pickford, and was called "Our Mary" by Griffith.

As her roles got larger, her popularity gradually grew. In early 1918, Love left Fine Arts for a better contract with Pathé.[ After the Pathé films were unsuccessful, she signed a nine-film contract with Vitagraph later that year, all of which were directed by David Smith. Her performances often received positive reviews, but her films often were shown at smaller movie theaters, which impacted the growth of her career.

Upon the completion of her Vitagraph contract, Love became a free agent. She took an active role in the management of her career, and was represented by Gerald C. Duffy, the former editor of Picture-Play Magazine.

Love sought roles that were different from the little girls she had portrayed earlier in her career when under contract to studios. She played Asian women in The Vermilion Pencil (1922) and The Purple Dawn (1923); a drug-addicted mother in Human Wreckage (1923); a woman accused of murder in The Woman on the Jury (1924); an underworld flapper in Those Who Dance (1924); and versions of her real-life self in Night Life in Hollywood (1922), Souls for Sale (1923), and Mary of the Movies (1923).

As a film star, she was expected to entertain studio executives at parties, so she learned to sing, dance, and play the ukulele. She gradually honed these skills and later performed them onscreen and on the stage. Because of her performance in The King on Main Street (1925), Love is credited with being the first person to dance the Charleston on film, popularizing it in the United States. Her technique was documented in instructional guides, including a series of photographs by Edward Steichen. She subsequently performed the dance the following year in The Song and Dance Man.

In 1925, she starred in The Lost World, a science fiction adventure based on the novel of the same name by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In 1927, she appeared in the successful Dress Parade, and was so impressed by her experiences on location that she wrote the unpublished novel Military Mary. A year later, she starred in The Matinee Idol, a romantic comedy directed by a young Frank Capra. Despite these successes, Love's career was on the decline. She lived frugally so that she could afford lessons in singing and dancing.

Love toured with a musical revue for sixteen weeks, which was so physically demanding that she broke a rib. The experience she gained on the vaudeville stage singing and dancing in three performances a day prepared her for the introduction of sound films. She appeared in the successful sound musical short film The Swell Head in early 1928, and was signed to MGM later that year.

In 1929, she appeared in her first feature-length sound film, the musical The Broadway Melody. Her performance earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress, and the success of the film resulted in a five-year contract with MGM and an increase in her weekly salary from US$500 to $3,000 (equivalent to $45,000 in 2019)—$1,000 more than her male co-star Charles King.

She appeared in several other early musicals, including 1929's The Hollywood Revue of 1929 and 1930's Chasing Rainbows, Good News, and They Learned About Women. Her success in these musicals earned her the title "the screen's first musical comedy star."

However, the popularity of musical films waned, again putting her career in decline. Love is quoted as saying of her career: "I guess I'm through. They don't seem to want me any more." She shifted focus to her personal life, marrying in December 1929.

She semi-retired from films, and traveled with a musical revue that included clips from her films The Broadway Melody, The Hollywood Revue, and Chasing Rainbows. While on tour, she learned she was pregnant with her daughter, who was born in 1932. Love stopped her stage work to raise her daughter. In 1935, Love moved to England, briefly returning to the United States in 1936 to obtain a divorce.

During World War II in Britain, when it was difficult to find employment as an actress, Love worked as the script supervisor on the film drama San Demetrio London (1943). She also worked for the American Red Cross.

After the war, Love began acting again, this time primarily in the theater and on BBC Radio as a member of their Drama Repertory Company; she also played small roles in British films, often as an American tourist. Stage work included such productions as Love in Idleness (1944) and Born Yesterday (1947). She wrote and performed in The Homecoming, a semiautobiographical play, which opened in Perth, Scotland in 1958. Film work included The Barefoot Contessa (1954) with Humphrey Bogart, and Ealing Studios' Nowhere to Go (1958), and she had supporting roles in The Greengage Summer (1961) starring Kenneth More, the James Bond thriller On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), and John Schlesinger's Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971). In addition to playing the mother of Vanessa Redgrave's titular character in Isadora (1968), Love also served as dialect coach to the actress.

When television became popular, Love appeared in dozens of episodes of British television shows in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s. In October 1963, she became the subject of This Is Your Life when host Eamonn Andrews surprised her at the stage door of Never Too Late after its London opening. Guests included London Scrapbook director Derrick De Marney, her Forget Me Not (1922) co-star Gareth Hughes, actor Percy Marmont, her friend and Those Who Dance (1924) co-star Blanche Sweet, and her daughter Patricia.

Love appeared in John Osborne's play West of Suez (1971), and as "Aunt Pittypat" in a large-scale musical version of Gone with the Wind (1972). She also played Maud Cunard in the TV miniseries Edward & Mrs. Simpson in 1978. Her film work continued in the 1980s with roles in Ragtime (1981), Reds (1981), Lady Chatterley's Lover (1981), and—her final film—The Hunger (1983).

Love married agent William Hawks at St. James' Episcopal Church in South Pasadena, California on December 27, 1929. Mary Astor (Hawks's sister-in-law), Carmel Myers, and Norma Shearer were among her bridesmaids, with Irving Thalberg and Hawks's brother Howard serving as ushers. Following their wedding, the couple lived at the Havenhurst Apartments in Hollywood, and their only child, Patricia, was born in 1932. Four years later, the couple divorced.

Love moved to England with her daughter in 1935, a year before her divorce was final. Her life in England kept her out of the eye of her American fans, which resulted in the American press erroneously reporting her as dead multiple times. Love became a British subject in the late 1960s.

Love was a Christian Scientist.

After several years of declining health, Love died at the Mount Vernon Hospital in Northwood, London from natural causes on April 26, 1986. Her ashes are interred at Breakspear Crematorium in Ruislip, Hillingdon, England.

Cartoonist Alex Gard created a caricature of Love for Sardi's, the famed restaurant in Manhattan's Theater District. It is now part of the Billy Rose Theatre Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Portraits of Love are also in the collections of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. and the National Portrait Gallery in London.

Love periodically was interviewed by film historians, and was featured in the television documentary series The Hollywood Greats (1978) and Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film (1980), both about early filmmaking in Hollywood. She also loaned materials from her personal collection to museums. In 1962, she began contributing articles about her experiences to The Christian Science Monitor. In 1977, she published an autobiography entitled From Hollywood with Love.

For her contributions to the motion picture industry, Love was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960 at 6777 Hollywood Boulevard.

#bessie love #silent era #silent hollywood #silent movie stars #golden age of hollywood #classic movie stars #classic hollywood #1910s movies #1920s hollywood #1930s hollywood #1940s hollywood #1950s hollywood #1960s hollywood #1970s hollywood #1980s Hollywood

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purplesurveys · 4 years

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1011

1. Five facts about your current relationship OR five facts about your single life.

a) I haven’t been truly single in...around 6 years, so it’s been a bit of an adjustment.

b) It was my last day as an intern yesterday (but they hired me, so I’m staying after all, haha) and since I’ve felt like I gained a family in the last two months, I thought it would be okay to give professionalism a break and share what had actually been going on with me on my first day on the job, aka when the breakup was still fresh and I was still figuring out how to function all over again. It unsurprisingly surprised everyone and my superior said something like, “Omg it’s the [company name] curse; it’s so strong it broke you guys up before you even got hired” which got a laugh out of me.

c) I’m not interested in seeing other people.

d) Probably wouldn’t be, for a long time. My trust has been irreparably broken.

e) Seeing couples in public has now become annoying. I’m happy for them, but it’s still annoying.

2. Five facts about a past relationship.

a) I’ve known her since kindergarten, but we didn’t become friends till 7th grade and didn’t start dating until junior year of high school.

b) We were legal with her family and her parents loved me and I them. On the other hand, I was never able to come out to my family because she broke up with me before I could be able to do so.

c) She introduced me to vaping.

d) We were never able to truly travel together, which we always planned to do after graduating. The farthest we reached was Batangas.

e) She never knew where she wanted to eat whenever we were out, so I was mostly the one who decided which restaurant we were going to have lunch or dinner in.

3. Five facts about your mother.

a) She has always worked in hotels, which is great because it has always allowed us to get room and buffet discounts, heh.

b) Her family (aka my grandparents, her, and my uncles) struggled financially for a little bit when my grandpa lost his job when she was in college. When her friends would go to fast-food restaurants, my mom would always decline, saying she had schoolwork to finish. In reality she just couldn’t afford anything, and the only money she held was for public transport.

c) She is a little childish considering her age, and I cannot stand her petty tantrums. She was childish even when I was a kid, and I believe my emotional well-being suffered because of that.

d) She has a high pain tolerance and the only time I’ve seen her struggle was when she was getting a tattoo on the back of her shoulder.

e) She is also extremely religious and it especially grinds my gears when she gets hypocritical about it, which is just about all the time.

4. Five facts about your father.

a) He has only ever dated my mom.

b) He grew up extremely poor and at some point his parents actually stopped being able to afford his tuition. Instead of being kicked out, a few nuns who served in the school paid my grandparents a visit and told them my dad would be given a scholarship since he had good grades and it would have been a waste if he got expelled.

c) He was a dancer in high school, knows how to play the guitar, and he also apparently knows how to draw very well. There’s a lot I don’t know about him, considering he has worked abroad my whole life.

d) He breaks or loses his reading glasses once every few months. I know which parent I definitely take after.

e) I have never seen him cry.

5. Five facts about your sibling. If you have more than one, pick one. Or do them all!

a) She had problems crying in school until she was in around 2nd or 3rd grade.

b) She’s in college and is currently taking up digital filmmaking.

c) She’s the biggest introvert I know. I’ve never seen her be willing to do anything silly; not even with her friends.

d) She can’t handle spicy food.

e) Her main interests have shifted from Harry Potter, to One Direction, to 5SOS, and now K-pop. I believe she’s into Seventeen the most.

6. Five facts about your town.

a) The upper part of the city offers amazing views of the Metro Manila skyline, which has recently made the place a kinda popular nightlife destination.

b) There’s a lot of hidden gem restaurants here but because most people spend more time complaining about how far my city is and how difficult it is to get to than actually just making the damn ride over here, the restaurants stay hidden and uncrowded. Their loss.

c) Used to be massively underdeveloped for most of my childhood and teenage years. Now there are several malls and I can easily go to a McDonald’s, Burger King, and Starbucks right outside our village.

d) Because you basically have to drive through a mountain to get to the upper part of the city, it’s not the safest highway and fatal crashes are unfortunately common.

e) The city is known for its suman, except I hate Filipino rice cakes and this actually doesn’t do anything for me.

7. Five facts about your house.

a) It used to have a balcony until we had that transformed into another bedroom. So technically it is still a balcony; it just hasn’t had that purpose for a while now.

b) My mom used a little cheat in our dining room and installed a huge wall mirror. Most people visiting for the first time always note how much larger it made the room (and thus the house) look.

c) I live in a neighborhood where the houses are of the same model and look (think the Squidville episode from Spongebob). That said, balconies are included in all properties. When my parents decided to renovate ours and turn it into a room, so many houses slowly followed suit as well. It was amusing to see it unfold, knowing the idea undoubtedly originated from us. It was like a revolution.

d) We don’t have a gate, which irritates me to no end because it allows noisy neighborhood kids to just march and run around our property. Sometimes they even make it to our carport and backyard, ugh. :(

e) Speaking of backyard, the landscaping for it used to be a pebble mosaic designed to look like a swan. But over the years the quality deteriorated, so my parents to opted to have the pebbles crushed into tiny rocks and embedded onto the ground. I don’t exactly know what this technique is called, but yeah.

8. Five facts about your niece or nephew. If you have more than one, pick one. Or do them all! Skip if you don’t have one. I don’t have any, but I do have a godson so I’m going with him as I don’t want to leave any section blank.

a) He was born sometime in December. I honestly don’t remember when, loooooool. Worst godmother ever.

b) He’s actually one of my first cousins, but I guess my aunt saw something in me and wanted me to be his godson. I’ve been a terrible one, though; I’ve never bought him gifts or money or anything – to be fair, I was made a ninang when I was like, 14 or 15 lmao. But I can definitely make up for it now that I’m starting to earn my own money.

c) He’s the calmer, sweeter version of his older brother. His kuya was a pretty naughty kid when he was his age.

d) He mainly speaks English, as how most younger parents raise their kids these days. He understands Filipino of course, but he mostly communicates in English.

e) The last time I saw him, he was in the middle of a ridiculously adorable interviewing phase where he’d approach anyone in the family and start asking them a series of questions: what’s your favorite color? What food can’t you live without? What’s your favorite subject in school? Would you rather win $1 million dollars or know how to fly? It typically got exhausting after the 25th question, but it was so cute nonetheless. None of us have any idea where it came from.

9. Five facts about your education.

a) I went to a private, all-girls, Catholic school from kinder up to high school, and then moved to a public, co-educational, non-sectarian university for college. It was the very epitome of culture shock, lemme tell ya.

b) Some classes I had in my first school that might be uncommon in others have included penmanship (because my school has its own brand of cursive), environmental education, and I don’t remember what this next class was called anymore but we were basically taught how to write professionally? Like how to write cover letters and resumés and all.

c) My first school is extremely homophobic and went so far as to ‘hire’ spies tasked to check up on who’s been in same-sex relationships, list them all down, and report them to the guidance office so that they can be called one by one and be interrogated, and for the most part, pressured to come out. I don’t know if they still do this, but the younger batches are definitely more vocal and woke now thanks to social media and I doubt those practices would still fly today.

d) My university education was a breath of fresh air. Suddenly people were wearing sleeveless tops, mobs and rallies were a common sight to me, and my instructors were now atheist and not shoving Catholicism and Jesus and salvation down my throat. I loved every single day of it.

e) The most interesting class I took in college was a course called Pornography in Electronic Media, under the broadcast communication department. Getting to tell people I take a class where we sit down to watch porn was such a fucking ride.

10. Five facts about your job.

a) I got hired last Wednesday, but I had been interning for the company for around two months before they extended the offer.

b) I’m pretty much gonna be doing the same things I did as an intern, except I’m now accountable for any boo-boos I make HAHAHAHA. Also, I’m gonna be paid a lot more, obviously, which is sweet. I really thought we interns were severely underpaid considering the work that we help with on a daily basis.

c) My role is going to be with another department which is a little scary because it means the things I learned with the department I actually interned at will be pretty much useless. I’ll be starting from scratch again, but I’m still excited.

d) It’s a work-from-home situation, which is a relief for me because I don’t have to wake up early and I don’t have to face traffic.

e) My job interview for the position was actually a bit of a bomb because I absolutely fumbled with and messed up the first question I was asked; and since first impressions matter, I really thought I lost the gig from the very start of the interview. I made up for it as the interview continued and fortunately was able to break the ice and build a rapport with the team members who spoke with me, and I guess I did enough for them to want to take me in anyway.

For those who are curious, I blanked the fuck out when they asked “Tell me something about yourself that isn’t in your resumé.” Slowest 15 seconds of my life.

#survey #surveys

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pennyfynotes · 6 years

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8.2.18 // 4:30pm // school subjects and AP exams oh my

so i recently (ok not so recently i’m sorry super busy rn) got an ask from an anon about subject specific tips and ap exams. this is the masterpost i told you to look out for ;). there are no ap exams in college, but some of the stuff is still applicable. i did my best to be as comprehensive as possible and dump everything in one place. hope this is helpful! xoxo, m ps. guess where the actual tips are? if you said “under the cut” then you’re right bc i’m predicable af

tips by subject:

languages (i took spanish): 1. flashcards are your friend. i don’t care if they’re digital (would recommend quizlet or studyblue) or paper, but they help immensely with either vocab or things like remembering literature.

2. charts are also your friend. conjugations giving you a hard time? write out a chart of the different tenses and the conjugations for each subject. put down some of the irregulars too.

3. acronyms/pnemonics are also also your friend. a lot of these already exist, you just have to go find them. i’m pretty sure i still remember what “wedding” stands for for the spanish subjunctive.

4. it’s ok to start over. it’s easy to start a sentence based on what you’d say in english. you’re doing fine until *bam* you hit that word/phrase you really need but you have no clue how to say it. whether it’s an oral or written exam, take a few seconds to think about it and, if you can’t figure it out, just back track. restart the sentence and rework it. better to do that than to lose all your time thinking of one word you may or may not know.

5. skirt around things. if you can’t remember how to say fridge but you really need to say it for something, just say “machine that keeps food cold” or something. it might sound silly, but it gets the point across and removes the road block.

6. make a list. no, not a to do list. if there’s phrases you find yourself reaching for all the time, but you can never remember, make a list of them and their translations. it might be because its a phrase/part of a sentence structure you use a lot in your native language or whatever. make that list and drill just those few phrases into your head. it’s helpful

english/language arts: 1. proofread. i guarantee you’ll find a mistake, a sentence that makes no sense, or one that just sounds cringy. thank me later.

2. have a damn thesis. its ok if you just need to write and spit words/ideas out for a while to figure it out. but figure it out.

3. conclusion ~= introduction. for those of you who didn’t get the tilde, it means not. yes, they both tie your points to your thesis but they are not to same. do not just reword the same information in the conclusion. push your ideas just a little further. i usually like the push them a little bit outside the realm of what i talked about in my paper. for example, if i focused on the first 5 chapters of the book in the rest of my paper, i’ll expand the ideas to the rest of the book. or if i’m talking about female characters and focus on just one or two, i’ll use the conclusion to potentially connect it to another.

4. have favorites. pick a few fav transitions, sentence structures, and fancy vocab words. basically build a toolbox. this way you won’t have to think as hard when you want to “spice up” your work.

5. summaries only go so far. once you get to higher level english classes, there will be a lot of analysis of specific imagery, or wording, or dialogue. reading cliff notes is only going to give you the plot and none of this. if you don’t have time to read and you’ve been assigned a pretty standard english novel/play/whatever, take the time to look up some famous quotes or symbols. they’ll probably come up in discussion and this will help you look less unprepared.

6. have on question/comment ready. if your teacher/prof is into discussions and grades on participation, it’s handy to write down one (or a few) things. it’s easy to forget what you were going to say while you follow the discussion and it sucks to get docked points for not saying anything. even if it’s just a thoughtful question, jot it down.

history: 1. lol prob my weakest subject, just go see the apush (ap us history) section bc i don’t have much more for you than that.

science: 1. back to basics. i say it all the time, i’ll say it again. really understand basic concepts. they will come back. i’m serious.

2. pattern recognition. science problems are often times about recognizing patterns. once you identify the type of problem it is, even if you’ve never seen the exact one/something similar before, solving it becomes way easier.

3. make a recipe book. tied to the last one, but once you recognize a type of problem, you need steps to solve it. go through any practice problems you’re given to determine all the “types” of problems. once you’ve categorized them, make yourself a step-by-step guide on how to solve.

4. flashcards. you’ll have to know polyatomic ions or random biology facts. see languages tip #1 for more.

5. note your errors in lab. if you do something wrong, don’t just try to brush it under the table and forget about it. not that it’s a big deal, because its not, so don’t freak out. they’re just great opportunities to note sources of error. i mean obviously dont write in your lab report that you weren’t paying attention and mixed the wrong chemicals, but something like “we may not have waited sufficient time for the product to dry” can explain why you got 800% yield.

6. have a toolkit. kinda like a recipe book, but just a collection of straight facts that come up often. knowing common molecular weights and chemical properties (is ammonia acidic or basic?) will make things go faster. like i said earlier, polyatomic ions are also great.

7. brush up on some simple arithmetic. similar to the tool kit, this will just make things go faster. being able to quickly add things and calculate easy percentages (ex: 30%) will make things like hw and exams go faster. i’m of the opinion it’s always good to know how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide w/o a calculator (on paper, not all in your head)

bonus: math #5 and #7

math: 1. see science #1

2. see science #2

3. see science #3

4. see science #4. see a pattern here? you might wonder why you need to flashcard math, but it’s good for learning equations or the names of certain techniques. if the prof asks you to solve something using X technique and you don’t know what that is, that’s gonna pose a problem. also good for the unit circle (don’t get me started)

5. figure out your speed. this is applicable to most everything, but i find it most relevant for math. is it better for you to speed through the whole exam and then do it all again/check it over 2x? or for you to take it slow so you know you got everything right the first time? personally i use the first approach, but i’m a fast taker and prefer to have time to process between repeating problems instead of staring at it forever once and never looking again.

6. science #7. a lot of teachers will expect you to be able to do this.

7. go over the material a couple times. also applicable to everything. i find it’s easier to remember things when i know that concepts are connected. you might have learned X 3 weeks before Y, but if you go back over, you might realize they’re closely related. this will help you if you’re not sure on a test because you can reason through things using the connections you’ve drawn

tips by ap course (obv look at the subject above bc i will be giving *really specific stuff* here that i’ve gathered from experience. they’re also ordered by when i took them, sorry it’s not super logical but i didn’t want to forget one)

general ap course/exam tips: 1. practice exams. you need to be familiar with what will/will not show up. you don’t always need to simulate and real testing situation, but i’d recommend doing at least 1-2 that way. also *know how many questions they’re are you so can pace yourself!!!!*

2. college board is pretty good about giving topic breakdowns. use those. go through and figure out what topics you’re solid on and which need more work. the above tip is to help decipher what the topics actually mean bc it can be confusing.

3. give the free response a quick flip through. do the ones you’re confident on first.

4. make sure you know the policies/what you can bring. don’t want to forget something. also once our test administrator tried to stop us 10 minutes early, but we were on top of our shit and all gave her a death glare bc we knew when we were supposed to finish.

ap chemistry: 1. polyatomic ions and molecular weights. know them

2. chapter/section reviews (in addition to class notes) and how-to guides. my teacher made us make them and let’s just say your girl did *really* well (and i’m damn proud of that one)

3. do a quick skim of the free response. applicable to most exams but, the year i took it, they’d just remade and re-curved the exam and put *way* too many free response. like no one finished them. if that’s still the case, make sure you do the one’s you’re confident on. also, i did not get to like 3 questions and still got a 5. they may have fixed this idk. (sorry this is redundant but i wanted to give this ap chem exam specific info)

ap environmental science: 1. there is a lot of damn information here. i would use chapter outlines and pick out key terms, policies, and events etc. treat this like a history class.

2. for the exam, use common sense. most of the time, the most environmentally friendly answer is the right one. if you just have a general gist of the course and its topics, but don’t know a lot of details, go with your intuition and you should be fine. i didn’t have a lot of time to study for this one and this method worked for me.

ap calc bc: 1. memorize standard derivatives. power rule, sin and cos, chain rule. that’s important.

2. similarly, memorize standard integrals.

3. don’t forget +c for indefinite integrals. just don’t.

4. similarly, if it’s definite, don’t forget to evaluate at the end! super easy thing to do, but also super easy way to lose points if you forget.

5. if the integral looks complicated, that probably means there’s a “trick” involved. u substitution, integration by parts, trig substitution. something like that.

6. memorize some standard series’, operations, and types (arithmetic, geometric etc)

7. if you’re looking at a word problem, understand what is dependent on your variable and what isn’t (in other words, what’s a constant). for example, if it says the water flows into the barrel at 50 mL/s and flows out at 1/5 times the volume, that translate to F = 50 - (1/5)V. don’t make things more complicated by trying to write everything in terms of V (in this example). also, your equation might just be a constant term or just a variable term doesn’t have to be both.

8. know what your derivative is with respect to/what it really means. aka if your problem is talking about flow and volume, how are they related to each other? flow is the change in volume *with respect to time*. so if i differentiate volume with respect to time, i get flow. if i integrate flow with respect to time, i get volume. this also helps you make sense of word problems.

*disclaimer*: it is been 5 years since i took this class and i have taken quite a few math classes after. i apologize if i introduce anything that is a little irrelevant.

ap spanish language: 1. flashcard. like seriously. there’s gonna be vocab involved.

2. understand what’s asked. for the persuasive email. *be persuasive*

3. toolkit. i mentioned this before but this was probably the most useful for this class. our teacher gave us a bunch of fancier words to use instead of causar (to cause) because that was a word we’d need a lot. the one that still sticks with me 4 years later is fomentar. have a few alternatives for these kinds of super common words, a good greeting and closing for your email, and a set of good transitions. *make sure you know how to use them properly*

4. write stuff down during listening. you can either answer questions during the first listen, then take notes the second to catch stuff you missed or vice versa.

5. it’s ok to backtrack in the speaking. don’t let yourself get stuck and just not say anything. it’ll freak you out for the rest of the exam and will rob you from showing off what you know. also take notes of things you want to mention based off cultural knowledge of the situation related to the dialogue.

6. don’t zone out. with everything going on and all the stress, it’s easy to zone out (esp during the conversation). don’t do it or you’ll have a hard time responding and freak yourself out (again)

7. don’t lose your place in the convo! they give you a sheet that shows you how many times the other “person” will talk. i lost track and said goodbye one segment early. it was bad ok. all these conversation tips are from personal experience.

ap statistics: 1. know the different kinds of tests inside and out. know the differences and the conditions. if you’ve got that, you’re like 75% the way there.

2. be familiar with sample vs population. it’s a bit confusing, but take the time to understand.

3. ok sorry i really don’t remember anything else. this exam really isn’t that difficult (in my opinion), you’ll be ok.

ap physics c: 1. free body diagrams. understand how to draw them *and draw them*. they will carry you through mechanics. draw gravitational force, normal if there’s a surface, and then any other given forces.

2. basic equations. you get an equation sheet, but knowing the equations means you know the concepts and the relations between them. big ones are f=ma and the equations relating position (x), velocity (v), and acceleration (a). also friction f=uN.

3. *normal isn’t always the opposite direction of gravity!!!!* gravity is straight down. normal is perpendicular to the surface.

4. vector components. please don’t just add vectors. break them down into components and then add or you are so fucked.

5. get familiar with triangles. this will help with the whole component thing.

6. kirchoffs rules are so helpful. know them.

7. understand the relations between voltage/potential and current in terms of the properties of circuit elements. that means the equations for resistors, capacitors, and inductors.

8. know how to add in parallel and series. it’s important. also! if the circuit is drawn “weird” a good way to know series vs parallel is that parallel elements share two nodes and that series circuits only share 1.

9. sorry i kinda blocked out E+M bc i didn’t know what i was doing (or so i thought). i still got a 4 tho so that curve is generous.

ap us history: 1. chapter outlines. pretty self explanatory.

2. make a timeline. put important events, sentiments, policies, and presidents. if you can associate these things together into time periods it will be easier. most of the time, any one question (esp long response or whatever they’re called) will only focus on 1 time period.

3. sentiments are important. if you know nothing else, know these bc they will help guide you through questions by reasoning even if you know nothing else.

4. gilder lehrman (or similar us history summaries). these are tailor specifically to apush bc they are organized by period (i think that’s what they were called?). i actually fell asleep listening to these bc i didn’t have time to study. they were mildly helpful, but every little bit helps right?

ap psychology: 1. chapter outlines/flashcards. this course is based heavily on key terms and less so on larger concepts.

2. ok sorry i took this online i remember literally nothing except how annoying my teacher was and that the exam was easy. if you know terminology i think you should do fine.

ap biology: 1. there is a lot. go through all the topics and make sure you’re solid. start with the big picture, then think about narrowing down.

2. know how charts work. things like pedigrees, punnet squares, and evolution trees (that’s def not the right term). some of the exam will just be interpretation of this.

3. i am so sorry i remember nothing else.

ap spanish literature: 1. flashcards. title, author, time period, short summary, key elements (a line, character, symbol). this is *so helpful*

2. think about the works in relation to each other. you might be asked to compare them. even if they ask you to compare something on the reading list with something new, you’ll be familiar with the points you might talk about.

3. know the lit terms. more flashcards. associate them with a particular work if you can/need to.

4. don’t freak on the listening. a lot of the recordings are old and shitty quality. take a deep breath and try your best. know that the rest of the test takers (excepting maybe natives) are experiencing the same thing.

5. use that tool box. see general spanish and ap spanish lang.

this is so freaking long and i think the moral of the story is that i blocked out my senior year ap exams. i hope this was helpful and, if you have more questions, or want more stuff like this, let me know!

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ecoamerica · 1 month

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Watch the 2024 American Climate Leadership Awards for High School Students now: https://youtu.be/5C-bb9PoRLc

The recording is now available on ecoAmerica's YouTube channel for viewers to be inspired by student climate leaders! Join Aishah-Nyeta Brown & Jerome Foster II and be inspired by student climate leaders as we recognize the High School Student finalists. Watch now to find out which student received the $25,000 grand prize and top recognition!

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bountyofbeads · 4 years

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This expose` is an fascinating look at Joe Biden’s life growing up as a stutterer and the effects this disability had on his life, including in politics. It's long but well worth the read in light of his debate performances being questioned and whether he's up to the challenge of facing off against Trump.

Biden says his father taught him about “shouldering burdens with grace.” Specifically, he told his son, “Never complain. Never explain.”

What Joe Biden Can’t Bring Himself to Say

His verbal stumbles have voters worried about his mental fitness. Maybe they’d be more understanding if they knew he’s still fighting a stutter.

Photography Mark Peckmezian, Story by John Hendrickson

SPECIAL PREVIEW: JAN/FEB 2020 ISSUE

LISTEN TO ARTICLE ON WEBSITE

His eyes fall to the floor when I ask him to describe it. We’ve been tiptoeing toward it for 45 minutes, and so far, every time he seems close, he backs away, or leads us in a new direction. There are competing theories in the press, but Joe Biden has kept mum on the subject. I want to hear him explain it. I ask him to walk me through the night he appeared to lose control of his words onstage.

“I—um—I don’t remember,” Biden says. His voice has that familiar shake, the creak and the croak. “I’d have to see it. I-I-I don’t remember.”

We’re in Biden’s mostly vacant Washington, D.C., campaign office on an overcast Tuesday at the end of the summer. Since entering the Democratic presidential-primary race in April, Biden has largely avoided in-depth interviews. When I first reached out, in late June, his press person was polite but noncommittal: Was an interview really necessary for the story?

Then came the second debate, at the end of July, in Detroit. The first one, a month earlier, had been a disaster for Biden. He was unprepared when Senator Kamala Harris criticized both his past resistance to federally mandated busing and a recent speech in which he’d waxed fondly about collaborating with segregationist senators. Some of his answers that night had been meandering and difficult to parse, feeding into the narrative that he wasn’t just prone to verbal slipups—he’s called himself a “gaffe machine”—but that his age was a problem, that he was confused and out of touch.

Detroit was Biden’s chance to regain control of the narrative. And then something else happened. The candidates were talking about health care. At first, Biden sounded strong, confident, presidential: “My plan makes a limit of co-pay to be One. Thousand. Dollars. Because we—”

He stopped. He pinched his eyes closed. He lifted his hands and thrust them forward, as if trying to pull the missing sound from his mouth. “We f-f-f-f-further support—” He opened his eyes. “The uh-uh-uh-uh—” His chin dipped toward his chest. “The-uh, the ability to buy into the Obamacare plan.” Biden also stumbled when trying to say immune system.

Fox News edited these moments into a mini montage. Stifling laughter, the host Steve Hilton narrated: “As the right words struggled to make that perilous journey from Joe Biden’s brain to Joe Biden’s mouth, half the time he just seemed to give up with this somewhat tragic and limp admission of defeat.”

Several days later, Biden’s team got back in touch with me. One of his aides gingerly asked whether I’d noticed the former vice president stutter during the debate. Of course I had—I stutter, far worse than Biden. The aide said he was ready to talk about it. Last night, after Biden stumbled multiple times during the Atlanta debate, the topic became even more relevant.

“So how are you, man?”

Biden is in his usual white button-down and navy suit, a flag pin on the left lapel. Up close, he looks like he’s lost weight since leaving office in 2017. His height is commanding, but, as he approaches his 77th birthday, he doesn’t fill out his suit jacket like he used to.

I stutter as I begin to ask my first question. “I’ve only … told a few people I’m … d-doing this piece. Every time I … describe it, I get … caught on the w-word-uh stuh-tuh-tuh-tutter.”

“So did I,” Biden replies. “It doesn’t”—he interrupts himself—“can’t define who you are.”

Maybe you’ve heard Biden talk about his boyhood stutter. A non-stutterer might not notice when he appears to get caught on words as an adult, because he usually maneuvers out of those moments quickly and expertly. But on other occasions, like that night in Detroit, Biden’s lingering stutter is hard to miss. He stutters—if slightly—on several sounds as we sit across from each other in his office. Before addressing the debate specifically, I mention what I’ve just heard. “I want to ask you, as, you know, a … stutterer to, uh, to a … stutterer. When you were … talking a couple minutes ago, it, it seemed to … my ear, my eye … did you have … trouble on s? Or on … m?”

Biden looks down. He pivots to the distant past, telling me that the letter s was hard when he was a kid. “But, you know, I haven’t stuttered in so long that it’s hhhhard for me to remember the specific—” He pauses. “What I do remember is the feeling.”

Istarted stuttering at age 4.

I still struggle to say my own name. When I called the gas company recently, the automated voice apologized for not being able to understand me. This happens a lot, so I try to say “representative,” but r’s are tough too. When I reach a human, I’m inevitably asked whether we have a poor connection. Busy bartenders will walk away and serve someone else when I take too long to say the name of a beer. Almost every deli guy chuckles as I fail to enunciate my order, despite the fact that I’ve cut it down to just six words: “Turkey club, white toast, easy mayo.” I used to just point at items on the menu.

My head will shake on a really bad stutter. People have casually asked whether I have Parkinson’s. I curl my toes inside my shoes or tap my foot as a distraction to help me get out of it, a behavior that I’ve repeated so often, it’s become a tic. Sometimes I shuffle a pen between my hands. When I was little, I used to press my palm against my forehead in an effort to force the missing word out of my brain. Back then, my older brother would imitate this motion and the accompanying sound, a dull whine—something between a cow and a sheep. A kid at baseball camp, Michael, referred to me as “Stutter Boy.” He’d snap his fingers and repeat it as if calling a dog. “Stutter Boy! Stutter Boy!” In college, I applied for a job at a coffee shop. I stuttered horribly through the interview, and the owner told me he couldn’t hire me, because he wanted his café to be “a place where customers feel comfortable.”

Stuttering is a neurological disorder that affects roughly 70 million people, about 3 million of whom live in the United States. It has a strong genetic component: Two-thirds of stutterers have a family member who actively stutters or used to. Biden’s uncle on his mother’s side—“Uncle Boo-Boo,” as he was called—stuttered his whole life.

In the most basic sense, a stutter is a repetition, prolongation, or block in producing a sound. It typically presents between the ages of 2 and 4, in up to twice as many boys as girls, who also have a higher recovery rate. During the developmental years, some children’s stutter will disappear completely without intervention or with speech therapy. The longer someone stutters, however, the lower the chances of a full recovery—perhaps due to the decreasing plasticity of the brain. Research suggests that no more than a quarter of people who still stutter at 10 will completely rid themselves of the affliction as adults.

“Mr. Buh-Buh-Buh-Biden, what’s that word?,” a nun asked Joe Biden in front of his seventh-grade classmates.

The cultural perception of stutterers is that they’re fearful, anxious people, or simply dumb, and that stuttering is the result. But it doesn’t work like that. Let’s say you’re in fourth grade and you have to stand up and recite state capitals. You know that Juneau is the capital of Alaska, but you also know that you almost always block on the j sound. You become intensely anxious not because you don’t know the answer, but because you do know the answer, and you know you’re going to stutter on it.

Stuttering can feel like a series of betrayals. Your body betrays you when it refuses to work in concert with your brain to produce smooth speech. Your brain betrays you when it fails to recall the solutions you practiced after school with a speech therapist, allegedly in private, later learning that your mom was on the other side of a mirror, watching in the dark like a detective. If you’re a lucky stutterer, you have friends and family who build you back up, but sometimes your protectors betray you too.

A Catholic nun betrayed Biden when he was in seventh grade. “I think I was No. 5 in alphabetical order,” Biden says. He points over my right shoulder and stares into the middle distance as the movie rolls in his mind. “We’d sit along the radiators by the window.”

The office we’re in is awash in framed memories: Biden and his family, Biden and Barack Obama, Biden in a denim shirt posing for InStyle. The shelf behind the desk features, among other books, Jon Meacham’s The Soul of America. It’s a phrase Biden has adopted for his campaign this time around, his third attempt at the presidency. In almost every speech, Biden warns potential voters that 2020 is not merely an election, but a battle “for the soul of America.” Sometimes he swaps in nation.

But now we’re back in middle school. The students are taking turns reading a book, one by one, up and down the rows. “I could count down how many paragraphs, and I’d memorize it, because I found it easier to memorize than look at the page and read the word. I’d pretend to be reading,” Biden says. “You learned early on who the hell the bullies were,” he tells me later. “You could tell by the look, couldn’t you?”

For most stutterers, reading out loud summons peak dread. A chunk of text that may take a fluent person roughly a minute to read could take a stutterer five or 10 times as long. Four kids away, three kids away. Your shoulders tighten. Two away. The back of your neck catches fire. One away. Then it happens, and the room fills with secondhand embarrassment. Someone breathes a heavy sigh. Someone else laughs. At least one kid mimics your stutter while you’re actively stuttering. You never talk about it. At night, you stare at the ceiling above your bed, reliving it.

“The paragraph I had to read was: ‘Sir Walter Raleigh was a gentleman. He laid his cloak upon the muddy road suh-suh-so the lady wouldn’t soil her shoes when she entered the carriage,’ ” Biden tells me, slightly and unintentionally tripping up on the word so. “And I said, ‘Sir Walter Raleigh was a gentle man who—’ and then the nun said, ‘Mr. Biden, what is that word?’ And it was gentleman that she wanted me to say, not gentle man. And she said, ‘Mr. Buh-Buh-Buh-Biden, what’s that word?’ ”

Biden says he rose from his desk and left the classroom in protest, then walked home. The family story is that his mother, Jean, drove him back to school and confronted the nun with the made-for-TV phrase “You do that again, I’ll knock your bonnet off your head!” I ask Biden what went through his mind as the nun mocked him.

“Anger, rage, humiliation,” he says. His speech becomes staccato. “A feeling of, uh—like I’m sure you’ve experienced—it just drops out of your chest, just, like, you feel … a void.” He lifts his hands up to his face like he did on the debate stage in July, to guide the v sound out of his mouth: void.

By all accounts, Biden was both popular and a strong athlete in high school. He was class president at Archmere Academy, in Claymont, Delaware. His nickname was “Dash”—not a reference to his speed on the football field, but rather another way to mock his stutter. “It was like Morse code—dot dot dot, dash dash dash dash,” Biden says. “Even though by that time I started to overcome it.”

I ask him to expand on the relationship between anger and humiliation, or shame.

“Shame is a big piece of it,” he says, then segues into a story about meeting a stutterer while campaigning.

I bring it back up a little later, this time more directly: “When have you felt shame?”

“Not for a long, long, long time. But especially when I was in grade school and high school. Because that’s the time when everything is, you know, it’s rough. They talk about ‘mean girls’? There’s mean boys, too.”

Bill Bowden had the locker next to Biden’s at Archmere. I called Bowden recently. “It was just kind of a funny thing, you know?” he told me. “Hopefully he wasn’t hurt by it.” Bob Markel, another high-school buddy of Biden’s, went a little further when we spoke: “ ‘H-H-H-H-Hey, J-J-J-J-J-Joe B-B-B-B-Biden’—that’s how he’d be addressed.” Markel said the Archmere guys called him “Stutterhead,” or “Hey, Stut !” for short. He fears that he himself may have made fun of Biden once or twice. “I never remember him being offended. He probably was,” Markel said. “I think one of his coping mechanisms was to not show it.” Bowden and Markel have remained friends with Biden to this day.

Before collecting from customers on his paper route, Biden would preplay conversations in his mind, banking lines—a tactic he still sometimes uses on the campaign trail, he says. “I knew the one guy loved the Phillies. And he’d asked me about them all the time. And I knew another person would ask me about my sister, so I would practice an answer.”

After trying and failing at speech therapy in kindergarten, Biden waged a personal war on his stutter in his bedroom as a young teen. He’d hold a flashlight to his face in front of his bedroom mirror and recite Yeats and Emerson with attention to rhythm, searching for that elusive control. He still knows the lines by heart: “Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books.”

Biden performs the passage for me with total fluency, knowing where and when to pause, knowing how many words he can say before needing a breath. This is what stutterers learn to do: reclaim control of their airflow; think in full phrases, not individual words. I ask Biden what his moment of dread used to be in that essay.

“Well, looking back on it, ‘Meek young men grow up in li-li-libraries,’ ” he begins again. “ ‘Li’—the l.”

“That kind of sound, the l sound, is like the … r sound,” I say.

“Yes.”

“Sometimes I’ve noticed, watching old clips, it looks like you do have a little trouble on the r. It’s your middle initial.”

“Yeah.”

“Like ‘ruh-ruh-ruh-remember,’ ” I say, intentionally stuttering on the r.

“Well, I may. I-I-I-I-I haven’t thought I have. But I-I-I-I don’t doubt there’s probably ways people could pick up that there’s something. But I don’t consciously think of it anymore.”

Biden says he hasn’t felt himself caught in a traditional stutter in several decades. “I mean, I can’t remember a time where I’ve ever worried before a crowd of 80,000 people or 800 people or 80 people—I haven’t had that feeling of dread since, I guess, speech class in college,” he says, referring to an undergraduate public-speaking course at the University of Delaware.

This is when I ask him what happened that night in Detroit.

After saying he doesn’t remember, Biden opines: “I’m everybody’s target; they have to take me down. And so, what I found is—not anymore—I’ve found that it’s difficult to deal with some of the criticism, based on the nature of the person directing the criticism. It’s awful hard to be, to respond the same way in a national debate—especially when you’re, you know, the guy who is characterized as the white-guy-of-privilege kind of thing—to turn and say to someone who says, ‘I’m not saying you’re a racist, but …’ and know you’re being set up. So I have to admit to you, I found my mind going, What the hell? How do I respond to that? Because I know she’s being completely unfair.”

I eventually realize that he’s describing the moment from the first debate, when Harris criticized his record on race.

“These aren’t debates,” he continues. “These are one-minute assertions. And I don’t think there’s anybody who hasn’t been taking shots at me, which is okay. I’m a big boy, don’t get me wrong.”

Listening back to that part of the conversation after our interview made me feel dizzy. I can only speculate as to why Biden’s campaign agreed to this interview, but I assume the reasoning went something like this: If Biden disclosed to me, a person who stutters, that he himself still actively stutters, perhaps voters would cut him some slack when it comes to verbal misfires, as well as errors that seem more related to memory and cognition. But whenever I asked Biden about what appeared to be his present-day stuttering, the notably verbose candidate became clipped, or said he didn’t remember, or spun off to somewhere new.

I wondered if I reminded Biden of his old self, a ghost from his youth, the stutterer he used to be. He and I are about the same height. We happened to be wearing the exact same outfit that day: navy suit, white shirt, no tie. We both went to all-male prep schools, the sort of place where displaying any weakness is a liability.

As I listened to the recording of our interview, I remembered how I used to respond when people asked me about my stutter. I’d shut down. I’d try to change the subject. I’d almost always look away.

In early september, I got in touch with my high-school speech pathologist, Joseph Donaher, who practices at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. I hadn’t heard Donaher’s voice for almost 15 years. Immediately, I was transported back to the little windowless room in the hospital where we used to meet. Donaher was the first therapist—really the first person—who ever leveled with me. I can still see his face, the neutrality in his eyes on the day he looked at me square and said the sentence my friends and parents had avoided saying my entire life: You have a severe stutter.

Donaher and his colleagues try to help their patients open up about the shame and low self-worth that accompany stuttering. Instead of focusing solely on mechanics, or on the ability to communicate, they first build up the desire to communicate at all. They then share techniques such as elongating vowels and lightly approaching hard-consonant clusters, meaning just touching on the first sound in a word like stutter—the st—to keep the mouth and throat from tensing up and interfering with speech. The goal isn’t to be totally fluent but, simply put, to stutter better.

This evolution in treatment has been accompanied by a new movement to destigmatize the disorder, similar to the drive to view autism through a lens of “neurodiversity” rather than as a pathology. The idea is to accept, even embrace, one’s stutter. There are practical reasons for this: Research shows, according to Donaher, that the simple disclosure “I stutter” benefits both the stutterer and the listener—the former gets to explain what’s happening and ease the awkward tension so the latter isn’t stuck wondering what’s “wrong” with this person. Saying those two words is harder than it seems. “I’m working with people who spend their whole lives and are never able to disclose it,” Donaher told me.

Biden says his father taught him about “shouldering burdens with grace.” Specifically, he told his son, “Never complain. Never explain.”

Eric S. Jackson, an assistant professor of communicative sciences and disorders at NYU, told me he believes that Biden’s eye movements—the blinks, the downward glances—are part of his ongoing efforts to manage his stutter. “As kids we figure out: Oh, if I move parts of my body not associated with the speech system, sometimes it helps me get through these blocks faster,” Jackson, a stutterer himself, explained. Jackson credits an intensive program at the American Institute for Stuttering, in Manhattan, with bringing him back from a “rock bottom” period in his mid-20s, when he says his stutter kept him from meeting women or speaking up enough to reach his professional goals. Afterward, Jackson went all in on disclosure: Every day for six months, he stood up during the subway ride to and from work and announced that he was a person who stutters. “I had this new relationship with my stuttering—I was like Hercules,” he told me. At 41, Jackson still stutters, but in conversation he confidently maintains eye contact and appears relaxed. He wishes Biden would be more transparent about his intermittent disfluency. “Running for president is essentially the biggest stage in the world. For him to come out and say ‘I still stutter and it’s fine’ would be an amazing, empowering message.”

Occasionally, Biden has used present-tense verbs when discussing his stutter. “I find myself, when I’m tired, cuh-cuh-catching myself, like that,” he said during a 2016 American Institute for Stuttering speech. Biden has used the phrase we stutterers at times, but in most public appearances and interviews, Biden talks about how he overcame his speech problem, and how he believes others can too. You can watch videos posted by his campaign in which Biden meets young stutterers and encourages them to follow his lead. They’re sweet clips, even if the underlying message—beat it or bust—is out of sync with the normalization movement.

Emma Alpern is a 32-year-old copy editor who co-leads the Brooklyn chapter of the National Stuttering Association and co-founded NYC Stutters, which puts on a day-long conference for stuttering destigmatization. Alpern told me that she’s on a group text with other stutterers who regularly discuss Biden, and that it’s been “frustrating” to watch the media portray Biden’s speech impediment as a sign of mental decline or dishonesty. “Biden allows that to happen by not naming it for what it is,” she said, though she’s not sure that his presidential candidacy would benefit if he were more forthcoming. “I think he’s dug himself into a hole of not saying that he still stutters for so long that it would strike people as a little weird.”

Biden has presented the same life story for decades. He’s that familiar face—Uncle Joe. He was born 11 months after Pearl Harbor and grew up in the last era of definitive “good guys” and “bad guys.” He’s the dependable guy, the tenacious guy, the aviators-and-crossed-arms guy. That guy doesn’t stutter; that guy used to stutter.

“My dad taught me the value of constancy, effort, and work, and he taught me about shouldering burdens with grace,” Biden writes in the first chapter of his 2007 memoir, Promises to Keep. “He used to quote Benjamin Disraeli: ‘Never complain. Never explain.’ ”

Stephen colbert launches across the Ed Sullivan Theater stage, as if from a pinball spring. It’s early September, and his Late Show taping is about to begin. To warm up, he takes a few questions from the studio audience. Someone asks what he’d want in a potential new president. “Empathy?” Colbert deadpans. “A soul?”

Colbert tapes in Midtown Manhattan on the same stage where the Beatles made their American television debut 55 years ago, when Joe Biden was a mere 22. Biden struts out to a standing ovation and throws up his hands in amazement: For me? A brief “Joe! Joe! Joe!” chant erupts.

At first, Colbert lobs softballs, and Biden touches on the key parts of his 2020 stump speech: Why voters must stand up to the existential threat of Trumpism and how the Charlottesville, Virginia, white-supremacist rally crystallized his decision to run. Then Colbert goes for it.

“In the last few weeks, you’ve confused New Hampshire for Vermont; said

Bobby Kennedy and MLK were assassinated in the late ’70s; assured us, ‘I am not going nuts.’ Follow-up question: Are you going nuts?”

“Look, the reason I came on the Jimmy Kimmel show was because—”

The audience howls. Biden flashes a flirty smile. Colbert adjusts his glasses, sticks his pen in his mouth, and nods in approval. The joke was probably canned, but Biden landed it.

Colbert continues to press him about accuracy issues in his storytelling. The studio audience is silent; I’m watching from the balcony and can hear the theater’s air-conditioning humming overhead.

“I-I-I-I-I don’t get wrong things like, uh, ya know, there is a, we, we should lock kids up in cages at the border. I mean, I don’t—” People applaud before Biden can finish.

When the interview is over, Biden receives a second standing ovation. He peers up toward the rafters, using his hand as a visor against the bright lights. A white spotlight follows him offstage. Several minutes later, he glides through the stage door and out onto West 53rd Street. People call to him from the sidewalk. “Joe! Joe Biden!” He climbs into the back of an idling black SUV, and the doors

clunk close.

I follow Biden for a couple of days while he campaigns in New Hampshire. His town halls have a distinctly Norman Rockwell vibe. One takes place in the middle of the day on the third floor of a former textile mill, another on a stretch of grass as the wind whips off the Piscataqua River. His crowds are predominantly older, filled with people who stand for the Pledge of Allegiance and wait patiently to ask questions. After he speaks, Biden typically walks offstage to Bruce Springsteen’s “We Take Care of Our Own,” then saunters down the rope line for handshakes and hugs and selfies. One voter after another tells me they’re unaware of Biden’s stutter. “Knowing that he has had something like that to deal with and overcame it, as well as other really sad things that have happened—it just makes me like him more,” says 70-year-old Grace Payne.

Back in New York, I start to wonder if I’m forcing Biden into a box where he doesn’t belong. My box. Could I be jealous that his present stutter is less obvious than mine? That he can go sentences at a time without a single block or repetition? Even the way I’m writing this piece—keeping Biden’s stammers, his ums and pauses, on the page—seems hypocritical. Here I am highlighting the glitches in his speech, when the journalistic courtesy, convention even, is to edit them out.

I spend weeks watching Biden more than listening to him, trying to “catch him in the act” of stuttering on camera. There’s one. There’s one. That was a bad one. Also, I start stuttering more.

In September, before the third Democratic debate, in Houston, I called Michael Sheehan, a Washington, D.C.–area communications coach whose company website boasts clients ranging from Nike to the Treasury Department. Sheehan worked with President Bill Clinton while he was in office and began consulting on and off for Biden in 2002, when he was in the Senate. On the day we spoke, he was in Wilmington, Delaware, doing debate prep with Biden.

Sheehan and I traded stories of daily indignities—he stutters too. “I remember exactly where the deli was; it was on 71st and First Avenue,” he said with an ache in his voice. He lamented the interventionists, the people who volunteer, “ ‘You know, why don’t you speak more slowly?’ I always want to say ‘Holy shit! Why didn’t I think of that? Thank you!’ ”

Sheehan’s own stutter improved, but didn’t fully go away, when he took up speech and debate in high school. This eventually led him to the theater, which is a common, if surprising, place where some stutterers find that they’re able to speak with relative ease. Taking on a character, another voice, the theory goes, relies on a different neural pathway from the one used in conversation. Many successful actors have battled stutters—Samuel L. Jackson, Bruce Willis, Emily Blunt, James Earl Jones. In 2014, Jones, whose muscular baritone is the bedrock of one of the most quoted lines in film history, told NPR that he doesn’t use the word cured to describe his apparent fluency. “I just work with it,” he said.

At an August town hall, Biden briefly blocked on Obama, before subbing in my boss. The headlines afterward? “Biden Forgets Obama’s Name.”

Sheehan was extremely careful with the language he used to describe Biden’s speech patterns—“I can’t say it’s a stutter”—though he noted his friend’s habit of abruptly changing directions mid-sentence. “I do hear those little pauses, but I really don’t hear the stuff that you would hear from me or I would hear from you,” he said. A few minutes into our conversation, he choked up while discussing Biden’s tenderness toward young stutterers. “Sometimes I feel when he goes a little long on a speech, he’s just making up for lost time, you know?”

Sheehan told me about a night when he came home with his wife and saw the answering-machine light blinking: “Hey, Michael, it’s Joe Biden. I just was watching The King’s Speech with my granddaughter, and I just thought I’d give you a call, because it made me think of you. Goodbye!” He says the message felt like a secret fraternity handshake: “You and I have both been there, and only people in that society know what that is about.”

In Biden’s office, the first time I bring up his current stuttering, he asks me whether I’ve seen The King’s Speech. He speaks almost mystically about the award-winning 2010 film. “When King George VI, when he stood up in 1939, everyone knew he stuttered, and they knew what courage it took for him to stand up at that stadium and try to speak—and it gave them courage … I could feel that. It was that sinking feeling, like—oh my God, I remember how you felt. You feel like, I don’t know … almost like you’re being sucked into a black hole.”

Presidential candidates usually don’t speak about their bleakest moments, certainly not this viscerally. It resembles the way Biden writes in his memoir about the aftermath of the 1972 car accident that killed his first wife and young daughter and critically injured his two sons, Beau and Hunter: “I could not speak, only felt this hollow core grow in my chest, like I was going to be sucked inside a black hole.”

A few weeks later, I ask Jill Biden what she remembers about sitting next to her husband during the movie. “It was one of those moments in a marriage where you just sort of understand without words being spoken,” she says.

As he watched The King’s Speech, Biden accurately guessed that the screenwriter, David Seidler, was a stutterer. “He showed me a copy of a speech they found in an attic that the king had actually used, where he marks his—it’s exactly what I do!” Biden tells me, his voice lifting. “My staff, when I have them put something on a prompter—I wish I had something to show you.”

He pulls out a legal pad and begins drawing diagonal lines a few inches apart, as if diagramming invisible sentences: x words, breath, y words, breath. “Because it’s just the way I have—the, the best way for me to read a, um, a speech. I mean, when I saw The King’s Speech, and the speech—I didn’t know anybody who did that!”

Biden is running for president on a simple message: America is not Trump. I’m not Trump. I’ll lead us out of this. With every new debate, with every new “gaffe,” the media continue to ask whether Biden has the stamina for the job. And with every passing month, his competitors—namely Senator Elizabeth Warren and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg—have gained on him in the polls.

A stutter does not get worse as a person ages, but trying to keep it at bay can take immense physical and mental energy. Biden talks all day to audiences both small and large. In addition to periodically stuttering or blocking on certain sounds, he appears to intentionally not stutter by switching to an alternative word—a technique called “circumlocution”—which can yield mangled syntax. I’ve been following practically everything he’s said for months now, and sometimes what is quickly characterized as a memory lapse is indeed a stutter. As Eric Jackson, the speech pathologist, pointed out to me, during a town hall in August Biden briefly blocked on Obama, before quickly subbing in my boss. The headlines after the event? “Biden Forgets Obama’s Name.” Other times when Biden fudges a detail or loses his train of thought, it seems unrelated to stuttering, like he’s just making a mistake. The kind of mistake other candidates make too, though less frequently than he does.

During his 2016 address at the American Institute for Stuttering, Biden told the room that he’d turned down an invitation to speak at a dinner organized by the group years earlier. “I was afraid if people knew I stuttered,” he said, “they would have thought something was wrong with me.”

Yet even when sharing these old, hard stories, Biden regularly characterizes stuttering as “the best thing that ever happened” to him. “Stuttering gave me an insight I don’t think I ever would have had into other people’s pain,” he says. I admire his empathy, even if I disagree with his strict adherence to a tidy redemption narrative.

In Biden’s office, as my time is about to run out, I bring up the fact that Trump crudely mocked a disabled New York Times reporter during the 2016 campaign. “So far, he’s called you ‘Sleepy Joe.’ Is ‘St-St-St-Stuttering Joe’ next?”

“I don’t think so,” Biden says, “because if you ask the polls ‘Does Biden stutter? Has he ever stuttered?,’ you’d have 80 to 95 percent of people say no.” If Trump goes there, Biden adds, “it’ll just expose him for what he is.”

I ask Biden something else we’ve been circling: whether he worries that people would pity him if they thought he still stuttered.

He scratches his chin, his fingers trembling slightly. “Well, I guess, um, it’s kind of hard to pity a vice president. It’s kind of hard to pity a senator who’s gotten six zillion awards. It’s kind of hard to pity someone who has had, you know, a decent family. I-I-I-I don’t think if, now, if someone sits and says, ‘Well, you know, the kid, when he was a stutterer, he must have been really basically stupid,’ I-I-I don’t think it’s hard to—I’ve never thought of that. I mean, there’s nobody in the last, I don’t know, 55 years, has ever said anything like that to me.”

He slips back into politician mode, safe mode, Uncle Joe mode: “I hope what they see is: Be mindful of people who are in situations where their difficulties do not define their character, their intellect. Because that’s what I tell stutterers. You can’t let it define you.” He leans across the desk. “And you haven’t.” He’s in my face now. “You can’t let it define you. You’re a really bright guy.”

He’s telling me, in essence, that my stutter doesn’t matter, which is what I want to tell him right back. But here’s the thing: Most of the time, Biden speaks smoothly, and perhaps he sincerely does not believe that he still stutters at all. Or maybe Biden is simply telling me the story he’s told himself for several decades, the one he’s memorized, the one he can comfortably express. I don’t want to hear Biden say “I still stutter” to prove some grand point; I want to hear him say it because doing so as a presidential candidate would mean that stuttering truly doesn’t matter—for him, for me, or for our 10-year-old selves.

Now his aide is knocking, trying to get him out of the room. I push out one more question, asking what he saw reflected in that bedroom mirror as a kid.

He goes off into a different boyhood story about standing against a stone wall and talking with pebbles in his mouth, some oddball way to MacGyver fluency. I do the thing stutterers hate most: I cut him off. “What did that person look like?”

Biden stops. “He looked happy,” he says. “You know, I just think it looked like he’s

in control.”

This article will appear in the January/February 2020 print edition with the headline “Why Won’t He Just Say It?”

🍁☕🍂🍞🍁☕🍂🍞🍁☕🍂🍞🍁☕

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cancerbiophd · 5 years

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Hi! Sorry if this isn't in your wheelhouse, but I'm a college freshman and I really want to go to grad school for marine biology. But right now I'm super struggling. I have adhd and executive dysfunction is literally destroying my academic career. The quarter is over in 2 weeks and I have a 20% in my English 101 class (my worst subject since elementary). I fear in the short term for this class and in the long term of future classes. Do you have any advice?

Hi anon! Apologies for taking a while to answer this. I’ve been thinking about my answer because as someone who doesn’t have ADHD, I’m probably not the best person to give advice.

But, I do want to say a few things in the hopes it’ll help (and this is US-centric, btw. I can’t speak for the processes of other countries):

You will have 2 different GPAs when you graduate college and apply for grad school in the sciences: one that lumps everything together, including English; and one that’s only for science classes, that doesn’t include English. The admissions team will take both into consideration, but may rely more heavily on your science GPA. So a bad grade in English doesn’t mean grad school is out of the question!

(I also want to add that I failed organic chemistry II in college, and then retook it and got a C, and I still got into grad school. So even a less-than-stellar science GPA isn’t the end to all grad-school-hopes and dreams!)

Going off that, it’s ok to retake classes in college. It’s also ok to withdraw from classes you feel like you’re not doing well in, and then retake them later. I’ve withdrawn from quite a handful of classes in college. Sometimes it just wasn’t the right semester to take a certain class, and that’s ok. And a W on a transcript (for Withdrawn) is better than a D or E.

The GPA is also only one aspect of your application, and you can bolster the rest by having garnered amazing experiences (like volunteering with a research group and getting a paper published with you as a co-author), a solid GRE score (though some schools are phasing out the GRE as a requirement, thank goodness), and strong letters of recommendation. It’s my personal opinion that taking a gap year (or couple) after college to gain experience and focus the application process is a really awesome choice, so you could consider that (it’s what I did!)

You can also mention your ADHD in your application (ie. the personal statement) if you feel you need to explain some aspects, like the grades. You definitely don’t need to if you don’t want to, of course, but it’s an option. Here’s my advice to an anon on whether or not to mention their chronic illness in grad apps (along with a perspective from a (presumable) professor).

I would also suggest talking to your English 101 professor and explain to them everything you just told me, followed by, “I really want to improve my grade and my understanding of the material; do you have any advice for what I should do?” You may not be able to bump your grade all the way up to an A, but something is better than nothing. And if you retake that class, work with the professor as much as possible during their office hours, or make use of learning centers or free tutoring that’s available at all universities (which you’re paying for as part of your tuition anyway). Remember: you are deserving of help. There are people, like professors and TAs at your university, who want to help. (Especially if it’s their literal job!)

I have a friend in my cohort getting their PhD in Immunobiology (they’re graduating at the end of this year!) and they have ADHD. I know mentioning this isn’t a concrete form of help, but I want to let you know that it’s possible to get into, and thrive in, grad school with ADHD. You can do it.

I know I’m not the best person to give you advice, but I hope those points helped in some way, or at least gave you a better idea of the whole grad app process in terms of GPA.

I’m also opening this up for anyone who has more experience with ADHD and academia. Please help anon if you can! Thank you so much!

[Edit: there are already some awesome messages in the replies, whoo!]

And one last thing I want to say: you’re going to be ok. I know things look a bit scary right now, but you’ll get through this. It may take a lot of time and work and energy, but you can get into grad school. I believe in you. You’re going to be ok

#Anonymous #college advice #grad advice

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genericnome · 5 years

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Watching Sherlock for the first time

So, I decided to watch Sherlock for the first time on Netflix. This is such a late post considering the fact of my previous 60+ note post of Mystrade exists (my apologies once again!). I just really wanted to share what my feelings were when I first watched Sherlock on the last week of November 2018. Be warned this might take more than a few minutes to read the entire post.

There were so many emotions going through me when I first watched Sherlock. I mean, Sherlock's reveal made my eyes widened in surprise and a struggling need to hold in my laughter as I watched him hit the corpse with a riding crop. There were lots of emotions going on as the episode goes along. But, I was more into during some particular scenes.

During this scene, I took a quick guess to Sherlock's question.

Sherlock: Come on, THINK! Who do we trust even though we don't know them? Who passes unnoticed wherever they go? Who hunts in the middle of a crowd?

Me: A taxi driver?

My quick response to my phone as I was watching was that because I remembered how loose my uncle's lips were when we were travelling by cab to go to Orchard Road in Singapore. The taxi driver was friendly and I couldn't help but wondered how much information he has heard from various people talking to him.

And, when Sherlock and John was chasing the taxi cab, I had initially thought they were chasing the driver because I didn't really see the taxi clearly and I have barely used taxi cabs since in my own country, most of us use our own motor vehicles. So, naturally, I was confused why they had thought the man was a suspect and why they went to the passenger side, not the driver side.

I thought that my guess was wrong and I decided to leave my guesses to Sherlock Holmes and let myself enjoy the rest of the episode. Imagine my curiosity when Mrs. Hudson told Sherlock that a cab was waiting outside while the drugs bust was going with D.I. Lestrade revealing his similar nicotine patch habit to Sherlock.

*while the scene is ongoing*

Me: Why the actual fuck is there a taxi cab outside? Did John accidentally ordered one? Is that how taxi cabs work? Wait, you can actually order a taxi cab to wait outside?

Anderson: So, we can read her e-mails? So, what?

Sherlock: Anderson, don't talk out loud. You lower the IQ of the whole street.

Me: Holy shit, Sherlock. It must be hella fine having that brain of yours. Now, back to the cab. Why is it there? No, don't yell at Mrs. Hudson please. She's sweet.

John: Here. It's on 221 Baker Street.

Me & Sherlock: How can it be here? How?

Also me: Oh my god, I was right? I was actually right? God, this beats having a B3 grade on Physics. I mean, it was an absolute miracle getting that grade but my correct guess on who the serial killer in Sherlock beats that feeling. Holy fuck.

It was like the entire scene made my face look like that shocked pikachu meme. I think I stayed like that till the scene where the taxi driver says that it wasn't chance, that it's chess.

Me: It's 50-50 according to what I have studied the last few years with Additional Maths and D Syllabus Maths in O Levels and Maths in A Levels (currently). If it isn't 50-50 chance like you said, my education has been meaningless and I have been lied to.

*moves one of the bottled pill forward*

Me: Oh, now you're doing the mind trick thing. But, it still is 50-50! You're just subconsciously pushing Sherlock to pick the one you didn't move forward. God, I wish I had taken Psychology/Sociology as an A Level Subject.

*scene moves forwards to John shooting the taxi driver using a handgun, an impressive shot considering the distance*

Me: Holy shit. He's an expert, that's for sure. Yay, Sherlock's alright!

*scene moves forwards and focuses on Sherlock in the ambulance, confused as fuck.*

Sherlock: Why do I have this blanket? They keep putting a blanket on me.

Lestrade: It’s for shock.

Sherlock: I’m not in shock!

Lestrade: Yeah, but some of the guys want to take photographs.

Me: And, you look absolutely adorable. Now, I wonder how you look like when you're wearing a beanie.

*scene forwards as Sherlock finally realises who shot the taxi driver*

Sherlock: Actually, you know what - ignore me.

Me: Aww, you care for John! *laughs as the scene continues on as Lestrade stands there, looking confused*

I thought that was it. Until, the mysterious stalking man returns with the woman in tow. I was confused, as Sherlock's expression seems to show that he knows the man.

Mysterious Stalking Man: We have more in common than you like to believe. This petty feud between us - it’s simply childish. People will suffer. And you know how it always upset Mummy.

Me & John: What? What? *more shocked pikachu face memes*

Sherlock: I upset her? Me? It wasn’t me who upset her, Mycroft -

Me & John: No, sorry, wait, wait - Mummy Who’s Mummy? (yes, I am not kidding. I was literally saying the same thing as John was albeit in a different accent)

Sherlock: Mother. Our Mother. This is my brother, Mycroft. Are you putting on weight?

Mycroft: Losing it, in fact.

Me & John: He’s your brother??

Also me: You don't look alike??

Sherlock: Of course he’s my brother.

Of course, the rest was obvious. I just sat there, stupefied as I watched the rest of the scene before the episode ended.

So, basically, the first episode was a rollercoaster of emotions. I was introduced to a cute genius and an adorable ex-military man that somehow forced me to want to ship them together as a couple and that this show will be the death of me.

Yeah, that was what I got from it.

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happystressedmuffin · 6 years

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Among the articles I wrote for our school newspaper these past three years, my most successful ones have been on the topic of education / the education system. As a person who has increasingly become disillusioned with the way school’s operate, I have a couple of thoughts. This may end up a little vague and I may go back to explore these ideas in more detail when I have more time.

First things first, my parents used to be teachers back in Belarus, and they often tell me about rules they had and how their schools worked. A lot of my thinking is influenced by them and their stories, in addition to personal experience.

Communication

One thing that American schools as a whole seem to lack is effective communication between teachers. I have seen this again and again, and it’s a shame considering that It’s an issue that can be fixed without bureaucratic measures. Why do teachers still have a difficult time communicating with one another? Countless times, I’ve had teachers schedule tests and quizzes on the same day, leaving students studying for three whole different topics, rather than focusing on carefully understanding one. My dad said when he used to teach, he would talk to the other teachers and they would plan their schedules out in accordance to one another to ensure that the students would not have an overload of work. While I cannot attest that lack of communication is a problem in every single individual American school, I can certainly say that just a couple weeks ago, our IB coordinator walked into our TOK room because our class snapped under pressure and some students were on the verge of tears. When we told her about the mountain of projects and tests, she seemed surprised, and even our TOK teacher decided to move one of her deadlines, because she was previously unaware of the pressure we were under.

Personally, communication between teachers is probably one of the biggest problems in any school system. Teachers should talk with one another and plan their assignments out; if not, at the very least, be ready to change the dates of certain assignments.

Of course, some things cannot be helped -- teachers cannot move standardized test days, and sometimes the speed of the lesson needs to quicken in order to have time to cover all the right material. Of course, that leads to another problem.

Standardized testing // allowing teachers to teach what they want

Standardized testing. A lot has been said on the topic already. Some countries such as Finland manage to get amazing marks without a lot of standardized tests; other countries get equally impressive marks with a lot of these tests (China). Whether or not standardized testing works depends on different factors, such as how the government operates, how the tests are structured, etc.

For example, the United States is a federalist form of government, meaning that power is shared between the federal and state governments. Largely, education has been a state issue, meaning how schools prepare their children for these tests and even the tests they take differ.

In terms of how the tests are structured, let’s talk about my friend who I will call “V.” V is in higher level classes. V has passed multiple AP tests. V wants to work in the film industry. As we all know, the SAT tests people on math and reading. Now, tell me, what does math and reading have to do with working in the film industry? English is not V’s first language -- he speaks Hindu and Spanish. He is not so bright in math. But if you’d seen the videos he produces, the editing work he does, even the scripts he writes, you could easily tell that this is a bright kid. His SAT score is certainly not bad in the slightest; in fact, it would probably be considered in the upper quartile. Nonetheless, in comparison to most our peers in this particular program (IB), his score seems a little...weak, to say the least. Some colleges rejected him as a result of his testing, which does not reflect the skills he will use later in life. Why should we consider this fair? Obviously, all people should know rudimentary math and reading; however, why should they be judged solely in those two categories?

At the end of the day, the real question we are trying to find is whether or not the state should give more control to the teachers in the classroom. Standardized testing limits what a teacher may teach due to time constraints.

Bad teachers / respect for teachers

And now, let’s bring our focus onto teachers. I have become highly disillusioned with teachers, especially this year. Here are a number of things I have witnessed:

1. A teacher “predicting” what our grade will be on a test and putting it in the grade system as our final grade for the assignment (essentially giving us a grade for something we have not actually done; and she wasn’t kind about it either; I got a C)

2. a teacher claiming we have to learn six chapters in three days and proceeding not to do a single thing to help us learn in class; instead he gave us a pop quiz and told us to read the book (hint: if we can replace you with a plant and have it not influence the class in the slightest, perhaps you need to do some teaching!)

3. A teacher telling us that the highest we can get on an assignment was a 70 and if we wanted something higher, we had to an “optional assignment”

4. A teacher taking off an entire letter grade because a student wrote the wrong class period on the header.

5. A teacher pausing a student in the middle of a presentation to yell at the student for seeming “too nervous” (how does yelling and humiliation help?)

6. One of my teachers accidentally taught the wrong curriculum for an entire three quarters before finding out that what we were doing was wrong. (I don’t blame the teacher too much -- this was actually a rather complicated situation).

7. A chemistry teacher who sat at her desk eating snacks while she played videos of her teaching, rather than teaching in person.

Now, all of this makes us students want to bang our heads against the wall; especially number 2 and number 6. The same teacher from #2 never read a single one of our essays (problematic, considering this is an AP / IB class) and instead has us peer score every single time. Nobody studies for his class because he curves every assignment so that a student with a D gets an A.

Should students not demand better? One of the issues with teachers, I believe, is that one does not necessarily need a teaching degree to teach; just a degree in the particular subject area. But at the end of the day, knowing a subject does not mean knowing how to teach it. Some people may disagree. Some people may say, a true sign of knowing is being able to teach. But teaching in itself is another art form. It involves communication. It involves a little bit of psychology. It involves knowing how to explain concepts in ways you may not have thought of before (A visual learner may not think to incorporate auditory details, for example). A person may be an awesome biologist, but that same person may not be an excellent communicator (outside of a research paper, that is). A person may be an awesome biologist, but that person may understand little about how an art/literature student may learn concepts. Knowing a subject well does not mean teaching a subject well. To say so insults the very art of teaching.

Another problem when it comes to teachers is a lack of overall respect for the profession. My AP Gov teacher (a really awesome man) was telling us a story about attending his wife’s party with her co-workers.

Someone asked him, “Hey, what do you do for a living?”

He said, “I teach high school government!”

That person frowned. “I’m so sorry!”

“Why are you sorry?” my government teacher asked, confused. “I love my job!”

And that story conveys a giant problem. People in general assume that teaching is a bad job. That we should feel sorry for those who teach. If you look at the amount that teachers get paid, you can tell that the job isn’t as highly valued as it should be. Teachers are entrusted with the entire future. They are tasked with educating future politicians, future surgeons, future historians, future writers, future academics, future working class people who may change living standard for the better. Why should we not pay teachers more? Why should we not make it harder for people to become teachers (increase the required training or make it better) while at the same time paying them more?

Students do not respect teachers too much either. That may be a sentence young people do not like to hear, because we feel cheated in the education system many times. But it’s true that many students do not respect teachers. I am a student; I have seen how the worst of us can behave. My favorite teacher (I’ve had her for all three years now and will have her next year too) talks quite frankly with me, and she always talks about students who put in no work all quarter and then have the audacity to call her and blame her for their grades.

I am quite lazy -- I really am. But I do my work, and I have never had anything below a A in her classes; and the one I’m taking at the moment is an IB class.

However, respect is a two-way-street. To say that students are respected would be a lie. Otherwise, we would be listened to more when it comes to problems that directly affect us.

The ultimate point is -- respect for teachers needs to increase, but we should also cut down on teachers who don’t know how to teach. These solutions seem obvious, but implementing the necessary actions to put them into place certainly isn’t.

Taxes / wealth

A big point to mention -- taxes. I had any power in this government, I would not have schools be funded by taxes. In order to learn, students should have the resources to do so. How can an underfunded school possibly compete with a suburban, rich school? The education system creates cycles by constantly valuing the rich and punishing the poor.

If you have money, here’s all the things you can do:

-Live in a nice area with well-funded schools

-Buy a tutor for the SAT

-Have enough money to be well-fed; no worries about food

-Buy all kinds of educational programs (rosetta stone, etc)

-Buy more books

-Get invited to go to interesting educational summer camps, and go

-Clubs (basically no clubs are free)

All these things contribute to college applications and success. But what about the student who struggles in math and cannot afford a tutor? What about that student who lives in a poor area and struggles to learn because of underfunded and stressed teachers? What about the student who has to turn down many opportunities simply because that students cannot afford it? What about the student that can’t afford to pay a fee to participate in dance club?

What about those students?

Is it not evident then that those students are put at a disadvantage, and that they never had equality to begin with? Is it not evident that those students will have a harder time getting to a brighter future?

Here’s some ideas I have seen around that I have not thought too much about, but I do want to look into:

- Religion’s affect on schools (the US has a long history of Protestantism / Evangelicalism; those who structured our schools may have been influenced. It would be interesting to see how religious thought has played into our education system)

-schools shaping students for labor / a career rather than education / useful life skills

- I would really love to learn about an anarchist’s point of view of the education system. I believe that most anarchists would be pro-education, but they typically are anti-system (anti-authority), right? How would people be educated in an ideal society? (this is mostly curiosity)

#education system #problems of the education system #teaching #student #school problems #school #education #long post #standardized testing #respect for teachers

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douchebagbrainwaves · 4 years

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I'VE BEEN PONDERING STOCK

And are English classes even the place to do it. By definition they're partisan. Would the transplanted startups survive?1 One of the best in the business. The other reason the number of startups started within them. Do they let energetic young people get paid market rate for the work they do.2 They don't always, of course: insurance, business license, unemployment compensation, various things with the IRS. But if I have to pause when I lose my train of thought. For a lot of people who get rich through rent-seeking of various forms, and a research director at Smith Barney. An essayist can't have quite as little foresight as a river. And so began the study of ancient texts had such prestige that it remained the backbone of education until the late 19th century.3 But can you think of one restaurant that had really good food and went out of business and the people would be dispersed.

A wimpy little single-board computer for hobbyists that used a TV as a monitor? Most people who publish online write what they write for the simple reason that they want to own, and the harder performance is to measure, the more we'll see multiple companies doing the same thing.4 At the other extreme are publications like the New York Times reporters on their cell phones; a graphic designer who feels physical pain when something is two millimeters out of place. But only graduation rates, not how much students learn. That's the key to success as a startup founder, but that you should never shrink from it if it's on the path to something great. I seemed awkward and halting by comparison.5 And they're going to be developing it for people like you. And since all the hackers had spent many hours talking to users, we understood online commerce way better than anyone else. Almost by definition, if a startup succeeds its founders become rich.6 The main reason they want to. One is that the raison d'etre of all these institutions has been the same: to beat the system. Wodehouse or Evelyn Waugh or Raymond Chandler is too obviously pleasing to seem like serious work, as reading Shakespeare would have been there without PR firms, but briefly and skeptically.

This does happen. This is called seed capital. This seems a common problem. Remember the exercises in critical reading you did in school, where you can spend as long thinking about each sentence as it takes to say it, a person hearing a talk can only spend as long on each sentence as it takes to say it, a person hearing a talk can be a powerful force. And the days when VCs could wash angels out of the picture. Why do the media keep running stories saying suits are back?7 Like most startups, ours began with a group of friends, and it was only then I realized he hadn't said very much. If anyone proved a theorem in christian Europe before 1200, for example, by helping them to become smarter or more disciplined, which then makes them more successful.8

Sometimes I even make a conscious effort to remind oneself that the real world you can create wealth as well as as apportioning the stock, you should either learn how or find a co-founder. Our offices were in a wooden triple-decker in Harvard Square.9 But this is a situation where it would really be an uphill battle. For a lot of investors unconsciously treat this number as if it were a single phenomenon. Reading P. You have more leverage negotiating with VCs than you realize.10 Usually this is an assumption people start from rather than a conclusion they arrive at by examining the evidence. We should fix those things.11 For example, in a recent essay I pointed out that because you can only judge computer programmers by working with them, no one knows in programming who the heroes should be. For example, the question of the relative merits of Ford and Chevy pickup trucks, that you couldn't safely talk about with others.

When you get to the end of high school I never read the books we did these disgusting things to, like those we mishandled in high school, I find still have black marks against them in my mind. The path it has discovered, winding as it is, represents the most economical route to the sea. A few years later I heard a talk by someone who was not merely a better speaker than me, but a famous speaker. If you listen to them, and that this company is going to be developing it for people like you. Design, as Matz has said, should follow the principle of least surprise. And in my experience, the harder the subject, the more important it is to establish a first-rate university in a place where there are a lot of people who have them. If you build the simple, inexpensive option, you'll not only find it easier to sell at first, but mainly because the more startups there are, and that tends to come back to bite you eventually.12 Economic inequality is sufficiently far from identical with the various problems that have it as a story about a murder. This was also one reason we didn't go public. Often they're people who themselves got rich from technology.13

Financially, a startup is to run into intellectual property problems.14 By the end of that year we had about 70 users. They seemed wrong. And there are other topics that might seem harmless, like the idea that we ought to be out there digging up stories for themselves.15 But for nearly everyone else, spoken language is better.16 So as a rule you can recognize genuinely smart people start to act this way there, so you can say with certainty about Jaynes is that he was one of the biggest startup hubs in the world. Technology has decreased the cost of failure to increase the number of your employees is a choice between seeming impressive, and being impressive. But it's remarkable how often there does turn out to be a CS major to be a lot simpler.17 So what's interesting? And when readers see similar stories in multiple places, they think there is some important trend afoot.

Notes

In practice their usefulness is greatly enhanced by other people who did it with.

It's hard for us to see.

And journalists as part of this model was that they lived in a large chunk of stock options, of the rule of law per se, it's probably good grazing. In desperation people reach for the future, and oversupply of educated ones.

Together these were the seven liberal arts. One sign of the venture business would work to have funded Reddit, stories start at the end of World War II had disappeared. Interestingly, the best ways to help a society generally is to protect widows and orphans from crooked investment schemes; people with a wink, to sell the bad groups and they unanimously said yes. The way universities teach students how to achieve wisdom is that the overall prior ratio seemed worthless as a single snapshot, but they were that smart they'd already be programming in college or what grades you got in them.

Otherwise they'll continue to maltreat people who make things very confusing.

When the Air Hits Your Brain, neurosurgeon Frank Vertosick recounts a conversation in which multiple independent buildings are traditionally seen as temporary; there is undeniably a grim satisfaction in hunting down certain sorts of bugs, and in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Oxford University Press, 1996.

One of the War on Drugs.

But a couple predecessors. I think it's confusion or lack of transparency. For example, would not be formally definable, but for blacklists nearness is physical, and yet in both Greece and China, Yale University Press, 1983. 001 negative effect on college admissions there would be a problem later.

Wufoo was based in Tampa and they would never come face to face meetings. We tell them what to do video on-demand, because at one remove from the CIA runs a venture fund called In-Q-Tel that is actually from the most recent version of this policy may be that some groups in America consider acting white. Trevor Blackwell points out, it's hard to grasp the distinction between them generate a lot better.

Apparently there's only one founder is in the sense of the web. In practice formal logic is not yet released. 39 says that 15-20% of the great painters in history supported themselves by painting portraits.

Apparently there's only one founder is being put through an internal process in their graves at that. For example, the transistor it is.

Loosely speaking.

As he is much into gaming. It would have become direct marketers.

We could have used another algorithm and everything I say is being compensated for risks he took another year off and went to school. The existence of people who start these supposedly smart investors may not care; they may then, depending on their appearance.

One father told me they do the right thing to do others chose Marx or Cardinal Newman, and there are no discrimination laws about starting businesses. But if so, why did it. Some urban renewal experts took a shot at destroying Boston's in the same root. Default: 2 cups water per cup of rice.

Like early medieval architecture, impromptu talks are made of spolia. 4%, Macintosh 18. 5%. If Bush had been able to resist this urge.

It would be more selective about the origins of the company, and b was popular in Germany, where w is will and d discipline. Unfortunately, not conquest. Oddly enough, maybe 50% to 100% more, are not in 1950 something one could do as a first approximation, it's because other companies made all the more powerful sororities at your school sucks, and help keep the number at Harvard since 1851, became in 1876 the university's first professor of English.

Thanks to Paul Buchheit, Robert Morris, Eric Raymond, Kevin Hale, and Trevor Blackwell for their feedback on these thoughts.

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whereoblivionreigns · 7 years

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i am very bored

A – Accidents 01. Have you ever been in a car accident?: No 02. Do you have a lot of scars?: A few on my arms, one on my right knee cap and one under my right eyebrow 03. Have you ever been in a fist fight with someone?: Yes 04. Have you ever seriously hurt anyone by mistake?: Sort of.. My sister and I were fake boxing once and I accidentally knocked her out cold 05. Have you ever had stitches? Where?: Yes, knee and eyebrow

B – Beauty 06. Do you consider yourself beautiful?: Still working on that 07. Are you self conscious of how you look?: I learned to not care about that shit long ago. 08. Do you put on a lot of makeup?: Not usually 09. Would you ever consider getting plastic surgery?: How rich do I look 10. What do you think makes a person beautiful?: Their aura, and the way they talk about their passions

C – Consequences 11. What was the longest amount of time you’ve been grounded for?: A week probably 12. What would you do if you got pregnant, keep it or have an abortion?: Abort 13. Do you ever think about how your actions affect other people?: Always 14. What do you think is the worst punishment someone could give you?: Putting me in a cage 15. What is one thing you wish you didn’t do, just because it wasn’t worth it in the end?: Chase after a boy

D – Dealing 16. When you are mad at someone, how do you show them?: By either ignoring them or taking the bitch up a few notches 17. Name a time when you had to be strong: An ex passed away a few months ago. It’s been tough but I have a great support system. 18. Have you ever dealt with a divorce or parents fighting? Any kind of abuse at home?: Divorce, fighting, physical abuse, emotional abuse. 19. When people at school don’t accept you, or have problems with you, how do you react?: Keep doing my thing 20. Have you ever lost someone to death? Explain how you got through it: My aunt when I was 11 and my ex recently. Lots of positive reflection, friends and drinking.

E – Experience 21. Have you ever had a job? Any volunteer jobs?: I’ve had several kitchen jobs and I had a co-op in an elementary school last semester. 22. Do you think that you are sexually experienced, or not at all?: I’d say I am pretty experienced. 23. Have you gone through a lot emotionally, or has life been easy thus far?: I have been through a hell of a lot. 24. Do you think you are ready to be on your own (have your own home, job, etc.)?: I am on my own, focusing on getting through school. 25. How old do you act?: Sometimes 12, sometimes 20, sometimes 60.

F – Family 26. Is there anyone in your family you don’t talk to? Why?: Not for any negative reason, only because we are all busy living our own lives 27. If you had to choose, family or friends?: My friends are my family 28. Can you tell your parents or one of your parents anything?: I can tell both of my parents anything 29. Do you have any siblings? One younger sister, 2 step sisters 30. How often do you spend ‘quality time’ with family members?: Not often

G – Growing 31. How tall are you? How tall do you wish you were?: I’m 5'3. Wish I were a few inches taller so I could reach the steel bowls at work. 32. Do you think that you have grown more in the past year than any year before that?: I’d agree yes. 33. As a person, do you think you are mature for your age or still act childish?: A good mix of both for sure, but mature for the most part. 34. Are you scared to think that one day you will turn 30, then 40, then 50?: Trying not to think about it. 35. Do you believe you still have a lot to learn?: Of course

H – Hope 36. Love – real or not?: I suppose it can be real 37. Are you a pessimist of an optimist?: More so an optimist 38. Do you believe in fate, that everything happens for a reason, or do you think that our actions lead the way?: The things we do bring us to where we want to be, but some things are certainly beyond our control 39. Do you think that after we die our spirit is still alive?: I don’t think I believe in an afterlife. 40. What gives you hope when you just feel like dying?: Music.

41. Do you suffer from depression or constant sadness/loneliness?: I have a colourful history with depression, it comes in waves these days. 42. Do you have any type of disease or disability?: I have a thyroid disorder, as well as a disease called chronic autoimmune urticaria, which causes me to break out in uncontrollable, painful hives and there’s nothing I can do about it. The two are likely linked but my doctor has no clue how to deal with it. 43. Are you currently in a hard relationship or have bad luck with the opposite sex?: Can’t seem to find the right one. 44. Do you think that you are alone in this world?: Not at all, though sometimes I’d prefer to be. 45. How often do you think about death, suicide or running away?: Not often, though the prospect of running away is a delightful one.

J – Jokes 46. Say a word or phrase that would not be funny to anyone but you & one of your friends (an inside joke): “Rock me like a fuckin’ train” 47. Are you usually the one who makes people laugh, or the other way around?: A good mix of both. 48. Do you cry when you laugh hard?: Always 49. Write down a hilarious moment you had with someone that makes you laugh to this day!: My best friend and I had a bucket list we wrote a few years back, and one of the things on it was to “punch some faces if Orange Goblin doesn’t come back in the next 3 years.” It’s been 3 years. 50. Do you ever get in trouble for laughing or talking a lot during class?: No

K – Knowledge 51. The purpose of school: to learn, to cause trouble or to hang out with friends?: Highschool is about hanging with buds, college is about learning. 52. Do people refer to you as smart, dumb, or average?: Smart. 53. What was the highest grade you have received (full course mark) ever?: I got an A+ in my elective last semester 54. What was your last average? This year would you like to maintain it or aim higher?: It’s definitely not happening this year aha 55. What do you find the most interesting subject to be (to study or to talk about)?: Psychology & History.

L – Love 56. Are you currently in love? If not, have you been before?: Not currently. I have been once, with someone who is no longer alive 57. Do people around you show you a lot of love (tell you they love you, hug you, kiss you, etc.)?: Yes, my friends and I are huggers for sure 58. Is love worth it?: This is yet to be determined for me. As of now, no. 59. Do you hate it when girls in their young teenage years say they ‘love’ someone that they’ve been dating for a few months?: Love is a very individualized concept. If it feels right to them, who am I to challenge it? 60. Does it take a lot for you to say you love someone, or is it just a word?: It takes everything in me.

M – Money 61. Do you believe that money makes the world go round?: Unfortunately 62. Is your family on the poor side, average, or above average when it comes to money?: On the poor-average side.

College or University, or planning to?: I’m in my second year of college

64. Would you rather win millions of dollars & be set for life, or find the perfect person to marry & start a family with?: The first one. The second part is easily achievable afterwards 65. On a scale of 1-10, how important is money to you?: Would be a 1 if I didn’t need it to live

N – Naught 66. Are you a virgin?: No 67. What do you think about doing sexual things with someone you’re not going out with?: Previously I would have been cool with it. These days casual sex is off the table for me, I just end up feeling horrible about myself. 68. Do you know anybody you consider a ’slut’? What makes you say that?: People should be allowed to fuck whoever they want without being razzed for it. 69. If you could, would you erase some things you did in the past or make it so you did more?: There was a guy I dated for about a month a couple years ago. It was a mistake on my part of get into it, and I ended up breaking it off before I moved out of town for school. He went crazy on me over the next couple months - called like 50x per day screaming stuff like that. I’d erase it if I could, we could have been good friends. 70. Do you consider yourself more nice or more naughty? You can’t say both!: Nice.

O – Openness 71. How long does it take for you to open up to someone?: Very long 72. What does it take for you to fully trust someone?: Years of not fucking me over. 73. Are you generally untrusting towards people because of past experiences, or any other reason?: Past experiences and a general distaste for the human race. 74. When are you comfortable with someone sexually?: Frightfully quickly

Family and close friends, what’s the limit of what you can tell them?: I tell them everything, except my mom who doesn’t know that I am fond of illicit drugs

P – Positive 76. Have you ever had an experience with someone that didn’t necessarily end positively? If so, would you rather erase the memory of that person because of the sad times or keep the memory of thatperson because of the good times?: The thing I mentioned previously. I’d rather erase it. 77. Do you agree with the saying:better to have loved and lost than not have loved at all?: Nope 78. Are you more optimistic or pessimistic? What do you try to be?: Mostly optimistic, I strive more for realism 79. Do you agree that something good can come out of everything?: I have a strange tendency to pick out the good in everything. 80. Have you ever had a time where something really bad happened, but something really good happened because of it? If so, please explain what it was: Every year when roll up the rim comes around I develop a Canadian gambling addiction. Sometimes I win so that’s good I guess.

Q – Questions 81. When faced with a problem, do you ask for help or try to figure it out yourself?: I usually try to figure it out myself at first 82. Do you often question the world and how we came about? What are some things you would like to know about creation?: I don’t really care to be honest. 83. Do you think the government is truthful? If you could ask the president one question, what would it be?: The government is sickening. I’d have nothing to say to them. 84. When someone does something wrong to you, do you confront them and ask them why they did it or just let it go?: Depends on the severity of the issue and who it is I’m dealing with. 85. What is one unsolved mystery about the world that you want answers to?: Where the fuck they got Loki chained up

R – Respect 86. How do you show respect?: I listen. 87. What can someone do for you to lose all respect for them?: Act as if they are in any way superior to another human. 88. Do you respect your teachers, parents, and other authority figures?: Parents and Teachers, yes 89. When you are disrespectful to your parents, what is the punishment?: Usually just a sick verbal smackdown 90. If someone is mean to you, are you mean back or do you kill them with kindness?: I am either mean back or ignore them

S – School 91. If you are still in school, what grade will you be going into?: I’m in 2nd year of college 92. When will you graduate high school/college?: 2014 93. After high school, what did you do/are you planning to do?: I took a year off to work and party my ass off. It was great but still trying to shake some of the habits. 94. Do you like or hate school? What do you like/hate about it?: I love to learn, but the school environment and structure sucks. It’s oppressive 95. Have you ever been suspended, expelled, or dropped out of school?: No

T – Temptation 96. Have you ever done something wrong, knowing it was wrong, because something inside of you said it was okay?: Yeah, I’m sure I’ve said some nasty things to my parents that I knew I shouldn’t have. 97. Has anyone ever pressured you to smoke or drink? Did you do it?: Beer pressure is a common theme among my friends. I don’t need to be pressured haha 98. Did you ever cheat on someone? Why did you do it?: Once. I was obscenely drunk and I’ve never forgiven myself for it. 99. Did you ever want to do something sexual with someone you didn’t really know or love? What did you end up doing?: Many many times. I followed the liquor. 100. Do you give in to temptation easily, or are you more independent and strong willed?: I have a pretty low impulse control to be honest

U – Unique (where’s the question 101?) 102. Do you do a lot of things because your friends are doing it?: No, unless its drugs or drinking. But even still I do it because I want to. 103. Do you follow trends, wear whatever you want, or wear really unique pieces?: I wear what I want 104. Do you give in easily to peer pressure? Do you do things such as smoke, drink, or have casual sex?: Peer pressure, not exactly. Everything I do is of my own account. Smoking and drinking occasionally, not casual sex these days. 105. What makes you different from people your age?: I know the actual meaning of St. Patrick’s Day and choose not to celebrate it.

V – Value 106. What’s the most expensive thing in your room?: My vest

107. What’s more valuable: your life or the lives of your loved ones? Would you sacrifice your life for other people?: Their lives.

108. What is something you value not because it cost a lot, but because it means a lot to you?: The stupid little things my ex used to bring me that I still have laying around

109. If there was a fire in your house/apartment, what is the first thing you would grab?: My laptop because I need it to pass school

110. Do you think past memories and experiences are more valuable than what could possibly happen in the future?: I have a tendency to romanticize the past, but I think the future will have more to offer

W – Wishes 111. If you had three wishes, what would they be?: Nice cabin on a Norwegian fjord, a pound of magic mushrooms and about 9 dogs 112. Would you rather wish yourself to be happy, or your loved ones?: If they’re happy, I am happy 113. Do you believe that wishes come true if you really believe in them?: No. 114. Have you ever had a wish come true? If so, what was that wish?: I wished I’d win on a roll up the win a few weeks ago - I did. It was a coffee 115. Do you find wishing for things a waste of time because everything that’s meant to happen, will happen?: Yes.

Y – You 121. Are you more independent or social?: Independent 122. What is something that makes you very mad when you see it?: Ignorance 123. Do you think that you have potential to do great things?: Yes. 124. Do you think people are born a certain way, or develop their personalities based on what they go through in life?: I believe experience shapes who we are 125. Do you think people are generally good?: No.

Z – Zest 126. Are you currently happy with your life? Why or why not?: So/so. I’m mostly just bored and tired. 127. Do you go on FacebookCraze.com to get facebook surveys and quizzes like this one?: I wonder how old this thing is 128. When change occurs, do you get scared or are you excited for it?: I generally embrace change 129. Do you like to try new things, meet new people?: Yes and yes 130. What is the most motivational thing in the world? Folk metal.

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indi-flying-with-dragons · 7 years

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(Get ready!) 1. Any scars? 4. Kissed anyone? 5. Coke or Pepsi? 6. Someone you hate? 7. Best friends? 8. Have you ever done alcohol or drugs? 9. What’s your dream job? 13. Height? 18. Obsession? 19. If you had one wish, what would it be? 21. Kiss or hug? 22. Nicknames people call you? 23. Favorite song? 24. Favorite band? 26. Best thing that has ever happened to you? 27. Something you would change about yourself? 30. Watch the movie or read the book? 32. Favorite show?

[Continued]

(Same anon continued!) 35. Do you wish you could ever start over? 36. Any bad habits? 37. Ever had a near death experience? 38. Someone you can tell anything to? 41. Someone you hate/dislike? 42. Are you okay?

WOW… you’re certainly a…. enthusiastic anon eh? e.o *mind boggled* Let me… let me reply to all these. As brief as possible. E^E….Geesh. 24 different questions. Damn… My apologies to everyone. This is gonna be a LONG POST. e.o

Btw THANKS FOR ASKING :D *GLOMPAGES* X3 *hug-SQUISH*

Long post below! O.e

1. Any scars?

Um, I have two on my head, right behind my ears at different heights from my two different cochlear implant surgeries to install the internal parts into my head so the external processors will work. When my hair is short it looks like someone purposefully buzzed a line through my hair there, lol, but it’s natural from the surgery when I was 7 and 11 years old respectively.

And since I heal very well, my scars are real hard to see. I still have a faint one on my thumb, at the base of the last joint to the front of it, and one along the left side of my middle finger (both fingers on my right hand) that is still rough and keeps peeling a lot even now, years after the event.

Those I got from a random-ass exploding lightbulb that I was screwing in, had MADE SURE the lamp was off both at the wall and at the lamp itself (though I didn’t unplug it because I didn’t think I needed to…), but nope I had screwed it in one too many times, saw a BRIGHT FLASH OF LIGHT, and then it exploded, glass everywhere, and somehow only got hit on my index finger, middle finger, and thumb. ONLY there! Even to this day my engineer mother is completely baffled as to how that happened.

4. Kissed anyone?

Yes. My first ever kiss[es] was with an enthusiastic sloppy and awkward boy during a yearly dance when I was in highschool (I was unschooling and going to the Voyagers Homeschooling Co-op and they hosted yearly dances). Five French kisses are not my idea of a good first kiss ever!

My second ever person to kiss was … well. *blush and funny deadpan with crossed arms* He knows who he is. Since apparently I keep totally forgetting it somehow until he mentions it in a teasing fashion and yes we did date for a short while there before breaking up and remaining friends.

My third and remainder of kisses are thoroughly claimed by my handsome, hot boyfriend. -w-

5. Coke or Pepsi?

Coke. ALL. THE. WAY.

Blame my awesome grandmother (R.I.P.) who had 4 pm be coca cola time every day. :D She got me on coke early. …NOT COCAINE! Yeesh. Dirty minds. She also introduced me to my love of dragons and she was awesomely supportive and adoring of my artwork. :3 Since she was hard of hearing from old age and I was born hard of hearing, we got along well with having the TV on a comfortable loudness (for us). x3

…Damn just thinking about coca cola makes me think of her. :,) I even drank a whole 1 liter glass bottle of coke we got at a Mexican food store nearby for her funeral fiesta since she wanted a party for a funeral, not a sad dirge. :3 https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/ea/51/da/ea51da750fc136a655021c558b7c28c5.jpg Yes this one. XD I drank it all in under an hour in her honor and memory. I was so thirsty and so proud. XD I still have the empty bottle. x3

6. Someone you hate?

IDK… Hmm… I’m not one to really hate people. It’s such a strong emotion… I always thought of it as a “I want you to instantly die, right here and right now!” kind of emotion. So I don’t really hate people.

…I DO know of someone I would… honestly NOT be sad if she died. Considering she caused a hellava LOT of suffering and torment for my friend. I’d be sad because my friend would be sad, BUT I wouldn’t be sad because I actually missed her or regretted her death in any way.

7. Best friends?

Oh gosh. :3 Off the top of my head @destan-of-the-shadows and @faes-hiding-place :D my boyfriend counts too! Two RL friends I can meet with at times are more friends than “best” friends but I still count them as my friends because we’ve been friends since like 5th or 6th Grade in Middle School when we were all like 11 or 12 years old. :D I’m 22 now so see how long we’ve been friends. :D

8. Have you ever done alcohol or drugs?

NO drugs! The only thing that counts as alcohol is that couple sips of champagne at my cousin’s wedding when the servers mistakenly forgot to give us kids sparkling apple cider instead of champagne. Oops. XD We of course took great advantage of sipping as much as we could before they removed it. ;D It tasted HORRIBLE though. X_X What’s the appeal? IDK!

I drank some sips of other people’s drinks when I turned 21 but I absolutely HATE and CANNOT STAND the horribly bitter taste of alcohol (even in the sweetest mixed drinks it is strong and proud there when nobody else can taste it). Even if it’s burned off when used in a cheese fondue, that HORRIBLE bitterness remains. Bitter like the rotting corpse of a dying animal.

No thank you. I don’t ever want to drink again. X_X

9. What’s your dream job?

…. :,,,( I’ve not thought about this in ages… since I had to give up a lot of my “dream jobs” and “dream life” in order to make peace with the chronically ill life I have now. The grieving process was hard.

Goodbye my aspirations of being a geneticist, a psychologist, or even a therapist. Hello my life goals of being a professional artist and published author. :3

13. Height?

5'10". 5 feet, 10 inches. -w- … I really wish I was taller than my dad though. *grumble* He’s 6 feet. At least I’m an inch taller than my MOM. -^-

18. Obsession?

Oh dear. Which one? XD Take your pick. ;D I have: dragons, wings, flight, flying, cats/felines, biology, psychology, discussing the universe, astrology, culture, world-building, magic, art (as in drawing and coloring), writing, daydreaming, reading, listening to music, and cuddling with my boyfriend in a literal Netflix and chill. -w-

19. If you had one wish, what would it be?

…. *blinks and sighs* … It’d either be to be healthy again so I wouldn’t have this chronic illness (but would still keep my being deaf and hard of hearing because I LIKE THAT PART)… or to go back home, to my home world where my soul came from.

Yeah. XP

21. Kiss or hug?

Hug. :3 Preferably cuddle. :D

22. Nicknames people call you?

Indi-bindy-bo (You know who you are

23. Favorite song?

OH GEEZE. Hard to answer! XD … My favorite song of ALL time that I will ALWAYS love, have always loved, and might as well be my theme song for the sake of it? xD “Can’t Take Me (I’m Free!)” by Bryon Adams, from the Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron movie. xD

24. Favorite band?

My favorite singer is Michael Jackson. :3 He’s the only one I really know a lot about. All other bands and singers I just like some of their songs but know nothing about them as people, not even what they LOOK like a lot of times. -////- I prefer to respect their privacy. :)

26. Best thing that has ever happened to you?

Oh… Oh GOSH. IDK… XD … :3 Meeting my boyfriend, @destan-of-the-shadows and @faes-hiding-place :3

27. Something you would change about yourself?

See my wish above. -.- I’d LOVE to change that chronic illness of myself. … If I can’t then my persistent anxiety, or to somehow grow wings (like this third would be more likely than the other two? XD Hell, I can still ask! XD)

30. Watch the movie or read the book?

I’d rather read the book. :3 Unless the book is so horrible, that I wanna see why people think it’s so horrible, then I watch the movie because they usually try to tone things like that down. If the movie is horrible in many of the ways that I’ve heard criticism of the book itself… then I know never to touch that book. E^E

32. Favorite show?

Of all time? Avatar: The Last Airbender, Gargoyles, and Seconds from Disaster. >:D

Right now? XD Air Disasters. -w-

35. Do you wish you could ever start over?

Start what over? This life? Blegh. Don’t make me go through puberty TWICE!

… *looks at the side effects of taking testosterone HRT* Oh wait, I’m already doing that! -p-

… Make that don’t make me go through it a THIRD time. xD Even if that means I’d be able to be in a male body from day one, as opposed to having to be trans. XP

36. Any bad habits?

Which one do you wanna know? -x- Anxiety, hyper-focusing on a thing in my mind and then having the mind get stuck and not concentrate on anything else until I yank it off that… Staying quiet about things that affect me because I don’t want to hurt others or be a burden? Often opting to be quiet instead of confronting things that could make the relationship better in the long run? Being intensely private? Judging the strength of my relationships based on how much of my inner self I truly share? Doing subtle tests as I get to know someone to see which subject is “safe” to talk about and which I should just shut up about without them ever knowing? Over-thinking things a ton? Apparently my not needing to talk to others for a while is a weird-ass thing? … I can go on. -x-

Oh wait, were you asking about like little quirks like twirling hair or picking at the skin kinda bad habits? My apologies. -x-;;

37. Ever had a near death experience?

Yes. Waking up to being strangled by a spirit counts as that.

No, I’ve had an occasion of sleep paralysis before. I know what that feels like. You can’t move anything.

This was where I CAN move. I could move my hands and arms and everything else. It’s just something invisible and mostly intangible was strangling the life out my throat. Not from the inside choking, because I know what that feels like too. (My Life…) but from the outside suffocation and pressure and constriction on the outside of my neck.

Being strangled to near death in my spirit form by another spirit meant my physical body could feel that too, panicked the FUCK OUT at the feel of almost dying, and I literally felt my awareness fading away into a black nothingness with the faint but faltering heartbeats starting to skip and take longer and longer between each beat. Gasping and choking and then going still…

Thankfully helpful spirits got the negative one off and thoroughly destroyed it. They could heal my spirit form and with that healed, my body was able to come back too.

Never want to do that EVER. AGAIN. *shuddering* Those spirit attacks over the course of those three years were HELL on Earth. *holds self tight*

38. Someone you can tell anything to?

My boyfriend. I’m still working on being more honest with my two close friends @destan-of-the-shadows and @faes-hiding-place but I’ve made a lot of progress over the years thankfully. :3

41. Someone you hate/dislike?

Try that woman I mentioned far above that I hate.

As for actively dislike? Trumperdink. Bigoted assholes. TRUSCUM, TERFS, SWERFS, rapists, rape-apologists, racists, ableist assholes, murderers, serial killers, homophobes, aphobes, transphobes, and all the rest of that shit. I really dislike and don’t trust the police force in this country. And the vast majority of politicians too.

My country is a dystopian nightmare the tyrannical capitalist US of A. x.= Save me.

42. Are you okay?

Umm…Today was a bit hellish. I survived though. *grins a bit too widely and eyetwtiches* My life is just…………. very…… VERY………. interesting. *twitch*

… I still stand by my previous opinion of laughing my ass off at the utter ridiculousness of how people try to portray those “superhero teenagers” as somehow balancing a “regular life” with “crime fighting on the side with a secret identity” and somehow NOT having the crime fighting life interfere with their regular life outside of those “special two episodes.”

Yeah the fuck right.

Obviously written by those who have NO idea what balancing two different lives are like. X_X In my case it’s nothing so noble as a superhero identity, but it’s the difference of my spirit life and physical life.

And above, in my near-death-experiences… you saw just ONE of the many manifestations of that clash. -x- …Not. ….Fun.

I high-key DO NOT RECOMMEND. -x-

Most days these days (since the spirit attacks ended WHOOT WHOOT!) I can have a normal calm life. Then SOMETHING comes up and I’m like “what the shit-fuck is my entire existence right now??”

Yeah. -x-

… Can I have a hug? ;;;n;;;

#answers #answering a submission #ask game #ask me anything #long post #thank you!#my confessional #confession #confessions

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zipgrowth · 6 years

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Can AR/VR Improve Learning? Integrating Extended Reality Into Academic Programs #DLNchat

When educators talk about bringing learning into the real world does that include the virtual world? Proponents claim virtual and augmented reality can enhance learning experiences like we’ve never seen before, bringing students into contact with environments they otherwise wouldn’t have access to. But can mixed reality become too real for the learner? Could it stifle creativity? And should we be concerned, or will the hype fade? On Tuesday, July 10 the #DLNchat community of faculty, administrators, instructional designers and entrepreneurs got together to discuss how academic programs should integrate AR/VR into the curriculum.

Lloyd Dean reminded us, “AR and VR are always put together but they are separate entities.” So what’s the difference? Chris Johnson put it this way: “AR adds digital information to a physical object or environment. VR digitally recreates the object or environment. Both then let the user manipulate that object to varying degrees.” Jennifer Albat condensed her definitions into a poetically simple equation: “AR = Places objects where you are, VR = Takes you to new places.”

Defined Simply: #AR = Places objects where you are, #VR = Takes you to new places. #DLNchat

— Jennifer Albat (@jenalbat) July 10, 2018

#DLNchat-ters shared how these definitions were coming alive at campuses across the country. Science and technical programs appeared to be leading the charge with examples from University of Memphis, Boise State University, Wichita State University and Northern Arizona University. Tom Grissom pointed out that through such virtual access students “get more reps in,” and that “repetition with immediate formative assessment can shorten learning cycle time and be more effective (and safer in some situations).” At The University of Arizona, shared Ryan Straight, students are being taken to a virtual Harlem as well as studying phobias using virtual spiders.

also provides opportunity to get more reps in, repetition with immediate formative assessment can shorten learning cycle time & be more effective (and safer in some situations) #DLNchat

— Tom Grissom (@tomgrissom) July 10, 2018

No matter the discipline, Jeffrey Pomerantz said, “3D tech is good for active and experiential teaching and learning, because it expands the range of activities a learner can gain hands-on experience with.�� As more programs implement AR/VR experiences into the curriculum, more research is needed to assess its effectiveness. Christopher Brooks, director of research for EDUCAUSE offered two guiding questions: “What educational activities lend themselves to the use of 3D technologies? And what are the most effective 3D technologies for various learning goals?”

Coming to this convo late. But v short answer is 3D tech is good for active & experiential teaching & learning, bc expands the range of activities a learner can gain hands-on experience with. More in the report, obv. #DLNchat

— Jeffrey Pomerantz (@jpom) July 10, 2018

This week’s #DLNchat then posed a different kind of question to consider: could mixed reality experiences become too real? Dr. Straight reminded us, “Brains are easily hacked and fooled.” So what are the potential side effects of VR/AR learning? Clark Quinn posited, “One of the problems is the ‘uncanny valley’, where too real (but not quite) is unnerving compared to less real” and another “potential problem might be ‘escapism’, similar to problems with environs like WoW: people would rather stay in the virtual world.” Maggie Melo also warned about the dangers of virtual harassment. “The Extended Mind surveyed 600+ VR users and found that all genders are subject to different types of harassment in VR.”

a2) one of the problems is the ‘uncanny valley’, where too real (but not quite) is unnerving compared to less real #DLNChat https://t.co/8X2YdgVhfh

— Clark Quinn (@Quinnovator) July 10, 2018

So take off those rose tinted headgear; there are serious design questions to consider when creating AR/VR content. One current challenge is ensuring equal access across abilities. Jennifer Rafferty shared an encouraging story about how VR may support learners with autism, but many accessibility questions linger—some that may not even have been considered yet. Dr. Brooks shared that in research with Gallaudet University, their pilot with mixed reality raised a host of issues not previously considered for learners who are hard of hearing. EdSurge’s Aneesa Davenport asked, “Must we rely on the VR tech creators for this or are there solutions instructional design can implement?” For now, Gallaudet seems to be tackling the issues with their own team.

A3: I am usually one of the first to be asking about how we should tackle the accessibility questions related to AR/VR experiences, but today I was encouraged when I found this great example of how virtual worlds can help learners with autism. https://t.co/buvyOYa9g7 #dlnchat

— Jennifer Rafferty (@palomitica29) July 10, 2018

Accessibility will hopefully be better addressed as the creation of mixed reality becomes simpler for a more diverse array of creators–including students. Lloyd Dean said, “Heard a colleague explain today that future tools will be available to create quick and basic VR. Think Wix website design.” Students could then demonstrate their learning both in virtual realities and by creating them. Michelle Miller advised considering coupling VR with conventional tools for assessment. She referenced a project demonstrating “written summaries as part of the VR learning activity and found that this was a critical design improvement for producing learning.” Ready to create a rubric and assess a virtual world? Not so fast. “Difficulty in assessing is same as, possibly, other creative fields like art or writing. Takes longer, it's individualized, etc. These are good things, just harder,” said Dr. Straight. Perhaps grading systems will move into the ether too?

This great project by Mayer's group, e.g., had written summaries as part of the VR learning activity and found that this was a critical design improvement for producing learning (as opposed to just interest/engagement) #DLNchat

— Michelle Miller (@MDMillerPHD) July 10, 2018

So is the future of learning in AR/VR? Niki Bray expressed a persistent concern shared by other #DLNchat-ters: cost. She said, “My biggest concern is the resources needed to develop and the associated costs. If we can overcome that, this has great potential.” Others shared that sentiment and agreed that it was likely coming very soon. Alex Kluge said, “I think the big hype cycle was in the 1990s. We have gone through the trough of disillusionment and are coming into a plateau of usability.” Dr. Brooks agreed: “Previously, our pedagogical vision was outpacing the technological capacity; I think the technology has not only caught up, but surpassed our pedagogical vision. We're going to need to play catch up,” he said. He also shared some results from the EDUCAUSE 2018 Student Study: “Only 4% of students reporting having access to #AR or #VR headsets. So, we have some time to work on this before it becomes ubiquitous.”

A6: Working on the 2018 @EDUCAUSE #StudentStudy right now and only 4% of students reporting having access to #AR or #VR headsets. So, we have some time to work on this before it becomes ubiquitous. #DLNChat https://t.co/FRgCM41wIJ

— D Christopher Brooks (@DCBPhDV2) July 10, 2018

Kristi DePaul articulated her optimism for AR/VR technology a bit differently. “Rather than declaring it the future of learning, I believe XR [extended reality] tech will open up educational possibilities with an impact we haven't yet grasped. And that includes providing firsthand experiences that enhance empathy and compassion.” You might say the future of AR/VR in academia is extended learning.

A6) rather than declaring it the future of learning, I believe XR tech will open up educational possibilities w/an impact we haven't yet grasped. And that includes providing firsthand experiences that enhance empathy + compassion: https://t.co/TPEUvyiHeh #DLNchat @csuci https://t.co/ES0UaKzlla

— Kristi E. DePaul 🗺📍 (@reallykristi) July 10, 2018

How do you imagine the future of virtual learning? Tweet our community with #DLNchat to share your ideas! You can also RSVP for our next chat: How Can Competency Based Education Unify Lifelong Learning Experiences? with special guest Charla Long, executive director of the Competency Based Education Network (CBEN), on Tuesday, August 14 at 1pm PT/ 4pm ET. For more topics, check out our index of past chats. #DLNchat is co-hosted by the Online Learning Consortium, WCET and Tyton Partners.

Can AR/VR Improve Learning? Integrating Extended Reality Into Academic Programs #DLNchat published first on https://medium.com/@GetNewDLBusiness

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angrybelieverconnoisseur-blog · 6 years

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