Here's a little post ranting about the Floridian education system and how it fucked over public school librarians this year, from the adult child of one who spent his whole summer helping his poor mom try and keep up with Desantis's ridiculous requests.

Every school year, the librarian always gets a couple weeks with a "closed" library to take inventory of the school's stock at the end. Normal stuff, y'know, if a bit tedious and boring. Scan every. Single. Thing. See what you have and figure out who last checked out what you should have, that sort of thing.

Well, Ron Desantis, in his genius, decided that concept had to be applied to all the books in the entire school to determine if they're "appropriate" (by his batshit conservative standards).

My mom didn't JUST have to do the usual inventory thing for her own library. She ALSO had to do something similar but far WORSE for her entire school's personal classroom libraries.

The objective of this SCHOOL WIDE requirement was to "approve" every book in the school as "appropriate". Every. Single. Book. In. The. School. Not the school library, no, the SCHOOL. All classrooms.

My mom's an elementary school librarian. There's around 1000 students at her school, give or take, and around 50 or so classroom libraries to sort through. And this was supposed to be done over summer, before the kids came back in the fall. Entirely unpaid.

She had to personally approve around 25,000-30,000 books school wide based on whether or not they're "appropriate for kids" (again, by Desantis standards), entirely unpaid, in about 2 months. Keep in mind these classroom libraries had been pre-existing for many years or even decades in most cases, so it's kinda useless to just now care about whether the books are "appropriate".

Mind you, you can't read that many individual books in under two months and then approve them in the system if you tried, even if most were children's books. She spent every single day of her summer, her only real time off each year, logging into the online portal and manually approving books from 8 in the morning to 8 at night, looking them up and trying to determine if they might be okay by the new standards since she couldn't possibly have the time to read them all and check, and again, entirely unpaid on her own. Teachers were scanning in their classroom's books to the system to be approved by her in real time, so she really never could get very far ahead. At most she'd knock out a few hundred a day, which I think is wildly impressive given the circumstances.

Even with all that work, she couldn't open her library for nearly a month into the new school year this August because she spent every school day finishing that approval thing for the classroom libraries for teachers. At least by that point she got paid for it. She was also way behind on getting her library ready for the school year, she really hadn't had time to prepare like normal. It was a crazy stressful time for her all around, moreso than back-to-school time normally is each year.

I helped as much as I knew how to, which mostly just meant looking books up for her or texting back and forth with my friends that work at Barnes and Noble or Books A Million asking if they could skim through certain books that might pose a threat at times, and coming up to the school with her sometimes while she worked on approving books and I worked on preparing her library for "business" again.

My mom was upset because she didn't have time for a real summer vacation, the most she got to do was occasionally visit the beach a few hours away for a day trip. (On one of the beach days, she even took her blessed laptop with her to work on it in the car ride over.) She was in the thick of it neck deep all on her own for months with hardly any time off and no pay to show for it.

It's frustrating because if she were to have approved a book that a parent later complains about, it could mean bad news for her. Again, no way in hell would she have been able to both read every single book, determine if she thought it was okay by Desantis's standards, and then approve every single book within the system. She did her best, but she's still nervous someone will complain.

All this conservative bullshit around books is hurting so many kinds of librarians and educators in so many ways, so just take a moment sometime soon to appreciate your local librarians and public school teachers putting up with this crap. They could use the love. Maybe some strong alcohol. And a big wad of cash, they do a lot of shit unpaid.

And do vote these assholes out of office that are making these poor librarians' and teachers' jobs harder with no additional support or pay.

awetistic things {211}

Youngstown is poorer than any of its ten neighbors, showing that as the city’s misfortunes have mounted, they haven’t spread. Instead, poverty has been concentrated within the borders of Youngstown City School District. This kind of segregation comes about largely because of how we organize and fund school districts. When district lines split better-off neighborhoods from poorer ones, that keeps local dollars on one side of the line and needy students on the other—and wealthy communities have every incentive to keep it that way.

Fault Lines

The Seeds We Plant Series #29: When You Love Someone, You Don't Put Them in a Bad Environment

Hi there, Happy Valentine’s Day to you! Recently, I watched a YouTube video in which Brian Tracy was a guest, and during his talk, he mentioned how we end up thinking, speaking, and acting like people in our environment. I’ve often written about how an environment can impact our character, especially in raising children. Creating a generational cycle of love involves paying attention to the…

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This video is really in depth and really informative and it's something I think people should watch

actually every single educator / person who works with children needs to be trained about neurodivergences

Ah yes the four houses, corresponding with the four types of students

Sports

Brains

Arts

And, of course, nepo babies

Born to draw podcast ship fanart, forced to be doing college algebra 2 as a junior in highschool :(

Are you a mineralologist or some other discipline of geology? Or are you just the most knowledgeable amateur ever? I'm an amateur geomorphologist, but I don't know as much about landforms as you do about minerals ❤️

No, I am just a hobbyist!

while I’m empathetic to the struggles of families who rely on dual income. It’s only my second day in the school system as a fieldwork student and I’m vowing to commit to the strain of a single income if it means any children of mine wouldn’t be in the public school system.

kristen needs to get her adhd diagnosed it won’t fix her but it sure will be a stepping stone to get there

Some good news

I understand the choice to change the original use of the word “fag” to “drudge,” for obvious slur reasons. But, by doing that, you’re ensuring that viewers won’t know that fagging was an actual practice that’s been around for centuries in Great Britain.

It clearly wasn’t a humane or ethical system, and it’s deeply frowned upon in present day. But it was a huge part of British public/boarding school culture, and “fag” and “fagging” were the words exclusively used for this practice.

There’s even a possibility that the modern gay slur “faggot” was derived from this practice, since fagging frequently involved physical and sexual abuse between students. However, tellingly, fagging became less popular in some schools when homosexuality was more actively criminalized.

All that is to say that—though I get the reasoning—you’re still erasing a plot-relevant part of history by glossing over this very bad, very true thing that existed in England (and in some English colonies!) up through the 20th century. The truth is ugly, but it’s better context for the story you’re telling, and quite honestly makes Ciel’s situation at Weston make a lot more sense.

Public education is not actually about academia, it's about industry. The purpose of american schools, from day one, was to integrate members of the general people into a society that is nigh dependant on submission to the status quo. If you ask any teacher, student, parent, counselor, or any other person who is invested in public schooling, what the purpose of going to school is, they will respond with some variation on how it's meant to prepare kids for their future careers. What's important is not that one is in touch with their history, or able to perform basic mathematics, or that one can engage with literature and art in a meaningful way. The important part is that schoolchildren have a dispassionately earnest work ethic, an unyieldingly flexible standard of punctuality, and an uncompromising set of inordinate values about properness drilled into them. I don't think it's funny or ironic that school settings are commonly compared to prisons, and I don't think education should have to exist to serve the purpose of monetary and political benefit to be considered worthy of investment. Until public education as an institution is no longer viewed as an extension of industry, intellectualism will never thrive and no number of foundational reworks of the system will be effective at remedying the underlying cause of dysfunction and corruption.

just remembered that my dunks gift card is more secure than my ssn and i think i've lost faith in america's ability to upgrade systems created two hundred years ago.

oh wait. i never had faith in america's anything. social security numbers are the tip of the iceberg.