Luke – 3 Months š
Day: June 20, 2017
#marantamonday – there are those of us who would like a day to show off their Marantas. Hereās my Maranta leuconeura doing her thing (13 hours in 8 seconds)
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#timelapse #houseplants #houseplantjournal #observe #plants #boredpanda #video #cool #science #botany #horticulture #urbanjunglebloggers #houseplantclub #plantas #vƤxter #gardentherapy #pflanzen #gardening #buzzfeed #buzzfeedvideo #ę¤ē© #ģė¬¼ #botanical #greenthumb #nature #naturegram #scientific
If I ever encounter the phrase “overcome their disabilities to follow their dreams” again, I may have a screaming fit.
Waking up in the morning without any symptoms…
Now Iām almost waiting for āif you order people around and generally sound like an arrogant ass, a lot of people arenāt going to appreciate thatā to get morphed into the obnoxious kind of tone policing šµ
Donāt feel bad if you sometimes fail in the kitchen šĀ (click for more)
this trend of people offering simple, usually good advice for feeling slightly better and being immediately met with āWE CANT ALL BE NEUROTYPICAL KARENā needs to die ASAP if only because 99.99% of the time on Tumblr its friendly advice from one mentally ill person to the rest of us
And alsoā¦ not everyone talking about this stuff is pushing it on everyone.
Like ā Unfuck Your Habitat doesnāt work for me. Trying to engage with it would harm me.
Iām also really glad it exists. It works for a lot of other people.
Itās not harming me by existing.
Getting pushy and assuming that the same strategies must work for absolutely everyone are really what I object to. Doesn’t matter that much who they are or where they’re coming from with it, that type of overbearing approach is unlikely to go over well.
Unsolicited advice based in assumptions that you know better than the other person about their own life and wellbeing is just not cool. (And it’s also hardly limited to any one group. Unfortunately.)
That is also very different from the way more respectful “I have tried X and it worked very well for me in my particular situation (though of course YMMV)”. That type of discussion can be very helpful.
mwap:
I donāt know all of these things with certainty, but I believe they are all true, and it would be nice if people stopped treating them as contradictory.
- Talking over people, condescending to them, not responding to signs of discomfort, etc., can and do cause harm.
- Autism and autistic traits tend to make people more likely to engage in these behaviors.
- These behaviors can also be made more likely by one person assuming that that the other person canāt have anything worthwhile to say, or by one person treating the other personās feelings as unimportant. These attitudes, in turn, can be made more likely by certain social privileges including class privilege and male privilege.
- People are often not consciously aware of the ways in which classism and sexism cause them to downplay certain perspectives, so these can be a factor even in the absence of malicious intent.
- Any individual instance of these behaviors might be influenced by multiple factors including the ones given above and others.
- Behaviors associated with autism are typically stigmatized as weird and embarrassing even when they donāt harm other people.
- Some of the stigma associated with the behaviors under discussion is rooted in ableism and the punishment of certain kinds of weirdness.
- Some of the stigma against condescension, ignoring discomfort, and talking over people derives from the actual harm these behaviors cause to other people.
Musings/potential elaboration:Ā Within the subset ofĀ āneurodivergent people who talk over others,ā I would add that lots of interpersonal and gender differences can probably be attributed to a kind of predictive shame. Iām hesitant to draw any sweeping conclusions, but Iāll say that most people I know who fit into said subset fall into one of two categories: theĀ āIām just going to embarrass myself so I wonāt say anythingĀ on the off-chance Iāll be rudeā type and the ānormies have it out for me, they just donāt getĀ my interestsā type. And while Iāll concede that thereās almost definitely a gender-socialization thing going on there, I think itās interesting that both cases are still grounded in the knowledge/expectation that the behavior is stigmatized and unwanted, not in classic entitlement.Ā
Another addition is:
There are different cultural norms about how conversations work.
In some cultures, youāre supposed to wait your turn. In others, youāre supposed to jump in and interrupt each other.
Neither is wrong.
Harm is often done when people arenāt playing by the same set of cultural assumptions.
Mom declares her daughter is done with homework in viral email.
Blogger Bunmi Laditan sent her 10-year-oldās school a clear message.
āHello Mayaās teachers,
Maya will be drastically reducing the amount of homework she does this year. Sheās been very stressed and is starting to have physical symptoms such as chest pain and waking up at 4 a.m. worrying about her school workload.
Sheās not behind academically and very much enjoys school. We consulted with a tutor and a therapist suggested we lighten her workload. Doing 2-3 hours of homework after getting home at 4:30 is leaving little time for her to just be a child and enjoy family time and weād like to avoid her sinking into a depression over this.ā
A++++ parenting š
Iāve talked with a whole cadre of child therapists and psychiatrists about this very issue. There is little conclusive evidenceĀ that homework significantly improves elementary school childrenās grades, understanding of subjects, or facility with various operations, processes, etc. However, plenty of evidence suggests that ever-increasing amounts of homework for young children lead to stress, anxiety, emotional fatigue, resistance toward academics in general, lack of leisure time to build social/interpersonal skills, and poorer family relations. Ā (My kids were doing about 3 hours a week IN KINDERGARTEN, at age 5 ā so thatās Ā½ hour every night, after a 6.5 hour school day, or else saving it up for long slogs over the weekend, even more disruptive. And that wasnāt including reading practice!)
We have stopped doing homework altogether with my 7 year old as a result of severe anxiety/depression and a learning disability. She had gotten to a place where she had so little self confidence and truly believed that she was stupid and worthless, not just because of homework of course ā but every time we tried to sit down to do homework with her, itād end in tears with her really vehemently berating herself, and no amount of encouragement could ameliorate the damage done. Now, granted, sheās got other things going on besides just an overload of school work. But in NO WAY did the homework help her, either academically or emotionally.Ā
No little kid should have to spend an hour or more each night getting through homework. Now, my deal with Siena is that if she wants to give her homework a shot, I will absolutely help her if she wishes for help, but I no longer force her to complete all of it or to work on it for some set length of time before finally throwing in the towel.Ā
Guess what? With the pressure taken off, sheās actually doing MORE independent work now, purely out of the desire to learn and practice, than she ever was before weād decided with her therapy team and school that homework was just not a thing this kid could handle.
Luckily for my older daughter my schoolās 3rd-grade team decided to hand out homework only 3x/week, and the sheets take no more than 15-20 minutes to complete. That is totally reasonable for 8-9 year olds!Ā
Anyway tl;dr just because the school system may require it sure as shit doesnāt mean parents canāt, or shouldnāt, fight it. Do whatās right for your kid, and above all, let them be kids.Ā
I eventually stopped doing homework because I was overwhelmed by it.
There was an article just the other day in the local paper about a primary school thatās abolishing homework! You can read it here (autoplay video, gives you a few seconds to stop it).
As a teacher the only āhomeworkā my students get is the work they donāt finish in class. Assigning homework for workās sake is the dumbest thing a teacher can do
I think part of the issue is not considering homework time as work. Like, 10 year olds shouldnāt be doing 10 hour days, and thatās pretty well recognised. But 7 hours in school, plus 3 hours at home? thatās fine/sarcasm
Obviously with older students they need to be writing essays on their own at home and so on, but making 7 year olds do maths practice at home isnāt going to help anything. If they didnāt grasp in it lessons, then theyāre not likely to figure it out on their own at home.
I was really lucky. My primary school only assigned homework in year 6 (10-11 years) and it was supposed to be 10 minutes a night max. My secondary school had a 20 mins per subject rule, no more than 4 subjects a night, no homework to be due the next day policy, and least in the first few years (up to 14-15 or so). And no homework over school holidays. Your week off was supposed to be actually off, not doing schoolwork. Kids need breaks.
Another problem with homework is that thereās very little that young children can reliably do independently. Little kids need a lot of scaffolding in order to practice things and develop their skills.
The kinds of repetitive drilling that little kids can do independently arenāt a very good use of anyoneās time. The kind of assignments that *are* a good use of time for young kids require support that most parents donāt know how to give.Ā
Without appropriate support, kids tend to get frustrated and demoralized. Itās not good for their learning, and itās not good for their relationships with their parents.Ā
why āspanking is harmfulā studies will, ultimately, never matter to parents who want to hit their kids:
@fandomsandfeminism wrote a great post recently about the fact that we have, essentially, a scientific consensus on the fact that all forms of hitting children, including those euphemistically referred to as āspankingā, are psychologically harmful. theyāve also done an amazing job responding to a lot of
parentsself-admitted abusers who think āI hit my child and Iām okay with thatā and/or āI was hit as a child and I donāt think thereās anything wrong with meā are more meaningful than 60 years of peer-reviewed research.unfortunately, Iām here to tell you why all of that makes very little difference.
in 2014, a couple of researchers from UCLA and MIT named Alan Fiske and Tage Rai published a book called Virtuous Violence, the result of a major study of the motivations for interpersonal violence. Rai wrote a shorter piece about it in Quartz, which is a pretty light but still illuminating (hah, I did not see that pun coming but Iām gonna leave it) read.
the upshot of Fiske and Raiās work is that most violence is fundamentally misunderstood because we think it is inherently outside the norms of a supposedly moral society. we presume that when someone commits a mass shooting or beats their spouse they are somehow intrinsically broken, either incapable of telling right from wrong or too lacking in self-control to prevent themselves from doing the wrong thing.
but what Fiske and Rai found was that, in fact, the opposite is true: most violence is morally motivated. people who commit violent acts arenāt lacking moral compasses – they believe those violent acts are not only morally acceptable, but morally obligatory. usually, these feelings emerge in the context of a relationship which is culturally defined as hierarchical. in other words, parents who commit violence against their children do so because they believe it is necessary that they do so in order to establish or affirm the dominance which they feel theyĀ are owed by both tradition and moral right.
when abusive parents say that they are āhitting children for their own goodā, they are not speaking in terms of any rational predictions for the childās future, but rather from a place of believing that the child must learn to be submissive in order to be a āgoodā child, to fulfill their place in the relationship.
this kind of violence is not the result of calm, intellectually reasoned deliberation about the childās well-being.
for that reason and that reason alone it will never be ended by scientific evidence.
history tells us more than we need to verify this. the slave trade and the institution of racial slavery, and their attendant forms of ācorrectiveā physical violence, for instance, did not end because someone demonstrated they were physically or psychologically harmful to slaves – that was never a question in peopleās minds to begin with. for generations, slavery was upheld as right and good not because it was viewed as harmless, but because it was viewed as morally necessary that one category of people should be ākept in their placeā below another by any means necessary, because they were lower beings by natural order and godās law. this violence ended because western society became gradually less convinced of the whole moral framework at play, not because we needed scientists to come along and demonstrate that chain gangs and whippings were psychologically detrimental. this is only one example from a world history filled with many, many forms of violence, both interpersonal and structural, which ultimately were founded on the idea that moral hierarchies must be maintained through someoneās idea of judiciously meted-out suffering.
and this, ultimately, is why we cannot end violence against children by pointing out that it is harmful – because the question of whether or not it is harmful does not enter into parentsā decisions about whether or not to commit violence in the first place. what they care about is not the hypothetical harm done to the child, but the reinforcement of the authority-ranked nature of the relationship itself. the reason these people so often sound like their primary concern is maintaining their ārightā to hit their children is because it is. they believe that anyone telling them they canāt hit their children is attempting to undermine the moral structure of that individual relationship and, in a broader sense, the natural order of adult-child relations in society.
and thatās why the movement has to be greater than one against hitting kids. it has to be a movement against treating them as inferior, in general. it has to be a movement that says, children are people, that says childrenās rights are human rights, that says the near-absolute authority of parents, coupled with the general social supremacy of adults and the marginalization of youth, have to all be torn down at once as an ideology of injustice and violence. anything less is ultimately pointless.
^^^
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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