ok so for my students’ final project, i’m having them select any text they’d like and produce a new edition of it, one that’s targeted towards a different audience than the text in its original form. their edition has to include a critical introduction as well, explaining the changes that they’ve made to the text and to its material form, challenges they encountered, etc.
i’m reading the project proposals now and there are so many good ones – a cnn article on “alternative facts” re-edited to work as a kindergarten lesson about political engagement, rewriting a piece of the californian legislation family code so it’s legible to non-experts or ESL parents, “no fear hegel” (kill me), a version of cat in the hat for high schoolers that includes peritext explaining its connection to the cold war, etc. but i just got to this one: “Have you ever wondered what would happen if you combined the underlying feelings of aggression and angst in modern American middle schoolers with the manipulative and cunning nature of Machiavellian philosophy?”
he’s editing the prince for preteens.
i made the mistake of posting this when i was only halfway through the stack. listen. listen. the official bartender’s guide, for NASA astronauts.
I want to read several of these.
HELLO FRIENDS, i’ve gotten permission from my kids so i’ll be posting (parts of a few of) their projects. here’s the tag, if you’re interested.
if you see someone active on social media or something, and you message them, and they don’t reply, they don’t have to. just because they are awake and alive does not mean they have to engage with you whenever you want them to. you are not entitled to someone else’s time.
in the past, an abuser would see me post online and then hound me on aim until i answered. i felt like i had to hide. they also lived in my building and would pound on my door if they saw me online and i wasn’t responding to them. i had to completely ditch a screenname, lie about having skype, and turn off my phone to hide. if i saw they were online i couldn’t post on facebook or interact with anyone without them demanding to interact with me. the only legitimate excuse not to talk to them was being asleep. in their eyes, if i were really their friend, i would always want to engage no matter what, even if i had a migraine or work to do or wasn’t feeling very social. it didn’t matter.
please do not do this. if someone doesn’t write you back, don’t guilt them about where they are or what they’re doing. if you see someone posting on tumblr or facebook and they aren’t signed into aim or google or skype or whatever, that’s their business. if they are signed on but don’t write you back, it’s okay. sometimes people can’t talk to everyone all the time every time. some people can only talk to one person at a time without getting overloaded. some people are signed on in case someone needs to contact them with something important and not to be social. they’re not always hiding from you, and you shouldn’t make them feel like they HAVE to hide from you.
this is probably jumbled and i’m probably missing a lot here, but pressuring people to always be available to you every hour of the day and always answer the phone or text or chat or pm or whatever…if you require that of someone, you might need to take a step back.
Reminder: There are also actual reasons that some of us may have serious trouble responding to messages at all. And it’s unlikely to be about you unless you are acting like that.
I really don’t want to come across as some kind of antisocial asshole, but notifications popping up still freak me out every time. It goes way beyond “I don’t like IMs”. Seeing that it’s from someone I would want to talk to if I weren’t having a PTSD reaction doesn’t actually make it easier to respond, unfortunately.
No worries for anyone who hasn’t been aware of the problem. I’m still not entirely comfortable talking about it. And I feel bad about just leaving people hanging.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
You must be logged in to post a comment.