I’ve had a nice couple of days off of school, but a bit of anxiety has crept up on me. I should be working on my own personal research for the University Scholars Program that I am in, however, I have been lazy and have wanted to avoid all work for at least two weeks.
Two nights ago, I had lunch with my good friend Christina and her girlfriend Jen. Christina is getting her Masters in Occupational Therapy and has been trying to convince me to join her since I’ve met her. I’ve been reluctant since I really did not know much about the field and wanted to explore all my career options. It seems like I am at that point where OT is looking mighty bright. Nothing interests me and I like the idea of working with the body and mind. I’ve wasted several years trying to figure out what I am passionate about and have found nothing. I’m going to give OT a chance.
It’s time to go to the registrar’s office and drop some classes and add others. This is going to be fun..
Today we had a pizza celebration in one of my classes.
Whilst everyone ate their pizza, one of the professors (a young cool grad student), asked if there was anyone who didn’t eat a slice of pizza? I didn’t raise my hand because I thought he wanted to know for the sake of fairness in distribution. He noticed that two of us were not eating anything. He asked us why we hadn’t grabbed a slice, but we both hesitated to respond. My friend yelled out that I was a vegetarian, which didn’t make any sense because they had purchased cheese pizza. I later found out that she was doing it to protect me. I thought for a moment, and then said “I am a vegan.” The other kid quickly said, “And so am I.” The professor yelled “Yes!! I won a bet!!!” (I’m not entirely sure what that bet was by the way)
As I left class, I wondered about my own reaction, my classmate’s reaction and my friend’s reaction. Why was I so embarrassed to admit I was a vegan? Why did he hesitate as well? Why did my friend feel the need to protect me with the label “vegetarian”? Other memories suddenly rushed into my mind.
Since I have been on a plant-based diet, whenever someone found out about my diet, repulsion would follow. They would usually say, “Well, you must be very unhealthy! How do you even get any protein?” This was usually in the context of a meal, where they would proceed to inhale a burger, fries, and a soda. I knew people (in high school) who would shove a piece of steak in front of my face and say “Look at the dead cow!!! What are you going to do about it?” or others who would call me a hypocrite because I chose to eat plants which were living organisms as well. I can honestly say that I’ve been bullied for not eating meat. One time, a group of kids in high school kept swinging a pepperoni pizza near my face while making cow jokes, until I couldn’t take it anymore and left the cafeteria because I needed to cry.
I have never once gone around “preaching” veganism or vegetarianism. If someone asked me why I was one, I would tell them my reasons. If someone wanted to initiate a moral debate, I would gladly participate. However, I have never looked at someone who was eating meat and said “Why are you eating that?? How do you remain healthy??” Perhaps they have encountered vegetarians/vegans who have made them feel morally corrupt because of their dietary choices, however, that person has not been me. Am I disgusted by the factory farming system? Yes. Do I hate the dissociation that exists between the food process and consumption? Yes. Do I worry that people do not eat well? Yes. HOWEVER, I have made the choice of avoiding all such food processes, thus avoiding eating animals. I do not expect others to do the same. This is a personal choice.
Sometimes I wonder if I should lie about being a vegan when someone asks why I am not eating something. This is how it usually goes:
Aquaintance: “Here, have some chicken wings.”
Me: (Smiling) “No thank you.”
Acquaintance: “Aww, come on, why not?”
Me: (Smiling) “I’m a vegan, but thank you for the offer”
Acquaintance: (Frowning) “Oh, okay”
(Usually there is a lot more insisting)
This is how I think I should do it:
Acquaintance: “Here, have some chicken wings.”
Me: (Smiling) “No thank you”
Acquaintance: “Aww, come on, why not?”
Me: “I already ate. I am really full.” OR “I’m not in the mood for chicken wings tonight” OR… just about any other lie.
Acquaintance: “Alright” (moves along to next person)
But then I think, fuck that shit! I’m not going to lie to possible be discovered later on. I am very much a vegan. I am not going to eat those chicken wings because I do not eat chicken wings. That is the reason. Very simple. Leave me alone. I try to treat everyone with respect and kindness and would like to be treated the same when someone finds out that I am a vegan….
or……
…an atheist for that matter!! (cue dramatic music)
Peace.
KR
In Love and Its Disintegration in contemporary Western Society, Fromm writes, “Love as mutual sexual satisfaction, and love as “teamwork” and as a haven from aloneness, are the two “normal” forms of the disintegration of love in modern Western society, the socially patterned pathology of love…” He believes that in a capitalist society such as ours, the regulation of all economic relationships, including social relationships, has caused that which is dead, such as shoes, to be of a superior value to that which is alive, such as human effort. He believes that this transformation from man to commodity, has led to an alienation of man from himself, others and nature. In order to survive this empty feeling of loneliness, man finds a companion to seek refuge from the “unbearable sense of aloneness” and this company is mistaken for love and intimacy.
As I sat here, attempting to study for my exams tomorrow, Fromm’s work popped into my mind. This feeling of alienation is especially prevalent when I am stuck on a seat for hours, memorizing thousands of words, in order to regurgitate them at a later time. It is dehumanizing.
I must force myself to get back to work now and not allow my mind to wander off as it loves to do.
That’s all Folks!
KR
I have a lot on my mind today. I haven’t been on tumblr much lately due to my extreme laziness. I would love to say that it is because I am a college student and I have too much on my plate, but honestly, I have more than enough time to write. I am a psychology major, and at least at my university, it means that I have a lot of time for naps and youtube.
Last week, I found out that my mother’s “boyfriend” stole my sister’s car and money from my moms bank account. He was someone that we took into our tiny little trailer because he had nowhere to go after going to jail for helping an illegal immigrant. We fostered him when he gambled part of my mothers money away and attempted to commit suicide. We tried out best to make him smile when he had no life left in his eyes. We were apparently overly optimistic and trusting with this man.
How far should one extend a hand? When should one let go? Should we have kicked him out of our trailer after he set his car on fire in an attempt to end is life? Maybe we should of… We simply felt that we couldn’t kick someone out when they had just tried to kill themselves. We were so torn, but we let him stay until he could find a job.
But then, my mom fell in love with him. Or maybe she always loved him? They became partners and I finally saw my mother smile with her eyes. Her eyes haven’t smiled since we were children. I cheered them on, hoped that his proposal to be wed with her was sincere, and carried on with my life light-hearted, knowing that my mom was safe and happy.
Now that he has stolen her heart, her little bit of money and my sisters car, I have a heavy heart. I cannot live well knowing that my mom is in so much pain.
That’s all folks,
KR
Aaron Swartz’s Tragic Battle With Copyright
Aaron H. Swartz, one of our our most vigorous champions of open access and copyright reform, committed suicide in New York City on Friday at the age of 26.
He was a pioneer and a renegade, part of the team that built Reddit as well as the widely-used RSS protocol. But he first began making headlines for a coding exploit that he undertook in September of 2010, when he used MIT’s servers to scrape and download some two million academic articles stored by the online catalog JSTOR using a program named keepgrabbing.py. Per copyright law, it may have been illegal or, as some argue, “inconsiderate”: these articles were meant only to be available to MIT affiliates, not to the wider world that Swartz believed deserved better access to the world’s information.
MIT didn’t press charges and neither did JSTOR. The government, however, decided to throw the book at Swartz, eventually hitting him with 13 separate charges and threatening to send him to prison for decades. According to his mother, Swartz was depressed about the court case and possibility of years in prison. He’d contemplated suicide in the past and, for unknown reasons, followed through this time.
READ MORE
- by Leandro Oliva and Adam Clark Estes
Let’s keep this 100 what is basically happening here is AFTER kids in ” failing districts ( read POc/rural/ under supported by tax dollars) have been used as guinea pigs and insulted, and had everything about their very selves critiqued and maligned.
The schools have the same rate OR WORSE than public schools.
And all the people who helped innate that change are less than 10 years later championing what they fought against , in new language in hopes we don’t notice
Charter schools are about to get a reality check.
As someone who has observed the breakneck pace of the growing charter school movement up close, Greg Richmond, who leads the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA), is taking a step back.
“We didn’t start this movement in order to create more failing schools, but that’s what we have,” Richmond told The Huffington Post. “Hundreds of them.”
On Wednesday morning, Richmond will join New Jersey Schools Commissioner Chris Cerf and California charter schools advocate Jed Wallace at Washington D.C.’s National Press Club to announce a new campaign, “One Million Lives,” that aims to crack the whip on the duds.
The campaign will focus on getting states to adopt rules that make failing charter schools close automatically, hold charter authorizers accountable for their schools’ performance, and revamp their authorizing bodies so they become more professional. Initial allies include organizations and philanthropies that have, until now, focused on growth — rather than quality — in the charter sector.
Charter schools are publicly funded but independently run, and often admit students via lottery. Proponents such as the Obama administration advocate for charter schools in the belief that educational opportunity should not depend on zip code, and that running schools without regulations — without district-imposed curricula or mandatory union representation — gives schools more room to innovate and succeed, unencumbered by bureaucracy.
But critics have long claimed that the schools siphon money away from public schools, and a steadystream of evidence has shown that, on average, charter schools do not outperform traditional public schools. NACSA found that between 900 and 1,300 charter schools are performing within the lowest 15 percent of schools within their state.
Charter schools are about to get a reality check.
As someone who has observed the breakneck pace of the growing charter school movement up close, Greg Richmond, who leads the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA), is taking a step back.
“We didn’t start this movement in order to create more failing schools, but that’s what we have,” Richmond told The Huffington Post. “Hundreds of them.”
On Wednesday morning, Richmond will join New Jersey Schools Commissioner Chris Cerf and California charter schools advocate Jed Wallace at Washington D.C.’s National Press Club to announce a new campaign, “One Million Lives,” that aims to crack the whip on the duds.
The campaign will focus on getting states to adopt rules that make failing charter schools close automatically, hold charter authorizers accountable for their schools’ performance, and revamp their authorizing bodies so they become more professional. Initial allies include organizations and philanthropies that have, until now, focused on growth — rather than quality — in the charter sector.
Charter schools are publicly funded but independently run, and often admit students via lottery. Proponents such as the Obama administration advocate for charter schools in the belief that educational opportunity should not depend on zip code, and that running schools without regulations — without district-imposed curricula or mandatory union representation — gives schools more room to innovate and succeed, unencumbered by bureaucracy.
But critics have long claimed that the schools siphon money away from public schools, and a steadystream of evidence has shown that, on average, charter schools do not outperform traditional public schools. NACSA found that between 900 and 1,300 charter schools are performing within the lowest 15 percent of schools within their state.
Because of results like this, some say an initiative like One Million Lives is long overdue. About a year ago, several charter school supporters told HuffPost that the movement needed to check itself, since it would be hard for politicians to continue advocating for funding these schools without definitive results, and with so many underperforming schools continuing to operate.
“We’ve been talking about this for a number of years and still there are hundreds of failing schools in the country,” Richmond said. “We have to switch gears from the rhetoric and make it reality.”
Most recently, he added, education policymakers have been concerned with low charter school closure rates. According to his organization’s survey, two years ago, 12 percent of charter schools up for renewal were shuttered; the next year, that number fell to 6 percent. These numbers were particularly startling because they indicate that charter schools aren’t holding up their end of the bargain: namely, increased flexibility in exchange for more accountability. New survey findings released Wednesday, it should be noted, show that the rate increased the following year.
Most notably, philanthropic groups that have attracted citicism for supporting massive charter growth — a move that often has them accused of “destroying public education,” as Richmond characterized their critics as saying — are getting behind the cause. Richmond said the initiative has significant support from the Gates, Walton, Robertson and Dell foundations.
Other initial allies include Cerf, who, in a statement, said the focus on closures “is precisely what the exchange of autonomy for accountability means — the core idea inherent in charter schools.”
Michelle Rhee, a former Washington, D.C. schools chancellor, also praised the campaign.
“If we are going to really help kids succeed, every school entrusted with public money … must be held accountable to the families they serve and the taxpayer for high standards and achievement,” Rhee said. ”We need to promote better authorizer practices and stronger state policies to achieve a higher quality of charter schools and, at the same time, set clear protocols for closing chronically failing schools.”
But even as the campaign launches, some states appear to be continuing down a path that prioritizes charter school growth over quality, threatening to create legions of new underperforming schools. The Michigan state legislature is currently weighing a bill that would expand charter schools further by allowing basically anyone to start one of these schools, with few safeguards for quality or experience.
“It provides no assurance of quality,” said Amber Arellano, who heads the nonpartisan advocacy group EdTrust Midwest. “This is a reckless gamble that threatens the very future of our students.”
huh, i guess the criticisms are starting to hit close to home. too bad students are going to have to pay the price of these folks greed.
and as always, fuck michelle rhee.
fuck this bullshit. WE KNOW the best way to fix our schools. We DO. Train tezchers, pay them well, properly fund the schools, ALL OF THEM, and root out discrimination on the basis of class race ability etc, make up a better currciculum that does not enrich the textbook and exam companies. But the powers that be need money and to fuck over poc. This aint about equal school. This is about money and power. And fuck the kids who aint white and rich and ablebodied.
Yea and stop giving children unequal education based on the taxes they pay. If we aren’t going to address poverty and what it means for kids before they get to school and racism as well, then there really is no point. Everything will keep failing because poverty and intentionally keeping people living in it and giving them subpar shit because of it doesn’t work and brings shit down. People in power aren’t stupid they don’t really want to improve schools they just want a good way to abuse kids with lies while making it seem official and not as bad as public ed.
Thanks. So, I’m waiting for the time when some genius start-up develops a real comprehensive online education system that figures out how to balance face-to-face contact with virtual exploration and includes meticulously designed immersive environments (possibly in the form of MMORPG) that get at curricular goals in the form of content, skills, and dispositions.
I really hope someone is working on it!
