honeybruh:

so here’s a quick lesson about having patience with kids.

I have a 6th grade student who isn’t really interested in doing her homework (big surprise). from my experience, kids who aren’t trying to do their homework usually fall into two general categories – “this is too easy and therefore boring” and “this is too hard and therefore i’m not even going to attempt”. it became clear by October that she fell into the latter group, but most of the staff chalked it up to “she doesn’t understand it”. I didn’t really believe it because she was a very smart, emotionally aware girl and it didn’t seem like she didn’t always want to try, just that she would rather do other things than struggle with her work. 

yesterday, she got sent to my office, just so that she would have a space away from her friends to focus on her work, and she asked me to help her with two questions. I looked at them and they were fairly straightforward, simple questions about the results of using various amounts of force on an object. I did what I always do – I read the question out loud first, and then tried to help her use recall to figure it out. she did in a snap. I did the same with the second question, and before I even finished it, she went “OH!” and started writing her answer.

that’s when it hit me – she doesn’t have trouble with the material, she just has trouble reading and processing what she’s reading at the same time. big difference! I asked her and she confirmed that it was easier to hear a question and understand it than to read it and understand it. so I got her phone out, pulled up her voice recorder, and told her to try reading the question aloud and then playing it back to herself so she could process it and she looked like i had handed her the holy grail.

the moral of the story is that sometimes you have to set aside what you think is a problem with a kid and just watch for what’s easier for them. will she be able to do that during a test? maybe not, BUT now that she knows that the issue is processing reading and that she’s an auditory learner, she’s in a better position to ask for resources to help her work better in school.

so i’m off to the school counselor to let her know so she can possible get more tools for auditory learners.  

jumpingjacktrash:

astrond:

frettedwithgoldenfire:

Trump, just now: “You know, they have a word. It sort of became old-fashioned. It’s called a nationalist. And I say really, we’re not supposed to use that word. You know what I am? I am a nationalist. Use that word.”

In the future, when they write the history and say fascism in America was like a frog in boiling water, remember that was a lie. We knew and saw and no one cared.

Resist.  Fight.  VOTE!!!

bullSHIT no one cared. pull your head out of your ass OP, we’re fighting like hell. just because it didn’t magically fix everything already doesn’t mean it’s all hopeless.

don’t just accept hopeless rhetoric like ‘no one cares’, fam. it’s not true.

your fight matters.

curlicuecal:

star-anise:

porcupine-girl:

razzybean:

Rather than reblog that long AO3 thing I saw and have seen before… I don’t really care if AO3 fundraises, although I’m curious what they’ll do with the extra tens of thousands of dollars, though I’m sure it’ll go into upgrades or into a lockbox for future use when funds are low.

Keep reading

For someone who claims to be a fandom elder, you seem to be really, really poorly informed on a) what a nonprofit is, b) how AO3 functions, c) the legal status of fanfiction, and d) the history of fanfiction platforms.

The OTW (which is the group that runs AO3) is legally registered as a 501©3 nonprofit corporation. That means there are very strict legal requirements as to how they can use their money. When we say they are not profiting, that means that when they have extra money, it goes right back into their operations. In a for-profit corporation, when there is extra  money, it is distributed among stockholders. That’s why people buy stock, and that’s why corporations put profits above everything else.

This would be like if OTW took whatever extra they had and gave it to their board members. They can’t do that, and they don’t do that. The board members who run it are entirely volunteers.

Now, nonprofits obviously can hire people and pay them for their work. CEOs of nonprofits can make hundreds of thousands of dollars, and sometimes nonprofits get bad publicity for that. If it’s too extreme, they can get their nonprofit status taken away.

The OTW occasionally has to pay a few contractors for things – if you look at their financial docs, which are easily accessible on the site, you’ll see that that only amounts to like $20K a year or something. That’s probably to hire someone with some specialty to fix a thing here or there, that kind of thing. I think last year they might have hired someone temporarily to help with some of the search overhauls? (Not sure, 2017 financials aren’t up yet)

They don’t have one single paid staff member. None. No, they don’t pay the writers, but they don’t pay the programmers, the lawyers, the tag wranglers, the people doing PR, the people handling the god damn money. None of those people personally sees a penny of what you donate.

So not only does nobody profit in that the extra money isn’t just distributed among stockholders or whoever, nobody involved in OTW/AO3 profits directly from their involvement.

That covers a and b. Now, for c and d…

I don’t believe for one second that you don’t know that the legality of fanfiction hinges on not making a profit from it. Elsewhere in replies, you point out places like RedBubble where people sell fanart – do you sell on RB? Because I do, and it is honestly a total crapshoot whether your designs get to stay up or not. If someone involved with a media property stumbles upon it and reports it, RB takes it down immediately, no questions asked.

Now, when a design based on Hamilton lyrics or something gets taken down, I get it. I know I’m rolling the dice when I post that.

But I had a design that said “Emotionally compromised by fictional characters” – no characters were mentioned in the design at all, it was just that text with a few flourishes around it. It got taken down because I tagged it Harry Potter (and some other fandoms). It was not violating any copyright at all, but RB took it down without question when Warner Brothers asked them to, because it was tagged Harry Potter. I could’ve just removed the tag!!

Is that how you want AO3 to function? Because if writers were getting paid, that’s exactly how they would have to function legally. As soon as a copyright holder complains, they’d take your fic down. YouTube has had all kinds of problems with this, because some studios get slap-happy with the DMCA claims on things that should be fair use, like commentary, and YT tends to take videos down and ask questions later.

The OTW, in addition to running AO3, also fights for the legal rights of fan creators, btw. For example, when the DMCA was passed, it basically made it illegal to rip your own DVDs and blu-rays. There go fanvids! The OTW was part of the legal team that got that exemption passed.

So if you want to know how writers benefit from AO3/OTW, they’re actively fighting for your right to write and post fanfiction at all. Thank them for that.

And as for being able to just go off to other platforms… Okay, so do that. Go. Is ff.net going to give you a cut of their profits? They make a profit-profit, btw. They are a for-profit company who makes actual money off of ads, and they do not give a penny of that back to writers. The people who run it keep it for themselves. They certainly don’t put it into improving their site, let alone fighting for the legal rights of their writers. Hell, they happily ban fanfiction based on any creator who complains about it!

Historically, every for-profit host of fan content has bowed to advertisers and/or dmca-happy content creators to one extent or another. AO3 is the only one that was created expressly for the purpose of protecting fanfiction and the rights of fic writers. You’re welcome to go back to those other platforms, but they won’t pay you and you better hope nobody complains about your fic.

If you can get people to pay you for your fic via Patreon or kofi whatever, more power to you. I support that. You won’t have a legal leg to stand on if the creators find you and shut you down, much like on RedBubble, but you can probably fly under the radar well enough.

But don’t ask a nonprofit organization to put its entire existence at risk just so you can make a couple dollars off your fic.

Also I’ve known enough AO3 volunteers that like… they don’t “get” to code the site like it’s their dearest wish. They code the site like it’s an arduous labor of love because they care about fandom. OTW volunteering is a hard thing to put on your resume; very few employers know what it is, or take it seriously.

update: if you are curious about OP’s good faith on this matter, they are (or were) blocking commenters and deleting notes that disagree with or correct them, as can be seen by scrolling through the post history. agh. sigh.

jumpingjacktrash:

copperbadge:

deadcatwithaflamethrower:

adhdpie:

–the Only Mood everyone else knows about: i  wanna do THIS and THIS and THIS and THIS and THIS and–SQUIRREL

–galaxy brain: i was listening to the lecture but the prof said something that reminded me of something else and now i’m not sure how much time i was lost in thought

–the tutorial only comes in video format: i’m sorry, but you’ve thrown off the emperor’s groove *hurls product & its tutorial video into the sun*

–damn you hyperfocus: i went to bed intending to wake up and write but this morning i was possessed by a cleanliness spirit and spent the next 14 hours organizing the apartment

–i dont think u tried at all.jpg: did i seriously spend an entire free day refreshing twitter b/c i didn’t want to spend 10 minutes finishing my hw but wouldn’t let myself do anything else until i finished it???? (yes)

–patrick star: *unlocks phone* time to check the weather. *opens twitter* the weather. *opens messenger* the weather. *opens mobage game* the weather. *opens facebook* the weather. *opens twitter again* THE WEA–

–smells like depression: literally everything is too boring. i’m going back to sleep

This post is fired for being too accurate.

Wait, being unable/unwilling to watch a video tutorial is a sign of ADHD? (Not facetious, genuine question, I find watching instructional videos unbearable and/or impossible.)

i only watch tutorial videos for things that couldn’t be shown in still photos. mostly knitting techniques. a lot of those, still pictures are just confusing, you have to watch the yarn and needles and hands and see how everything goes around and under and through. but if it could be photos, i want it to be photos.

part of this is that i have trouble with spoken words. if a tutorial video has accurate subtitles, that helps a lot. but most don’t. and everyone rambles so much. just. chatter chatter chatter. i didn’t come to your tutorial video to make a friend, buddy, i don’t know you, i just want to know how to get spider mites off my houseplants, all right?

minecraft is the worst for this. every tutorial is 15 minutes of blithering about nothing, running around in 1st person view so i get motion sickness, opening and closing the inventory, and overexplaining every item and process, for a procedure that could be documented perfectly well with two screenshots and three sentences of text. i think there are a lot of lonely college boys reaching out for human contact or something. a surprising number of them are australian. anyway, when they finally get around to doing the damn thing, i miss it, because they’ve lulled me into a zoneout with their content-free nonsense. 15 minutes of blithering, 3 seconds of actual tutorial. infuriating.