Baller.
Definitely.
Congressman Anthony Weiner (D-New York, 9th District) recently went a little bit Mr. Smith on Washington after a failed attempt by congress to pass what should have been a fairly straight forward bill: providing free healthcare for 911 first responders who have been suffering long-term injuries due to toxins present following the attack.
While some news headlines have called Weiner “ridiculous” and “out of control,” or accused him of “literally losing it” (I hate it when people misuse the word literally), this blogger disagrees. In fact, I welcome Anthony Weiner for cutting through the bull shit and niceties often present during congress debates. We need more politicians who are impassioned about the issues, who are not afraid to stand up at the podium and rant when frustrated. Not only does it remind me that they are real people (shocking!), it also reminds me that they do care.
To pass this bill, the Democrats needed a two-thirds majority. When the tally was announced there were 255 representatives for the measure and 159 against. Thus, by a margin of under 20 votes, the bill failed to pass into law. This likely means that the courts will now have to settle compensation issues.
Weiner accused his Republican counterparts of being more concerned with procedure than with the people they represent.
You vote yes if you believe yes! You vote in favor of something if you believe it’s the right thing! If you believe it’s the wrong thing, you vote no…It’s Republicans wrapping their arms around Republicans, rather than doing the right thing on behalf of the heroes! It is a SHAME, a SHAME! If you believe this is a bad idea to provide health care then vote no, but don’t give me the cowardly view ‘oh, if it was a different procedure.’
I will not stand here and listen to my colleagues say, ‘oh, if only I had a different procedure that allows us to stall, stall, stall, and then vote no.’ Instead of standing up and defending your colleagues and voting no on this humane bill, you should urge them to vote yes, something the gentleman has not done.”
Of course, this is just one of many times Anthony Weiner has spoken out for something he believes in and I expect, not the last. Meantime, here, here Anthony! Thanks for saying what we’re all thinking.
With TV being so good nowadays, what can books offer? I ask that question in seriousness, not in the facetious way that a white bearded English professors who still thinks TV has only 3 channels might ask it. There is tons of heinous TV, but there are also shows whose quality rivals that of any novel or play ever written. Six Feet Under, Mad Men, Arrested Development, Insert the Show that You are Furious I Didn’t Mention Here–can novels even compete with stuff this good? Should they even try?
But books are still wonderful, and still offer a distinctly different pleasure than even the best-crafted TV series can. Here’s my attempt to do a bit of Pandora-like matching between some shows and books:
If you like….Mad Men (and are SO excited that the 4th season just started)
Read….The Hours, by Michael Cunningham and Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
(you could see the movies too, but read the books first)
Some of the similarities between these books and the series are obvious–all three have a late 1950s housewife as one of their main characters. Laura Brown in The Hours and April Wheeler in Revolutionary Road are like Betty Draper, if Betty was even more depressed than she already is. The three have something deeper in common, though, in their tone and pacing. If you like Mad Men, chances are that you enjoy watching people lead “lives of quiet desperation.” You somehow enjoy watching people be trapped in isolating, misery-inducing circumstances. The Hours shows how a woman might escape her desperation and remain alive–Revolutionary Road devastatingly shows another way of getting out. These books, respectively a Pulitzer Prize winner and a National Book Award Finalist, are so well-written that I was certain I’d found The Most Beautiful Sentence in the English Language every few pages. Revolutionary Road ends with the following two: “But from there on Howard Givings heard only a welcome, thunderous sea of silence. He had turned off his hearing aid.” These may well be the two most devastating sentences in the English language–read it to see why.
If you like….Gossip Girl
Read….Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld and I am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe (Have some self-respect…don’t read the Gossip Girl books)
Away from the depressing (and objectively good) stuff…on to the genre of Silly-but-Still-Kind-of-Awesome. For what it is, Gossip Girl really is a pretty good show–infinitely better acted than The O.C., better written than any daytime soap, and (I hate to say it) more full of cute clothes than Sex and the City. Prep is not a work of stunning literature, but, like Gossip Girl, it’s well-paced, somewhat funny, and, most importantly, provides the voyeuristic pleasure of seeing the lives of the super-wealthy. Prep centers around Lee, a girl from a modest upbringing who is desperately struggling, both socially and academically, at her fancy East coast boarding school. Sittenfeld does a wonderful job with this character–the book is told in first person, yet you can still easily see why Lee doesn’t make friends easily: she’s awkward, she makes you uncomfortable, she’s an insufferable wannabe. She’s a far cry from the way unpopular people are usually portrayed in books about high schools: as martyrs victimized by those mean, rich popular kids. Yet you still feel for her, and ache when she starts sleeping with a popular guy who doesn’t care about her at all, just because she’s just that desperate for validation.
I am Charlotte Simmons was clearly meant to be a searing indictment of modern day elite colleges, or, perhaps, an excuse for the now 80-year old Tom Wolfe to feel cool by publishing a book that liberally uses the phrase “skull fuck.” Charlotte Simmons is a doe-eyed country girl who goes to the fictional Dupont College (a Yale-Dartmouth-Duke hybrid) and discovers that (gasp!) it’s full of sex and drugs. Not as full as Gossip Girl’s Upper East side, but still, enough to shock poor Charlotte. She meets a few Chuck Bass-types and loses her innocence/virginity/soul. It’s a silly book, but there are just enough mean rich kids to keep it entertaining.
If you like….30 Rock
Read… I Was Told There’d Be Cake by Sloane Crosely and Laughing Without an Accent by Firoozeh Dumas
The television-based humor is funny. The New York satire is spot on. But what has gotten 30 Rock by far the most attention, and the most fans, is Liz Lemon/Tina Fey. Why? Because people (particularly female people) love how “real” and self-deprecating she is. Her obsession with junk food, her constant problems spilling on herself, and her extreme awkwardness all make her a welcome foil to the uber-adorable Rachel Greens and Pam Beesleys of the sit com world. Both Crosley and Dumas make fun of themselves at every turn, telling cringe-worthy tales about locking themselves out, collecting plastic ponies, eating pig intestines, mistaking the phrase “You’re quite a jester” for a sexual come-on…and so forth. You can imagine both of these authors exclaiming “Oh god! There’s a spider nest in my yoga mat!” or beginning a story with the phrase “I met him on K-Date, which is the personals section of the Kraft Foods website.” Are they Tina Fey funny? Of course not. But she also has much, much more money than they do.
The wonderful thing is this: for every great TV show, there are hundreds and hundreds of great books. If you love both, you can lead a delightfully entertained life.
Note: The next shows I’m planning to book-link are The Office and Deadwood. Suggestions for another?
Check out my guest post on The Busy Signal:
“The Washington Post recently published its first of several installments investigating “Top Secret America,” a super-secretive cohort of United States intelligence agencies charged with keeping America safe from terrorism. The first installment concerns the “top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, [which] has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.”
The report is shocking. It describes a hyper-expansive, dangerously bloated American intelligence community bordering on the megalomaniacal, one which exists on an inconceivably grand scale and whose senior-most officials don’t even fully understand its scope or purpose. At a time when citizens and lawmakers alike are losing faith in a war waged in the name of counter-terrorism, and when out-of-control budget deficits have led to doom and gloom proclamations from both the left and the right, the article’s revelations are especially poignant.” Read More…
You heard it here first! Well…probably not, but maybe you heard it here second.
The Arrested Development movie is apparently back on.
According to a GQ interview with Will Arnett, the much anticipated Arrested Development movie’s “on like Donkey Kong.” Okay. I know what you guys are thinking. You’ve heard these rumors before, only to have your hopes and dreams crushed like a bug, leaving you with a gaping void where there should be laughter and joy. But this time is different!
GQ actually called show creator Mitch Hurwitz to confirm. Yes, they did the legwork. Now reap the benefits. According to Hurwitz, they have a script. It’s not what one would call finished, per se, but it is a script, a script they are quite happy with. He says this of it:
We’re changing some of the Bush references to Obama because we started it awhile ago. And the Bluths may not be vacationing in the Gulf of Mexico anymore. We also might have to recast the part of Uncle Mel, the former action movie star. Both other than that we have a clear path.
Further, all of the cast has signed on (including the prickly I’m-too-cool-for-school-because-I-was-in-Superbad-and-don’t-care-about-my-acting-roots-anymore Michael Cera).
So yes, this may crash and burn once again, but for now I – like so many other devoted Arrested Development fans – will choose to celebrate. We’ll keep you guys updated with more info as soon as it comes in.
Check out my post on Phlebotomist.net:
Gore in movies is an interesting thing. Sometimes it’s funny, other times gross. Sometimes it’s shocking, and occasionally it’s reprehensible. The following list contains ten films which, for a variety of reasons, are noteworthy for their depiction of blood-letting. In a loose sense, they could be regarded as ten of the bloodiest films ever made, although other films could certainly be substituted. In any case, this list is intended to be fun and interesting, so sit back, read on, and enjoy!
10. Tenebrae (1982)
In the 1970s and early 80s, Italian auteur Dario Argento was a cinematic force to be reckoned with. After helping to pioneer the short-lived “giallo” genre (a series of European mystery-thrillers in the 60s and 70s, noted for their stylized depictions of violence and avant-garde sensibilities; see, for example, Deep Red), he went on to direct the undisputed and hyper-violent horror classic, Suspiria. Though for all of Argento’s filmic bona fides, it’s one of his lesser-remembered works—Tenebrae—that deserves a spot on this list.
Tenebrae’s plot is nothing special: While abroad in Rome, an American murder-mystery author becomes ensnared in a string of killings somehow connected to his latest book. What is special about Tenebrae is its engrossing visual and directorial style, terrific soundtrack (provided by 70s synth-rockers and frequent Argento collaborators, Goblin) and, above all, its daringly abundant use of The Red Stuff. For anyone interested in gore, genre cinema, or both, Tenebrae is an absolute must-see. Read more…
Meaningful. Has a decent salary. Uses my college education. Looks good on a resume.
What college graduate would pass up a job that fits all these criteria? Judging by Teach for America’s application numbers, not many. In the 2009-2010 school year, Teach for America received 35,000 applications. 10% of the graduating class at all Ivy League colleges applied. These applicants have chosen to apply because the basics of the program are extremely appealing. The program tells you that if you are admitted, you will have a job for the next two years–a meaningful, resume building, reasonably paying job.
For some people, being a Teach for America corps member works out better than they could have hoped. For many, a lack of information about the program makes them rue the day they ever sent in their application. Here are ten things you absolutely must know before you make a decision about whether or not to apply to this program.
1. At any point in the process, you can be rejected by a form letter, and you will never know why.
The application process to get into Teach for America is only slightly shorter than the application process to become, say, a NASA astronaut or a Supreme Court justice. You compile the usual essays and letters of recommendation for the initial application. If they like that part, you will be interviewed by phone. If your phone interview goes well, you will be invited to an in-person interview, in which you will teach a lesson, be personally interviewed, and be observed like a lab rat in a variety of different settings.
At any time, they can simply say, “Nope.” They, like most colleges, are vehement that they will “not discuss the reasons for admitting or rejecting an individual applicant.” It is a harsh introduction to the world of job hunting. Many applicants are stunned to be rejected from a job that they view as closer to volunteering or community service work than a “real job.” It happens, though, to 90% of the applicants.
2. The summer institute program is specifically designed to break a person’s spirit.
The logic goes something like this: If a TFA teacher quits their school after a month, TFA will look bad. If that happens too many times, TFA will look really bad. The interview process is specifically designed to weed out quitters. They ask a series of questions to determine where a person’s breaking point might be. (If you met a grizzly bear on a hike, would you keep going? What about if it started to hail? What about if you stepped in quicksand?) Institute, the 5 week teacher training program that every TFA recruit endures, is designed to push you to you breaking point and then slightly beyond to see if you really will last in the classroom.
The indignities are unending. You sleep three or four to a single-person room. It occurs during the summer in places like New York and Houston, and there is no air conditioning. The bus you take to and from your school leaves at 6 in the morning and doesn’t come back to campus until 5 in the evening–at which time you will have lesson plans to write and night classes to attend. (One girl in my dorm was hospitalized for sleep-deprivation caused psychosis). The line for the copy machine can last a full hour. The food is a level of bad last seen in Depression-era bread lines. Most dignity stripping are the “writes ups” which you can get for anything from wearing clothes that aren’t professional-looking enough to being 30 seconds late to a meeting (Everything is timed with a stopwatch). If you are used to being, in general, an on-top-of-it person who gets praised for exceeding expectations, be prepared to be criticized, ridiculed, and to cry a lot. Also, it should be noted that for this entire fantastic experience, you are paid not one cent. This brings me to my next point…
3. You don’t get paid for a loooooooooooong time.
A looooooooooong, loooooooooooong time. You graduate from college. You don’t have time to get any sort of other job before you need to pack up everything you own, buy a plane ticket, and move to a new state. You endure the 5-6 weeks of hell known as Institute. During Institute (during your copious free time?) you need to pay first month’s rent, security deposit, etc, and secure yourself an apartment. You then have about 3 weeks before your school year starts to move in there. THEN, you work for two weeks. Around mid-September, you finally get your first paycheck. Doing the math, it’s a solid 3 months in which you have extremely high expenses and absolutely no income to speak of. So save.
But, you say, I have heard we get transitional loans from TFA to ease us in our switch. True. But, the loans are not for much (just try to have your loan cover a fraction of your living expenses for these many months) AND you will probably spend it all buying school supplies. School supplies, you ask? Yes…..
4. You have to buy your own school supplies.
It’s technically true: when you are teaching summer school you don’t HAVE to buy anything. Teach for America will provide you with a sad, crumpled piece of butcher paper and access to markers to make posters. If you stick with those supplies to decorate your classroom, you will probably be put on an “improvement plan” (institute speak for being in the doghouse) and, if you don’t shape up, you will be dismissed from the program. You are graded on the beauty of your classroom, and making a beautiful classroom costs money. At my summer school, many many teams of teachers chose to bring in donuts, bagels, orange juice, and other treats for their students. Every single day. No, it’s not required, but the teams that brought in food were held up as examples of what we should strive to be. It’s a little like in Office Space when Jennifer Aniston is chastised by her manager for her lack of “flair.” Fifteen pieces of “flair” are all that’s technically required, but, he repeatedly asks her, does she want to be the kind of person who only does the minimum? When you are desperate for your summer school kids to actually show up and equally desperate to be praised for doing something (anything!) right, the price of a dozen donuts seems negligible.
It’s not, though. The costs are astronomical, and all the cheerful stories you hear about there being tax breaks for teachers on school supplies are simply not true. $250 is all you get to claim on your deduction, and you don’t see that money until April. TFA encourages its math teachers to buy a wipe board and marker for each kid, its science teachers to bring in their own supplies so that each student might do hands-on experiments, and its literacy teachers to have an extensive classroom library filled books to appeal to every students’ interest and reading level. Your classroom is supposed to be filled with bright posters, splashy bulletin boards, and (if you’re an elementary teacher) cosy reading rugs. There are a few schools that provide the basics (chalk, pencils)–mine was not one of them. None of the schools that any of my fellow corps members worked at in New York had a copy machine that you could just walk in and use–you had to do a long dance in which you submitted the worksheets you wanted copied to the principal for him to sign off on and then submit those copies to a copy room attendant who, more often than not, had mysteriously vanished. For Christmas, I asked for a Kinkos card so that I could avoid taking the subway to the Teach for America office for its cheaper copies every time I wanted to copy a worksheet less than a week before I needed it.
In short, if you are applying, start soliciting donations and saving NOW. It will not be enough, but at least you won’t be blindsided.
5. You are not an employee of Teach for America.
Teach for America is a middleman. A prestigious middleman, certainly, and one that certainly treats you like an employee, but it is not your employer. The school district in which you work is. Hence, TFA has no say in whether or not you get hired, fired, or how you will be evaluated. If you are dismissed from your initial school for ANY reason, TFA will not find you a new job. If you get a job in the first place. Which brings up the next issue….
6. You are not guaranteed to get a job.
This is a huge one, and a fact that Teach for America downplays to the extreme. The Q and A section of their website includes an ingenious doublespeak answer to the seemingly straightforward question “Am I guaranteed a placement?” Their answer? “Teach for America strives to guarantee every corps member an initial teaching placement.” Ah, TFA. “Strives to guarantee” is simply not the same thing as “guarantees.” If they wrote, however, that they did “guarantee” every corps member a placement that would be false because, as I said, THEY do not have hiring and firing power (see # 5). All they can do is send you on interviews and wish you luck. You have to interview your way into the job. Most people manage to do this with relative ease, but for some, the school year starts, they’re on their 7th interview, and they still don’t have a job. Many people quit the program in annoyance at this point, but some stick it out and remain in limbo indefinitely. My roommate at institute was a wonderful but shy woman, and her shyness did not go over well in her interviews for New York schools. She went to 10 different interviews, and, when she was not hired, Teach for America basically told her “Well, maybe we made a mistake in accepting you.” Thankfully for her, one of the schools accepted her as a student teacher, which she loved, but she was making a fraction of the salary that she had anticipated. It is a great credit to her that she stayed positive and ended up finding a job that worked perfectly–it is not a credit to the program that she had to.
7. You are supposed to be going to be attending graduate school in addition to your full-time job.
The TFA experience gave me a whole new respect for people who go back to school while working. Why? Because it’s an impossible, Herculean, Sisyphean task. While my professors were talking about the theoretical underpinnings of phonics teaching, I was trying not to be too conspicuous while I compulsively rocked back and forth and ran through everything I had to do in my head. Class gets out at 9, so if the subway gets right there I can get home by 9:30. Then I can grade the 8th graders’ worksheets–except, shit, I need to buy some more stickers before I do that–so 9:45, then if I really grade fast it could maybe just take an hour and then I’ll run down to Kinkos to copy off the 7th graders’ poems…and so on. The graduate school classes had so little to do with what I actually needed help with that it bordered on the absurd. It was a bit like you spent all day being slowly roasted over a flame and then at night attended a class in which you learned about the chemical reactions that caused fire. As it turns out, when your flesh is burning, you don’t really care how exactly the fire was formed.
8. You will not be mean enough.
On the subway in mid-August, I heard some 2nd year TFA corps members talking. School was starting in two weeks, and there was fire in both of their eyes about just how mean they would be. “I will just…..oh man….” one very sweet-looking woman began, gazing off into the distance and smacking her knee with her fist. It will just be like “Don’t even…” They both were lost in visions of their well-ordered classrooms. They alarmed me. I did not intend to be “mean.” Firm, yes, and no nonsense, but mean? I reasoned that they were just not very effective, and mistook fear for learning.
I should have listened. Oh, would that I had listened. The kids you teach are not bad kids, by and large. In fact, a month into teaching, you will be a veritable fountain of adorable kid stories (I was, and I taught 7th and 8th grade…I can only imagine how many more stories elementary teachers have). But the moment they see your age, the moment you falter even slightly and give away your inexperience, it will be an eternal uphill battle for their respect. The best lessons in the world don’t work if no one is listening and no one is staying in their seat.
So, unless your classmates already give you a wide berth when you walk anywhere because you are so well-known for your cruelty, be as mean as you know how to be the first day. Let no one go to the bathroom. Call the parents of any kid who talks out. Do not smile.
I got this same advice and dismissed it–I wanted to be a positive force in the lives of these kids, not a tyrant. I know now that I could have been a much more positive force if I had only been tyrannical at first. Make Judge Judy, Jillian Michaels, (insert your favorite psycho reality TV star here) look soft. Your students will thank you, and you will thank yourself later.
9. It will be harder than you think.
“But I have climbed Mt. Everest and expect it to be much harder! I have passed Organic Chemistry and expect TFA to be harder! I hold the world record for longest time without sleep…and expect TFA to be harder than that!” Good. It’s still harder than you think, but at least you’re thinking along the right lines.
10. http://www.theonion.com/articles/teach-for-america-chews-up-spits-out-another-ethni,1293/
This is the finest article ever written about the program. Read it, and ignore the fact that it is from a parody newspaper. Every TFA corps member I’ve shown it to has grimaced and said something like “It’s a little too true.” Yes, yes it is.
Of course, each of the 35,000 applicants believes that he or she is unique–that OTHER people might find the job impossible, but that’s just because they lack the right can-do attitude. That’s exactly the culture that TFA tries to create–that if things don’t go well, it is always 100% your fault.
And, if you still apply after knowing all 10 of these facts, it probably is.
Is it a coincidence that the root of the word internship can mean to “confine (someone) as a prisoner” (Oxford American Dictionary)? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Internships act as America’s new age reinvention of the apprenticeship, except that apprenticeships used to suggest a built-in promise of a future job while internships offer the promise of….well, nothing in particular.
Internships can be as varied as real-life jobs, the main difference being that they usually do not pay as much as regular employment and that they have a finite life span. For some unlucky souls, an internship means a summer of filing the most boredom-inducing documents that have ever been generated, fetching coffee for the full-time employees, and calculating the correct postage for a package going from Austin, Texas to Chicago, Illinois. For others, it can mean a chance to experience a dream job, like writing articles for the Wall Street Journal. Most end up falling somewhere in between on that spectrum.
Internships have become more and more of a hot commodity in the last ten years, so much so that they are no longer merely considered a bonus experience on the way to success but rather an expectation, and not just for undergrads, either. College-bound high school students are scampering to find the golden internship that will garner them entrance to the university of their choice, and even those with college degrees are seeking out internships that will boost their chances of acquiring a bona fide job in their desired field.
The fact that a vast majority of internships are unpaid, however, means that more is at stake than the dignity of young hopefuls. Internships have become yet another factor in the battle between the haves and the have nots—another reinforcement of the elite maintaining the status quo. Many students simply cannot afford to take an unpaid position for the summer; they need to earn actual money for books and tuition so they can continue to attend school to eventually earn a degree that will allegedly lead to a good job someday…unless, of course, that position calls for someone with a bit more experience on their resume, like, say, an internship.
The New York Times has reported that the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights recently held an auction for media internships where an internship at Vogue went for $42,500. That’s the equivalent of a year’s tuition at any top-notch university and would easily cover the entire four-year tuition of many state schools—all shelled out so someone’s child can have the coveted opportunity to work for free. An interesting take on justice and human rights.
But internships are just a small cog in the great wheel of disparity between the rich and the poor, and there can be a lot of advantages to them if you can find one that fits into the mold of your life. In April, Obama’s administration released a fact sheet meant to enforce stricter regulations on internship programs under the Fair Labor Standards Act. It specifically states that internships should be educational, and interns should never be hired for free to replace an actual employee.
So, if you are able to land that perfect paid internship, more power to you. If not, some colleges and universities offer grants to those who find fantastic internships that just aren’t able to offer them any money. Another option is to find an internship that will allow you to work part time so you can still afford to pursue your education while gaining some real world experience. Just be sure to ask the right questions. What exactly will your intern duties be? Will you be learning a new skill? Finding out if you are truly interested in a particular field? Building a useful network? If so, an internship might really be worth your time.
If any of our dear readers of MDAMB have a good internship horror or success story, please feel free to share them! And good luck out there—not every internship will cost as much as a private jet.
Check out my post on Building the Future about my experiences with Teach for America. Here’s an excerpt:
“American schools suck. Conservatives and democrats, adults and children, and, most strikingly, teachers and non-teachers overwhelmingly agree on this point. But why? Why after so many years of hand-wringing, so many reforms, so many presidents pounding podiums and decrying our schools as unacceptable, do they still… suck?
According to one camp, the main problem with our schools is that teachers’ unions protect incompetent teachers and give good ones no reason to do their jobs well. Unions make it very difficult for principals to fire teachers, and thus bad ones can skate along without actually imparting any knowledge to their students.
The other camp asserts almost the exact opposite. Schools suck, they say, not because of the teachers–the teachers are doing a great job–but because of more nebulous factors: lack of parental involvement, poverty, lack of funding. To get rid of unions is to get rid of the one perk of this underpaid, overworked, and under-respected profession.
Last year, in a large, miserable school in New York City, I found myself unwittingly thrust into the middle of this debate.
I was a 22- year-old first year Teach for America 7th and 8th grade English teacher. In New York City alone, there were 550 of us, most newly graduated and delighted that we had found a sort of “back door” to getting respectable employment. We had spent the summer in a sticky Bronx school while the directors of Teach for America gave lessons on subjects like “Classroom Management Tactics” and “Working with ESL Students.” We had taught summer school classes, most ranging in size from about 5 to 10 students. Armed with this training, we were ready to do what Teach for America told we must do: Raise our students’ two grade levels in reading, have them pass the state mandated test with flying colors, and, last but not least, EMPOWER THE STUDENTS AND THEIR FAMILIES TO BREAK THE CYCLE OF POVERTY.
All this was fine except for one notable problem: I sucked. Read More…”
Since (very) occasionally we do in fact write on topics that directly relate to education, here is a guest post by our writer Sarah Stegner featured on EduDemic:
The Ten Best Podcasts for Teachers
Podcasts are a fantastic way to gain new information from the Internet quickly and efficiently. With a huge variety of topics available, podcasts offer something for everybody. We’ve scoured the Internet and picked out the ten best podcasts specifically for teachers.
Each podcast features teachers and other educators presenting information about research or their own personal experiences. Take a moment to read through these and then start listening! You may be surprised by how much excellent information they offer.
The Education Podcast Network: This site attempts to bring together a wide variety of podcasts helpful to teachers—including podcasts by students and classes as well as subject-specific podcasts in such diverse areas as mathematics, music education, English language arts, dance education, and computer/technology skills. A huge amount of information is contained on the site, making it sometimes difficult to sort through, but the categories are clearly delineated and the site easy to maneuver. Read more…
Dear Twilight franchise,
I know it may not seem like it now, but one day, your glory will fade. There will be no more movies. No more books. Stephanie Meyer will stop writing and go back to raising her three boys, who for the rest of their lives will try to get dates by announcing, “My mom wrote Twilight.” Saddest of all, the young girls who first made you a star will grow up, pack your black-covered books and blue-tinted movies in a box, and get on with their lives.
But don’t worry! Though those girls may think they are done with you, your lessons will stay with them. You are, after all, one of their first exposures to romance. What you taught can’t be soon forgotten. As a tribute to you, I’ve compiled a list of some of your most valuable lessons:
Abusive men don’t mean to hurt you, baby…they just weren’t thinking.
As Edward tells Bella, “I could kill you quite easily, simply by accident. . .I could reach out, meaning to touch your face, and crush your skull by mistake.” So, girls, if you just keep walking into his fist, you really should forgive him—after all, he wasn’t trying kill you.
Following you around is romantic…but watching you sleep without your knowledge is true love.
Edward reveals to Bella that he comes to spy on her constantly because “What else is there to do at night?” She is flattered. She is embarrassed. She is “unable to infuse her voice with the proper outrage.” All is forgiven, though, when he tells her, “Don’t be self-conscious.” That, girls, is the true problem with having a man sneak into your window to watch you sleep without your knowledge: you might say something stupid in your sleep. (Buffy fans have to appreciate that when Angel was watching Buffy sleep it was another sign that he had lost his soul and had become evil and creepy.)
Crushingly large egos are hott. With two ts.
When he’s not making thinly veiled threats to kill her, Edward is pretty busy telling Bella just how fabulous he is. Some notable statements: “You’re intoxicated by my very presence.” “Are you still faint from the run? Or was it my kissing expertise?” And when Bella states, ‘You’re good at everything’ he “shrugs, allowing that.” Girls, comments like these are in no way worthy of a swift kick to you-know-where. They’re just fine…warranted, even…because he really is just that great.
The hottest boys are cold, white, and sparkly.
‘Nuf said. The best kisses are with “cold, marble lips.” The best way to be touched is “with hands so freezing that it. . . feels almost as if [your] skin was burning.” Though, as we’ve learned, you should absolutely never ask anything at all of your boyfriend, maybe for your birthday he will pop himself into a freezer and roll around in glitter. Here’s hoping.
The best lesson of all: There is absolutely no irony at all in building your life entirely around an abusive man and then writing your Shakespeare paper on “Whether or not his portrayal of the female characters is misogynistic.”
No irony at all. And yes, that is a direct quotation from the book.
See Twilight? Don’t be sad. It thrills me to no end to hear my 12-year-old sister and her friends talk about one day getting to “meet a boy like Edward.” If it weren’t for you, they wouldn’t even have such things to aspire to. I am delighted, deeply delighted, that you have given this next generation of women such a wonderful look at what romance can be.
Here’s hoping someday I find my Edward too!
Love,
Sarah
