things my impossibly young looking Roman history lecturer has said
‘listen to your seminar tutors over the booklet, but only for seminars – in lectures i am king. unless you have me as a seminar tutor as well, in which case i am your king and god.’
‘has anybody played Rome: Total War? no?’
‘Cataline tried to burn the city and everyone he hated but he failed because, in short, nobody liked him.’
‘the mediterranean diet didn’t include tomatoes in the ancient world. i know. oh my god. i know.’
‘so of course when Hannibal turns up, the senate goes ‘sod it, lets kick his arse’.’
‘one man’s optimates is another man’s silver-spoon bearing prick.’
‘we don’t have much information about the 70s BC, largely because Plutarch doesn’t care.’
‘i’m not saying Rome: Total War is entirely accurate, but its battle campaigns are surprisingly historically informed.’
[hand drawing a map in chalk because the projector is broken] ‘i’ll give it a go, this is why i hate technology, and oh. well. that’s not italy.’
‘every army needs bakers and prostitutes, this is just a fact of life.’
‘Sulla. He’s a bit of a badass, but also a bit of a prick.’
‘yes, that is a slide from Spartacus. The film, not the series, which is more accurate and less like soft porn.’
‘the Romans liked Campania because its very fertile. they didn’t know this was because of its proximity to a volcano – poor buggers found THAT out later.’
‘Crassus gets given command of Syria and high fives everyone in the senate.’
‘Catullus was very pithy, very hellenistic in style. unlike the Iliad, which is 24 books of tedium.’
‘An Afternoon at Carrhae: the Romans being shot at repeatedly by Parthian cavalry because if there’s one thing the Romans aren’t good at, it’s having a cavalry.’
‘It’s good to have fast legs in war. Caesar moves very fast, not unlike Napoleon. The Usain Bolt of ancient warfare. I’m not sure why I said that, it’s an atrocious analogy.’
‘Athens is the Edinburgh of the ancient world; it has nothing to offer but education and pretty buildings.’
‘Shout out to those of you who spent your teenage years playing Rome: Total War.Which is what I did.’
‘The senate go into a panic and they decide to flee Rome at dawn, but some idiot forgets the treasury. I know. Ridiculous.’
‘Again: don’t use elephants during warfare. They’re not as cool as they look. And given they’re now endangered, it’d just be mean.’
‘I had to use this meme, I’m sorry. You’re all aware of the one does not simply walk into mordor meme right? I’m sorry, we’ll move on.’
‘I put this photo in for dramatic effect but I realise that it’s just a field. I don’t know why people bother going to see battle sites, they’re all really boring. I saw bones once, they were quite interesting. But most battle sites: boring.’
‘Caesar doesn’t tell Rome anything while he’s away in Egypt for a year, so they have no idea Pompey’s dead. All they know is that Antony is being a pain in the ass, which is, in all honesty, not unusual for Antony.’
‘Caesar is very good at one liners. You always draft a pithy one liner before a battle so you have something to say when you win. You don’t want to win and then just be like ‘whoo, thank god for that.’’
This, incidentally, is the methodology I used when I tutored people in history. And D students would end up getting A’s on the subject materials I helped them with. I suspect this is why Shakespeare was considered a fantastic writer too. People pay attention when you’re willing to put something on their level instead of being so caught up in sounding fancy and academia. (Yes, Shakespeare, for his day, was considered quite accessible to the regular people to come to the theater as opposed to only being a high-class affair.) People identify with something when you identify with them. And everyone should identify with history because it’s all human beings who screwed up, some who did some really heroic awesome stuff, and some who got handed a bad hand and turned it around. Sure, it happened in different places and people had ‘strange’ names and fancy titles, but in the end, we see those same people doing the same sort of things today. We spread posts about them, get discouraged at our society’s apparent lack of caring, and wonder how we’ll ever make a difference. Whether we’ll leave our mark. The answer is, we will.
It’s just not history yet.
It will be.
So don’t give up on history. You’re a part of it.
Tag: education
Watch: In one epic rant, this college student nails everything that’s wrong with America’s collegiate system
Ok but what’s their name? Stop doing this to black people we have all this great information about what they’re doing and no name in the description
His name’s David Badu.
Scientists need your help looking at photos of adorable penguins. Seriously
Guys, this is not a drill. Antarctic scientists need you to study photos of penguins to help them figure out how climate change is affecting these stumpy little flightless birds.
Scientists from the UK have installed a series of 75 cameras near penguin territories in Antarctica and its surrounding islands to figure out what’s happening with local populations. But with each of those cameras taking hourly photos, they simply can’t get through all the adorable images without your help.
“We can’t do this work on our own,” lead researcher Tom Hart from the University of Oxford told the BBC, “and every penguin that people click on and count on the website – that’s all information that tells us what’s happening at each nest, and what’s happening over time.”
The citizen science project is pretty simple – known as PenguinWatch 2.0, all you need to do is log on, look at photos, and identify adult penguins, chicks, and eggs in each image. Each photo requires just a few clicks to identify, and you can chat about your results in the website’s ‘Discuss’ page with other volunteers.
Science!
@bloodthreadsaltglassandtears your time has come
i have already registered an account and begun looking at penguins
#the title reads like a joke article#but this is a genuine science emergency!
@hisnamewasbeanni LUKE.
I fucking love projects that harness the ridiculous power of the internet for SCIENCE
Scientists need your help looking at photos of adorable penguins. Seriously
sigh … okay, I go againI think there is a divide between those who were discriminated against and bullied and abused for being weird or “immature” or other things like that but were able to succeed academically and those who weren’t able to succeed academically and faced discrimination and bullying and abuse for being “stupid”.
For the first person, when they’re being constantly knocked down by some jerks, being able to say “well, I’m smarter than you” is really empowering and liberating. And I’m not advocating for taking that away from anyone who has it now, I’m not.
But where do the other kids go? The ones who can’t say “at least I’m smarter than you” because by every traditional definition of “smart”, they’re not. Their bullies are the smart ones.
In my experience, telling a kid who is not succeeding in school, that “well really you are smart. you’re a good artist and thinker and all these things”, doesn’t help. Because the kid knows, they feel like they’re being placated. Okay, you say I’m smart, but I know I’m not what really smart is. I can’t do what being really smart means. Sure, I’m good at those things but I’m still not like the kids who are really smart.
And that’s why I’m arguing that, going forward, if we continue to define intelligence by these specific, narrow things, people are going to get hurt by being told “you’re smart” with no other qualifier. The kids who can’t succeed in an academic environment, who are surrounded by this traditional idea of intelligence, aren’t going to believe you when you tell them they are, because in every other way they’re being told they aren’t. They’re going to lose out.
And the “smart” kids may be even worse off. Because what if one day they lose the skills that defined them as smart, or their other struggles suddenly outpace their intelligence? They really lose out, cause in one fell swoop they lose the thing that defined their worth.
So what I’m saying is, in the future, if we tell kids from the get-go, “intelligence isn’t something you are, it’s something you apply. to anything. and everyone has the ability to apply it to different things, because each of our brains have different blueprints, and no one thing is better than the other, and no one thing takes more or less intelligence,” then we’re going to be much better off.
Don’t get rid of the concept of intelligence, just get rid of how we conceptualize it. It’s not a trait, it’s a universal tool, applicable in different ways by different people.
So all of Detroit public schools are going to close after April 8th if there’s no funding and there’s definitely no money so I guess the school to prison pipeline is now completely removing schools from the equation here.
I just wanted to clarify that by close, what’s actually happening is after April 8th, the district will literally not have the money to pay any of the teachers. At all. None. Unless lawmakers grant them 50 mil in aid, but so far they can’t agree on a plan. And there are already teachers on the news saying they will not be going to work if they’re not being paid. Given the current conditions DPS teachers deal with every day (lack of funding, overcrowded classrooms, limited resources) no one can really blame them or say anything. No one knows exactly what will happen since the district is already about 515 mil in debt but it’s not looking good.
http://www.mlive.com/news/index.ssf/2016/03/detroit_public_schools_could_r.html
this is the most fucked up thing
Young People Need To Stop Getting Offended: A Wealthy Professor’s Take
where are these wealthy professors though?
They’re all at R1 universities or Ivy Leagues doing research and getting their graduate students to teach your 100 level classes.
“25-Year Old Depressed and Stressed Graduate Students Need To Stop Complaining To Me About How Their Students Are Getting Offended: A Wealthy Professor’s Take” is more like it
Alternately: “I Don’t Give A Shit What You Think You Whiny Little Brats Just Learn The Goddamn Material Because I Teach 9 Classes This Semester At Three Different Colleges Just to Make 20K This Year You Fucking Little Monsters: An Adjunct’s Take”
(I.e., how college education in the U.S. predominantly is going right now)
American School System: We have given knowledge to the youth.
The doctors: You fucked up perfectly good children is what you did. look at them. they have anxiety.
In third grade I had this teacher who would give every student the same grade on each assignment. After the A at the top of the paper, she’d mark all the wrong answers with a red pen, and then would come by each student’s desk to talk to us about where we went wrong. Together we would fix each sentence or math problem until it was right.
At Parent night, one of the dad’s complained that his daughter worked hard to get her A, and that some of the other kids deserved to fail. The teacher allowed him to finish talking, and then responded in the same polite tone she always used in the classroom. “I’m not teaching your children how to pass test… I’m guiding them on how to learn.”
Months later our teacher posted everyone’s final grade on the board, and at first, no one was surprised to see we all had A’s. But after looking closer at our papers, and book reports, and our final assignments, we didn’t see any red ink on them.
I don’t think we should lie to children and tell them they got it all right if they didn’t. That doesn’t help anyone. But I also know that if you keep telling a child they are a failure; they messed up; or they did a bad job, after a while they’ll start agreeing.
eirenical17 