Over The Waves by Setsuko Matsushima

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Demon petting a capybara

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Just a wee bit. 

not to oversimplify an extremely complex discipline but if i had to pick one tip to give people on how to have more productive interactions with children, especially in an instructive sense, its that teaching a kid well is a lot more like improv than it is like error correction and you should always work on minimizing the amount of ‘no, wrong’ and maximizing the amount of ‘yes, and?’ for example: we have a species of fish at the aquarium that looks a lot like a tiny pufferfish. children are constantly either asking us if that’s what they are, or confidently telling us that’s what they are. if you rush to correct them, you risk completely severing their interest in the situation, because 1. kids don’t like to engage with adults who make them feel bad and 2. they were excited because pufferfish are interesting, and you have not given them any reason to be invested in non-pufferfish. Instead, if you say something like “It looks a LOT like a tiny pufferfish, you’re right. But these guys are even funnier. Wanna know what they’re called?” you have primed them perfectly for the delightful truth of the Pacific Spiny Lumpsucker

I was in martial arts for years, and in particular I kinda specialized in working with the younger kids.

The two Big Rules when instructing younger students was- 1. Compliment before Critique 2. Don’t say ‘but’, say ‘now’

Praise kids on what they get right first, especially if they are struggling. Like OP said, kids don’t like to engage with people who make them feel bad. They need encouragement when learning new things.

Number two boils down to this. If you tell a kid a compliment, then say “but you need to fix this”, that ‘but’ completely negates your compliment. It’s gone. It was canceled out like adding a negative to a positive. Using “hey, that punch is looking great, now let’s focus on your stance” doesn’t verbally cancel out the progress they’ve made. It’s like they’ve checked off something on their list of stuff to work on.

Wording can absolutely make or break a child’s motivation and interest.

Rebloggling as it’s relevant in a Medical Education context

Honestly I use all of these to teach vet students too. I think people in general respond better to positivity in teaching. Not coddling, but acknowledging when a student got part way to the right answer, or had a good thought process, is something I’ve found keeps students engaged and builds confidence, which encourages them to keep going instead of shutting down and just “getting through” a lab or a rotation

Advise we use at my work (teaching mostly younger kids with a hard time reading) is Specific Positive Support. If they read the word “brisk” as “bricks” you go “ yeah, you got that first blend, nice job, those can be tricky!” before getting into what they struggled with. Just saying ’ good work’ or ‘nice job’ starts to feel like a platitude and precursor to ‘here is everything wrong’ if it’s not paired with proof that the kiddo /actually did do a good job on a thing/. Kids aren’t stupid, they can tell when you’re Just Saying Something Nice to head off a shutdown. But praising the specific things they did well, or got right, even if it’s just “ dude, you said that so fast!” or “Thanks for matching my question, good job listening.” is a game changer.

When I was 3 years old I went to a preschool that had this little green crocheted crocodile finger puppet that was my absolute favorite toy to play with of all time. I named her Chelsea, because Chelsea starts with C and crocodile starts with C and more often than not wild animals in fiction aimed at kids have names that start with the same first letter as their species. I played with Chelsea every day, because she was my favorite toy, and because the other kids weren't really interested in her, and also because I eventually started to hide her in a special secret spot in the room so no one else would find her before I did. She was so beloved by me that when I graduated from preschool, my teachers gave Chelsea to me permanently, because it was clear no one else would ever love that little crochet crocodile as much as me anyway (in part because I hid her). They waited a few weeks after I graduated before doing it, too, and sent Chelsea with some post cards as if the crocodile had been on a whirlwind "travel the world" vacation before deciding to come live with me.

And Chelsea remained my favorite toy all through my childhood. There were others I loved nearly as much, like my Imperial Godzilla and the big red T.rex from the first Jurassic Park toy line and my tiny knockoff plush Charmander, but Chelsea always held the place of honor in my heart. She was my absolute favorite toy.

I kept a lot of my favorite toys through adolescence, even if social pressure eventually got me to give away a lot of them (and some, y'know, broke). That's obviously not surprising to you if you've followed my blog, since I still collect toys into my adulthood. But it's important to note because while I know I made a conscious effort to never throw out Chelsea every time I pared down my collection... at some point, she went missing.

I became aware of it when I graduated from high school. I was feeling really emotional about leaving that stage of my life and, y'know, becoming an adult and shit, and in that state I decided to find Chelsea to reassure myself that I hadn't entirely left childhood behind. But Chelsea wasn't there. No matter how hard I looked, I could not find Chelsea anyway.

And that was, like, devastating, because the only explanation was that somehow, at some point, I had accidentally tossed her out with some other "childhood junk" while trying to grow up and be responsible in my teen years. I had literally thrown away my childhood in a careless attempt to be more grown up.

Of course I knew she was just a toy - nothing more than some yarn twisted together in the loose shape of a crocodile, lifeless and soul-less and more or less worthless in the objective light of day. But she was also Chelsea, my best friend since i was three, my stalwart little pal, a source of comfort for most of my life at that point, and I had just... tossed her out! Like garbage! What kind of person was I becoming if I could do that to my best friend?

I was very visibly distraught, and my mom noticed. Being very crafty, she tried to find the pattern for Chelsea so she could knit me a new one. The problem is, she had no idea where to find said pattern. She checked all her books of crochet patterns, and when that failed she tried the internet, but no matter how hard she looked, she found nothing.

So my mom found the next best thing.

The original Chelsea was a tiny finger puppet, and I had "met" her when I was three. Well, I was eighteen now - shouldn't Chelsea have grown too? And as has been established, this crocodile was fond of whirlwind vacations. My mom found a pattern that looked as much like Chelsea as possible while also being a much bigger crocodile, and gifted her to me before I left for college - to show that while we can't stop the flow of time or how it changes us, that doesn't mean we have to leave it behind.

And yeah, I decided to believe it. That's Chelsea now. Yeah, I know that in reality it's a completely different set of yarn made by my mom rather than... whoever it was that crocheted the original Chelsea, but then, Chelsea was never really the yarn. She was the feelings I put into the yarn, you know? So that's Chelsea, all grown up, and still my most prized toy.

...

Flash forward... Jesus, eighteen years, holy shit. A few weeks ago I saw a post trying to identify a different crochet crocodile pattern, and thinking it was cute, I decided to try and look for it on ebay and etsy, just to see if maybe I could find it. I didn't, but do you know what I found instead?

A very familiar crochet crocodile finger puppet. An intensely familiar one, you might say. Of course I bought it. And of course I asked the seller if, perhaps, they might have the pattern for it or know where it came from (they did not, alas). And after a few days, she showed up at my house.

She's not Chelsea, obviously. For one thing, she's far too clean and fresh looking - Chelsea was very well loved, and looked the part, while this crocodile finger puppet has definitely not endured years upon years of a child's affection. And, more importantly, she's not Chelsea because we've already established that Chelsea grew up into a bigger crochet crocodile. This has to be Chelsea's younger sister, Cici.

And if I could find another of Chelsea's kind after all these years, then maybe, with a bit of luck, I might find the pattern for her, and be able to make more of them. Fill the world with Chelseas.

In Anglish, it can be hard to talk about science worldken, technology workingcraft, organization bookkeeping, and government lawcraft. It can be yet-harder to talk about tongues themselves, and the workings of them. The throughline is seen: The more unworldly a thing, the harder it is about which to talk. But the hardest...

The hardest thing about which to talk, is the thing done with ones and twos and so forth. Of putting them together, and all the other doings with them. As you see, I haven't even a word (yet!) for the kind of thing that ones and twos are.

i was gonna suggest "countings" maybe but oops thats from latin too :(

"tell" seems like it'd be too confusing

Little child! You think I didn't think of all the words like "count"!

But, yes, since we cannot "count", or "add", only togetherput, nor have we a word for that thingkind which we would togetherput... The odds are against us!

German for "number" is Zahl, and its English cognate is tale, which is attested as meaning "count", but that's not that different from tell. (Both of which, weirdly enough, are unrelated to tally. Too bad, because "tallying" would have worked pretty well.)

It doesn't wholly sate my whims, but "count" or "compute" might be "reckon." There is a great deal of overlap in meaning here with other everyday English words, but "reckon" is a little less everyday than most, and you could make it stand out a little bit with a following word like "up" (cf. "count up, add up") or "out" (cf. to "work something out"). One who counts or computes could be a "reckoner," which seems fair to me.

A "numeral" or a "number" is sometimes called a "figure" in English, which you could trace over as "shape." Or, if that's too like other words, mayhap you could do something with "mete" (as in "to measure"). "Meter," the French word for a oneness of length, is from Latin, but "a thing which measures" could still be a "meter" in English, without straying from wholly Theedish roots. Words like "lot, share, deal" also are the wordhoard of the kind of practical, everyday reckoncraft that the Angles and Saxons were broadly using, though mayhap they're not as workable for such an open thought as "a number."

Scorecraft (that is to say, "arithmetic") is likely going to always need a fairly basic wordhoard. But lots of reckoncraft takes everyday words in a new or narrow way, so maybe that's not so bad. One already speaks of "six times four" or "taking five from seven." One might just as well speak of "giving four to six" or "cutting twelve by two[s]." "Addition" could be just "giving" (though "putting together" truthfully works well too), "subtraction" be "taking" or "taking apart," "multiplication" be "timesing" and "dividing" be "cutting."

And one could raise four to the might of two to get sixteen, or get the third root of eight. (I don't know what the Anglish for "cube" or "square" would be; in Theedlandish a "triangle" is a "three-corner," so you might call a "square" a "four-corner," which would partially trace over the Latin word "square" is grounded on; but mayhap that's too hard to tell apart from "rectangle"). To carry over the words of calculus, perhaps one could look at Newton's "fluxions" and "flow"?

An "integer" could just be a "whole [number]" (shape, meter, etc), a "rational number" could be a "cuttable [number]", and a "real number" a "true number." An "irrational number" would then be an "uncuttable number," and an "imaginary number" mayhap a "dream number" or a "fake number."

To speak of tongues, it is clear that Anglish is a West-Thedish tongue.

It does not enfold its words much.

Its deedwords know only two times: the past, and the now. To speak of other times one must use helping deedwords such as "will", "shall", "have", or "going to" with the helping deedword folding, and the main deedword staying unfolded. When speaking of the now, deedwords take a following -s when the doer is the lone third man. When speaking of the past, the most deedwords take a following -ed, and do not show the doer. Other deedwords wander their selflouds in the past.

Its namewords know no kinds, and two reckonings: the lone, and the many. For most namewords the many is shown by an -s, but some others wander their selflouds instead.

Anglish has ruins of a birthing namefall, an -'s that shows that the earlier saying owns or births the following nameword. Unlike a true namefall, this 's sticks to a whole namesaying and not a specific nameword. That is, one says "the Queen of England's dog" and not *"the Queen's of England dog".

Anglish has fast wordrank. In most speeches, the doer comes first, then the deed, and only then the done.

In fraining, the wordrank wanders. If it has the words "who", "what", "where", "why", "when" (and so forth) they come first, then the helping deedword "do", the doer, the unfolded deed, and the done, leaving off any in whose stead the frainingword stands. In other frainings, the helping deedword "do" comes first, then the doer, the unfolded deed, and the done.

Anglish has a wealth of selflouds, and many withlouds too, some of which are seldom found, such as the two "th" withsounds made with the tongue and the teeth, one stevened, and one not.

I come here late with an offering for the riddle of ones and twos: name it twocraft. For, while the doings of ones and indeed *naughts* take up a main part of twocraft, do not we already, in twocraft, riddle men of *ones* and *naughts*? how could a man bespeak his fellows of more than *one* one, were he not riddling in twocraft?

twocraft also has the same wordmake as deercraft, for it is true that there are many deer in the world, and they take from and give to each other in twocraft ways.

writing tip #3778:

you don't have to write every day to be a writer! you just have to feel guilty every day that you don't

Franklin Booth.

Care for a drink?

I just saw a DNI for "evil intentions". nobody puts up a warding talisman anymore just a fucking DNI

going 30mph over the speed limit in my lifted honda civic with "COPS DNI" spraypainted on both sides

C'mon you can blur the username and icon but I NEED to see this for myself. I want to put it in my journal and cherish it.

I knew this Episcopal priest who was really into bucking the Anglo-Catholic trend and bringing in more low-church Protestant practices and that’s how I ended up with a bunch of older Ann Arbor Episcopalians Laying Hands on me and calling on Jesus to heal me of my internalized homophobia. Which did not work but which I do recommend nonetheless and which I feel confident that you could into any Episcopal church now and request. Membership is shrinking. They’d do it just on the off chance you show up next Sunday.

The thing they don’t tell you about executive dysfunction and poor time management is that you will feel guilty every second of every day for your entire life.

people who dont experience it cannot comprehend how awful executive dysfunction is. I WANT to do the task, i have the resources TO do the task, i will feel better having DONE the task

but i cant fucking do the task

The design of a dandelion

Girlboy with a he/him pin on one sleeve and a she/her pin on the other. Two people sitting on either side of her aggressively correcting each other on his pronouns

*her pronouns

*his pronouns