Renegade's Spot

so there’s this girl in my spanish 2 class. we’ll call her kayla.

kayla is a sophomore. she is funny and outspoken and a little crazy. the main thing to remember about kayla is that she will stand up for herself when needed. and that’s why something happened with her and my spanish teacher.

we’ll call my teacher miss irving. miss irving has been teaching spanish for 30 years. she’s a little forceful, hates technology, and hates when people don’t just listen to her without questioning it.

it began when kayla entered class late near the beginning of the school year. “sorry, ma’am,” she said to miss irving. “i was at the counselor’s.”

miss irving looked up at kayla and asked for a pass. kayla didn’t have one, but she said that miss irving would be able to call the counselor and the counselor would verify her visit. miss irving refused to do so and gave her detention on the spot. kayla started trying to justify her own actions, and she received yet another detention.

this marked the beginning of a long, long feud. every time kayla did something, miss irving would reprimand her for it. kayla put on chapstick or began to eat in class and miss irving began to yell. kayla read a paragraph slower than the rest of us and miss irving would snap at her. slowly, kayla began to get fed up.

the last straw for her was when she asked miss irving to go to the counselor during class, and it changed everything.

“miss irving? i have an appointment with the counselor down the hall. may i go?”

“obviously not,” my teacher snapped back. “you can’t leave in the middle of the class.”

“but i need to see her, i have an appointme-“

“i don’t care. you’re going to translate that paragraph-“

“ma’am, i already translated it-“

“well, then i’ll give you more work to do-“

“no.”

at that word, all of the heads in the clasroom turned. it’s an unspoken rule that you don’t say no to miss irving. but kayla had fire in her voice, and was now standing up and glaring at the teacher.

“excuse me?” miss irving responded, and kayla went off.

“no matter what i do, you get on to me about it. i have issues that i need to take care of that you refuse to understand. you’re a teacher. you’re supposed to care about us. it’s your job! listen to me carefully: i. have. mental. health. problems. and there are times i need to eat in class or i need to go to the counselor’s office because of it, so could you just get off of my ass about it and try to understand?”

miss irving turned beet red and sent her to the principal’s office.

what followed was a battle between the two. miss irving kept emailing kayla’s parents, but kayla’s parents took their daughter’s side. then my teacher emailed kayla’s other teachers and asked them to take her side, but the other teachers said they didn’t ever have problems with kayla.

kayla went to talk to the principal about the situation and told her what was going on. the principal talked to miss irving, and miss irving lost her teacher of the year award for that year. she also received a strike on her teaching record for refusing to respect a student’s mental health protocol. and kayla won.

miss irving still teaches our class and we still have kayla with us. now, miss irving doesn’t hide her hatred for kayla at all. she expresses it fully to her other classes. and most of those other classes hate her as well.

but my class and i love kayla. because kayla has a newfound power, and she doesn’t take it for granted. instead, she uses it to help us.

and this matters so much to me because, one day, she helped me.

i have generalized anxiety disorder. one of the methods i can use to calm myself down is by doodling, and doodling also helps me listen more closely to the teacher’s lesson. so i started doodling on the edges of my papers in spanish a lot, especially when we started having tests every class period and it became very anxiety-inducing for me.

miss irving started taking points off for every doodle i made. and i mean A LOT of points. i drew an eye in the corner of a worksheet once and i got an 80 instead of a 100. when i tried to explain that it was for my anxiety, she didn’t care. so now i had even more anxiety because i couldn’t reduce my anxiety.

one day, miss irving was lecturing and i was doodling, when she started to yell at me for it.

i can’t remember a lot about what happened because at that moment i went into a full blown panic attack. but what i do remember is kayla standing up and yelling at her.

“what are you doing? stop! she’s obviously having a panic attack!”

she came over to my desk and led me through breathing exercises. calmed me down. told me my doodle of half a face looked really good, asked me how long i’d been taking art and about my disorder. the entire class was silent, watching, and miss irving was fuming.

when i was calm enough to, i thanked kayla, and she squeezed my hand in a silent alliance.

then miss irving walked back to the whiteboard and never said anything about my doodles again.

the moral of the story? just because a teacher or principal or parent is older than you doesn’t mean they deserve to be obeyed no matter what. if what your “elders” say to you or do to you belittles you, tears you down, or keeps you from being able to get help or be a better person, they are not doing their job, and you can stand up for yourself and others.

It’s not because they care. It’s not to “make the site safer for minors”

It’s because the staff want ads and you “can’t put ads next to ‘porn’ ” (first off, bullshit)

It’s because the app store took down their app for CP. If the app store hadn’t done that nothing would have changed.

It’s all about money. No one on Apple devices are downloading their app. They’re doing whatever they can to please Apple to get their app back on the store.

If the app isn’t on the store no one is seeing ads that people pay them to put on their site. If no one’s seeing them, why pay to have ads on the site. They’re losing money.

Staff does not care about us or what we want.

They’re excuses about making the site more positive are lies.

They are going to destroy communities and online families/friendships.

They are going to destroy safe spaces for people who have no where else they can be themselves. Where they won’t be shamed for what they’re into.

DON’T LET THE STAFF SILENCE US.

We will fight to change this.

We have until the 17th.

A former staff engineer, who recently left Tumblr and asked to remain anonymous for professional reasons, tells Vox that the NSFW ban was “in the works for about six months as an official project,” adding that it was given additional resources and named “Project X” in September, shortly before it was announced to the rest of the company at an all-hands meeting. “[The NSFW ban] was going to happen anyway,” the former engineer told me. “Verizon pushed it out the door after the child pornography thing and made the deadline sooner,” but the real problem was always that Verizon couldn’t sell ads next to porn.

Porn on Tumblr is something Verizon needs to wipe out if it’s going to make any money off what it thinks is actually valuable about the platform — enormous fandom and social justice communities that, just before the Verizon acquisition, Khalaf was insisting the staff figure out how to better monetize.

On that note-