#the_blackjay

I'm doing DIY

I'm learning quantum physics

I'm doing combination DIY and quantum physics

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I grew up going to a private school, granted I was the poorest, scummiest, worst dressed kid in this school, but I was there nonetheless. While I have many gripes and disagreements about private religious schools as a whole, I will give them one thing: they taught each student how to formulate thoughts and opinions of their own.

Ironically, this lead me to dissent against religion and find my own way through life outside of the church, but the fact still stands that during my most influential and important educational years, I was actively being instructed on how to read a text book, pluck information from said text book, and formulate my own answer to questions with that information. We were not allowed to copy the answers from the book as they were written!!! We had to actually comprehend what was said, and we had to write our own responses instead of copying whatever was in the book.

This is so important! Reading comprehension is the most important skill a child can have imo, and it's horrifying to know that literacy is declining.

Now, when I transitioned into the public school system in the 7th grade, I naturally kept my old habits and turned in assignments the way I was always taught: writing everything in cursive, and formulating my own answers instead of copying the text book. This actually got me in trouble with my teachers! They called a meeting with my guardians and made me tell them why exactly I wasn't just writing the answers from the book. I didn't have an answer for them, I remember just telling them that that's how I always had to do assignments. They told me to stop doing that because it was making it take longer for them to grade my papers. It's easier when all the students write the same exact answer, and if I was the odd one out writing my own answers, then the teachers had to spend extra time grading me. (They also told me to stop writing in cursive, but that doesn't really matter.)

Now that that is out of my head and onto the internet, I would love to know if anyone has had similar experiences growing up. I firmly believe that making kids write their own answers is fundamental for developing reading comprehension and critical thinking skills.

Why do we have an entire generation of kids not understanding nuance, not practicing discernment, not understanding characters that are complex in nature, and thinking everything is black and white with no room for development or expansion? Because I really believe that they just don't understand the details of what is going on beneath what is being said. Sometimes, the curtains are just blue, but sometimes, the author wants you to dissect the symbolism surrounding them because it gives what is written a deeper meaning.

We need a solution for the next generations. We need to take action now to ensure that these kids can actually read and understand what they're reading. I'm scared for the future, now more than ever, with predatory language being used to take advantage of people. Ballots being just one example of why this is such a pressing issue. How can we fix this? I need some hope.

I mounted these butterflies the other day, have you ever dabbled in oddities?