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Hi! So I’m going on a social media hiatus for a while starting today. (There will still be a new vlogbrothers video from me every Tuesday and a new episode of our podcast Dear Hank and John each week.) 

There are a lot of reasons for the break, but it boils down to this: For both professional and personal reasons, I want and need to write a book, and so I want to direct all my energy toward the story.

I’ve also had a difficult few months in terms of dealing with my mental illness, which is a chronic (but treatable!) part of my life, and I’m hopeful that taking a step back from online life will help me regain some equilibrium. 

How long will this last? I don’t know. Rosianna will keep things updated around here on the crash course/art assignment/public health/AFC Wimbledon/etc. fronts. If she’s posting, you’ll know because she’ll put RHR in tags.

I made a post earlier today with lots of updates on various endeavors, so if you’re curious about any of our ongoing projects you can find and/or follow them here.

I had never thought about wrong notes that way. I had thought that wrong notes came from being “bad at piano” or “not practicing hard enough,” and if you practiced harder the clinkers would go away. But that’s a myth.

In fact, wrong notes always have a cause. An immediate physical cause. Just before you play a wrong note, your fingers were in a position that made that wrong note inevitable. Fixing wrong notes isn’t about “practicing harder” but about trying to unkink those systematically error-causing fingerings and hand motions….

Often, I think mistakes are more like bugs than errors. My clinkers weren’t random; they were in specific places, because I had sub-optimal fingerings in those places. A kid who gets arithmetic questions wrong usually isn’t getting them wrong at random; there’s something missing in their understanding, like not getting the difference between multiplication and addition. Working generically “harder” doesn’t fix bugs (though fixing bugs does require work).

…These days, learning disabilities are far more highly diagnosed than they used to be. And sometimes I hear the complaint about rich parents, “Suddenly if your kid’s getting B’s, you have to believe it’s a learning disability. Nobody can accept that their kid is just plain mediocre. Are there no stupid people left?” And maybe there’s something to the notion that the kid who used to be just “stupid” or “not a great student” is now often labeled “learning disabled.” But I want to complicate that a little bit.

Thing is, I’ve worked with learning disabled kids. There were kids who had trouble reading, kids who had trouble with math, kids with poor fine motor skills, ADD and autistic kids, you name it. And these were mostly pretty mild disabilities. These were the kids who, in decades past, might just have been C students, but whose anxious modern-day parents were sending them to special programs for the learning disabled.

But what we did with them was nothing especially mysterious or medical. We just focused, carefully and non-judgmentally, on improving their areas of weakness. The dyslexics got reading practice. The math-disabled got worksheets and blocks to count. Hyperactive kids were taught to ask themselves “How’s my motor running today?” and be mindful of their own energy levels and behavior. The only difference between us and a “regular” school is that when someone was struggling, we tried to figure out why she was struggling and fix the underlying problem, instead of slapping her a bad report card and leaving it at that.

And I have to wonder: is that “special education” or is it just education?

People suffering from schizophrenia may hear “voices” – auditory hallucinations – differently depending on their cultural context, according to new Stanford research.

In the United States, the voices are harsher, and in Africa and India, more benign, said Tanya Luhrmann, a Stanford professor of anthropology 

The experience of hearing voices is complex and varies from person to person, according to Luhrmann. The new research suggests that the voice-hearing experiences are influenced by one’s particular social and cultural environment – and this may have consequences for treatment.

Fact Source: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/july/voices-culture-luhrmann-071614.html

Tumblr is not monitored. Anyone can say whatever they want, and there’s little to no consequence to saying it. That’s social media. Nobody posting here has to get a PhD in what they’re talking about; it’s all exactly as casual as posting status updates on Facebook.

This can lead to many good things, like spreading information about under-reported horrors (Ferguson, for example, would’ve been most definitely swept under the rug and forgotten if not for the combined efforts of all social media). However, it also leads to a dangerous climate for learning.

Everyone assumes that whatever they see on Tumblr is true so long as it has enough notes. Last year, for example, a text post grew wildly popular because it accused the creator of Five Nights at Freddy’s of being anti-abortion and a hardcore Christian, something which the OP heard from someone else, didn’t bother fact checking, and posted. This got out of hand quickly, with thousands of social justice-minded people reblogging and spreading the word. By the time that the real information got out, the damage had been done.

Treat Tumblr the same way that you treat wikipedia: it is a starting point. Do you see a post with NO source claiming that ___ is problematic/bad? Look it up on google. If you can’t find any non-tumblr sources, it just might be the highest form of bullshit.

Tumblr is not a place to “learn more”. Entire chunks of Tumblr are dedicated to claiming that teachers are evil for getting pissed off that you’re talking in class, or that parents are “ageist” for establishing a curfew, or yes, that you can somehow make infinite chocolate. It’s a springboard: you need to go to reputable sources with experts in the field to get the actual information.