francislare:

dearestandqueerest:

ianthe:

Hundreds of Chicago Students Walk Out of Standardized Test

Hundreds of Chicago students are taking up the mantle in the fight against the role of standardized tests in public school closures as they walked out of a state exam Wednesday. Their message: “We are over-tested, under-resourced and fed up!”

Over 300 students from over 25 different Chicago public schools boycotted the second day of a state-wide standardized test.

Ahead of a school board meeting, at which the demonstrators were banned from speaking, the students rallied outside the district headquarters carrying placards and forming a human chain.

“We’re just trying to make a statement that tests should not determine our future or the future of our schools,” said student organizer Alexssa Moore, a senior at Lindblom High School.

Brian Sturgis, senior at Paul Robesan High School and boycott organizer with the group Chicago Students Organizing to Save Our Schools (CSOSOS), declared in an op-ed “We are Chicago students and we are here to save our schools!”

He writes:

Mayor Emanuel and his Board of Education want to close 54 grammar schools around the city, all of which are in black and Latino communities: this is racist. These schools are also being judged based on assessments and tests given throughout the year: this is foolish. These school closings will leave neighborhoods dismantled, parents lost, students unaccounted for, and more importantly, will put children in harmful situations: this is dangerous.

Sturgis explains that Mayor Emanuel and the Board of Education

are putting too much pressure on standardized testing and threatening to close schools that don’t have high test scores. When schools are under so much pressure to raise test scores it leads to low-scoring students being neglected, not supported. This is what happened when 68 low-scoring juniors were demoted to sophomore status at a southwest side high school in Chicago last month, right before the state test.

The student boycott follows a protest earlier this month, Occupy the Department of Education, during which teachers and education activists descended on the Capitol to draw attention to the rampant privatization of public schools and the rash of recent school closures.

In February, a nationwide day of action led by the Seattle school teachers’ boycott of a standardized test brought this issue to national attention.

yes. yes yes yes. more of this. yes.

I’m in love

raviolitimelord:

riddle-my-hiddles:

tardisparadox:

thestarsgowaltzingout:emilytea10:invisiblecashews:

Actually,  the photographs are spaced ten years apart, not sixteen.

1912 to 1922.

The young, homeless (but no less dapper) wanderer shown in the first survived the sinking of the Titanic and swam to the shores of West Egg. There he built a life and a large, empty house, in an effort to win the heart of the wealthy, upper class woman he’d fallen in love with a decade earlier and had been separated from against his will.

He shed his earlier identity, and changed his name to reflect his new station. Jack was now known as Jay Gatsby, the eccentric millionaire who threw parties every night in the hopes that one day his love would show up and spin with him as they had long ago in the dance hall of the lower decks.

#and he still ends up dead floating in the water

holy shit

And then, at the beginning of Inception, he starts out washed up on a shore.

still no oscar

Leo’s entire film career of unrelated projects has better continuity than glee.

In 30 more years lions, tigers, elephants, rhinos and hippos wont exist anymore. How insane isn’t that? THIS IS REAL. How sick isn’t our planet? Imagine not being able to show an elephant to your kids?

Something we can do is, when we travel, don’t pay people (for example)  take a picture with a monkey or pet it. Don’t feed elephants and don’t go to animal shows. They’re not taking care of these animals. If someone is taking money for others to take pictures with monkey, they’ll kill the monkey when it gets older. There’s more we can do. Please google this and read more about it. You can also read more about it and follow Tom Svensson’s work here: http://www.tomsvensson.se/

inmeo:

butyouarealliwant:

joeyisweet:

Gateway of the Mind

In 1983, a team of deeply pious scientists conducted a radical experiment in an undisclosed facility. The scientists had theorized that a human without access to any senses or ways to perceive stimuli would be able to perceive the presence of God. They believed that the five senses clouded our awareness of eternity, and without them, a human could actually establish contact with God by thought. An elderly man who claimed to have “nothing left to live for” was the only test subject to volunteer. To purge him of all his senses, the scientists performed a complex operation in which every sensory nerve connection to the brain was surgically severed. Although the test subject retained full muscular function, he could not see, hear, taste, smell, or feel. With no possible way to communicate with or even sense the outside world, he was alone with his thoughts.

Scientists monitored him as he spoke aloud about his state of mind in jumbled, slurred sentences that he couldn’t even hear. After four days, the man claimed to be hearing hushed, unintelligible voices in his head. Assuming it was an onset of psychosis, the scientists paid little attention to the man’s concerns.

Two days later, the man cried that he could hear his dead wife speaking with him, and even more, he could communicate back. The scientists were intrigued, but were not convinced until the subject started naming dead relatives of the scientists. He repeated personal information to the scientists that only their dead spouses and parents would have known. At this point, a sizable portion of scientists left the study.

After a week of conversing with the deceased through his thoughts, the subject became distressed, saying the voices were overwhelming. In every waking moment, his consciousness was bombarded by hundreds of voices that refused to leave him alone. He frequently threw himself against the wall, trying to elicit a pain response. He begged the scientists for sedatives, so he could escape the voices by sleeping. This tactic worked for three days, until he started having severe night terrors. The subject repeatedly said that he could see and hear the deceased in his dreams.

Only a day later, the subject began to scream and claw at his non-functional eyes, hoping to sense something in the physical world. The hysterical subject now said the voices of the dead were deafening and hostile, speaking of hell and the end of the world. At one point, he yelled “No heaven, no forgiveness” for five hours straight. He continually begged to be killed, but the scientists were convinced that he was close to establishing contact with God.

After another day, the subject could no longer form coherent sentences. Seemingly mad, he started to bite off chunks of flesh from his arm. The scientists rushed into the test chamber and restrained him to a table so he could not kill himself. After a few hours of being tied down, the subject halted his struggling and screaming. He stared blankly at the ceiling as teardrops silently streaked across his face. For two weeks, the subject had to be manually rehydrated due to the constant crying. Eventually, he turned his head and, despite his blindness, made focused eye contact with a scientist for the first time in the study. He whispered “I have spoken with God, and he has abandoned us” and his vital signs stopped. There was no apparent cause of death.

Could read this a million times over

that is the most amazing and interesting thing I have ever read