Today in “the sentiment is a good one but under the circumstances the punctuation could potentially cause confusion”: just to clarify, the story in question does not, repeat, does not involve a romantic relationship between Sherlock Holmes and HP Lovecraft.
well not with THAT attitude it doesn’t
I mean, if you WANT it to have meant that….there’s always…fanfiction.
Ok but Neil Gaiman KNOWS what the slash means don’t play dumb with me people
Anonymous asked: How do you manage to always make your potatoes SO crispy? Is there like a basic technique you use for all your recipes? Your potatoes are uncannily crispy, its impossible.
Yes! There is absolutely a technique to this. Actually there are two ways to do it so I will list them.
1. The kinda-sorta-almost-healthy way: diced your potatoes into about quarter sized squares and soak them in a bowl of steaming hot water for ten minutes. During the last five minutes, put your frying pan on and add about 4 tbsps of oil (olive, canola, sunflower, whatever.) Then drain your potatoes, add seasoning to them and stir, and then drop them in the pan on medium high for about eight minutes, stirring frequently. Then you’re done!
2. The fucking delicious way: dice your potatoes into quarter sized slices and put about a half cup of oil into the bottom of a skillet, then turn it on medium high. Add your spices to your potatoes and mix, then add them to the pan. Stir until the oil evenly coats the potatoes (there should still be some standing in the pan) and then cover the pan with a lid and turn down the heat to medium low. Allow to simmer for about ten minutes. Then, after that time, use a colander to drain the oil out of the potatoes and put them back in the skillet, then turn the skillet up to a high heat setting. This will make them soft on the inside but crispy on the outside. I like to get them just a little blackened :) but I’m weird that way.
an educational graphic about critical thinking for tumnblr
The all important journalist questions, and then some.
A missing line from Why:
“If you really want to be
a critical reader, it turns out you have to step back one step
further, and ask not just whether the author is telling the truth,
but why he’s writing about this subject at all.“
That is an excellent addition.
One other one for How: “how could this be exploited by someone acting in bad faith?” Closely coupled with a What: “what are the limits on the ill-effects this could produce?”
And a quick check for double standards: “who, or what, is the speaker not applying this principle to?”
(This is also a great guide for interrogating historical documents such as, say, a constitution, a press release, a speech, a letter, a diary, a bill of rights, political policies, &c)
I need to grab this and adapt this for my little filmmaking courses.
Because these questions are equally indispensible when YOU are the author of the script, the book, the story, the speech.
A little tip for parents with children in school (or for children in school to show their parents)
My mom gave me and my sister two days every semester that she called “mental health days.”
Those were days, that for ANY reason, and without having to tell my mom the reason, we could skip the day of school. We’d just tell her we were taking a mental health day and she’d call the school and let them know we were not coming in.
#1 This helped keep our grades up by lowering our stress levels. I never got a C in any grade school class. The majority of my classes I received A’s. I also took 4 AP classes and they were not weighted. Trust me, it made a difference.
#2 I never felt the need to skip school. I knew if I ever wanted to or needed to my mom would help me.
Your kids are young and need time to recover. They need some days where they can do nothing but stay in bed for no reason. They need their own space where their privacy is respected. It will make a huge difference.
I would like to add something to this for the teachers too! (I may have already told this story on tumblr but OH WELL I’m telling it again)
One of my math teachers in high school had a policy called The Red Beanbags of Don’t Bother Me. He kept a pile of red beanbags on his desk, and at any time of the day you could go over and take one. From that point on, as long as you were in his classroom with a beanbag on your desk, no one could bother you. He wouldn’t call on you to answer problems, no students were allowed to talk to you, and perhaps most importantly, no one could ask why you took a bean bag that day. The only caveat was that if you used the beanbag more than three times in a semester you had to go talk to the school counselor about it.
I only used the beanbag a handful of times during those 4 years, but it was a godsend when I needed it. I knew people who would camp in his classroom during lunch (or even skip class and stay there all day) under the protection of the beanbag. As a teacher there’s not always a lot you can do for a student suffering mental illness/emotional abuse/ other struggles, but giving them some space and privacy in your class can make a HUGE difference.
So I used a new icebreaker today and it went really well. I got it from this blog (x). It’s really great for getting kids to work in teams. I’ve already got them set up in their Classcraft teams (even though we can’t actually get signed up for Classcraft until tomorrow), and I think it generally worked really well to get them to bond.
Here’s the gist: Have each team write 30 things they all have in common on index cards. (I’m lucky in that our team has a ludicrous number of index cards hoarded. I don’t know who ordered them, but no one uses them in the bulk numbers we have.) They start off really silly (”We all have…eyes!”), but eventually they get into some slightly more personal stuff (”None of us has ever had a cavity”). It lets them see immediately that even though the people in their group may not be their best friends, they have at least a few things in common.
Then you have them build a card house/tower/whatever out of the index cards. I told them they couldn’t use any adhesives, but they were allowed to fold the cards. I was thinking of Cardhalla at Gen Con (where elaborate card structures are built and then destroyed for charity).
Anyway, I think it did the trick in most cases. Another nice thing is that almost all the kids experienced failure when their first attempt fell down. They all started with the same idea, then when each structure failed, they changed tactics and learned from their failure.
This tactic doesn’t work well, and it was the first thing every single group tried.
The best structure of the day!
I think I’m going to take a little time tomorrow to explicitly talk about how that illustrates a growth mindset. Very few kids gave up after the first (or second or third) time their structure fell. I even heard a kid say, “Adapt. Improvise. Overcome,” which was pretty great.
I’m going to unashamedly steal the crap out of this. Did you think 30 was a good amount, or might it work better with more/less?
Please do! I think it would work with more, but probably not with less. I think a time limit on both the index card writing and the structure building would be helpful too
This is awesome! A perfect Kingdom Day activity for the beginning of school. Thanks for sharing it.
