not to oversimplify an extremely complex discipline but if i had to pick one tip to give people on how to have more productive interactions with children, especially in an instructive sense, its that teaching a kid well is a lot more like improv than it is like error correction and you should always work on minimizing the amount of ‘no, wrong’ and maximizing the amount of ‘yes, and?’
for example: we have a species of fish at the aquarium that looks a lot like a tiny pufferfish. children are constantly either asking us if that’s what they are, or confidently telling us that’s what they are. if you rush to correct them, you risk completely severing their interest in the situation, because 1. kids don’t like to engage with adults who make them feel bad and 2. they were excited because pufferfish are interesting, and you have not given them any reason to be invested in non-pufferfish. Instead, if you say something like “It looks a LOT like a tiny pufferfish, you’re right. But these guys are even funnier. Wanna know what they’re called?” you have primed them perfectly for the delightful truth of the Pacific Spiny Lumpsucker
I was in martial arts for years, and in particular I kinda specialized in working with the younger kids.
The two Big Rules when instructing younger students was- 1. Compliment before Critique 2. Don’t say ‘but’, say ‘now’
Praise kids on what they get right first, especially if they are struggling. Like OP said, kids don’t like to engage with people who make them feel bad. They need encouragement when learning new things.
Number two boils down to this. If you tell a kid a compliment, then say “but you need to fix this”, that ‘but’ completely negates your compliment. It’s gone. It was canceled out like adding a negative to a positive. Using “hey, that punch is looking great, now let’s focus on your stance” doesn’t verbally cancel out the progress they’ve made. It’s like they’ve checked off something on their list of stuff to work on.
Wording can absolutely make or break a child’s motivation and interest.
Rebloggling as it’s relevant in a Medical Education context
Honestly I use all of these to teach vet students too. I think people in general respond better to positivity in teaching. Not coddling, but acknowledging when a student got part way to the right answer, or had a good thought process, is something I’ve found keeps students engaged and builds confidence, which encourages them to keep going instead of shutting down and just “getting through” a lab or a rotation
Advise we use at my work (teaching mostly younger kids with a hard time reading) is Specific Positive Support. If they read the word “brisk” as “bricks” you go “ yeah, you got that first blend, nice job, those can be tricky!” before getting into what they struggled with. Just saying ’ good work’ or ‘nice job’ starts to feel like a platitude and precursor to ‘here is everything wrong’ if it’s not paired with proof that the kiddo /actually did do a good job on a thing/. Kids aren’t stupid, they can tell when you’re Just Saying Something Nice to head off a shutdown. But praising the specific things they did well, or got right, even if it’s just “ dude, you said that so fast!” or “Thanks for matching my question, good job listening.” is a game changer.
Experience: Learning the right way to connect the dots.
This is the best representation of something I have been trying to explain to people for years!!!! Saving this to my phone so I can routinely pull it out when I need.
trying to explain to tumblr that the Middle Class in not their enemy
saw someone say that someone complaining about only having 7k in savings makes them contemplate “doing something bad”
you know that 7k covers like. one hospital visit WITH insurance, right?
“people who make six figures shouldn’t be allowed to complain —“ most people who make six figures are, these days, solidly middle class. where i live, a combined household income of $110k is *lower middle class*.
“people who can afford homes —“ are typically 400-600k in debt for them. also if “can own your own home” is your threshold for the rich you are contemplating eating, i think you are genuinely stupid
“boohoo your investments dropped, stop complaining rich boy” idk how to tell you this but. most of us have a retirement account. you should probably open one
I get what you’re saying, I pretty much agree, but, like, $110k is about ten times what I am expected to live on, and the government won’t allow me to have ANY kind of bank account with more than $2k in it.
“Open a retirement account” babe, my retirement plan is dying 7-15 years younger than average, because that’s all the government will let me do.
AND THATS THE GOVERNMENT’S FAULT
Look. I get it. I tried to get on income assistance when i was 18, after being kicked out months previously and living on my savings from my minimum wage job from when i was 16.
And they dont let you have more than 2k. And you only get ~$500 a month.
And that sucks. But thats not the middle classes fault.
Kids and dependants are expensive. Four people living on 110k is actually reasonable. Legally, i cant ever hold more than 100k in assets myself without getting kicked off my disability income, but im not blaming the normal people who work in construction, fishing, trades, medical, or even middle management or sales.
No, im harassing my politicians. Rent asstance went from 350 to 500 last year, where most places cost at least 2k.
And yes, that also mean shouting at people WHO CAN BUY POLITICAL POWER.
Most millionaires cant. If someone isnt kicking around at least 50-100 million, they arent actually going to be much more impactful a voice than you or I.
Even though they have more money, and having that much money would absolutely change your life; they dont actually have much more power over you. Thats the difference.
Oh word, absolutely. I’m on SSI, I get it. I don’t fuck around personally sniping at people with basically none more money than me – one bad day and they could be wiped out completely – because they can afford something I can’t. It’s just…you know…like. How to explain. Hmm.
It is the government’s fault, completely.
But on a pure “I’m human and am frustrated often” level, I understand the bitterness, and I understand the exasperation at not being seen or heard, because while $100k/yr won’t keep you safe, the functional difference between that and the daily life of someone making $12k/yr is immense.
It’s especially frustrating because the middle class (or, shit, a whole lot of people below that too – the number of destitute people who think they DIDN’T deserve it and other people DID is disappointingly high) has very little solidarity with the poor. Has in fact been fairly successfully taught that those who have less than them are a threat to them, and deserve being poor and should stay poor until they can redeem themselves through labor. Such that folks who are barely scraping by will consistently fight against measures that would help people less well-off than them.
In that regard, yes, they are a danger.
This:
Very true. I like that.
(But what was the original? It was altered to flip the guy in the middle.)
The next frame should be Many Cookies dude pointing at No Cookies dude and saying to One Cookie dude “He is why you have only one cookie.”
And I get why No Cookies dude might be mad about that, just a little. I have sympathy for that. Even though the reality is probably that neither of those guys can afford to have teeth.
ANYWAY YEAH SO the lower and middle class should show solidarity and support each other, because the difference is so negligible when compared to the power stacked against us, we might as well be the same. And since that’s the case, we should act like it and act together.
(Bluesky’s nuclear block function means the original post isn’t visible here, but the context is yet another leftist doing the “Dems bad, don’t us for refusing to support Dems, etc., etc.” song and dance)
You know, the second to last post is true for a lot of these Very Online leftists, I think. They actually do know the parties aren’t the same, deep down, but they can’t possibly risk being seen as Cringe and a bootlicker by saying so, leaving them to hope everyone else acts like an adult and does the work for them
[ID: A Bluesky thread from Dana Simpson @danacorn.bsky.social responding to a post on Bluesky that the person screencapping had blocked:
(1) Sure it can. Let me help you.
Leftists are a tiny and unreliable sliver of the population. Dems would like your votes, but you’ve spent the last decade angrily calling them names and refusing to give them credit when they do the things you say you want.
You’ve declared your votes ungettable.
(2) Dems therefore HAVE to win without leftist votes. They can! It’s just harder.
And we still get to be mad you made it harder. We think you should be a bit more willing to take yes for an answer, to be part of a coalition even if that means compromise, and a bit more concerned with stopping fascism.
(3) Also, democrats don’t “eat shot constantly”. They win about half the time.
The fact that they do this in elections where you loudly announced you were going to make them lose if your ever-shifting demands weren’t met makes you seem pathetic.
(4) However, sometimes you say that and they DO lose, and yes, it’s reasonable to think you contributed to that by yelling loudly for the entire campaign that they suck and should lose.
You don’t get to then go “uwu I’m a smol bean with no power”.
(5) “I am going to do everything in my power to make the Democrats lose.”
Dems: lose
“Hey, why are you mad at ME?”
(6) Why aren’t you happy that you openly got what you said you wanted? If a Democrat says you’re partly responsible, why isn’t your reaction “damn straight, that was my goal”?
(7) Kinda makes it seem like you DO want Democrats to win, you just don’t want to be SEEN wanting them to win. You want to make it hard for them to win, but for them to then win anyway.
When I was 3 years old I went to a preschool that had this little green crocheted crocodile finger puppet that was my absolute favorite toy to play with of all time. I named her Chelsea, because Chelsea starts with C and crocodile starts with C and more often than not wild animals in fiction aimed at kids have names that start with the same first letter as their species. I played with Chelsea every day, because she was my favorite toy, and because the other kids weren’t really interested in her, and also because I eventually started to hide her in a special secret spot in the room so no one else would find her before I did. She was so beloved by me that when I graduated from preschool, my teachers gave Chelsea to me permanently, because it was clear no one else would ever love that little crochet crocodile as much as me anyway (in part because I hid her). They waited a few weeks after I graduated before doing it, too, and sent Chelsea with some post cards as if the crocodile had been on a whirlwind “travel the world” vacation before deciding to come live with me.
And Chelsea remained my favorite toy all through my childhood. There were others I loved nearly as much, like my Imperial Godzilla and the big red T.rex from the first Jurassic Park toy line and my tiny knockoff plush Charmander, but Chelsea always held the place of honor in my heart. She was my absolute favorite toy.
I kept a lot of my favorite toys through adolescence, even if social pressure eventually got me to give away a lot of them (and some, y'know, broke). That’s obviously not surprising to you if you’ve followed my blog, since I still collect toys into my adulthood. But it’s important to note because while I know I made a conscious effort to never throw out Chelsea every time I pared down my collection… at some point, she went missing.
I became aware of it when I graduated from high school. I was feeling really emotional about leaving that stage of my life and, y'know, becoming an adult and shit, and in that state I decided to find Chelsea to reassure myself that I hadn’t entirely left childhood behind. But Chelsea wasn’t there. No matter how hard I looked, I could not find Chelsea anyway.
And that was, like, devastating, because the only explanation was that somehow, at some point, I had accidentally tossed her out with some other “childhood junk” while trying to grow up and be responsible in my teen years. I had literally thrown away my childhood in a careless attempt to be more grown up.
Of course I knew she was just a toy - nothing more than some yarn twisted together in the loose shape of a crocodile, lifeless and soul-less and more or less worthless in the objective light of day. But she was also Chelsea, my best friend since i was three, my stalwart little pal, a source of comfort for most of my life at that point, and I had just… tossed her out! Like garbage! What kind of person was I becoming if I could do that to my best friend?
I was very visibly distraught, and my mom noticed. Being very crafty, she tried to find the pattern for Chelsea so she could knit me a new one. The problem is, she had no idea where to find said pattern. She checked all her books of crochet patterns, and when that failed she tried the internet, but no matter how hard she looked, she found nothing.
So my mom found the next best thing.
The original Chelsea was a tiny finger puppet, and I had “met” her when I was three. Well, I was eighteen now - shouldn’t Chelsea have grown too? And as has been established, this crocodile was fond of whirlwind vacations. My mom found a pattern that looked as much like Chelsea as possible while also being a much bigger crocodile, and gifted her to me before I left for college - to show that while we can’t stop the flow of time or how it changes us, that doesn’t mean we have to leave it behind.
And yeah, I decided to believe it. That’s Chelsea now. Yeah, I know that in reality it’s a completely different set of yarn made by my mom rather than… whoever it was that crocheted the original Chelsea, but then, Chelsea was never really the yarn. She was the feelings I put into the yarn, you know? So that’s Chelsea, all grown up, and still my most prized toy.
…
Flash forward… Jesus, eighteen years, holy shit. A few weeks ago I saw a post trying to identify a different crochet crocodile pattern, and thinking it was cute, I decided to try and look for it on ebay and etsy, just to see if maybe I could find it. I didn’t, but do you know what I found instead?
A very familiar crochet crocodile finger puppet. An intensely familiar one, you might say. Of course I bought it. And of course I asked the seller if, perhaps, they might have the pattern for it or know where it came from (they did not, alas). And after a few days, she showed up at my house.
She’s not Chelsea, obviously. For one thing, she’s far too clean and fresh looking - Chelsea was very well loved, and looked the part, while this crocodile finger puppet has definitely not endured years upon years of a child’s affection. And, more importantly, she’s not Chelsea because we’ve already established that Chelsea grew up into a bigger crochet crocodile. This has to be Chelsea’s younger sister, Cici.
And if I could find another of Chelsea’s kind after all these years, then maybe, with a bit of luck, I might find the pattern for her, and be able to make more of them. Fill the world with Chelseas.
