Roads to Safe Places

Title: Gone.
Artist: mothwing .
Rating: G.
Notes: an illustration of Crockywock's wonderful fanfics The Prince's Tale and The Silver Cat.
Summary: After Voldemort's defeat, Severus is released from both his debt and also from his connection to Lily, which is driven home by the fact that his patronus changed with his feelings for Minerva. The loss of his old patronus as well as the meaning of the new one cause very mixed feelings.

Click for full view.



This is also the first time that I drew both humans and animals without any kind of reference, not even the trusted artist's dummy. I also practised doing rooms here, and I'm quite happy with how they turned out. Severus' face and expression, on the other hand, really still need some work. I'm rather happy with the cat, though, even though I consciously avoided doing fur, because my attempts at following Jab's pointers were pretty catastrophic and need some more work.

Heads of House brushing up relevant skills for the Yule Ball. Not entirely successful on the part of the Head of Slytherin, which is part of the reason why he ended leaving early with Karkaroff and skulking around among the rose bushes, leaving the hosting duty of the other guests to the other Heads of House.

Yes, this is silly, but I got tired of preparing for the teach-a-thon of doom.

I like hands. I couldn't draw hands. So I drew hands. So now I can draw hands.

This is another cheesy one, Severus about to die, Lily's ghostly hand reaching out, but him being saved by Minerva who actually makes sure whether people are dead and knows her first aid spells.

I never realised how easy it is to do tasty things with white mushrooms

( Tastiness... )

Still playing around with silhouettes. I love silhouettes. And big noses.

Sadly, I'm still having some anatomy troubles - don't ask how long Severus' arm is in this picture.



( Coloured version )

I liked the first picture so much I added some more.

Like playing with digital hand puppets, wheee.

One of my students hates poetry, she says.

She doesn't want to have anything to do with it, whenever they're faced with poems in class everything about her speaks her dislike. Her body language, her expression, her moans, how she approaches the topic, the way she deals with it. She just doesn't like poetry and frequently expresses intense dislike when confronted with poetry, she's easily confused and frustrated, and doesn't see the point of dealing with it.

At first I thought it was that specific poem, which was admittedly rather obscure and gave them a second one the next lesson. Again, the same reaction. Frustration, lack of understanding of both content or why rhythm is important at all.

And then I gave her a poem in Russian, her native language. I wish I'd had a camera to capture just how quickly she snatched that sheet ouf of my hands, and how hungrily she read those lines, and how eagerly she engaged with the poem, and the translation provided below. She immediately had a plethora of opinions on this poem, too, I've never seen her that engaged with a poem- any text - ever before.

It was clear that this student, homesick, rejecting all things German, would appreciate the inclusion of her native language in class, but I had just never pictured just how much. I hope I can manage to incorporate the student's native language in German classes in future somehow.

Then I discovered some of the specimen that populate DA.

Oh boy.



TL;DR - or rather, too pink, didn't read - yeah, that's Severus' little sister, half mugle, is obviously not only in Gryffindor, but also stood up to their father and was sent away for that, she's also Sirius' One True Love, Remus is her best friend and she dislikes Peter. Note the animagus shape there.

At first I thought that this was some kind of rather overdone technicolour parody, but not so. Also, the artist (age 21) doesn't seem to realise that anything might be ... off about this character and is impervious to irony or subtly incredulous questions as to wtf is going on here.

There's apparently also a fic, but I don't think that anyone can be more mind-numbingly awesome than this picture.

I'm still hoping that this is a parody. Oh, please let this be a parody.

I'm not prone to considerations such as these, and I love the poetry of all three (especially no. 1), but vapidly, superficially, optically?

		♥

My school is going to undergo a TÜV test in April, as my boss informed me yesterday. Turns out they don't only come to check on how our students like us and to examine the administrative portion, they also audit our lessons, and I didn't really like the sound of that. When I replied half-jokingly that I'd have to prepare something extra-special for them, she said that what with my "outstanding preparation" I "wouldn't have to worry one bit", and she'd try to schedule their visit so that they could audit my lessons specifically, because I'm such a credit to the school.

Made my day. I suppose it's not such a big deal in the greater scheme of things, especially considering the nagging thought - which Crocky echoed once I got home - that the fact that I distinguish myself from the others because of preparation is not really a sign that the school is doing that well.

Still. Outstanding preparation, people. Credit to the school. Excuse me while I try to squeeze my inflated ego through that door to do some late lunch now (I bought 1kg of fresh spinach to celebrate and I'm now not sure what to do with it, really. Spinach lasagne?).

I have a student I tutor who is difficult, mostly because she is homesick and really demotivated.

Homesick because she's from Siberia and she gets tearful whenever she talks about her home. Last time she was rendered incapable of participating in class for twenty minutes because she saw a map of Europe and the East lying about before class and spent five minutes looking at her former home, then sat there, brooding, sullen. She was so bubbly when she came in, and this is not the first time she said she'd remembered something from home and went quiet.

Demotivated because they're analysing poetry, and she can't be bothered because she doesn't see the point both of poetry, what the particular pieces I bring in are about (they're supposed to work with Romantic poetry, and the Golden Age poets are a good match for obvious reasons), and why analysis is a good idea.

Now I'm thinking about bringing in a few poems in Russian which deal with similar subject matter as the German poems we're doing in class. I'm not sure it's such a good idea because I don't want her to feel bad, obviously. Still, it'd be an excuse to pick a native speaker's brain on Pushkin in the original, and possibly even Achmatova, because she's obsessed with Stalin's Russia, although if anything is likely to depress her, this'd probably be most likely to.

Excitingly, there's a free-for-all post on isurrendered , a community that I've been reading avidly during the last couple of days and I decided to submit these prompts: 

• A political drama/musical series about the Sängerkrieg
• A soap/crime series set in the Icelandic Commonwealth
• A series about werewolf detectives

I'd really love to see someone picking up one of these.

Yes, I'm trying to keep myself from thinking about my exam tomorrow. My two youngest students in the tutoring centre are in sixth and seventh grade respectively and they're at the tutoring centre because their written work is poor. Writing is not the most popular task for many kids, and the fact that their lesson is on Friday afternoon, after school does not help. These lively kids are usually very fidgety and find it very hard to concentrate - no wonder, given the fact that they're in the centre for ninety minutes between two and four on after a week of work!

Last week I had one act out an action with the other had to construct a sentence in the tense that he was revising, and all their sleepiness and demotivation went away as if by magic. Earlier, I had them set each other vocab tests on the board in adjacent rooms to give them an excuse to move around, write on the board, and teach each other rather than doing another test in written work.
A few weeks previous, I had them set each other dictations, which is a little too hard for the kid in sixth grade, but surprisingly doable. Spelling games like Scrabble, Boggle and Quiddler adapted for the needs of my students are also really popular and we usually use those during the last ten minutes. They've been known to insist on staying in ten minutes longer just to finish a game, and they do remember the words they used during the game, so that seems to work, but lately, I've been running out of ideas for quick things that are cost-effective with regards to the lesson time they take up.

My youngest student has not only failed their last vocab test, but he's also supposed to learn the irregular verbs - he never does his homework and learning things by heart seems to be nigh impossible for him. When we talked about their vocab learning methods, the younger dude said something along the lines of, "If I ever did learn my vocabulary lists, I'd probably copy them down and learn them by heart." Pwned by conditional II there, kid.
So ever since I heard that they had to study the irregular verbs I've been trying to come up with ways to make this more fun, and I think I might have found something:

Crocky uses this to teach her younger piano students to read sheet music, and I'm thinking of making something similar for irregular verbs. It's just a slightly shinier way of getting him to quiz himself, really, but who can resist a d12 - even if it happens to have irregular verb forms written on it?!
Also, it's a perfect excuse for me to have fun with cardboard, glue, and possibly even adhesive book covering. Other obvious options include crossword puzzles and bingo, but they also involve sitting down, and this at least allows some moving around. I realise it's not that much.

Are there any other way of getting students to improve their vocabulary? I'm quite partial to the vocabulary duel, too, which might still work with their age group, and similar things to make quizzing each other sound more appealing - especially if they involve moving around.

The first drafts of the DSM-V are out.

I can't say that I wouldn't have expected some of what's in there. Still. WOW. 

Let's start with something positive: I'm glad they're including Binge Eating as an eating disorder now. That's a good thing. I'm torn on Non-Suicidal Self Injury and wonder why they didn't also list this under paraphilias.

Other than that... Wow.

Let's begin with the fact that they've chosen to dispense with listing "distress" in their criteria as a measure for whether something is a disorder or a mere deviation from an abstract norm. I am not sure what is going to take its place - the way things are looking now, there is no telling where the boundary between clinical condition and deviation from the norm lies, really.
Zucker suggests that the likelihood of social ostracism is supposed to be the boundary for the norm here for his field, and my impression is that it will be really down to the estimation of the psych rather than the patient whether they have a condition that ought to be cured than the patient's distress with their situation.

Nearly all of the criteria regarding GI in children  that aren't related directly to the child's experienced gender still don't make sense and are deeply rooted in sexism, though the change in terminology is a good one. WTF is "typical masculine/feminine clothing" for children? What's wrong with cross-gender roles during fantasy play? WTF are "toys, games, or activities typical of the other gender", and what's wrong with rejecting games considered "appropriate" for your own gender?
Also, the shift in focus when it comes to the basis of this diagnosis from Gender Incongruence in adults does not make any sense to me - if behaviour appropriate to a person's gender is irrelevant in adults, why enforce it in children to this degree?

Zucker's paper... where to start. I am not an expert and I'm probably missing many things that are noteworthy, but there is still enough that is really anoying. He fails gender 101 ("if there was a social reason for girls to want to be boys, the same reason would apply to boys wanting to be girls"), it's creepy how he has as test subjects of one study comprised 500 boys who were referred to his clinic and only 79 girls - which to me seems to speak volumes of the inherent sexism of the entire enterprise and the femmephobia it engenders - his insistence that GID is a condition that ought to be cured by changing the individuals gender expression because that will cause their problems to disappear because they won't be socially ostracised anymore... there is so much that's troublesome in that paper, but his insistence that if you fix yourself, your situation will be better because your peers will react more positively to you is probably one of the least sensible I have ever heard. Would he maintain that that's applicable to other condition that cause children to be ostracised by their peers, I wonder?

Gender policing is creepy and superfluous, and it doesn't get better if people start even earlier with this nonsense. I want more freedom to experiment, especially for boys, not less. Most of my childhood friends presented with at least for of these criteria, in girl's cases five. I want back what I had when I was younger. More androgynous clothes for children, more toys that were coded as androgynous rather than marketed towards a specific gender, more room for experimenting. When I was small, nearly all of the male friends I had in kindergarten played more with their dolls than I did - my best friend, a boy called Sebastian, had a dolly that he used to take along everywhere and that was usually integrated into our games, usually in the role of his baby. Most of the girls I was friends dressed in androgynous clothes that would be perceived as "boy clothes" today because they're not sexualised, they played with androgynous and toys coded as "for boys" today, many had more friends who were boys than friends who were girls, and we all wore trousers with tears on the knees. I haven't seen any of that during my internship in kindergarten, and it's a fucking shame.

Edit: another thing I'm wondering here is what the benefit of having those extra criteria at all. I can't imagine that there many people who say that they don't feel their assigned gender is correct for shits and giggles, so surely, that ought to be enough for the medical gatekeepers...?
I guess I ought to shut up about this. I'm a cis ex-psych minor and really not informed enough to join the discussion of these issues.

So. Paraphilias.

The paraphilia-related changes in many areas actually seemed to make things worse rather than improve them. They apparently want to make a distinction between paraphilias and paraphilaic disorders - one being merely ascertained for study purposes, the other being diagnosed.

Not sure what the benefits of ascertaining something in a medical context are, especially in a Diagnosis Manual for Disorders, but fine, if they must. Still, the change in the wording for this is failtastic: for masochism, for example, according to the revising people, the difference between "real, not simulated" harm and ... well, harm, simulated or not, is pointless enough to just drop it altogether. Which means that  a lot more people now ought to go see a therapist, because there is no difference between sexual games and reality any more, if I'm reading that correctly.

Also, we have "autogynephilia" (and the continuing absence of autoandrophilia as well as notes to whether ciswomen experience autogynephilia, which they do) rear its ugly head again under "transvestic fetishism". As far as I can see from Blanchard's paper there is no reason for the inclusion of this "condition" at all, really, apart from Blanchard's own fucking creepy obsession with studies on the sexual fantasies of trans women.

Also, asexual people need to get their heads checked, and so do people who don't enjoy being penetrated, or those people who just like their vanilla sex too much.

Who else needs chocolate cookies?

EDIT: and I'm still trying to get my head around the necessity to list the symptoms of healthy paraphilias in a diagnosis manual for disorders under the title of the disorder it's supposed to diagnose, and I'm still drawing a blank.

Can anyone help me out? I must be missing something here and I hate that.

I  went shopping the other day and saw this: 



Can anyone guess what I read? Instead of "Back Oblaten", that is? Does that happen to anyone else, or is it just me? I'm sometimes doubting my sanity. What I read doesn't have anything to do with didactics, but it does show my ongoing mental involvement with the memory of my previous exams, in this case, my translation exam.

And for something completely petition-unrelated: kindkit on discworld shared these promotional pictures for the adaptation of Going Postal that have been published on Sky's official page:



I haven't been following this, and I'm mostly looking forward to this as this is really not a series I care about that much. I am not sure how I feel about Witchfinder Aredian/Mr Tulkington/Christopher Lilly/Lord Stockbridge/Maxim de Winter being cast as Lord Vetinari, but Im not likely to agree with whomever gets cast in that role. Well, unless the acting is going to be what it was in large parts of Hogfather, then I'm not sure I'm looking forward to this at all.

( 4 more pictures )

So you live in Germany? Sign this petition for the inclusion of sexual identity in our Artikel 3 in the GG.

So you have to sign up on the website to sign it? Sign it anyway, it really doesn't take that long (and I know people for whom that was the only reason not to sign it. Seriously, people, seriously).

So you don't know anyone who'd benefit from this petition and therefore don't want to make the effort? Yes, you do, so sign it.

So you don't think it is necessary to include sexual identity in the constitution specifically because everybody's protected by the other parts of that article already? Do you think that the inclusion of this would harm anyone? Sign this petition.

So you think that this won't accomplish anything and therefore is not worth your time? You can continue doing so, later, so sign it in the meantime.

So you think that this won't accomplish anything? It does not hurt to sign it, anyway, so sign it.

Why?

Because the absence of your name on this list says a lot about you. Because I'd like to be able to read your name alongside mine in this matter, even if it does nothing, even if this doesn't go anywhere. It doesn't hurt to sign this. It won't hurt you to sign this. It won't hurt your rights to sing this.

If you have a really good reason not to sign, please do share. I'd like to know what could speak against that.

Otherwise - sign this petition.

"Young girls who can be expected not to be sexually active (I wouldn't even recommend female colleagues to ask questions in these delicate matters, let alone male colleagues!), usually don't have full-sounding tones between the F in their chest register and the C or D in their middle register. These tones are usually weak without exceptions."
- Victor Funk

Which is roughly:

"Due to the fact that the physical and mental influence which sexual activity has on women is completely individual, the application of general rules is discouraged: should a girl or a woman feel happy without sexual intercourse, no one should expect that a change in her sexual life would have a positive influence on her voice - and the singing instructor is not to concern himself with anything else. It should be emphasised that, regardless of the effect sexual experience has on women in individual cases, it can never be expected to replace proper singing technique. "

Good to know that singing instructors offering a extra help with that after lessons is discouraged.

Apparently, people of my race like this (anyone else think that this blog is often really self-congratulatory rather than satiric? I'd have hoped for more satire), so I thought I'd give it a try. It turned out very tasty, and now I'm wondering what other kinds of spreads and dips there are that could be tasty - I'm thinking about giving mushroom dip a price.

Anyone want to share a recipe? I'd be grateful.

The set text for my exam were an excerpt from Room with a View, something I didn't even glance because the author was US American and I'm an anglist (turns out it was a quite interesting short story by a gay POC author on freedom), and The Solitary Reaper by Wordsworth.

William Wordsworth. Huh.

Obviously, given his popularity, I prepared pretty much everything BUT him.

Also, my professor is a big fan of texts being "very much concise and to the point", and I think that my 17-page, rambling, at times essayistic text quite cuts that. Gnaagh.

The Solitary Reaper
William Wordsworth

Behold her, single in the field,
Yon solitary Highland Lass!
Reaping and singing by herself;
Stop here, or gently pass!
Alone she cuts and binds the grain,
And sings a melancholy strain;
O listen! for the Vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound.

No Nightingale did ever chaunt
More welcome notes to weary bands
Of travellers in some shady haunt,
Among Arabian sands:
A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard
In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird,
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.

Will no one tell me what she sings?--
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago:
Or is it some more humble lay,
Familiar matter of to-day?
Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
That has been, and may be again?

Whate'er the theme, the Maiden sang
As if her song could have no ending;
I saw her singing at her work,
And o'er the sickle bending;--
I listened, motionless and still;
And, as I mounted up the hill,
The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more.

Has anyone already seen this? It's a project hosted by the Freie Universität Berlin on discrimination. From their home page: 

And in German: 
They're asking people to submit anonymous accounts of discrimination they experienced or witnessed here; you can do so in German, French, Polish, Russian, or Turkish.

Report away!

Sadly, everything outside is thawing by now.

We had about a foot of snow, and the icicles were up to three feet!!

I think I am far too exited about these things, especially the ones outside our window.



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