children aren’t dumb. we knew that trophies meant nothing when everyone in the fucking class got one
Also who was giving out those fucking trophies? SPOILER ALERT IT WASN’T US. IT WAS YOU.
Who the fuck got trophies?? I got a piece of paper saying Participation on it with a cheap-ass shiny sticker in the corner!
Sometimes they were ribbons.
Sometimes they were just the gnawing awareness that you could never trust any praise an adult gave you.
^^^^
When I was in 7th grade, the administration at my middle school decided to make a bunch of changes to pep rallies, including changing the spirit award to the grade that showed the most school spirit to three spirit awards SO THAT EACH GRADE COULD HAVE ONE.
We decided in about 2.5 seconds that this was fucking stupid and that it was pointless to have a school-wide spirit contest IF NO ONE WAS ACTUALLY ABLE TO WIN. Our entire grade organized ourselves and boycotted the pep rally in protest. We still went to the pep rally, but the entire 7th grade sat quietly in the bleachers and refused to cheer or otherwise participate.
AND IT INFURIATED THE SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION. INFURIATED THEM.
They ended up giving one spirit award to the 8th grade and two spirit awards to the 6th grade. At which point, our entire grade stood up and cheered, and the principal screamed into her microphone that we needed to sit down and stop cheering.
Because we hadn’t broken any school rules, the administration realized they couldn’t punish us, and they changed back to one spirit award and got rid of the other unpopular pep rally changes. But they never forgave us. The principal saved up all of her anger for a year and a half and then called a special “promotion ceremony rehearsal” for our grade right before we graduated from middle school specifically so that she could spend an hour yelling at us about how THIS WAS NOT FOR US, THIS WAS FOR OUR PARENTS AND OUR TEACHERS AND THE ADMINISTRATION AND THE SCHOOL, AND IF WE FUCKED THE CEREMONY UP IN ANY WAY, SO HELP HER, SHE WOULD MAKE OUR LIVES A LIVING HELL.
So, yeah, tell me again about how my generation expects trophies for participating. I dare you.
Someone somewhere has a great post about how all Millennials learned from this “everybody gets a trophy” culture foisted on us was to distrust conventional feedback methods (if everybody gets one, the system must be wrong and someone who tells me I’m good at something is probably lying). So the fact that we’re a generation filled with insecure overachievers with a well-documented lack of interest in conventional life markers is partly due to all those stupid participation trophies.
Ruined a perfectly good kid that’s what you did. Look at it. It’s got anxiety
In a 1970s experiment, a Stanford
psychologist and 7 other mentally
healthy participants got themselves
admitted to 12 different psychiatric
hospitals across the US by pretending
to hear voices. Once inside, they began
acting normally, but all 12 hospitals
diagnosed each of them with disorders,
forced them to take drugs, and required
them all to admit they had a disease
before they could be released. SourceSource 2
This was the study ‘being sane in insane places’ by David Rosenhan. The purpose of the study was to determine whether or not the staff of asylums could truly determine a person’s sanity after being admitted.
Rosenhan ans his colleagues did not pretend to hear voices, they pretended to hear a ‘hollow thud’- something with no basis in psychology. From the get go they were offering the doctors and nurses a chance to deny them entry, but despite the fact that the thing they were faking wasn’t even a real symptom, they were all admitted.
That very day, the moment of their admission, they went back to acting normal. They went about their day as normally as possible, and waited to see if the staff of each hospital they were in would notice. They stopped reporting hearing the noise that got them admitted.
The staff never noticed.
Some of the patients did.
Despite this, all of them were eventually released, but none were declared sane on release. Some were in the hospital for 2 weeks, one remained for over 50 days.
What the study proved was that it became impossible to establish sane from insane in the setting of a mental hospital. To retest, after Rosenhan came forward with his findings, he told asylums all over the nation that they’d be doing the experiment again, but with more participants this time. After a certain period, he would ask the head doctors of the ‘targeted’ asylums which patients they believed were faking it.
All of the hospitals reported at least one person.
No one was actually sent in.
This reiterated the original claim, proving for all that the perception of sanity is reliant on location and societal standards.
“Why broadcast your bisexuality/queerness, even if you’re in a monogamous relationship? It’s not because you want to be seen as available, but because you want to be SEEN. And you want others, who may feel invisible, to see themselves in you.”
@SaraSoueidan: Dear men, This is how you greet a veiled Muslim woman (a Hijabi). Hand on your chest, not offering to shake hers. 🙋
so prominent BLM activist deray mckesson just retweeted this which i think is super cool for various reasons :)))
I did not know this. Is it OK for a non Muslim woman to shake hands with a Hijabi? Or do we do the hand on chest thing too?@popcanpoli
hey so i don’t wear a hijab and i’m not muslim so i definitely don’t have the authority to answer this question (or any other questions i’ve been getting abt this) (i’m just a lil canadian politics blog i didn’t expect this to blow up lol)
BUT here are some tweets by the original tweeter (who wears a hijab) that clarify some things
one:
two:
three:
This is also good if you’re meeting an Orthodox Jewish person who’s not the same gender as you! Not all Orthodox Jews hold by this restriction, and many consider it a permissible exception to shake hands in a formal greeting context; I’d guess this is parallel to Ms. Soueidan’s last-quoted tweet above. And as that says, the sensible thing is to wait for initiation.
QueerGalaxies 