#carolyn looks like a school teacher helping a student read | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

skelenyxx · 5 years

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3 - Antics ~WOR

"You better hang on if you're taggin' along cause we'll be doin this 'till 6 in the mornin'. Nothin' wrong with goin' all night long. Tough to put the brakes on, doesn't matter when you'd rather get up, and go out. Me and all my friends. We drink up, we fall down and then we do it all again. Just sittin around, hangin out this afternoon." ~ This Afternoon - Nickelback

.•*•.•*•.•*•.

*Andy's POV*

I walked through the double doors of the office out into the school yard. The lunch bell had already rung, so many students were bustling about carrying books or trays of food. I used to be like that once, and the thought actually made me shudder a bit. Yikes.

I set out across the grass heading towards the cement area where the tables were. A few students stopped what they were doing to gape at me as I passed them, as if they hadn't already done enough of that at the assembly this morning. "Fag," muttered a big guy in a football jersey as I passed him. I turned and flipped him off. Fuck haters, that's all I have to say.

I continued walking until I reached the tables on the white cement. I scanned the tables, looking for the girl who set up this whole thing; Katrina. I finally spotted her, sitting alone at one of the far tables with her nose in a book. Her long, straight, dark blonde hair was blowing around in the breeze and glinting like gold. She had on a brown leather jacket and had the sleeves pulled up over her hands. She was also wearing tight blue jeans and grey boots. She definitely didn't look like the typical, stereotypical girl who would experience bullying. She was pretty, in a sort of goody-two-shoes way.

I plopped myself down in the seat across from her. She looked up, eyes wide.

"Hey." I said, a smile playing on my lips.

"H-Hey," she stuttered nervously. She looked down at her feet, redness creeping up her neck.

"You're Katrina right?" I knew she was, but I felt like asking anyway.

"Yeah," she smiled thinly at me.

"I'm Andy. Andy Biersack," I told her.

She smiled. "I know who you are," she replied. "I'm a fan."

"Oh. So you listen to us?" I asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Yes," she chuckled. "You guys are my favorite band."

"Oh really?" I smirked. She nodded. "So what are you reading?" I inquired, looking at the book in her hands.

"Well, um-" she began but was cut off by a high pitched voice.

"Katrina!" the voice exclaimed, sounding sort of pissed off. I turned around to see the same snobby blonde girl from the assembly marching towards us. I heard Katrina sigh, sounding kind of annoyed.

"So, this is your idea of a fun experiment?" she asked when she reached us. "By bringing these emo fags to our school?" She put her hands on her hips and glared at me.

I was about to say something back, but Katrina shot a look at me telling me to stay silent. I clamped my mouth shut, watching the exchange.

"Savannah, just leave us alone," Katrina snapped. "They are not emo fags. They are real people who are living out their dreams, which is more than you can say about yourself."

Savannah scoffed at her and stalked off, walking right past Ashley who was walking towards us with Jake, Jinxx, and CC in tow.

"Hey Andy," Ashley said when he got to us, sitting down next to me on the bench. Everyone else followed suit by sitting at the surrounding benches. "We were wondering where you wandered off to. You're Katrina right?" He looked at Katrina.

"Y-Yeah," she stuttered in reply, redness creeping to her face yet again.

"Well, I'm Ashley, this is-"

"She knows who we are," I cut him off with a small chuckle. "We're her favorite band." I smirked and her blushing got even darker, which I didn't even think was possible.

"Oooooooo. So the goody-two-shoes listens to Rock music, huh?" CC asked looking at Katrina who was sitting next to him.

"I am not a goody-two-shoes!" She gasped, glaring at CC.

"Oh please!" Ashley laughed. "Everything about you screams good girl, from your hair to your make up to your shoes. I'm sure you probably have straight A's and I bet you don't even cuss."

"I do to cuss!" she replied with a laugh.

"Then say 'fuck.'"

She looked him dead in the eyes. And opened her mouth, before closing it again, somewhat resembling a fish out of water.

"Goody goody!" Ashley exclaimed.

"Am not!"

"Yes you are!"

"Not!"

"Are!"

"Not!"

"Are!"

"Not!"

"You soooooooo are."

She sighed in defeat. "You know what? It doesn't matter 'cause I could still kick your ass either way." A devilish grin curled on her lips, her blue eyes glinting.

Jake gasped. "Oooooooo the goody-two-shoes cussed!" He laughed. Katrina just stuck her tongue out at him.

"Oh you're mature," Jinxx joked. Katrina laughed an airy, light-hearted laugh, one that made us all smile and laugh with her. All except for Ashley, who rose from his seat and walked over to Katrina, looking somewhat serious.

"So, you think you could kick my ass?" he asked, looking down at her. Her laughter died, along with ours.

She smiled. "Yeah, I probably could."

Ash sighed and picked her up and tossed her over his shoulder like a potato sack and began walking off with her.

"PUT ME DOWN PURDY!" She yelled, making us all laugh. She tried unsuccessfully to hit him and kick him, but just ended up making her self tired. Ashley just laughed at her. So did we. Since Ashley's back was to us as he walked off with her, Katrina was facing us. She glared at us, causing us to laugh even harder.

"I'm serious Ash. Put me down. People are looking at us like we're crazy!" she exclaimed.

"I don't care," he replied. They were about twenty feet away from us now and Ash was starting to turn around to bring her back.

As they got closer Katrina looked over her shoulder at us. "You guys better not be staring at my ass."

"You don't have anything to stare at," I replied.

"Hey!"

"Just kidding!"

"Why are you looking?!"

I threw my hands up in defeat. I wasn't going to win this battle.

"Put me down," she whined with a laugh and tried once again to free herself from his grasp, still failing miserably. I rolled my eyes, still shaking with laughter.

They finally reached us and Ashley put her back down on the bench next to CC. She tried to look angry, but couldn't contain her smile and ended up laughing with us.

When we were finally out of breath and the laughter died, Jake turned to Katrina and asked, "So, how long have you been listening to our music?"

"Since 9th grade," she responded. "My best friend was in love with you guys and was constantly trying to get me to listen to you. At the time, I was completely against it. You guys, no offense, kinda scared me with the looks. I judged you by the way you portrayed yourselves and I didn't want to like you guys. But after a few months of her constantly nagging me, my curiosity got the better of me. I looked you up on Pandora, and as soon as I heard the first song, something just, just clicked. The message behind the music, the style, everything, it just fit." She sighed. "All of my previous thoughts about you guys just disappeared. I fell in love with everything about you guys, and as I listened to more and more of your music, the more and more I realized who I really was. I had been hiding who I was the entire time and as I listened to your guys' message, I changed. I became less worried about what other people thought and more about what I thought. Due to that though, I've kinda butted heads with the majority of the popular kids here. But I honestly don't care. They can think what they want." She smiled thinly when she finished.

"Wow," Jinxx started. "That's awesome Katrina. I'm glad we were able to help you."

"Yeah, sorry to get all serious on you guys, but your music literally changed my life. It was the beginning of my love for Rock and it helped make me the stubborn, out-speaker I am today." She smiled again.

I had heard story after story about how our music had changed fans' lives, but hearing this story form her was just different. She had given up the potential of popularity and people accepting her for our music. We helped her find herself and she was proud of it. I was happy for that. I mean, I'm sure I'd probably heard fan stories like this one a million times before, but it's never really hit me like Katrina's story did. She just seemed so innocent.

"What was the first song you heard?" Ash asked her.

"Believe it or not, God Bless You." She grinned a cheesy grin.

"Really?" I questioned. God Bless You is one of our more heavy rock songs. She nodded in response. "Is it your favorite too?"

"No, In The End and Carolyn are my favorites."

"Good choices," Jake told her.

"So what classes do you guys have?" She asked us all as she checked her phone for the time. I did the same. We had five minutes until lunch was over. Oh joy.

"All of the classes you have," Jinxx replied, pulling out his schedule and scowling at it. "First period, Economics. Second period, Advanced Choir. Third period, AP English 12. Fourth period, Spanish II. Fifth period, Algebra II. Sixth period, P.E. And seventh period, Biology. May I ask why you have things like AP English and then you have low classes like Biology which should've been taken in your like Sophomore year?" He actually looked quite confused.

"That's because I don't actually take those classes, I'm a Teacher's Aid in them. The only classes I actually take are Advanced Choir, AP English, and P.E. Since I started taking summer courses, I've pretty much maxed out all of my educational classes. It was either be a T.A. or take electives like welding and stuff. Not my thing really so yeah... How come you guys are taking all of the classes I am?"

"You are the one who set this up. We figured that we'd get to know you better." Ashley told her, smirking at her for some unknown reason. She shrugged.

"So how come you guys are wearing your war paint?" She asked us. "I'd heard you had stopped doing it."

"We have. We just thought it'd be funny to see people's reactions to it," I laughed. "Needless to say, it had the desired affect."

She chuckled. "Yeah, it did."

I heard the bell ring, signally it was time to start heading to fifth period, which, according to Jinxx, was Algebra II. Joy... I'd passed that class once before, and I hadn't liked it much then. I doubt I will now. I was snapped from my day dreaming by Katrina's voice.

"So since I'm the only one her that knows how to get to class," she said as she stood up and began to gather her books from the ground. "Does this make me your chauffeur?"

"Yeah, I guess it does," I said as I too rose from my seat.

"Okay then," she replied cheerfully as she hooked her arm through CC's and mine. "Shall we?"

This should be fun...

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welcometophu · 6 years

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Not Your Love Song: Chapter 6

PLEASE NOTE: The text in this post looks messed up with strange characters due to a bug which shows it incorrectly on your dash. If you click through to read the post on the Welcome to PHU blog, it will show with correct, readable formatting.

Marked Book 2: Not Your Love Song

Chapter 6

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Rory wakes to the rhythm of Alaric’s breath nearby, and a sound that he swears is Thorne taking pictures. He cracks one eye open, shakes his head before Thorne snaps another one.

Thorne raises an eyebrow. “It’s like a sleepover.”

“It’s exactly a sleepover,” Rory whispers. “Everyone crashed on the floor and I didn’t bother to leave since you had the keys to the apartment. We slept over, therefore it’s a sleepover.”

“Shut up, pillow,” Stormy mutters, swatting him on the chest. She’s curled with her head on his shoulder, one leg across his. Alaric butts up against his other side, curled away and Rory guesses that he’s facing Chris. Rory can’t remember who else decided to crash on the living room floor, but he sees Mac’s hand hanging down from the couch where she’s curled into a tight ball.

He has a vague memory of late night discussions about whether they should leave, but Thorne was warm and slightly drunk, Stormy was already half asleep, and everyone just gave up and found space on the floor. Rory’s hip aches—he’s too bony for this—but otherwise he feels fine.

Thorne’s phone starts playing classical guitar, quietly at first but quickly escalating while he fumbles it, trying to press the answer button and whisper, “Hey, Dad.” By the time Thorne takes a step back, Alaric is sitting up, and TJ has thrown a pillow at him.

Rory catches Thorne’s eye, and Thorne nods. Rory manages to slip out from under Stormy and threads his way between the people to follow Thorne into the kitchen.

“I’ll put you on speaker, okay?” Thorne says, touching the button without waiting for an answer.

“—Benefit concert,” Dad says.

“Hey, Dad,” Rory calls out to let him know he’s there. “What about a benefit concert?”

“We’ve been asked to play a benefit concert with you on the twenty-first,” Dad says. “Apparently the requester researched when the semester starts, and asked if we’d be willing to do it on the Saturday before since we’ll be bringing you two back to school anyway.”

“Here?” Thorne asks, and Rory imagines the way Dad nods while he paces.

“At the Whitman Center in Valiant, yes.” A shuffling of papers in the background. “It’d be just us and you, and it’s to help pay for the medical costs of Lorraine Barr. She was injured in a magical accident last fall and is still in the hospital. Her ex is donating the venue, and her friends reached out to us.”

Rory exchanges a look with Thorne, not sure if he remembers the name. “We’ll do it,” Rory says, and Thorne’s eyebrows go up.

We will? He mouths, and Rory nods.

“She’s a VIT student, like my roommate’s best friend,” Rory adds. He doesn’t say Corbin knew her, but he manages to imply it, and Dad won’t ask for clarification. Thorne’s eyebrows go a little higher at the implied lie. “Just get us the information, and if there’s anyone we need to talk to here. You guys can use the van for equipment, and we’ll just take more than one car out here. I think it works for Stormy and Andy’s schedules, too. Don’t we all start back at the same time?”

It takes a moment for Thorne to realize that’s his cue. “Yeah,” Thorne says. “I mean, Dad, let us talk to Andy and Stormy to confirm it for sure, then we’ll get back to you. I’ll email you later, but I’m pretty sure we’re all in.”

“I’ve already talked to the guys here, and they’re in. It’s fun when we get to have our kids open for us.” There’s a smile in Dad’s voice. “We’ll see you guys again on Sunday, right? Rich asked when Stormy’s coming home.”

“Sunday, yeah. We had a good time in Vermont,” Rory says. It’s Dad, so it’s safe to say that. As long as Rory doesn’t mention the mark, Dad won’t pry, not like Mom and Dad would. “We’ll tell you all about it when we get home. And we should rehearse, too. Maybe we can all do a song together.”

“We’d like that,” Dad agrees.

Thorne spreads his hands, mouths, what are you doing?

Rory holds up one finger for him to wait.

Noise on the other side, a door opening and closing, muffled voices. A low huff, before Dad says, “I’m told it’s time for breakfast. You two have a good weekend, and drive safe. We love you.” There’s an echo in the background as Dad calls out loud enough to be heard through the phone.

Rory raises his voice, Thorne matching him. “Love you!” they call together, before the call ends.

“What was that about?” Thorne asks, sticking his phone in his pocket.

“She’s the girl who was attacked by the Shadowwalker and ended up in coma rather than dead,” Rory says quickly. “That’s who Lorraine Barr is.” He heads back to the living room, because Alaric’s going to be interested in this.

Everyone has moved and rearranged before they get back. TJ and Jackson are gone, and Mac’s sitting up, curled into the corner of the couch, cuddling a throw pillow. Stormy sits on the floor, her back against the couch where Mac sits, while Alaric and Chris have taken over the other couch. Carolyn looks sleep-tousled and barely awake, sitting in the chair, idly shuffling a deck of cards. Drea and Corbin come down the stairs as Thorne and Rory walk in, and Corbin shifts to fly across the room, resolving back into human as he drops onto the couch next to Alaric.

“You didn’t need to go that far,” Rory mutters. It was showy and rushed, and Rory knows it was solely so he couldn’t take the seat on that couch. Which doesn’t matter, since Rory was planning on sitting right where he does, on the other end from Mac, his legs stretching out so he can poke Stormy.

“I know why we’re up, but why is everyone else up?” Drea asks as she joins Corbin. She sits back, feet up on the couch, knees bent tightly. “Nate said he’s on the early shift, and so’s Serina, if you want to join us going to Teas Please.”

“Alaric,” Rory says, waiting until he has his attention. “Do you remember Lorraine Barr?” Alaric’s brow furrows, so Rory elaborates, “she’s in a coma.”

Alaric’s nostrils flare and he nods sharply. “She’s the one who survived. Her friend’s dead and Dax can’t reach him, and the other guy was cleared of suspicion. The Deathstalker attack after Orson.”

“They’re the ones from VIT,” Corbin adds. “Not the boyfriend. He’s a local teacher. Why?”

“We’re playing a benefit concert for her medical costs in a couple of weeks.”

“We’re what?” Stormy asks, quieting when Thorne touches her shoulder.

This is the part where Rory should apologize for putting the mystery of what happened before the band. He should, and he will, but he’d do it again because he’s still certain that whatever is going on isn’t over yet. “This is about what happened to Alaric and Drea’s brother,” he says quietly. He nudges Stormy with his foot. “And when Alaric and Mac were attacked by the shadow, and the shadow we caught. Someone died from VIT and there’s a girl who’s been in a coma since. They want Dad’s band and us to do a benefit show, and well, (a) it’s the right thing to do, and (b) maybe we’ll find out more about what’s going on, in case it happens again.”

Stormy pinches her lips together for a moment, lets her breath out in a small explosion of sound. “Well, Andy’ll love that short notice and decision making on his behalf, I’m sure. He’s probably got plans with his girlfriend.”

They can’t really play without Andy.

“I’ll make sure he comes round,” Thorne says. “Rory’s right, it’s what we should do, and Dad’s doing it anyway, so it’d look weird if we didn’t. I mean, all our dads are there, and we’re saying no?”

“I’m not arguing, I’d just like to be included in the decision making next time,” Stormy says patiently, arms crossed tight across her chest. “I have a life outside the band. I have my own education and it’s three hours from here. I need to be able to make plans.”

Rory slides off the couch, edges closer to her and tilts his head to lean against hers. “I’m sorry,” he says quietly, and Stormy relaxes. She threads their fingers together, and accepts the apology with a squeeze of her hand.

“Even if the shadow isn’t coming back, these people are involved and they don’t really know it,” Drea points out. “Dax tried talking to Noah’s ghost, but that didn’t work. Corbin talked to Darrik, but there really wasn’t much said. Darrik’s not really a talkative guy, and I don’t think he knows much anyway. So maybe making contact with them—getting to actually know them—is a good idea. For their safety as much as ours.”

“And we get to play before we have to stop until the summer tour,” Rory adds. “Which should be being nailed down soon and we’ll get the dates for that set, but it’s going to be a long time between now and then.” January to May seems like forever when it comes to performing.

“Time enough for new music,” Stormy says.

If anything comes of the little bits and pieces wandering around Rory’s head, sure. Or if he can nail Thorne down long enough to work together. Maybe now that Thorne isn’t having his thing with Alaric, he’ll be a better music partner.

Then again, it’s Thorne, and he’s easily distracted. So maybe not.

“What ended up happening with the vote, Ric?” Thorne asks. “Should we be worried about having to go to war?”

Alaric’s jaw goes tight enough that Rory can see it from across the room. Chris settles a hand at the nape of Alaric’s neck, fingers pressing tight against his skin, and there’s a faint puff of smoke from Alaric’s nostrils.

“That bad?” Rory asks. His fingers itch, and he flexes them, silently asking if Alaric’s upset enough that he needs help to quiet his ability. Alaric shakes his head slightly, and Rory takes that as an answer.

“It was long,” Alaric mutters. “Really long. My father didn’t like the way the vote went, so we had counter-arguments, and another vote. It took three tries before we convinced him.”

“No war then,” Thorne says, voice tight.

“Dayton’s alliance came through.” Alaric looks over at Thorne. “No war. But we’re revisiting it if anything else happens, especially anything around my home or family. He believes in protecting his community, and that means everyone. Drea and I need to go back again, after this.”

“I’m heading back to Massachusetts for a couple of weeks. Theobald made it clear that the human’s not welcome right now,” Chris says dryly.

“Just have Rory come visit for a week next. One Mage in the house and Theobald will forget all about the fact that his son’s sleeping with a human,” Corbin suggests. Rory would take offense, but he sees a wicked glint in Corbin’s eyes, knows that he’s joking.

Besides, Drea swats Corbin hard enough that his expression fades and he quietly apologizes. She has it under control.

“The point is, besides putting the threat of war on hold, nothing’s changed,” Alaric says. The smoke has faded, and he leans back against Chris. “My father wants someone to blame for Orson’s death, and he lost the shadow. He won’t believe that Mages aren’t doing this somehow, he won’t look outside his worldview.”

“So if we make contact with the people having this benefit for Lorraine and start looking at the problem from that angle, it could help,” Rory says. Out of the corner of his eye, he spots Thorne nodding, and Stormy pats his head. Of course he had a plan; they need to learn to trust him.

“It could help,” Alaric agrees.

“Thanks,” Drea says. “For us. For Orson.”

“For Dax, who is still under whatever geas type thing that the ghosts do to him because Orson’s not satisfied yet,” Chris adds. “Best I can figure out, it makes his brain itch.”

“Sounds annoying,” Mac comments, idly scratching the side of her head, and Stormy snickers.

The background noise of cards shuffling abruptly stops. Carolyn sits up, back stiff and straight, looking at the door. When it doesn’t open, her brow furrows and she doesn’t relax.

“Is there a reason why you’ve got your cards?” Drea asks, and Carolyn looks down at them like she didn’t even realize they were in her hands.

Carolyn shuffles them again, spreads them out and offers them to Drea. “Take a card for the coming year,” she says, as Drea leans forward, one hand on Corbin’s knee to balance herself as she reaches across the space.

Drea plucks a card out of the fanned set, and holds it up, facing Carolyn. It looks like a mandala on a clock face, the numbers represented by runes.

“Wheel of Fortune,” Carolyn says. “The year ahead is going to be one of change for you. Lots of change, and very fundamental change. But it’s going to be good, and you should be ready to roll with it.”

“I think we already knew that,” Alaric mutters. “Everything’s been changing already, maybe too much.”

“Maybe not enough yet.” Drea’s tone is light, but her expression is serious. “What about Alaric?”

Carolyn pushes the card back into the stack and shuffles again, before fanning them in front of Alaric. He considers it, brow furrowed, but doesn’t sit forward until both Drea and Corbin encourage him.

“I’ll take one after you do,” Corbin offers. “If that’s okay with you.” He nudges Alaric, who slowly slips a card from the set.

Carolyn looks at the card Alaric holds up—two men sparring with wands in their hands, another one lying on the ground in front of them. “Yeah, that’s fine,” she says, although Rory’s not sure Carolyn realizes what she’s agreeing to. She raises her gaze to meet Alaric’s. “This matches with Drea, and with what you’re going through. Find your passion, Alaric, and fight for it. Drea’s going to go with the change, but you’re going to create it. Just remember: when you’re fighting for change, there’s someone else on the other side. Don’t steamroll them, don’t go too far. Fight so that it’ll happen in a positive way.”

Corbin claps Alaric on the shoulder. “Our fearless leader, bringing our Clan into the modern century. It’s only a few years late.” He leans past Alaric, wiggles his fingers impatiently while Carolyn shuffles again.

The others rearrange, and Rory realizes that the focus is on Carolyn. That everyone will ask her for a card, perhaps for the new year rather than their birth year, but it would still work. There’s still a precedent for the predictive magic.

He tunes out as Carolyn tells Corbin about creating a comfortable, sustainable life for himself. That he has the opportunity to create the future that he desires, and to live it in peace and harmony. He dimly registers that Drea answers it with a kiss for Corbin, and that Stormy laughs as she reaches for a card next.

Rory rubs at the mark on his wrist, then very carefully stops doing exactly that. He pulls out his phone, busies himself making a note in his calendar so he doesn’t forget the show, and texting the band’s group chat to say that they have a gig planned for Valiant.

He puts his phone away before Andy can text back, just in case he complains.

Stormy pats his knee. “Rory. Take a card.”

The deck is fanned right in front of him, and Carolyn waits. It’d be odd if he doesn’t take one now, but he isn’t sure he wants to know the cards will say, either. He tugs one free, jerking it when it seems to stick, then turns it around without looking at it first.

“The Queen of Swords,” Carolyn says. She takes it and shows it to him, the woman on the card severe and strong, looking away from the lovers that embrace in the distant window behind her.

“I’m not sure how that fits into my future,” Rory says, making an effort not to rub at the mark again. “I can’t think of any women I know like that.”

“Well, if it means a woman, she’s a strong one,” Carolyn says. “When this card refers to a person, she’s the kind of take-no-bullshit woman who gets things done. But since we’re looking at a card about you, and your year to come, I think it means that you need to be like that. Make your own decisions, and stand on your own two feet. Don’t be dependent on anyone else.”

Stormy stifles a laugh, and Rory nudges her shoulder with his foot. When he glances up, Thorne is watching him, and offers a small smile and shrug.

The card may have a point. Rory’s the youngest. The one who’s followed behind all along, and who has always relied on his older brother, on his best friends. He wouldn’t follow them blindly, but he would follow them.

On the other hand, he did just take charge in agreeing to this benefit concert, right?

“I’ll keep it in mind,” he mutters, sinking back against the couch. It’s just advice, after all.

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#welcome to phu #welcometophu #not your love song #phu marked #marked

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orbemnews · 3 years

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A student harnessed the power of beets to make healing from surgery safer -- and more equitable The Iowa student has dedicated her life to equity work, from serving as one of her school district’s diversity equity leaders to participating in her high school’s Black History Game Show club. But when her junior year chemistry teacher at Iowa City West High School, Carolyn Walling, was recruiting students for the Science Fair club, Taylor signed up, fascinated by the prospect of answering her own research question — and incorporating economic equity into science by trying to remove financial barriers to medical treatment. Over a year later, she’s seeking a patent for a creation she carefully curated in her high school chemistry lab: color-changing stitches that indicate when a wound is infected. The key to her success? Covering the stitches in beet juice. “I dabble in science,” Taylor, who is now a senior, told CNN. “It’s been an amazing experience because I’ve never done any research prior to this project.” Since beginning to compete on the science fair circuit in February 2020, her beet juice-coated sutures have won numerous regional titles. In January, Taylor was among the top 40 finalists from nearly 1,800 applicants in the Regeneron Science Talent Search, the nation’s “oldest and most prestigious science and math competition for high school seniors.” The accolades aren’t what matters, she says. Now, she’s focused on making sure the sutures actually help people. “Equity work has my heart, and that’s what I want to do for my career,” Taylor said. “I do plan on continuing my research, and ensuring that this project is released and people actually get this discovery, and it will save lives.” She wanted to make new inventions equitable Taylor’s stitches are a remake of “smart sutures,” stitches that use smart technology to detect when wounds become infected. Always looking through an equity lens, Taylor realized that this new technology may not be easily accessible to underprivileged populations that already struggle to obtain affordable surgical care. Around 5 billion people do not have access to surgical care worldwide, with 9 out of 10 people struggling to access basic surgical services in low- and middle-income countries, the World Health Organization (WHO) has found. “I classify my research as where equity meets science,” Taylor said. “The people who are really going to need (smart sutures) will not be able to afford it … so I decided to take that and run with it and make something cost-effective.” Approximately 11% of patients who undergo surgery in low and middle-income countries experience surgical site infections (SSIs), WHO found in 2016. Taylor particularly wanted to help African women undergoing C-sections, as upwards of 20% of African women receive SSIs during such surgeries. Her stitches operate using simple chemistry. While human skin is naturally acidic, or around a pH of 5, Taylor explained, infected wounds have a basic pH, meaning it’s 8 or higher. A natural indicator — in this case, a beet mixture — can change color based on the pH of something. Beets change color “very quickly” right around when skin’s pH becomes basic, Taylor found, going from a healthy light purple to a darker magenta as pH increased — the ”perfect” natural indicator, she said. After creating variations of a beet concoction, Taylor combined the dye with the sutures to create an item that could detect infection at the correct pH levels, completing Phase 1 of her research by February 2020. She excelled in competition Upon taking the sutures to competition in February 2020, the invention was an immediate success. At her first competition, the regional Junior and Science Humanities Symposium, Taylor said she “dominated,” taking home first place and numerous other awards. Taylor credited her success in large part to Walling’s help. Walling, who has recruited students for science fairs for around 10 years, told CNN this is the first time she’s seen a student make it this far in competitions. “The reason why she did as well as she did in my opinion is that she was just interested, like she just kept wanting to know why and how can this work and what can we do with it,” Walling explained. Despite pandemic limitations, Walling recalled that Taylor was determined to continue her research. She worked with administrators to use the chemistry lab in August, incorporating judge feedback from the previous season and beginning Phase 2 of her research. Taylor also sought insight from University of Iowa microbiologist Theresa Ho, after realizing beets have antibacterial properties. Upon reaching the top 40 in the Regeneron competition, the other finalists voted for Taylor to receive the Seaborg Award, allowing her to speak on behalf of the Regeneron Science Talent Search Class of 2021. And her work has inspired others Now that competition season has ended, Taylor’s research has received extensive praise since entering the national and international science arenas. Taylor recalled how an elementary teacher in Massachusetts asked their students to read about Taylor’s work and write a paragraph about why she inspired them. Upon receiving a 24-page document from the teacher with all the students’ thoughts, Taylor said she cried. “I consider changing the world inspiring the next person, like if I get to inspire someone to go do something great, that’s what success is in my mind,” Taylor said. While Taylor plans to major in political science on a pre-law track, she encourages anyone remotely interested in science to pursue it, saying, “If you’re curious about something, research it.” In that spirit of discovery, Taylor has encouraged kids in her hometown to get involved with science, from hosting a kids science program with her local public library to holding Zoom discussions with elementary students. But Taylor isn’t just inspiring kids; Walling said Taylor “inspires her” and anyone else she’s around. “She doesn’t just push herself to be better, she wants everyone to be better,” Walling said. “It’s just so amazing to see how I’m already changing the world in really just being myself and having fun and exploring my intellectual horizons,” Taylor said. “I just never knew I was gonna do all of this at 17 years old.” Source link Orbem News #beets #equitable #harnessed #healing #power #safer #student #surgery

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chloegrayportfolio · 3 years

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Module Two: Doing Worthy Work

Week 9 Progress Log

What do you believe it means to be educated?

To be educated is to be a well-rounded and well-verse member of society who is socially aware.

What are some of the personal concepts you have about how learning happens?

I believe there are many factors that can influence and alter an individual’s learning experience, such as their relationship with the teacher, their place in the classroom, and how they are taught. Learning only truly happens if it is occurring in a positive, supportive environment.

What is your understanding of what it means ‘to teach’?

To teach is to share my knowledge with each generation of young learners in a way that is both efficient and memorable.

What makes you think that you would be a good teacher?

I believe I will be a good teacher because of how passionate I am in everything I do. Everyday I will work to not only teach and inspire my students, but do so in a way that they appreciate and enjoy. I will also be a good teacher because I will be open and approachable—not at all a figure my students fear.

What do you feel are some of the issues facing schools and education today?

I believe some of the biggest issues facing schools and education today are the heavy dependence and reliance on standardized testing, a lack of access to qualified mental health professionals within schools, and an inequality in opportunities for students in lower-income schools.

What would an observer see in your classroom related to teaching, learning, and the community of learners?

An observer would also see an open learning environment where my students are given options on how to better their learning experience. They would see a variety of teaching and learning styles (verbal, visual (images), text). They would see an open community of learners that treat others with respect and are able to work together and help one another.

What would an observer in your classroom see you doing?

An observer in my classroom would see me forming bonds with my students in order to better understand them and their needs. An observer would also see me always looking to make education and teaching more unique and entertaining for my students through a variety of activities, experiments, and games.

What makes your classroom unique? Describe it.

I have always believed that a teacher’s classroom is also the students’ classroom, meaning students should be able to have a say in how their classroom is structured. What would really make my classroom unique is based on the feedback and ideas I receive from my students. However, my classroom would have tables set up in a way that makes the classroom feel like a large, open space (rather than rows of desks). It would be colourful without chaos and include things such as quiet corners, a wall displaying the hard work of each student, and as well as an anonymous question box regarding homework that will be answered by me to the entire class, as a way to inspire my students to ask more questions without nerves or anxiety.

How do your students engage in learning?

As a teacher, I would incorporate many different styles of teaching and learning into my classroom, as I believe and understand that each student learns differently and in order to ensure engagement in my students, I must provide them with a variety of things that will help them work towards success. I will incorporate things such as verbal lesson explanations, visual representation (examples(s) of work), and written instructions. My students will have always have the option to explore different learning styles in order to remain best engaged.

What do you want your legacy as a teacher to be?

As someone who is looking to become an elementary school teacher with a preference towards teaching in the primary grade levels, I believe there is a huge responsibility on myself in how I introduce and teach things such as reading and writing to my students—two things I am passionate about. I would like my legacy as a teacher to be the teacher my students will look back on and remember as the person who taught them the joys and excitements of reading—the person who inspired them to visit the library on their free time and appreciate books, especially as these students will still have many years of schooling to go.

I believe …

I believe that a classroom belongs to the students in the class just as much as it belongs to the teacher—therefore, the teacher should always make sure it is an environment their students feel welcome, comfortable, and ready to learn in through the creation of a floor plan and desk plan that works for the class and artwork/motivational images chosen by the students.

I believe that the use of standardized testing in schools is proven to be less of an accurate representation of a student’s knowledge each year and that education needs to move towards more open, community and group-based learning that does not rely solely on independence and memorization to measure understanding.

I believe that there is no logical explanation as to why we expect 25+ students to have the same learning style—each student has the right to be provided with a variety of options when listening to lessons as well as completing assignments, in order to find what works best for them.

I believe there are many factors that can influence and alter an individual’s learning experience, such as their relationship with the teacher, their place in the classroom, and how they are taught—learning only truly happens if it is occurring in a positive, supportive environment, and the responsibility of the creation and upholding of this environment is on the teacher.

Reflection: It was actually quite difficult to choose which sentences to reflect my main beliefs, as the thought of teaching in the future is very inspiring and exciting for me. I have such strong beliefs and opinions regarding how schools and classrooms are “traditionally” run—especially regarding standardized (memorization-based) testing as well as isolated seating plans and work settings. I truly believe that we need an education reform and my beliefs as a future teacher reflect what an education reform could look like, and would look like for myself, my classroom, and my students. These beliefs reflect the desire and hunger for change I have. These beliefs come from a plethora of reasons, but most notably because of recent reflections I have done by myself regarding my history of schooling and education. Despite having solely positive experiences myself in the classroom growing up, I am now well aware it was not like that for all of my classmates. Growing up, I never really noticed how poorly the students in my classes who required extra help or different teaching styles were treated, but as I grew older the biases teachers held in the classroom became clear and apparent. Teachers would talk to these students like they were absolute nuisances, and then get angry when those same students would act up in class or simply just not hand in the assignment. I am able to reflect on the education system and teachers that pushed these students away and punished them. I think about all the children who grew up hating school, when they were really just given adults who were unable to recognize the variety of needs in a single classroom. My beliefs stem from my desire for the next generations to enjoy school and learning much more than mine did.

Assignment 2: Grading and Motivation

Part I: Analysis of Eileen (Student)’s Learning

Student input. What did the student come to the learning with? (Discuss at least 2 dimensions in details)

Despite Eileen’s painful ailments of arthritis and diabetes that hindered and limited her general movements and physical activity, Eileen seemed to be a highly positive, optimistic, and uplifting presence—even prior to meeting Carolyn. Three things Eileen came to the learning with were her values and her aspirations. Whether or not Eileen realized it, she seemed extremely well-rounded in the classroom regarding the work she was doing and the relationships she was building and developing. This well-roundedness comes from who Eileen was a person—what her life values were and the person she aspired to be.

Eileen came to the learning with wholesome, selfless life values that were reflected in both how she spoke to others as well as her behaviour around her classmates: she put every single other person above herself. All Eileen wanted to do was encourage others, put a smile on peoples’ faces, and keep the peace and happiness. Despite the chronic pain she was in, she never wanted to inconvenience others by making a showing of it. Eileen could have easily expressed annoyance, frustration, and anger towards her limitations, but instead she expressed things such as happiness, patience, and strength. However, a negative side of these wholesome, selfless values is that Eileen often put herself last out of fear of inconveniencing others, such as her classmates, Carolyn, and the school Nurse when her swollen legs were in excruciating pain from an arthritis flare up. When Carolyn questions Eileen on why she did not let her pain be known, Eileen says that she cannot tell even her mother because “She was too sad already” (Mamchur, 1981), inferring that these values of Eileen’s may be a result of how she has always had to put her mother’s emotional pain above her own physical pain.

Another strong thing Eileen brought to the learning were her aspirations—she aspired to succeed in whatever was being done, no matter how difficult it was for her to complete—and she did so without a single complaint leaving her lips, only words of encouragement and praise for her peers. The fact that Eileen never gave up on a task and was consistently working to be stronger than the poor health conditions that hindered her capabilities reflects the kind of person she was: hardworking, determined, and strong. She aspired to grow above her limitations, and this was shown in a variety of ways. Despite her own hardships, she always lent a helping hand to her classmates when it came to threading needles or organizing activities (Mamchur, 1981), Eileen came to the classroom with the aspiration to be a helpful, positive presence within the classroom—and she succeeded.

Environment. What did we do together in the school to learn life skills? (Discuss at least one experience that has impacted Eileen’s learning)

Despite the fact that the class Eileen was enrolled in of Carolyn’s was a class that specialized in traditional feminine behavior modification, tackling life skills such as sewing, I believe the most valuable life skill I witnessed Eileen learn in those three pages was how to speak up for herself without fears or anxiety regarding the potential of burdening, inconveniencing, or depressing someone.

This learning experience happened after the school Nurse questioned Eileen as to why she was silent about the intense, excruciating pain she was suffering through. Carolyn noticed that Eileen’s response to this question were her eyes filling with tears, which led to a deep and meaningful conversation between Carolyn and Eileen in which Carolyn assured Eileen that no one would be upset with her for being sick (Mamchur, 1981). This assurance led to Eileen confiding in Carolyn, inferring that her mother cannot support or help her due to sadness she feels. The supportive response she received from Carolyn upon the reveal of this information is probably one of the biggest learning experiences for Eileen—a learning experience that taught her to think about and care for herself.

Outcome. What was the outcome of the student in that environment? (Discuss changes in student in at least 2 dimensions)

Two changes Eileen underwent during her time in this environment were in her self-concept and in her abilities.

Regarding her self-concept, the time spent in this classroom positively impacted her for two main reasons, these reasons being both the helpful role she played to her peers in the classroom as well as being valued, respected, and truly known by Carolyn. The experience of being a helpful, positive figure within the classroom contributed to the changing of Eileen’s self concept because it gave her a sense of purpose and value within the class—even if she could not be entirely successful at a task, she knew she could still help others work towards their desired achievements. The presence of such a positive, trusting, and helpful adult in her life—Carolyn, positively contributed to the changing of Eileen’s self concept because Carolyn was able to let Eileen know that she is deserving of care and support, as well as allow Eileen to realize her worth—both in a classroom setting and on a personal level.

Eileen also experienced changes in her abilities as a result of this environment. One large change that is mentioned by Carolyn is Eileen’s involvement in organic teaching, in reference to Eileen helping a younger child count out their change correctly (Mamchur, 1981). Due to the group-like, non-traditional academic setting Carolyn designed that they had been learning in, the students, Eileen included, were able to initiate and participate in less traditional forms of learning and teaching.

Part II: Analysis of Carolyn (Teacher)’s Learning

Teacher input. What did the teacher come to the learning with? (Discuss at least 2 dimensions in details)

Carolyn came to the learning with many aspirations and values. In fact, the entire reason why Carolyn even found herself asking for volunteer work at that school was because of her aspirations and values.

Carolyn’s initial aspirations included going to Florida to obtain her Education Degree, but unplanned instances somewhat derailed her plan. This led her to develop different aspirations, eventually asking for volunteer work at a local school for Children with Special Needs. She then brought her aspirations within the school walls and let them show through a variety of creative, expressive ways—”In preparation for classes, I carefully braided my hair, weaving a bright scarlet ribbon through the strands. My nails matched my lipstick and I chose to wear a white dress splashed with small pink roses…” (Mamchur, 1981). Carolyn came to the learning with the aspiration of influencing this group of girls—not only through behavior modification, but on a personal level, as well. She was looking to be more than just the typical teacher and educator to this group and she succeeded through her usage of non-traditional teaching and learning styles, focusing more on experiencing what they were learning, rather than just reading and writing about it.

Carolyn’s values were reflected in what she taught and how she taught it. Yes, volunteered in a classroom setting where traditional, feminine behaviours were valued and taught, yet she did so in a non-traditional way that represented her own values and shared them with her students. For example, old-fashioned feminine activities were explored and completed, such as tea time, hair-braiding, and sewing. However, they were not explored in the typical, strict way we may imagine schools to run things. Carolyn’s values were brought in and really implemented through her non-traditional ways of teaching—such as letting the girls explore things such as sewing and hair-braiding, rather than forcing them to watch educational films or lessons on such activities.

Environment. What did we do together in the school to learn life skills? (Discuss at least one experience that has impacted Carolyn’s learning)

Carolyn may have taught Eileen and the rest of her students an abundance of useful life skills regarding etiquette throughout the year, but she did learning of her own, as well. Through the observing of and communication with Eileen, Carolyn learned important life skills, too. Despite being the student, Eileen was able to subconsciously teach Carolyn the key life skills of maintaining a positive and optimistic attitude even in the most difficult hardships. Carolyn’s way of learning was watching Eileen prevail through her pain, her illness, and her suffering. The experience that impacted Carolyn’s learning most was the watching of Eileen’s consistent smiling, laughing, and praise of her classmates, all while suffering from chronic pain without letting a single complaint slip. Eileen’s determined attitude deeply impacted and inspired Carolyn, which is shown through Carolyn’s sending of a Christmas gift to Eileen.

Outcome. What was the outcome of the teacher in that environment? (Discuss changes in teacher in at least 2 dimensions)

The outcome of the teacher, Carolyn, in this environment was a very positive one. This environment provided unique teaching and learning experiences for both Carolyn as well as her students. At the end of the school year, she left this school for Children with Special Needs with an abundance of new abilities and knowledge (on a demographic of students who are often left behind and forgotten, especially back then).

After this experience in this learning environment, her teaching abilities had evolved and grown to best fit the needs of her students, thus providing her with a high-level experience before even leaving for her Degree in Florida. She was able to form relationships and deep connections with her students, resulting in bonds of trust that allowed the students to explore a variety of learning and teaching styles. This led to Carolyn’s recognition of organic teaching within her classroom, as demonstrated by Eileen when she helps a younger student count their change.

Another area where Carolyn experiences growth due to this learning environment is in her knowledge, both in her better understanding of disabilities due to this experience as well as her knowledge of the individual life experience of Eileen. Due to the trusting bond the two of them have built, Carolyn is able to gain insight and knowledge on who Eileen is as a person, her ailments, and the factors that cause her to behave the way she does, such as her mother’s sadness.

References

Mamchur, C. (1981). Educational Leadership, 39(2), 152.

Reflection

I included the Progress Log of Week 9 in my portfolio because it allowed me to explore my personal philosophy regarding education and teaching. The questions required deep thinking and deep reflection, which was useful for me, as it allowed me to revisit and remember the reasons as to why I am so passionate about becoming a teacher. The credo I constructed for this Progress Log is something I believe in to the core. Every word written really reflects my principles, values, and beliefs regarding teaching, education, learning, and the classroom. One of the reasons why I have always wanted to be a teacher throughout my life is because alongside providing education, I would like to provide my students with support, positivity, and care needed in order to ensure their success, as well. I believe students deserve better than what they have been given (especially students in the extremely underfunded public school system). I believe students deserve change. I also chose to include this Progress Log because it includes critiques I have regarding the Education system, as it is important to recognize, remember, and understand the flaws in this system and how these flaws affect learning, productivity, and behaviour in the classroom. I included Assignment 2: Grading and Motivation, as I really enjoyed the exploration into Eileen’s personal relationship with Carolyn’s and vice-versa. I am very passionate about the wellbeing of students and making the classroom a happy place to be, so this Assignment was very educational, informative, and beneficial to me. It was extremely heart-warming to read the story of how they inspired and motivated each other and it was inspiring to read of the positive impact Carolyn clearly had not only on Eileen, but on the class as a whole. Additionally, I really enjoyed being able to go through the text and make connections between Carolyn and Eileen’s input, environment, and outcome.

From this Module, I have learned of how personal beliefs impact your approach to teaching, education, and the classroom, as well as the importance of creating meaningful relationships with your students and what these relationships entail. Something this Module has done is allow me to explore my beliefs regarding education. This exploration has led me to a deeper understanding of my thoughts and feelings in relation to my personal philosophy towards teaching. This deeper understanding has been a huge learning moment in my understanding of why I want to teach. After the completion of this Module, I revisited the reasons why I want to teach, and I realize my reasons align perfectly with my credo. The focus of my credo is on improving the education system, understanding students and learning, and being an overall positive person and educator in their life. As someone who grew up in an underfunded inner-city public school, an environment that was unable to entirely align with this credo, I feel as though my experiences allowed me to see flaws and holes in the system from a young age. Revisiting these reasons and truly understanding the role they play in my beliefs as a prospective teacher has been a learning experience for me.

Something that challenged me in this Module was reading Carolyn’s story of Eileen. This challenged me because it forced me to consider and think about the physical ailments of students that may require them to have Special Needs within the classroom. Typically, when I think of accommodating students to make them comfortable in the class, I think about things that will accommodate and comfort them emotionally and mentally. Physical special needs of my students really are something I have failed to consider in the past, which also challenges me to analyze and reflect on how my privilege as an able-bodied person could lead me to be ignorant to the needs of others. However, after being presented with this text, I think about physical needs and what I will be able to do to satisfy these needs for my students. This Module challenged me because it forces me to challenge and change the image of a student in my head and allows us to see how our privilege affects our mindset. I consider myself an open person with little biases and little assumptions, yet the realization of how static the image of what a student is like both mentally and physically has challenged me to work harder in the unlearning of these assumptions, as I must be prepared for every type of student as a teacher.

I see growth in my passions and aspirations regarding the education system. After the completion of this Module, I have learned my goals extend beyond the classroom and school. I have always known that I wanted to teach because I wanted to create positive learning experiences and be a positive role model in students’ lives, but through the completion of this Module, I realize these goals and desires exist because of problems in the bigger picture. These goals and desires did not come out of nowhere, they exist because of things in the school system I disagree with, such as my disapproval of standardized testing and my first-hand experiences watching the education system fail students who I know deserved better. Another thing I see growth in is the way I think of my future students and classroom. Prior to the completion of this Module, I did not consider the possibility of having students with physical limitations in class. However, I now consider it with every aspect of the classroom, such as the classroom layout and group activities.

Overall, this Module taught me the importance of my credo, the role my beliefs will play in my classroom, and what it means to create safe, supportive, and accessible environments for all students. This Module has helped me to recognize the important role these factors play in the creation and upholding of a positive learning environment with little problems.

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iamliberalartsgt · 6 years

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Hannah Corpe Introductory Post

I’ve been into history since I was in the first grade in 2003. I know that sounds extra, and that’s how everybody starts introductory blogs, but it’s true. One of my older sisters did a book report on Mary, Bloody Mary by Carolyn Meyer and left the book lying around, and I picked it up and was instantly hooked. This started me on a passion for the history of Tudor England specifically, but also a fascination with how things used to be and how they had changed in the intervening centuries between now and “a long time ago”.

At first, history was just a hobby, a class I excelled in and was interested by, but nothing more. Then in 9th grade, I saw quote from Stephen King, saying that a real author reads 70-80 books per year. Since being an author had been the ambition of my tender heart since before I knew how to write (I actually got in trouble several times for “writing” when I was in pre-k, since my “writing” at the time was just scribbling lines of loops in the perfectly nice journals I had been given for practicing the alphabet) I thought, I should give that a try. I pretty quickly ran out of YA that I found compelling, and so I moved on to historical fiction, remembering how interesting I had always found different time periods. Shortly even that wasn’t enough, and I began to read more scholarly works of historical nonfiction to find out more about my favorite subjects. By the time I was in 11th grade (2013) I knew that I wanted history to figure prominently in my higher education.

I knew that I wanted my future to involve a well-paid job without many extra years of schooling beyond undergrad, so it seemed like a traditional liberal arts college was out of the question. But there was nothing that interested me as much or made me as happy as history, and nothing that made me feel as out of my depth as technology. Because my dad from graduated Tech (BSBio in 1976) and I had two sisters there at the time who have since graduated (both BSBAs in 2016) and I’ve been going to Tech football games since before I really knew what football was, it made sense to at least check it out and see if I could picture myself happy in any of the majors.

That was when I hit across something that perfectly fit all of my requirements- the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts. I could study my history and learn about the things that interested me, but I could also learn other supporting skills that would help me get a job after graduation. All of my coursework would be geared towards relevance in the modern world without losing respect for the past. The IAC had a wealth of opportunities, from doing research with professors to being a college ambassador, and I would have access to all the resources of a large, well-funded state institute while still enjoying the small class sizes and close relationships with professors of a regular liberal arts college. Additionally, I would graduate with a Bachelor of Science, instead of a Bachelor of Arts, so I would be equally prepared for any path I wanted to take- if I wanted a job in a humanities field, my coursework would speak for itself, and if I wanted a job in any different field, having a BS would clearly demonstrate that I had been well trained in the rigorous STEM courses expected of a Bachelor of Science. And as an added bonus, the History, Technology, and Society major had the most free credits of any major in the school, making it easy for me to pursue anything from a double major to a certificate as well as possible to continue participating in band and orchestra, programs I have enjoyed since my early adolescence.

When I packed up and moved to campus and got ready for my first semester, I didn’t know just how many amazing opportunities I would have. I’ve been able to participate in the research option, and write an entire paper about the Tudors, which I presented at the most recent regional history conference. I’ve become one of the Ivan Allen College Ambassadors, and the vast array of skills I’ve learned from helping coordinate volunteers at our Shadow Day recruitment events and hosting information sessions have helped me become a more effective student and to stay calm (or calmer anyway!) in high-pressure situations. Those skills also translated well to working part-time while also taking classes in the Office of Enrollment and Student Affairs for almost a year. I founded a club (the History and Sociology Club) and was inducted to Phi Alpha Theta, the national history honor society. I’ve taken classes that have impacted my worldview like European Intellectual History and the History of Disease and Medicine, and classes that greatly developed my understanding of subjects I previously thought I knew a lot about, like the Classical Tradition, and the Science, Politics, and Culture of Nazi Germany. I’ve had a chance to learn from teachers who are some of the foremost subject experts in their field. It’s also been possible for me to get a certificate in Information Technology Management from the Scheller College of Business, which helped me get my current internship with IBM, and to remain a member of the Yellow Jacket Marching Band and become a brother of KKPsi, the national honorary band service fraternity.

These experiences have really influenced my development from a teenager who was unsure of quite what she wanted to do but knew she wanted it to not involve chemistry or computers into an adult with aspirations to work full-time, and perhaps pursue a masters’ degree, in Cybersecurity Policy. My experiences at Georgia Tech as a whole, but specifically in the Ivan Allen College, have taught me that if there’s anything important to have in life, it’s the attitude that any problem, no matter how daunting, can be solved. Except for maybe chemistry I’m not gonna lie to you it’s the devil’s work.

As I enter my senior year, I’m looking forward to continuing to work part time, and giving more of my attention to my extracurricular activities. I still have one more year left, and I’m really excited to see how many new opportunities and experiences are waiting around the corner.

Note: the picture above is of me as Eleanor of Aquitaine at the HCon, hosted by the History and Sociology Club on Halloween. Featured also is the most prominent HTS major, Kayleigh Haskin, as a fabulous Boudicca.

#gtliberalarts #intern #atlanta #ibmsecurity #ivanallencollege #hts #student #classes #research #hannahcorpe

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multipleservicelisting · 3 years

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Black, Deaf and Extremely Online

“I have to make sure my hands are not ashy before I sign,” Nakia Smith, who is deaf, explained to her nearly 400,000 followers.

In one of the dozens of popular videos she posted to TikTok last year, Ms. Smith compared her habit of adding a quick dab of lotion to her hands before she starts signing to the sip of water a hearing person takes before beginning to speak.

Since Ms. Smith created her account last April, the small ritual has caught millions of eyes, drawing attention to a corner of the internet steeped in the history and practice of a language that some scholars say is too frequently overlooked: Black American Sign Language, or BASL.

Variations and dialects of spoken English, including what linguists refer to as African-American English, have been the subject of intensive study for years. But research on Black ASL, which differs considerably from American Sign Language, is decades behind, obscuring a major part of the history of sign language.

About 11 million Americans consider themselves deaf or hard of hearing, according to the Census Bureau’s 2011 American Community Survey, and Black people make up nearly 8 percent of that population. Carolyn McCaskill, founding director of the Center for Black Deaf Studies at Gallaudet University, a private university in Washington for the deaf and hard of hearing, estimates that about 50 percent of deaf Black people use Black ASL.

Now, young Black signers are celebrating the language on social media, exposing millions to the history of a dialect preserved by its users and enriched by their lived experiences.

Nuances of Black ASL

Users of Black ASL are often confronted with the assumption that their language is a lesser version of contemporary ASL, but several scholars say that Black ASL is actually more aligned with early American Sign Language, which was influenced by French sign language.

Ms. Smith, whose sign name is Charmay, has a simple explanation of how the two languages differ: “The difference between BASL and ASL is that BASL got seasoning,” she said.

Compare ASL with Black ASL and there are notable differences: Black ASL users tend to use more two-handed signs, and they often place signs around the forehead area, rather than lower on the body.

“Here you have a Black dialect developed in the most oppressive conditions that somehow, in many respects, wound up to be more standard than the white counterpart,” said Robert Bayley, a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Davis.

As white deaf schools in the 1870s and 1880s moved toward oralism — which places less emphasis on signing and more emphasis on teaching deaf students to speak and lip-read — Black signers better retained the standards of American Sign Language, and some white sign language instructors ended up moving to Black deaf schools.

According to Ceil Lucas, a sociolinguist and professor emerita at Gallaudet University, many white deaf schools were indifferent to Black deaf students’ education.

“The attitude was, ‘We don’t care about Black kids,’” she said. “‘We don’t care whether they get oralism or not — they can do what they want.’ And so these children benefited by having white deaf teachers in the classroom.”

Some Black signers also tend to use a larger signing space and emote to a greater degree when signing when compared with white signers. Over time, Black ASL has also incorporated African-American English terms. For example, the Black ASL sign for “tight” meaning “cool,” which comes from Texas, is not the same as the conceptual sign for “tight,” meaning snug or form-fitting. There are also some signs for everyday words like “bathroom,” “towel” and “chicken” that are completely different in ASL and Black ASL, depending on where a signer lives or grew up.

The same way Black hearing people adjust how they speak “to meet the needs” of their white counterparts, Black ASL users employ a similar mechanism depending on their environment, according to Joseph Hill, an associate professor at Rochester Institute of Technology’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf.

As one of the first Black students to attend the Alabama School for the Deaf, Dr. McCaskill said code switching allowed her to fit in with white students, while also preserving her Black ASL style.

“We kept our natural way of communicating to the point where many of us code-switched unconsciously,” she said.

Ms. Smith said she noticed that others communicated differently from her around middle school, when she attended a school that primarily consisted of hearing students.

“I started to sign like other deaf students that don’t have deaf family,” said Ms. Smith, whose family has had deaf relatives in four of the last five generations. “I became good friends with them and signed like how they signed so they could feel comfortable.”

Remarking on how her relatives sign — her grandfather Jake Smith Jr. and her great-grandparents Jake Smith Sr. and Mattie Smith have all been featured on her TikTok — Ms. Smith notes that they still tend to use signs they learned growing up.

Generational differences often emerge when Ms. Smith’s older relatives try to communicate with her friends or when they need help communicating at doctor’s appointments, she said, exemplifying how Black ASL has evolved over generations.

Much like any Black experience, Black deaf people’s experiences with Black ASL vary from person to person, and seldom neatly fit into what others expect it to be.

A language born of oppression

Similar to much of Black American history, Black ASL grew out of the immoral seeds of racial segregation.

One of the most comprehensive looks into the language comes from the Black ASL Project, a six-year research study started in 2007 that draws on interviews with about 100 subjects across six Southern states, with findings compiled in “The Hidden Treasure of Black ASL.” (Dr. McCaskill, Dr. Hill, Dr. Bayley and Dr. Lucas are authors.)

The project found that segregation in the South played a large role in Black ASL’s development.

Schools for Black deaf children in the United States began to emerge after the Civil War, according to the team’s study, with 17 states and the District of Columbia having Black deaf institutions or departments. The first U.S. school for the deaf, which later came to be known as the American School for the Deaf, opened in 1817 in Hartford, Conn., and did not initially accept Black students.

Separation led to Black deaf schools’ differing immensely from their white counterparts. White schools tended to focus on an oral method of learning and provide an academic-based curriculum, while Black schools emphasized signing and offered vocational training.

“There were no expectations for Black deaf children to be prepared for college or even continue their education,” said Dr. McCaskill, who started to lose her hearing around age 5 and attended the Alabama School for the Negro Deaf and Blind in Talladega, Ala.

In 1952, Louise B. Miller, joined by other Washington parents, sued the District of Columbia’s Board of Education for not permitting Black deaf children at the Kendall School, the city’s only school for the deaf.

The court ruled in Ms. Miller’s favor under the precedent that states could not provide educational institutions within their state for one race and not the other. Black students were permitted to attend the Kendall School in 1952, with classes becoming fully integrated in 1954 after the Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education.

Desegregation wasn’t immediate in the South however, as most schools resisted racial integration until threatened with the loss of federal funding. In Louisiana, the state’s white and Black deaf schools delayed integration until 1978.

In 1968, Dr. McCaskill became a part of the first integrated class at the Alabama School for the Deaf. As a teenager in a newly integrated class, she had a daunting realization: She couldn’t understand her white teachers.

“Even though they were signing, I didn’t understand,” she said. “And I didn’t understand why I didn’t understand.”

A new generation takes ownership

With the pandemic forcing many to flock to virtual social spaces, Isidore Niyongabo, president of National Black Deaf Advocates, said he had seen online interaction grow within his organization and across the Black deaf community as a whole.

“We are starting to see an uptick with the recognition of the Black deaf culture within America,” Mr. Niyongabo said, adding that he expected it would “continue spreading throughout the world.”

Vlogs and online discussion panels — for millions, staples of pandemic life — have helped foster a more tight-knit community, he said.

In the last year, the documentary “Signing Black in America” and the Netflix series “Deaf U” introduced the stories of deaf people to wider audiences.

Similarly, Ms. Smith’s TikTok videos have captured attention across the internet, including and especially among Black audiences.

Ms. Smith said she could see herself working with other Black deaf creators online to lift up the stories of Black deaf people, contributing to the recent explosion of Black ASL content that, among other things, has experts optimistic about the future of Black ASL and its preservation.

“History is important,” she says in one video. “Am I trying to divide the language between ASL and BASL? No. I just carried the history.”

Particularly on social media, younger Black deaf generations have grown more outspoken about Black ASL, proudly claiming it as a part of their culture and their identity, Dr. McCaskill said.

“Historically, so much has been taken away from us, and they’re finally feeling that ‘this is ours,’” she said. “‘This is mine. I own something.’”

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sherryfundin · 5 years

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Looking For Some Serial Killers? Check out Carolyn Arnold @Carolyn_Arnold @GoddessFish

BRANDON FISHER FBI SERIES by Carolyn Arnold

GENRE: Police Procedural/Mystery

Meet today’s guest, Carolyn Arnold.

She is an international bestselling and award-winning author, as well as a speaker, teacher, and inspirational mentor. She has four continuing fiction series and has written nearly thirty books. Both her female detective and FBI profiler series have been praised by those in law enforcement as being accurate and entertaining, leading her to adopt the trademark, POLICE PROCEDURALS RESPECTED BY LAW ENFORCEMENT™.

Today, she answers a few questions for us and gives us insight into her life and journey as a mystery author.

Have you ever been on a manhunt or at the scene where a dead body was found?

I took part in my local police department’s Citizen’s Academy. As part of this, I received an inside look at seventeen divisions over a ten-week period. As an added benefit, each student was afforded a ride-along. And mine… Well, I went on the perfect one for a crime writer.

My ride-along actually started out with a manhunt. I experienced the excitement of wanting to find the guy and found myself scrutinizing every male I spotted in the area just to make sure he wasn’t the one we were after. Unfortunately, the search moved to the downtown area from the eastern end of the city where the hunt had begun, and the sergeant signed off the investigation. By the end of my ride-along, about five hours later, the man still hadn’t been found.

After the sergeant left the investigation, he turned to me as he was driving and asked if I had ever seen a dead body. I told him I had at memorials and funerals and then asked why. I soon found out that our next stop involved one.

I figured I’d catch a glimpse of the deceased under a tarp or being wheeled away, but I got far more than that. I received a front-row seat to a death investigation. For hours, the sergeant and I were mere feet away from the body. I witnessed firsthand how it changed color over time, but I also found that I went into detective-mode. The forensic identification unit—essentially CSIs—was called in and arrived with collection kits. The team members gloved up, snapped photographs, took fingerprints from the deceased, and more.

The entire time that I was on scene, I noticed myself going into a detached state—the result of adrenaline. Later that evening, it began to sink in that I had spent hours with a dead body, and I was nauseated. As more time passed, I became weepy as it sank in that the deceased had been a husband, a father, a lover, a friend…a person. That night I dreamed about the man. It wasn’t a nightmare, but I was an officer trying to figure out what had happened to him.

I couldn’t imagine returning to the field the next day and having a similar experience or witnessing something even worse, like a violent murder scene or that of a fatal car accident.

What do members of law enforcement say about your books?

Many testimonials attest that I am pleasing readers in law enforcement. They love that my mysteries are accurate in that regard, and they view that alone as a sign of my respect for them.

Here are a few testimonials that I have received on Eleven (Brandon Fisher FBI series):

“I spent thirty-eight years with a major police department in Missouri, fifteen of which were in the homicide section. I also had numerous dealings with the FBI throughout my career, mostly bank robbery, interstate shipment thefts, and a few kidnappings. Eleven kept my interest piqued throughout… Loved it.”

–Richard Bartram, Sergeant (retired), St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, St. Louis, MO

“I am a forty-year veteran of police work. All local, no Fed. Eleven was a great read. All the descriptors and nomenclature were spot on.”

–Joe Danna, Police Officer, Katy Independent School District Police Department, Katy, TX

“Very good! I worked as a police officer for eleven years and with the Federal Bureau of Prisons for twenty-two. I have also dealt with the FBI.”

–Richard Smith, Facilities Development Manager (retired), Federal Bureau of Prisons, Central Office, Washington, DC

“A great police procedural! … Full of twists and turns. The characters are well-developed and a mix of interesting personalities. … Holds your interest to the end!”

–Mark Davis, FBI Special Agent (retired), Washington, DC

What did you do before you became a bestselling author?

For a living, I worked in accounts receivable for a few different companies collecting from businesses. Yet, despite working full time, in 2006 I was reunited with writing. I wrote every chance I got—before work, on lunch breaks, after work, on the weekends. I became so focused on writing and the publishing world that hardly a day went by without them being a part of my life, and since the summer of 2014, I’ve been a full-time author.

How do you know so much about what criminals think?

I can’t answer that without incriminating myself… Just kidding.

Everyone has what we call a “dark side.” In writing these books, I suppose you could say I tap into this side of my psyche. Whatever I can scheme up is possible, and I write that which scares and excites me.

When did you know that you had hit the big time with your books?

When I got to say good-bye to my day job! Even before I fully resigned, I had cut back a five-day a week job to four days, then to three. It got to the point, though, that I loathed going in for that many days, and I knew it was time to make the move and become a full-time author. That was in the summer of 2014. Since then, I incorporated my own publishing company in the summer of 2015, and, at the start of 2016, my husband joined me there full time.

MY REVIEW FOR SILENT GRAVES

We have all different sides to our personalities, both good and bad. What happens when the bad takes control? We will be finding out here.

Women are missing…and one of the women is rising from the dead, from their grave, where her murderer had thought she would remain hidden..so says the villain, who is missing one.

Brandon and the rest of the gang are called in to help. Brandon is still trying to fit in, but he walks a fine line with Paige. You always have, at least, one know it all want to be ther hero cop. And Stenson was it. He’s a Dumfree’s police officer but he wants to be so much more.

There are more killers than they thought and many more bodies that will be exposed.

Brandon and Paige…well, we will see what happens…Can they move on from each other? Can they work together, whether or not they stay romantically involved?

We have plenty of suspense and need Carolyn Arnold to take us through the investigation, questioning here and there, each person having their part to do, while dealing with every day life, tiredness and egos. She is a pro at keeping the mystery alive and making me follow along to learn she wraps up the case.

I voluntarily reviewed a free copy of Silent Graves by Carolyn Arnold.

4 Stars

ENTER THE GIVEAWAY AND READ THE REVIEW & INTERVIEW HERE

MY REVIEWS FOR CAROLYN ARNOLD

Remnants

In The Line Of Duty

Halloween Is Murder

Power Struggle

City of Gold

The Secret of the Last Pharaoh

Eleven

On The Count of Three

Shades of Justice

You can see my Giveaways HERE.

You can see my Reviews HERE.

If you like what you see, why don’t you follow me?

Leave your link in the comments and I will drop by to see what’s shakin’.

I am an Amazon affiliate/product images are linked.

Thanks for visiting!

#carolyn arnold #series #mystery #suspense and thriller fiction #read in 2019 #4 star review

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5questions · 7 years

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Ken Baumann

Ken Baumann lives in Santa Fe with his wife, two cats, and a 125 lb. St. Bernard. He acted in film and television for twelve years, then studied at St. John's College. He wrote the novels Solip and Say, Cut, Map, then the nonfiction book EarthBound. He is looking for a publisher for his third novel, titled A Task (you can read its first five parts here). He’s also written these things. He edits, designs, and publishes books through Sator Press and its imprint Satyr Press, and designed the covers for Boss Fight Books. He organizes the Santa Fe chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.

1. Your 2013 book SOLIP was sort of Jocyean or Beckettian in its style and scope. How does your upcoming book A TASK compare to that? I remember publishing an excerpt of it as part of the defunct magazine Keep This Bag Away From Children; it was politically-charged and seemed to revolve around a cult or commune of some sort. How has it developed since then? You’re also trying to get it published right? Or already have a deal?

Most sentences in A Task are simple, and the book's structure is complicated. A Task is a story about dissolution told as clearly and concisely as possible, whereas Solip and Say, Cut, Map use polyphony to create something more alien to everyday experience. I want people who don't often read novels to pick up A Task and feel welcomed by its language.

The excerpt you published was from the book's first draft. I finished that draft five years ago, then threw it away and started over. I wrote the new draft by hand, with pen and on paper; I wanted to work against quickness, and get more of my body into the book. It took me five years to realize I should cut one of the book's core sections; it took me four years to hear the book's last sentence. A Task is the record of an attempt to distill my severest fear, love, and patience into a novel.

A Task is a 55,500 word novel told in five parts, each consisting of four sections, plus one section near the middle (which works like night).

A summary: A young woman named Rose runs out of a forest and onto the road. Having escaped a cult whose leader preached the justice of mass suicide, she is sheltered by Paul, a black police officer scarred by war. Warren, entranced by the cult leader Daniel, struggles to live through mental illness; back home, the fragments of his life are regathered. And in a text transcription of a 24 hour-long performance, a famed painter recounts the beauties and losses which constitute him, and the role of art in a collapsing society. As they voluntarily dissolve their lives, fleeing new fascisms, Rose, Paul, Warren, and the artist map the terrain of life amid nihilism. A Task is a novel about wounded people escaping our world’s suicidal logic.

I'm looking for a publisher and an agent. The only editor whose work I admire is Cal Morgan, so he has A Task in his inbox. To let someone publish the book, I want three conditions satisfied:

1. I work with an editor whose first editorial principle isn't salability;

2. I work with a publishing company that prints and distributes at least 10,000 copies;

3. I work with a marketing department that grants me final approval of the cover.

I want the book to be beautiful and discoverable in many bookstores and libraries. I don't care about an advance. (Though if you're an agent, I've got a scheme to get you paid.)

If the book hasn't been published within a couple years by a corporation willing to satisfy those three conditions, I'll publish A Task via Sator Press.

2. What other writing projects you are working on? You’re always publishing new stuff with SATOR PRESS. What’s next with that?

I've been writing essays then publishing them on Medium and Tumblr. Since I don't try to make a living from my writing, I see no point in trying to get these essays published online or in print by other people. The only editors I've enjoyed working with are Claire Evans and Carolyn Kellogg, but Claire is a supremely busy polymath and Carolyn publishes reviews about new books, with which I rarely keep up.

Most publications are like political parties: they exist primarily to homogenize and react. If you want to avoid enriching capitalists via addiction and reaction, you should try as rigorously as possible to not support big media platforms. More often than not, goodness and scale are inversely proportional. (When I have some time, I'll move my writing from Tumblr and Medium to my personal website.)

3. Here’s a big question (or four): Why do you write? What motivates you? How about with publishing? Why publish?

When I was young, I wrote to make places more vivid than life's. Now, I know life is immanent; the fictive places are in the real places, and the real places are in the fictive places—and neither have anything to do with purity. I no longer read or write to transcend; if the universe is an ocean of infinite eddying complexity, I read and write to go further in. More practically, I write to lessen my anxiety. I write to make a document untouchable by cruelty while making myself unconcerned with history. (Oedipus and Hamlet, two great pretenders, were out of time's joint for a reason.)

I publish books because they are the only mass-produced objects which bring me peace. For better and worse, I've been concerned for decades with those who spoke before me, and with those who further that conversation. I love compendiums of quiet questions. I publish books because to refuse to publish a great text when you have the health, money, skills, and time to do so is an act of cowardice. And because I want to pay comrades for doing the work that makes them want to stay alive.

4. I’ve noticed you’ve become active in the DSA in your area. Would you say Bernie or Trump was more of a cause behind your involvement? What’d you think of the recent DSA national convention? What issues is your chapter of DSA most involved in? Does your chapter have an electoral working group?

Sanders' policies and rhetoric were life-affirming, contrary to that of other massive political campaigns I've seen. I volunteered for his campaign, but its scale upset me; I'm learning that I'm not meant for most of today's magnitudes. The DSA advocates for decentralization as much as possible, while also affirming democracy (i.e. making the decisions which most affect you) and socialism (i.e. owning the means by which you live and thrive). And I love the DSA's emphasis on the interrelatedness of cruelty: capitalism, racism, sexism, fascism—they must be fought at once. Good.

I didn't know about the DSA until November 2016. With a handful of friends, I started New Mexico's first chapter in January.

Donald J. Trump is a demagogue and a fascist (i.e. a person who violently maintains a belief in one group's supremacy over all others). I wasn't surprised he was elected, because I grew up with people who yearned to be granted permission by history to lynch minorities. These people were my friends, until I became friends with some of those minorities. Though it didn't surprise me, Trump's election radicalized me—it made me embrace fully my political desires. Capitalism is a system by which we assure life's suicide. It must go, and with it, all systemic exploitation.

I didn't attend DSA's recent convention, but our chapter's two elected delegates did. They came back roiling with hope. So far, we've done a lot of organizing, and a bit of mobilizing. We've picketed with and fed striking CWA workers. We've made content and raised money for Chainbreaker, a local group that's been fighting for tenants' rights for years. We've lobbied at our state legislature and City Council. We've taught over 100 people about the New Mexico Health Security Act. We've run reading groups. We've fed day laborers and homeless folks near downtown Santa Fe. We've raised a mutual aid fund, then paid a comrade to replace his car's shattered back window. Soon, we'll help defeat a racist and nativist group's City Council candidates. We've got so much work to do, yet I trust those with whom I'm doing the work.

5. You started teaching at a charter school recently. How do you like it? How are your class sizes? How is your view on charter schools informed or intersected by your ideas about democratic socialism? I seem to think of charter school as being a move towards governmental politics of privatization and anti-unionization, but it’s possibly that’s very informed by me being from Ohio and working in NYC, both states with big histories of unions, specifically teachers unions.

I've been teaching for three weeks. Nearly all of my students are Hispanic, Chicanx, or Latinx. Many are from working class families; some already work to support others. It's a dual language, project based school—which means we take our students into the world outside the classroom. Between 10 and 28 students attend each class.

It's my shaky understanding that charter schools in New Mexico are more strictly regulated than those in other states. I receive health benefits via the New Mexico Public School Insurance Authority, and my salary is near that offered to first-year public school teachers in Santa Fe. My school doesn't charge tuition.

I attended and graduated from a charter high school in Los Angeles, and was glad to do so. As a professional actor, a charter school was the only school to meet my needs. This was also true for many young people who recently got out of juvie; for many young people who were working two to three jobs to support their families; for many young people whose illnesses prevented them from attending schools which expected them to show up 8 hours per day, 5 days per week. In principle, I support and affirm the right of every human to a decent and free education, but I do not automatically decry schools which teach different constituencies in different ways. (Again, scale is important.) It's sad to me that many capitalists use poorly-regulated charter schools to steal taxes while providing subpar educations for young people; I am against any system whose zero-sum logic harms the vulnerable.

So far, I believe my school isn't exploitative; many of my students and all of my coworkers argue that it's been great for them. But I've got a lot to learn. (And there's another charter school in Santa Fe whose teachers are unionized, so there's some homework for me, too.)

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zapata46martinez · 5 years

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What To Look For In A Martial Arts School

By Carolyn King

Joining a school for martial arts is not easy. You do not always find out what you will get until it is already too late. Martial arts Vancouver BC schools are not all created equal and the teachers does not have to be connected to a government agency or regulatory commission. There are also no one that will keep watch of how well they do their business. The approach you use for picking a martial arts school should be the same approach that was used when you were picking the school of your children. A teacher who has won in a lot of competitions or has earned a black belt is not good enough. A good teacher is more than this. Here are factors to consider when choosing a school. Facility. Expect to find an organized and clean facility. When the looks of their facility is nowhere near professional, this only means that the services being offered by them are not good. Take a look at the first aid kit they have and see if all the medical supplies inside are correct, it should not contain band aids only. Instructor. The right instructors can help you achieve your goals and will make you feel happy and motivated in all of your training. The instructors in the school has to be courteous, personable, and professional. Observe how they teach and communicate with students. You want an instructor that can easily be approach by students. Attitude. The attitude of their instructors and students can indicate school spirit. Avoid those instructors who treat students with no respect, yet they demand the surrounding people to respect them. Discipline and respect could be natural or forced. Observe how students react when instructors are not around. Attitude. During your visit and observation, when you feel that there is something off with the staffs, instructors, or even their students, trust in your instincts because your instincts are just telling you something that is not good. When you feel welcome and comfortable however, then this means the school is worth it. Facility and equipment. The amenities and equipment offered by a school depends on what type of combat are they offering. There are schools which are modern and big, has great weight training equipment, and is equipped with lockers and showers. What you choose is up to you. Keep in mind that the school does not have to be highly functional, just as long as it has the basic stuffs it would be okay. Your budget and the price. Most schools provides you a contract that you have to sign. The contract is an agreement between you and the school about how long do you need to be enrolled to them. Make sure you read the contract carefully before signing it. Clarify things which you are not clear to you to avoid problems in the end. Choose a school that offers a trial lesson. Trial lessons are important so that you can have a first hand experience of their school without signing a contract just yet. With this, you may choose another one when you did not like your experience. Trial lessons are for free, so stay away from those who charge you for it.

About the Author:

Get details about important things to consider before picking a martial arts Vancouver BC instructor and more information about an experienced instructor at https://ift.tt/2xk4JUc now.

What To Look For In A Martial Arts School from 1BetterOf2https://ift.tt/2RKvsCV

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redabiz2 · 5 years

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How Do You Choose The Correct Martial Arts School

By Carolyn King

Martial arts are different types of combats, including karate, taekwondo, jiu jitsu, and more. There could be number of reasons why one would like to join a martial arts Vancouver BC school, for physical, spiritual, and mental development, for competition, for self defense, etc. No matter what are your reasons are, it is important that you pick the right school for you. The approach you use for picking a martial arts school should be the same approach that was used when you were picking the school of your children. A teacher who has won in a lot of competitions or has earned a black belt is not good enough. A good teacher is more than this. Here are factors to consider when choosing a school. Facility. Expect to find an organized and clean facility. When the looks of their facility is nowhere near professional, this only means that the services being offered by them are not good. Take a look at the first aid kit they have and see if all the medical supplies inside are correct, it should not contain band aids only. Instructor. Good instructors will work with you to help achieve your goals. With the right instructor, there would be no reason for you to not love your training. All the instructors in that school along with their staffs must be professional, personable, and courteous. During your visit there, observe how instructors communicate and teaches their students. Accidents happen anywhere in any day. During an accident, the teacher must know how to properly take care of the students involved. This means, knowing how to perform a CPR and any other first aid. There are dishonest instructors, so do not rely on what they say to you, do a brief background check yourself. Location. The proximity of the school from your home to your work must be taken to consideration. An hour of commuting might not be bad at first, but understand that you will be doing that tow or three times a week. Pick according to your needs and it has to be within the acceptable distance of driving. Style. The style comes after the instructor and how do they teach classes. Ask questions about how they teach physical skills for that certain types you want to learn. You see, some types might not be good for you, like Taekwondo, this is not recommended for people with heart condition. If your sole purpose is self defense, then make sure the curriculum of the school reflects that. Your budget and the price. Most schools provides you a contract that you have to sign. The contract is an agreement between you and the school about how long do you need to be enrolled to them. Make sure you read the contract carefully before signing it. Clarify things which you are not clear to you to avoid problems in the end. Choose a school that offers a trial lesson. Trial lessons are important so that you can have a first hand experience of their school without signing a contract just yet. With this, you may choose another one when you did not like your experience. Trial lessons are for free, so stay away from those who charge you for it.

About the Author:

Get details about important things to consider before picking a martial arts Vancouver BC instructor and more information about an experienced instructor at https://ift.tt/2xk4JUc now.

How Do You Choose The Correct Martial Arts School via Lose weight with REDA https://ift.tt/2NuA2GK

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adnfif · 5 years

Text

What To Look For In A Martial Arts School

By Carolyn King

Martial arts are different types of combats, including karate, taekwondo, jiu jitsu, and more. There could be number of reasons why one would like to join a martial arts Vancouver BC school, for physical, spiritual, and mental development, for competition, for self defense, etc. No matter what are your reasons are, it is important that you pick the right school for you. The approach you use for picking a martial arts school should be the same approach that was used when you were picking the school of your children. A teacher who has won in a lot of competitions or has earned a black belt is not good enough. A good teacher is more than this. Here are factors to consider when choosing a school. Facility. Expect to find an organized and clean facility. When the looks of their facility is nowhere near professional, this only means that the services being offered by them are not good. Take a look at the first aid kit they have and see if all the medical supplies inside are correct, it should not contain band aids only. Instructor. The right instructors can help you achieve your goals and will make you feel happy and motivated in all of your training. The instructors in the school has to be courteous, personable, and professional. Observe how they teach and communicate with students. You want an instructor that can easily be approach by students. Attitude. The attitude of their instructors and students can indicate school spirit. Avoid those instructors who treat students with no respect, yet they demand the surrounding people to respect them. Discipline and respect could be natural or forced. Observe how students react when instructors are not around. Attitude. During your visit and observation, when you feel that there is something off with the staffs, instructors, or even their students, trust in your instincts because your instincts are just telling you something that is not good. When you feel welcome and comfortable however, then this means the school is worth it. Style. The style comes after the instructor and how do they teach classes. Ask questions about how they teach physical skills for that certain types you want to learn. You see, some types might not be good for you, like Taekwondo, this is not recommended for people with heart condition. If your sole purpose is self defense, then make sure the curriculum of the school reflects that. Your budget and the price. Most schools provides you a contract that you have to sign. The contract is an agreement between you and the school about how long do you need to be enrolled to them. Make sure you read the contract carefully before signing it. Clarify things which you are not clear to you to avoid problems in the end. Choose a school that offers a trial lesson. Trial lessons are important so that you can have a first hand experience of their school without signing a contract just yet. With this, you may choose another one when you did not like your experience. Trial lessons are for free, so stay away from those who charge you for it.

About the Author:

Get details about important things to consider before picking a martial arts Vancouver BC instructor and more information about an experienced instructor at https://ift.tt/2xk4JUc now.

June 28, 2019 at 04:46PM from the best massage oilhttp://thebestmassageoil.blogspot.com/2019/06/what-to-look-for-in-martial-arts-school.html

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bintaeran · 5 years

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How Do You Choose The Correct Martial Arts School

By Carolyn King

Martial arts are different types of combats, including karate, taekwondo, jiu jitsu, and more. There could be number of reasons why one would like to join a martial arts Vancouver BC school, for physical, spiritual, and mental development, for competition, for self defense, etc. No matter what are your reasons are, it is important that you pick the right school for you. The approach you use for picking a martial arts school should be the same approach that was used when you were picking the school of your children. A teacher who has won in a lot of competitions or has earned a black belt is not good enough. A good teacher is more than this. Here are factors to consider when choosing a school. Facility. The facility of the school should be both clean and well organized. If the facility does not look professional at all, then their service are most probably not good either. Ask to see their first aid kit. They should have one and it should contain the right medical supplies. When all you see are band aids, look for another one. Keep in mind that the safety of your child is your number one priority. Instructor. The right instructors can help you achieve your goals and will make you feel happy and motivated in all of your training. The instructors in the school has to be courteous, personable, and professional. Observe how they teach and communicate with students. You want an instructor that can easily be approach by students. Attitude. The attitude of their instructors and students can indicate school spirit. Avoid those instructors who treat students with no respect, yet they demand the surrounding people to respect them. Discipline and respect could be natural or forced. Observe how students react when instructors are not around. Attitude. During your visit and observation, when you feel that there is something off with the staffs, instructors, or even their students, trust in your instincts because your instincts are just telling you something that is not good. When you feel welcome and comfortable however, then this means the school is worth it. Style. The style comes after the instructor and how do they teach classes. Ask questions about how they teach physical skills for that certain types you want to learn. You see, some types might not be good for you, like Taekwondo, this is not recommended for people with heart condition. If your sole purpose is self defense, then make sure the curriculum of the school reflects that. Your budget and the price. Most schools provides you a contract that you have to sign. The contract is an agreement between you and the school about how long do you need to be enrolled to them. Make sure you read the contract carefully before signing it. Clarify things which you are not clear to you to avoid problems in the end. Only go with schools who offer trail lessons. If you are on a budget, ask how much is their monthly membership and if they are currently offering any promo. What you choose will depend on your budget, so do not waste your time checking schools that you cannot afford. Avoid those who will not tell you how much the cost during the trail lesson, this only means that their prices are high.

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writtenbycarolyn-blog · 6 years

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Bruni & Carr

Today we will be looking at two articles.

In the first article Frank Bruni discusses how we tell kids how to get into college, but not how to be successful or survive in college. As kids are prepared for college they are not told the whole story, just the half that will get them in or at least their application looked at. I resonated a lot with this article, as I have just been released from being under the thumb of high school teachers saying what to do to look good for college and thrown to professors who explain as nicely as they can “we’ll help you, but most of it is on you.” It’s relieving and terrifying all at once. But I’ve survived the first week, so I think I can share some opinions on this topic. Three points of this article struck me the most. The first was “write an essay like that” when Bruni described how high schools see the college process. I still have some friends from my high school, their seniors now and the amount of times they come to me and go “how should I write my essay I don’t know what to do I’m stressed” is more than I should waste your time counting. So much pressure is put on a piece of paper that is perhaps a quarter of all that colleges look at, and to an extent is not brought up again. It’s unneeded stress. The next point was when Bruni explain that not all kids live in dorms, “they live with their parents. They pray for parking.” I do both those things, especially the later when I come in later. For me, staying at home meant saving money, in this economy how could I pass that up? But I feel we, as a society, make college out to be this wonderful grandiose thing, when in reality it is just school. Yes the location, the teachers, and who you see will most likely be different, but the concept of it all is not. The final point that struck me was that college students should meet their professors, get to know them more than just a recognizable face. This I am still learning to do- it has just been a week of school and I’m still trying to make sure I go to the right place at the right time. Yet, I also feel like over the Summer preparing for college that this concept never crossed my mind. I feel that could be because of the teachers I had in high school telling us that professors in college would not care about us, maybe that was bitterness from their experiences or just not wording “hey guys college is not as easy as high school” wrong. However, that miscommunication or bitterness made college professors sound almost evil and heartless. Sure, I barely know any of my professors, but I think if I had an issue or concern they would not just tell me to get out of their face- if they could they would help, if not they would try to find someone who could. College is not what the world makes it out to be, there’s much more to it than society puts emphasis on.

In the second article Nicholas Carr writes that Google may be the reason people do not have very long attention spans. Much like the last article I can understand the point of view and I found three points that hit me more than others. The first point is almost the start of the article where Carr explains he has trouble staying focused reading anything now, when that never used to be a problem. I had that problem just last week. I was reading the chapter for history that was due and it took longer than it needed to because I could not focus, and then I would have to go back and re-read what my eyes had just looked over. I could not understand what the problem was. I like history, as a subject & learning about it and the content was not to hard to grasp- so what on earth is stopping me from reading in a timely fashion? Thinking back on it now I realize the fact my brain was spinning over what I still had to do, plans later that week, and do I know where tomorrow’s classes are? took away all of my attention from what mattered at that moment. Thankfully the next history reading I did was not as challenging. My second point is how Carr described other people saying the internet made them lose their ability to read longer works. I feel that there is more to the story than that. I feel that in this day and age so much online reading is done for work and school and after a while an article on anything seems like a chore. For example I collect vinyl records and am fascinated with pressing info (the numbers; how many copies are made) and variants (what color is it). I have read posts multiple times on a vinyl blog (and I should add they are long posts) and I eat up every word, yet I just explained how reading history was a challenge for me. I think if you are truly interested in a topic you will read all you can about it, if it is another thing to do on your list it will become the chore that you made it. The final point is how we may be reading more now than people did in the 1970s and 1980s (Carr). I would have to agree to that. I mean, we have the news at our fingertips- and that news is not just what happened in the world or your home town, it is what happened to your friend, or your cousin, or who ever you follow on social media. It has broadened our horizons for the better, and while we may not read as much length wise, we are still getting so much out of what we do read content wise. Google helps and harms us in more ways than this generation will ever really know, but it is not an entirely bad thing. However, that does not make it an entirely good thing. The articles are linked below if you would like to check them out for yourself!

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/17/opinion/college-students.html

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/306868/

- Until the next post Carolyn

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doctorwhonews · 6 years

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Third Doctor Adventures Volume 4

Latest Review: Writer: Guy Adams, Marc Platt Director: Nicholas Briggs Featuring: Tim Treloar, Katy Manning, Rufus Hound, Mina Anwar, Joe Sims, Carolyn Pickles, Nicholas Briggs Big Finish Release (United Kingdom) Running Time: 5 hours Released by Big Finish Productions - March 2018 Order from Amazon UK Before we begin, a quick housekeeping query: is everyone sufficiently bucked up and ready for further old-school 1970s (or 1980s, depending on whom you ask) sci-fi escapades? Wonderful. Perhaps emboldened by the success of their Dalek revival in Volume 3, Big Finish isn’t skimping in the slightest on classic villains in their newest pair of Adventures for the Third Doctor. In fact, they’ve introduced not one but two returning antagonists into the fray for Volume 4 in the forms of the Meddling Monk and – for the first time ever in a Jon Pertwee-era tale, so better late than never – the Cybermen. Admittedly this reviewer took umbrage with how intent “The Conquest of Far” seemed with simply reliving Dalek glory days, rather than seeking to develop how we perceive Skaro’s finest in any notable way, last time around. Will Guy Adams and Marc Platt’s next efforts to immortalise the late Pertwee’s beloved Doctor – now revitalised via Tim Treloar’s loving aural homage – fall into the same traps, then, or can their connective thematic tissue surrounding the ever-complexifying concept of human nature elevate proceedings? “The Rise of the New Humans”: “Look, Bessie’s a lovely car Doctor, I mean a really lovely car, but have you ever thought about investing in a little roof rather than a flappy tarpaulin to keep you dry?” “Don’t you listen, old girl – she knows you’re beautiful really!” Had we ever told diehard fans of all things Doctor Who after watching the divisive “The Woman Who Lived” in 2015 that supporting star Rufus Hound would go on to resurrect a long-overlooked classic antagonist to tremendous acclaim, the best case scenario, most would have justifiably scoffed in our faces. Between his infrequent appearances in the Short Trips and Doom Coalition ranges along with the British comedian’s headline role in Volume 4’s opening tale, however, that’s all changed and the results could hardly feel more satisfying than in the case of “The Rise of the New Humans”. A whirlwind four-parter that’s by parts thought-provoking, hilarious – as if we’d expect anything less of Hound – and thrilling, “Rise” fits into the mold of the Third Doctor era perfectly, posing a fascinating metaphysical concept as human test subjects find themselves transformed into supernatural beings capable of withstanding nearly any affliction. Naturally, though, Doctor Who wouldn’t be Doctor Who without an audacious experiment gone wrong, and sure enough the side effects – not to mention the technology recklessly co-opted by the Monk to achieve his not-so-altruistic goal – quickly lead listeners and the major players alike to question the limits of science’s oft-perceived god complex. If this all sounds too grim and sombre an affair to warrant the Monk’s involvement, then rest assured that Hound alleviates any such concerns with unmistakable ease from the outset. It’s thanks to his sinister, almost sickly, charisma and brilliantly earnest haplessness in the face of just about any danger that Adams’ borderline gothic – certainly Frankenstein-esque – script never gets too bogged down in its contemplations on evolution and the increasing risks of intervention in this natural process for financial gain, with the Monk’s attempts to disguise his seemingly benevolent intentions so delightfully inept that the audience should barely mind sitting through the humour-laden first half before discovering his true ambitions. At the same time, though, Adams thankfully also realises the supreme value and drawing power that Tim Treloar and Katy Manning both hold in the eyes of the Adventures range’s fandom, peppering in a wealth of understated conversations between the pair which perfectly encapsulate their bubbly, at times teacher-student-style dynamic. Whether they’re arguing over Bessie’s temperamentality on a rain-swept road – a subtle homage to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, perhaps? – or the Doctor’s comforting Jo upon her poignant realisation that rumours of us only accessing 10% of our brain power may have been exaggerated, every exchange that the characters share could’ve been ripped straight out of a 1970s serial, with Treloar’s righteously confident and Manning’s sweetly innocent line deliveries both as completely pitch-perfect as ever. The only noteworthy misstep on the wright in question’s part, then, comes with Part 4. While by no means a deal-breaker, the final installment of “Rise” does succumb to an all-too-familiar virus plaguing myriad audio and TV Who adventures – hightailing it to the finish line and ditching any intriguing ideas laid along the way in the process. One can’t help but notice the superior running time afforded to the boxset’s second story – the individual episodes of which run for around 30-35 minutes each compared to this serial’s 20-25 – and wonder if Adams struggled to give ideas like humans struggling with their deadly mutations full due, hence the final 25 minutes descending into the usual catastrophic monster mash and retconning a hugely tantalising cliffhanger regarding Jo within moments of its occurrence. Maybe Adams simply needs to keep honing his stabs at the four-part format instead, but it’s food for thought in terms of whether he might better befit a five- or six-episode serial should he contribute another script for the recently-announced Volume 5. “The Tyrants of Logic”: “Doctor, what are they?” “Cybermen!” Reading the above lines of dialogue alone will, for many fans, surely prove a cathartic experience in and of itself. After all, despite coming into contact with Daleks, Silurians, Sea Devils, Sontarans, Ice Warriors and Autons over the course of his four-year tenure, not to mention the Master on a near-weekly basis, Jon Pertwee’s Doctor never earned himself the chance to battle arguably Doctor Who’s second most iconic monster, joining Paul McGann, John Hurt and Christopher Eccleston’s as the only such incarnations faced with this unspeakable on-screen plight. But, as Hurt’s War Doctor proclaimed in 2013’s similarly Cyber-lite 50th anniversary special “The Day of the Doctor”, no more. Setting down on an initially near-deserted human colony dubbed Burnt Salt, the now exile-free Time Lord and Jo soon discover that they’re far from alone; quite to the contrary, a nearby saloon houses a wild assortment of rogues and ex-soldiers, all of whom bear a secret inevitably doomed to surface as the Cybermen make their presence on Burnt Salt known with their destructive efforts to secure a vital hidden weapon. Prior to us proceeding any further, though, a word of warning – with its Cybermats, Cyber Wars fallout and attempted Time Lord-Cyber conversions, Marc Platt’s latest script represents a quintessential story for everyone’s favourite Mondas residents, for better and for worse. Unless this boxset somehow marks your first encounter with Who, many of the twists in “Logic” will likely seem rather familiar; from characters mistakenly willing to sacrifice their humanity to the robotic menaces escaping supposed extinction yet again, from the Doctor needing 10 minutes to alleviate his companion’s dismay at their latest foe’s near-human nature to Part 4’s predictable final duke-out, there’s nothing particularly fresh to speak of in what’s a fairly run-of-the-mill nostalgia tour. Nothing, that is, save for the continuing thematic strand surrounding what it truly means to call oneself a member of the human race. If “Rise” explores this existential concept through a metaphysical exploration of our species’ DNA being evolved to a supposed higher state, then “Tyrants” – as with many Cyber-tales, although to more emotional effect a la Spare Parts – does so by presenting members of our species on the brink of having every aspect of their personalities stripped away. Can we possibly still define someone as human when they’re clinging to any remains vestiges of their Id / ego / super-ego? Sure, it’s a line of inquiry also recently pursued by TV serials like “Asylum of the Daleks”, but without spoiling too much, Carolyn Pickles achieves wonders as her character Marian Shaeffer’s cold exterior peels back to reveal her heartbreaking motivations in this regard. Indeed, even if “Logic” doesn’t exactly break a great deal of new ground compared to a recent TV Cyber-outing like “World Enough and Time / The Doctor Falls”, it’s not for want of the central and supporting cast alike doing their utmost – with director Nicholas Briggs’ support and guidance, no doubt – to provide an entertaining 2-hours of pseudo-base-under-siege action. That Treloar and Manning’s insatiably endearing chemistry injects humour and charm at every turn likely goes without saying at this point, but look out too for Briggs’ finest turn yet as the ever-hauntingly impassive invaders standing in Burnt Salt’s doorway as well as a contrastingly vulnerable performance from Deli Segal’s Skippa, another innocent bystander caught in the crossfire of a seemingly unyielding, constantly destructive conflict. The Verdict: Above all, this stellar new boxset for Treloar’s Third Doctor marks a vast improvement on Volume 3, offering a far more consistent pair of serials that seldom cease to provide gripping listening no matter your chosen venue of aural consumption. Does “Logic” still follow the roadmap presented by Cyber-tales gone by a little too rigidly at times? Sure, but its stirring explorations of warped human psyches – combined with Adams’ own study in “Rise” of our dangerous strides towards godhood of late – ensure that it’s nonetheless a far superior beast to “Conquest of Far”, particularly with Briggs taking such unnerving pride in chronicling Pertwee / Treloar’s proper first encounter with the Cybermen. This reviewer has spoken before on the matter of whether Big Finish’s abundant New Series productions – see Tales from New Earth, The Churchill Years Volume 2, Gallifrey: Time War and The Diary of River Song Series 3 in 2018’s opening quarter alone – threaten to overshadow their Classic Series output if they’re not careful. Provided that the studio keeps producing such captivating jaunts into the lives of Doctors past, though, then their listeners, stars, scribes and directors should have nothing to worry about in terms of the job security that Hartnell-McGann’s incarnations will maintain going forward. And buck down…see you next year for Volume 5 at the same Bessie-time, same Bessie-place! http://reviews.doctorwhonews.net/2018/03/third_doctor_adventures_volume_4.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=tumblr

#THIRD DOCTOR #BIG FINISH #{s{BFTheThirdDoctorAdventuresVolume04}}

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trendingnewsb · 6 years

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A Familys Race to Cure a Daughters Genetic Disease

One July afternoon last summer, Matt Wilsey distributed small plastic tubes to 60 people gathered in a Palo Alto, California, hotel. Most of them had traveled thousands of miles to be here; now, each popped the top off a barcoded tube, spat in about half a teaspoon of saliva, and closed the tube. Some massaged their cheeks to produce enough spit to fill the tubes. Others couldn’t spit, so a technician rolled individual cotton swabs along the insides of their cheeks, harvesting their skin cells—and the valuable DNA inside.

One of the donors was Asger Vigeholm, a Danish business developer who had traveled from Copenhagen to be here, in a nondescript lobby at the Palo Alto Hilton. Wilsey is not a doctor, and Vigeholm is not his patient. But they are united in a unique medical pursuit.

Wilsey’s daughter, Grace, was one of the first children ever diagnosed with NGLY1 deficiency. It’s a genetic illness defined by a huge range of physical and mental disabilities: muscle weakness, liver problems, speech deficiencies, seizures. In 2016, Vigeholm’s son, Bertram, became the first child known to die from complications of the disease. Early one morning, as Bertram, age four, slept nestled between his parents, a respiratory infection claimed his life, leaving Vigeholm and his wife, Henriette, to mourn with their first son, Viktor. He, too, has NGLY1 deficiency.

Grace and her mother, Kristen Wilsey.

BLAKE FARRINGTON

The night before the spit party, Vigeholm and Wilsey had gathered with members of 16 other families, eating pizza and drinking beer on the hotel patio as they got to know each other. All of them were related to one of the fewer than 50 children living in the world with NGLY1 deficiency. And all of them had been invited by the Wilseys—Matt and his wife Kristen, who in 2014 launched the Grace Science Foundation to study the disease.

These families had met through an online support group, but this was the first time they had all come together in real life. Over the next few days in California, every family member would contribute his or her DNA and other biological samples to scientists researching the disease. On Friday and Saturday, 15 of these scientists described their contributions to the foundation; some studied the NGLY1 gene in tiny worms or flies, while others were copying NGLY1 deficient patients’ cells to examine how they behaved in the lab. Nobody knows what makes a single genetic mutation morph into all the symptoms Grace experiences. But the families and scientists were there to find out—and maybe even find a treatment for the disease.

That search has been elusive. When scientists sequenced the first human genome in 2000, geneticist Francis Collins, a leader of the Human Genome Project that accomplished the feat, declared that it would lead to a “complete transformation in therapeutic medicine” by 2020. But the human genome turned out to be far more complex than scientists had anticipated. Most disorders, it’s now clear, are caused by a complicated mix of genetic faults and environmental factors.

And even when a disease is caused by a defect in just one gene, like NGLY1 deficiency, fixing that defect is anything but simple. Scientists have tried for 30 years to perfect gene therapy, a method for replacing defective copies of genes with corrected ones. The first attempts used modified viruses to insert corrected genes into patients’ genomes. The idea appeared elegant on paper, but the first US gene therapy to treat an inherited disease—for blindness—was approved just last year. Now scientists are testing methods such as Crispr, which offers a far more precise way to edit DNA, to replace flawed genes with error-free ones.

Certainly, the genetics revolution has made single-mutation diseases easier to identify; there are roughly 7,000, with dozens of new ones discovered each year. But if it’s hard to find a treatment for common genetic diseases, it’s all but impossible for the very rare ones. There’s no incentive for established companies to study them; the potential market is so small that a cure will never be profitable.

Which is where the Wilseys—and the rest of the NGLY1 families—come in. Like a growing number of groups affected by rare genetic diseases, they’re leapfrogging pharmaceutical companies’ incentive structures, funding and organizing their own research in search of a cure. And they’re trying many of the same approaches that Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have used for decades.

At 10:30 on a recent Monday morning, Grace is in Spanish class. The delicate 8-year-old with wavy brown hair twisted back into a ponytail sits in her activity chair—a maneuverable kid-sized wheelchair. Her teacher passes out rectangular pieces of paper, instructing the students to make name tags.

Grace grabs her paper and chews it. Her aide gently takes the paper from Grace’s mouth and puts it on Grace’s desk. The aide produces a plastic baggie of giant-sized crayons shaped like cylindrical blocks; they’re easier for Grace to hold than the standard Crayolas that her public school classmates are using.

Grace’s NGLY1 deficiency keeps her from speaking.

BLAKE FARRINGTON

At her school, a therapist helps her communicate.

BLAKE FARRINGTON

The other kids have written their names and are now decorating their name tags.

“Are we allowed to draw zombies for the decorations?” one boy asks, as Grace mouths her crayons through the baggie.

Grace’s aide selects a blue crayon, puts it in Grace’s hand, and closes her hand over Grace’s. She guides Grace’s hand, drawing letters on the paper: “G-R-A-C-E.”

Grace lives with profound mental and physical disabilities. After she was born in 2009, her bewildering list of symptoms—weak muscles, difficulty eating, failure to thrive, liver damage, dry eyes, poor sleep—confounded every doctor she encountered. Grace didn’t toddle until she was three and still needs help using the toilet. She doesn’t speak and, like an infant, still grabs anything within arm’s reach and chews on it.

Her father wants to help her. The grandson of a prominent San Francisco philanthropist and a successful technology executive, Matt Wilsey graduated from Stanford, where he became friends with a fellow undergraduate who would one day be Grace’s godmother: Chelsea Clinton. Wilsey went on to work in the Clinton White House, on George W. Bush’s presidential campaign, and in the Pentagon.

But it was his return to Silicon Valley that really prepared Wilsey for the challenge of his life. He worked in business development for startups, where he built small companies into multimillion-dollar firms. He negotiated a key deal between online retailer Zazzle and Disney, and later cofounded the online payments company Cardspring, where he brokered a pivotal deal with First Data, the largest payment processor in the world. He was chief revenue officer at Cardspring when four-year-old Grace was diagnosed as one of the first patients with NGLY1 deficiency in 2013—and when he learned there was no cure.

At the time, scientists knew that the NGLY1 gene makes a protein called N-glycanase. But they had no idea how mistakes in the NGLY1 gene caused the bewildering array of symptoms seen in Grace and other kids with NGLY1 deficiency.

Wilsey’s experience solving technology problems spurred him to ask scientists, doctors, venture capitalists, and other families what he could do to help Grace. Most advised him to start a foundation—a place to collect money for research that might lead to a cure for NGLY1 deficiency.

As many as 30 percent of families who turn to genetic sequencing receive a diagnosis. But most rare diseases are new to science and medicine, and therefore largely untreatable. More than 250 small foundations are trying to fill this gap by sponsoring rare disease research. They’re funding scientists to make animals with the same genetic defects as their children so they can test potential cures. They’re getting patients’ genomes sequenced and sharing the results with hackers, crowdsourcing analysis of their data from global geeks. They’re making bespoke cancer treatments and starting for-profit businesses to work on finding cures for the diseases that affect them.

“Start a foundation for NGLY1 research, get it up and running, and then move on with your life,” a friend told Wilsey.

Wilsey heeded part of that advice but turned the rest of it on its head.

In 2014, Wilsey left Cardspring just before it was acquired by Twitter and started the Grace Science Foundation to fund research into NGLY1 deficiency. The foundation has committed $7 million to research since then, most of it raised from the Wilseys’ personal network.

Many other families with sick loved ones have started foundations, and some have succeeded. In 1991, for instance, a Texas boy named Ryan Dant was diagnosed with a fatal muscle-wasting disease called mucopolysaccharidosis type 1. His parents raised money to support an academic researcher who was working on a cure for MPS1; a company agreed to develop the drug, which became the first approved treatment for the disease in 2003.

But unlike Dant, Grace had a completely new disease. Nobody was researching it. So Wilsey began cold-calling dozens of scientists, hoping to convince them to take a look at NGLY1 deficiency; if they agreed to meet, Wilsey read up on how their research might help his daughter. Eventually he recruited more than 100 leading scientists, including Nobel Prize-winning biologist Shinya Yamanaka and Carolyn Bertozzi, to figure out what was so important about N-glycanase. He knew that science was unpredictable and so distributed Grace Science’s funding through about 30 grants worth an average of $135,000 apiece.

Two years later, one line of his massively parallel attack paid off.

Matt Wilsey, Grace’s father.

BLAKE FARRINGTON

Bertozzi, a world-leading chemist, studies enzymes that add and remove sugars from other proteins, fine-tuning their activity. N-glycanase does just that, ripping sugars off from other proteins. Our cells are not packed with the white, sweet stuff that you add to your coffee. But the tiny building blocks of molecules similar to table sugar can also attach themselves to proteins inside cells, acting like labels that tell the cell what to do with these proteins.

Scientists thought that N-glycanase’s main role was to help recycle defective proteins, but many other enzymes are also involved in this process. Nobody understood why the loss of N-glycanase had such drastic impacts on NGLY1 kids.

In 2016, Bertozzi had an idea. She thought N-glycanase might be more than just a bit player in the cell’s waste management system, so she decided to check whether it interacts with another protein that turns on the proteasomethe recycling machine within each of our cells.

This protein is nicknamed Nerf, after its abbreviation, Nrf1. But fresh-made Nerf comes with a sugar attached to its end, and as long as that sugar sticks, Nerf doesn’t work. Some other protein has to chop the sugar off to turn on Nerf and activate the cellular recycling service.

Think of Nerf’s sugar like the pin in a grenade: You have to remove the pin—or in this case, the sugar—to explode the grenade and break down faulty proteins.

But nobody knew what protein was pulling the pin out of Nerf. Bertozzi wondered if N-glycanase might be doing that job.

To find out, she first tested cells from mice and humans with and without working copies of the NGLY1 gene. The cells without NGLY1 weren’t able to remove Nerf’s sugar, but those with the enzyme did so easily. If Bertozzi added N-glycanase enzymes to cells without NGLY1, the cells began chopping off Nerf’s sugar just as they were supposed to: solid evidence, she thought, that N-glycanase and Nerf work together. N-glycanase pulls the pin (the sugar) out of the grenade (the Nerf protein) to trigger the explosion (boom).

The finding opened new doors for NGLY1 disease research. It gave scientists the first real clue about how NGLY1 deficiency affects patients’ bodies: by profoundly disabling their ability to degrade cellular junk via the proteasome.

As it turns out, the proteasome is also involved in a whole host of other diseases, such as cancer and brain disorders, that are far more common than NGLY1 deficiency. Wilsey immediately grasped the business implications: He had taken a moon shot, but he’d discovered something that could get him to Mars. Pharmaceutical companies had declined to work on NGLY1 deficiency because they couldn’t make money from a drug for such a rare disease. But Bertozzi had now linked NGLY1 deficiency to cancer and maladies such as Parkinson’s disease, through the proteasome—and cancer drugs are among the most profitable medicines.

Suddenly, Wilsey realized that he could invent a new business model for rare diseases. Work on rare diseases, he could argue, could also enable therapies for more common—and therefore profitable—conditions.

In early 2017, Wilsey put together a slide deck—the same kind he’d used to convince investors to fund his tech startups. Only this time, he wanted to start a biotechnology company focused on curing diseases linked to NGLY1. Others had done this before, such as John Crowley, who started a small biotechnology company that developed the first treatment for Pompe disease, which two of his children have. But few have been able to link their rare diseases to broader medical interests in the way that Wilsey hoped to.

He decided to build a company that makes treatments for both rare and common diseases involving NGLY1. Curing NGLY1 disease would be to this company as search is to Google—the big problem it was trying to solve, its reason for existence. Treating cancer would be like Google’s targeted advertising—the revenue stream that would help the company get there.

But his idea had its skeptics, Wilsey’s friends among them.

One, a biotechnology investor named Kush Parmar, told Wilsey about some major obstacles to developing a treatment for NGLY1 deficiency. Wilsey was thinking of using approaches such as gene therapy to deliver corrected NGLY1 genes into kids, or enzyme replacement therapy, to infuse kids with the N-glycanase enzyme they couldn’t make on their own.

But NGLY1 deficiency seems particularly damaging to cells in the brain and central nervous system, Parmar pointed out—places that are notoriously inaccessible to drugs. It’s hard to cure a disease if you can’t deliver the treatment to the right place.

Other friends warned Wilsey that most biotech startups fail. And even if his did succeed as a company, it might not achieve the goals that he wanted it to. Ken Drazan, president of the cancer diagnostics company Grail, is on the board of directors of Wilsey’s foundation. Drazan warned Wilsey that his company might be pulled away from NGLY1 deficiency. “If you take people’s capital, then you have to be open to wherever that product development takes you,” Drazan said.

But Wilsey did have some things going for him. Biotechnology companies have become interested of late in studying rare diseases—ones like the type of blindness for which the gene therapy was approved last year. If these treatments represent true cures, they can command a very high price.

Still, the newly approved gene therapy for blindness may be used in 6,000 people, 100 times more than could be helped by an NGLY1 deficiency cure. Wilsey asked dozens of biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies if they would work on NGLY1 deficiency. Only one, Takeda, Japan’s largest drug company, agreed to conduct substantial early-stage research on the illness. Others turned him down flat.

If no one else was going to develop a drug to treat NGLY1 deficiency, Wilsey, decided, he might as well try. “We have one shot at this,” he says. “Especially if your science is good enough, why not go for it?”

“Matt was showing classic entrepreneurial tendencies,” says Dan Levy, the vice president for small business at Facebook, who has known Wilsey since they rushed the same Stanford fraternity in the 1990s. “You have to suspend a little bit of disbelief, because everything is stacked against you.”

At 11 am, Grace sits in a classroom with a speech therapist. Though Grace doesn’t speak, she’s learning to use her “talker,” a tablet-sized device with icons that help her communicate. Grace grabs her talker and presses the icons for “play” and “music,” then presses a button to make her talker read the words out loud.

The "talker" used for Grace’s therapy.

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“OK, play music,” her therapist says, starting up a nearby iPad.

Grace watches an Elmo video on the iPad for a few moments, her forehead crinkled in concentration, her huge brown eyes a carbon copy of her dad’s. Then Grace stops the video and searches for another song.

Suddenly, her therapist slides the iPad out of Grace’s reach.

“You want ‘Slippery Fish,’” her therapist says. “I want you to tell me that.”

Grace turns to her talker: “Play music,” she types again.

The therapist attempts one more time to help Grace say more clearly which particular song she wants. Instead, Grace selects the symbols for two new words.

“Feel mad,” Grace’s talker declares.

Grace working with a therapist in one of their therapy rooms.

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There’s no denying how frustrating it can be for Grace to rely on other people to do everything for her, and how hard her family works to meet her constant needs.

Matt and Kristen can provide the therapy, equipment, medicines, and around-the-clock supervision that Grace needs to have a stable life. But that is not enough—not for Grace, who wants "Slippery Fish," nor for her parents, who want a cure.

So last summer, Wilsey raised money to bring the Vigeholms and the other NGLY1 families to Palo Alto, where they met with Grace’s doctors and the Grace Science Foundation researchers. One Japanese scientist, Takayuki Kamei, was overjoyed to meet two of the NGLY1 deficiency patients: “I say hello to their cells every morning,” he told their parents.

And because all of these families also want a cure, each also donated blood, skin, spit, stool, and urine to the world’s first NGLY1 deficiency biobank. In four days, scientists collected more NGLY1 deficiency data than had been collected in the entire five years since the disease was discovered. These patient samples, now stored at Stanford University and at Rutgers University, have been divvied up into more than 5,000 individual samples that will be distributed to academic and company researchers who wish to work on NGLY1 deficiency.

That same month, Wilsey closed a seed round of $7 million to start Grace Science LLC. His main backer, a veteran private equity investor, prefers not to be named. Like many in Silicon Valley, he’s recently become attracted to health care by the promise of a so-called “double bottom line”: the potential to both to make money and to do good by saving lives.

Wilsey is chief executive of the company and heavily involved in its scientific strategy. He’s looking for a head scientist with experience in gene therapy and in enzyme replacement therapy, which Mark Dant and John Crowley used to treat their sick children. Gene therapy now seems poised to take off after years of false starts; candidate cures for blood and nervous system disorders are speeding through clinical trials, and companies that use Crispr have raised more than $1 billion.

Wilsey doesn’t know which of these strategies, if any, will save Grace. But he hopes his company will find an NGLY1 deficiency cure within five years. The oldest known NGLY1 deficient patient is in her 20s, but since nobody has been looking for these patients until now, it’s impossible to know how many others—like Bertram—didn’t make it that long.

“We don’t know what Grace’s lifespan is,” Wilsey says. “We’re always waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

But at 3 pm on this one November day, that doesn’t seem to matter.

School’s out, and Grace is seated atop a light chestnut horse named Ned. Five staff members lead Grace through a session of equine therapy. Holding herself upright on Ned’s back helps Grace develop better core strength and coordination.

Grace on her horse.

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Grace and Ned walk under a canopy of oak trees. Her face is serene, her usually restless legs still as Ned paces through late-afternoon sunshine. But for a little grace, there may be a cure for her yet.