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troubleSo I'm pretty much at the point of complete and utter dysfunction regarding my sleep schedule, my eating habits, my internet time-wasters, and my thesis, but hey! I called my mother and we had a good chat, and then my father wrote the NDP a sternly worded email about web accessibility that he cc:ed to me and I almost fell out of my chair. So while the rest of my life is falling apart, the family thing is going well.
(I may actually see my brother sometime this calendar year too, which will be the first time since 2003. Or maybe before. Please remember that I forgot to tell my parents I was moving to China until about a week beforehand because it slipped my mind to tell them. My family & I haven't had some falling out or anything, we're just... not that sort of close. It's very strange, especially since generally my family is really awesome and I like talking to them, but it just never seems to occur to me to do so.)
I have no idea what's going on in anyone else's life, but I've sorted my Facesock's farm on Farmville to my satisfaction, gotten terribly bored of Tumblr (except for the Sailor Moon stuff), apparently made enough passive-aggressive tweets about my university being irritating about accessibility & disability issues that the student newspaper contacted me to ask if I wanted to write a column (no, because then I'd have to read the student newspaper, which proudly published an article last year about how Roman Polanski was an innocent woobie who was just framed by the system because if the 13 year old girl he raped didn't want to be raped then she shouldn't have let herself be raped), and have written exactly 0 words of my thesis since last I reported the number of words I'd written on my thesis, but HEY. My imaginary pixel trees are all nicely in order now.
I think I may have finally gotten to the point where whatever procrastination is left in my soul is just bored of procrastination, because the big things I'm looking forward to today are having tea with Ginny & Ysa (and some guys that are married to various people at this tea party but they're not as important) and then actually sitting down and writing rather than... well, anything else, actually. (Well, and Karate, but I scheduled myself to be in three places at once today so I threw everything that wasn't Ginny & Ysa and tea to the wolves.) I feel kinda bad about it because I don't want to ignore my friends, but my thesissmells like freesia really is quite nifty and it would be better if I actually wrote it so I could share it with the world.
Let me tell you about this part of my thesis because it is so cool and shiny! To me.
Basically the first half of this chapter, which essentially wrote itself because it was summarizing a big chunk of my Honours Thesis, detailed out some of the Creation Myths around the School for the Deaf and how this indicates interesting things: The Deaf school was originally founded by Deaf people but quickly taken over by hearing people who promptly hired a hearing professional to be a teacher and completely ignored the Deaf people who tarted the school; its primary focus was on Saving Souls - Christian Religious Instruction was really the whole purpose of the Deaf School for a lot of years; and the School attracted students rather quickly from the beginning, which indicates to me that there was a Huge Gap To Be Filled. Basically as soon as the Deaf School started getting more than a handful of students and started raising actual funds, a Board of Directors was struct, it was dominated by Evangelical Protestants, and everything sort of comes out of that.
In contrast, the School for the Blind was founded after some rich dude died and left a ridiculously huge sum of money for its founding. A Board of Directors was struck that was dominated by Important Persons - the Lord Mayor and the Chief Justice are on the Board from the start (and are just referred to as that - damn it, these people had names, why couldn't you put them in the Minutes?). The requirements of the Bequest were that an equal amount of funds needed to be raised and put towards a proper building for the School for the Blind, and that this building needed to be complete before the dead dude funds would be released. It didn't take all that long to raise the funds, the land was purchased (and is actually not that far from here - I walk by it on my way home from the archives), the building built, and everything seemed to be going peachy-keen. They deliberately sought out recent graduates from schools for the blind to be teachers which I find very interesting in comparison to the School for the Deaf basically rejecting Deaf people as teachers. This could be for any number of reasons - I lean towards "who else is going to know how to teach these poor pitiful souls!" - but I love that it was a deliberate act to hire blind people, and for the next several decades the vast majority of full-time teaching staff hired are Blind.
The big concern of the Blind School isn't saving people's souls. It's not that they reject religion or anything like that, but the biggest Thing they keep going on about is the importance of employability. And I really feel this is in direct consequence of them hiring blind people to actually run the School.
As I said, they also have land and build a purpose-built residential school building which I find really interesting after the whole thing with the Deaf school changing locations 5 times in three years and then having to buy and renovate space until ultimately they close for a year so they can get something going for them. In contrast the school for the blind ends up with a lovely building that they just keep adding out buildings and attachments to until it closes, well after I'm done caring about it. (I was so certain there was a photo up on the NSARM site, but there isn't. Here's a photo of a class being taught sewing.)
Two other things that are relevant here and different from the Deaf school: 1) They are very concerned about propriety, and they fire their first principal after a couple of years for reason so scandalous they refuse to go into details in the Minute Book, except to say they won't ever tell anyone because it would reflect poorly on the school. I really think this is because of the issues with scandal around the original founders of the school for the Deaf, which I am too tired to go into right now. 2) They really struggle for students for the first five or so years. They actually open with fewer students then they said they wanted before opening (they open with 4). The building has enough space for 40 live-in students. There seems to be this belief that education the blind children is a bad idea, and I suspect this is why so much of the later stuff focuses on employability: education your blind child so they can be something other than pathetic and pitiful.
Arg, so tired. I had more thoughts on this. I guess I'll just have to write my thesis, huh?
In order to get back on track I need to have two chapters written in the next 6 days. This may actually be doable, if I buckle down and do nothing else. Which, conveniently, I can (after tea).
♥
(I may actually see my brother sometime this calendar year too, which will be the first time since 2003. Or maybe before. Please remember that I forgot to tell my parents I was moving to China until about a week beforehand because it slipped my mind to tell them. My family & I haven't had some falling out or anything, we're just... not that sort of close. It's very strange, especially since generally my family is really awesome and I like talking to them, but it just never seems to occur to me to do so.)
I have no idea what's going on in anyone else's life, but I've sorted my Facesock's farm on Farmville to my satisfaction, gotten terribly bored of Tumblr (except for the Sailor Moon stuff), apparently made enough passive-aggressive tweets about my university being irritating about accessibility & disability issues that the student newspaper contacted me to ask if I wanted to write a column (no, because then I'd have to read the student newspaper, which proudly published an article last year about how Roman Polanski was an innocent woobie who was just framed by the system because if the 13 year old girl he raped didn't want to be raped then she shouldn't have let herself be raped), and have written exactly 0 words of my thesis since last I reported the number of words I'd written on my thesis, but HEY. My imaginary pixel trees are all nicely in order now.
I think I may have finally gotten to the point where whatever procrastination is left in my soul is just bored of procrastination, because the big things I'm looking forward to today are having tea with Ginny & Ysa (and some guys that are married to various people at this tea party but they're not as important) and then actually sitting down and writing rather than... well, anything else, actually. (Well, and Karate, but I scheduled myself to be in three places at once today so I threw everything that wasn't Ginny & Ysa and tea to the wolves.) I feel kinda bad about it because I don't want to ignore my friends, but my thesis
Let me tell you about this part of my thesis because it is so cool and shiny! To me.
Basically the first half of this chapter, which essentially wrote itself because it was summarizing a big chunk of my Honours Thesis, detailed out some of the Creation Myths around the School for the Deaf and how this indicates interesting things: The Deaf school was originally founded by Deaf people but quickly taken over by hearing people who promptly hired a hearing professional to be a teacher and completely ignored the Deaf people who tarted the school; its primary focus was on Saving Souls - Christian Religious Instruction was really the whole purpose of the Deaf School for a lot of years; and the School attracted students rather quickly from the beginning, which indicates to me that there was a Huge Gap To Be Filled. Basically as soon as the Deaf School started getting more than a handful of students and started raising actual funds, a Board of Directors was struct, it was dominated by Evangelical Protestants, and everything sort of comes out of that.
In contrast, the School for the Blind was founded after some rich dude died and left a ridiculously huge sum of money for its founding. A Board of Directors was struck that was dominated by Important Persons - the Lord Mayor and the Chief Justice are on the Board from the start (and are just referred to as that - damn it, these people had names, why couldn't you put them in the Minutes?). The requirements of the Bequest were that an equal amount of funds needed to be raised and put towards a proper building for the School for the Blind, and that this building needed to be complete before the dead dude funds would be released. It didn't take all that long to raise the funds, the land was purchased (and is actually not that far from here - I walk by it on my way home from the archives), the building built, and everything seemed to be going peachy-keen. They deliberately sought out recent graduates from schools for the blind to be teachers which I find very interesting in comparison to the School for the Deaf basically rejecting Deaf people as teachers. This could be for any number of reasons - I lean towards "who else is going to know how to teach these poor pitiful souls!" - but I love that it was a deliberate act to hire blind people, and for the next several decades the vast majority of full-time teaching staff hired are Blind.
The big concern of the Blind School isn't saving people's souls. It's not that they reject religion or anything like that, but the biggest Thing they keep going on about is the importance of employability. And I really feel this is in direct consequence of them hiring blind people to actually run the School.
As I said, they also have land and build a purpose-built residential school building which I find really interesting after the whole thing with the Deaf school changing locations 5 times in three years and then having to buy and renovate space until ultimately they close for a year so they can get something going for them. In contrast the school for the blind ends up with a lovely building that they just keep adding out buildings and attachments to until it closes, well after I'm done caring about it. (I was so certain there was a photo up on the NSARM site, but there isn't. Here's a photo of a class being taught sewing.)
Two other things that are relevant here and different from the Deaf school: 1) They are very concerned about propriety, and they fire their first principal after a couple of years for reason so scandalous they refuse to go into details in the Minute Book, except to say they won't ever tell anyone because it would reflect poorly on the school. I really think this is because of the issues with scandal around the original founders of the school for the Deaf, which I am too tired to go into right now. 2) They really struggle for students for the first five or so years. They actually open with fewer students then they said they wanted before opening (they open with 4). The building has enough space for 40 live-in students. There seems to be this belief that education the blind children is a bad idea, and I suspect this is why so much of the later stuff focuses on employability: education your blind child so they can be something other than pathetic and pitiful.
Arg, so tired. I had more thoughts on this. I guess I'll just have to write my thesis, huh?
In order to get back on track I need to have two chapters written in the next 6 days. This may actually be doable, if I buckle down and do nothing else. Which, conveniently, I can (after tea).
♥
no subject
Date: 2010-09-25 05:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-26 08:09 pm (UTC)