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- Notes: . Loreena McKennitt has been an influence in writing this. Her music really helped set the mood I was going for, I think, even if it's not exactly gritty sounding music. [Is this badthor talking smack about Loreena? What do you mean, not gritty? D: Illusions: crushed.]
- Disclaimer: Bogus, Baloney & Hooey! Nothing’s true...Nada, Zilch. I don’t even know where this crap comes from except it usually involves a song.
- Summary: Frank is having the kind of day where everything (+ a little more) is going wrong.
- Disclaimer:This never happened!(sadly) I do not own these beautiful, talented men, but IF I did I would totally make them reenact this against their will.(can I get sued for saying that? LOL)
A/N:There will be sequel to this... If you want ;)
A/N2:Oh and btw, I typed this up in three hours(yeah, I'm slow) It's like three 3am here, so if you see any mistakes try your hardest to ignore it. It's not as bad as it seems. - Summary: After accidentally admitting to being a bisexual to the majority of the team, Sam finds himself the target of lustful fulfillment. [No! NOT LUSTFUL FULFILLMENT!]
2 Dec 2009
Last night's lecture (course for classroom assistants), the second from a Special Education teacher, was mostly about the national guidelines for building local and school-level curricula/course of study.
The teacher talked about leveling and how it was abolished entirely in Finland in the mid-1980s, all the way from elementary school up to high school (where the Finnish system splits into entirely voluntary technical schools and academic high schools). Even reading and maths are integrated for the whole class and Finland also has no what she called "elite" (or inherently leveled) schools. There isn't money to truly provide special needs children with THEIR education all the way throughout the country, which has many rural areas dotted with tiny rural schools with as few as 2-3 teachers and 15-50 students. Imagine, then, how little provision is possible for children of above-average intelligence. The lecturer admitted to me that these children are frequently not provided for; the ideal is that the teachers are meant to look at each individual pupil's level and provide them with more to do (or less to do, and more help), but the only REQUIREMENT is that the basic curriculum be taught in a certain way to everyone (except for special-needs students for whom a formal process provides exceptions).
God, I mean, just imagine how boring (I suspect, though, given that Finland has some of the best education in the world going by tests and so on, that it's actually still less boring than my childhood was). I was bored, and many many people are bored even in advanced classes (even primary school classmates who IQ-tested into the special weekly "Gifted and Talented" additions, as they were called in Alabama, but then didn't make the performance-based cuts to the top advanced levels of English, History, and math in middle school at grade 6).
There is no question that a child of above-average intelligence is in less need of help than a child with learning difficulty. Of course, the resources of society should be aimed at the latter, because the former is just bored, and the odds are, has the intellectual resources to find something else to do, and keep themselves occupied. But that's not to say that the deeply-ingrained habit of utter boredom and superiority imprinted on these children by inadequate primary school doesn't harm them! I actually didn't realize until the last several years how much it harmed me, but I am starting to think now that it was a lot worse for me than I suspected.
I am so accustomed to boredom, so used to it from the first day I transferred from a private Montessori school in New York to the Alabama public schools at age 6, that it didn't even occur to me until last night's lecture that the AIM of schooling is actually not only to "challenge" every pupil (a platitude I've often heard and which, let's face it, is problematic and in many cases not actually meant) - but to keep them occupied. The infinite variety of ways to occupy yourself "After you finish your work" was so familiar to me that I sat dazed and confused for several minutes while the lecturer talked about the ways classroom teachers can and do try to provide extra material and assignments for the above-average so they don't just sit twiddling their thumbs! "Isn't thumb-twiddling an essential, indeed, the MAIN point of school?", I thought at first.
I estimate that from age six when I started reading my own novels in class (first with Babysitter's Little Sister, quickly on to Babysitter's Club and Nancy Drew and thence to YA and adult fantasy from my parents' library), I was never without several personal books brought to read per day in my extra time, and I typically finished at least one per day all the way up through 7th grade, which was the first time I encountered classes I couldn't get through even if I kept reading the entire time the teacher was talking. I still remember the staggering force of my epiphany, in 7th grade "social studies" (really world history) that not only could I be engaged if I listened to the teacher only instead of reading while listening with one ear, what she was saying was actually complex enough to require more than one ear's attention to understand! Through high school, I was still able to finish a novel in a day to a week reading only in the time after I finished my work; but in primary school, I probably spent a good 50%-70% of my school hours reading.
And, hey, I have just fully realized the magnitude of that. Because... that is wrong. That is FUCKED-UP. And that should be obvious - should have been obvious to a long string of teachers who kind of weren't doing their jobs, not that it was really their fault with the utterly inadequate resources given to public education in Alabama.
The teacher talked about leveling and how it was abolished entirely in Finland in the mid-1980s, all the way from elementary school up to high school (where the Finnish system splits into entirely voluntary technical schools and academic high schools). Even reading and maths are integrated for the whole class and Finland also has no what she called "elite" (or inherently leveled) schools. There isn't money to truly provide special needs children with THEIR education all the way throughout the country, which has many rural areas dotted with tiny rural schools with as few as 2-3 teachers and 15-50 students. Imagine, then, how little provision is possible for children of above-average intelligence. The lecturer admitted to me that these children are frequently not provided for; the ideal is that the teachers are meant to look at each individual pupil's level and provide them with more to do (or less to do, and more help), but the only REQUIREMENT is that the basic curriculum be taught in a certain way to everyone (except for special-needs students for whom a formal process provides exceptions).
God, I mean, just imagine how boring (I suspect, though, given that Finland has some of the best education in the world going by tests and so on, that it's actually still less boring than my childhood was). I was bored, and many many people are bored even in advanced classes (even primary school classmates who IQ-tested into the special weekly "Gifted and Talented" additions, as they were called in Alabama, but then didn't make the performance-based cuts to the top advanced levels of English, History, and math in middle school at grade 6).
There is no question that a child of above-average intelligence is in less need of help than a child with learning difficulty. Of course, the resources of society should be aimed at the latter, because the former is just bored, and the odds are, has the intellectual resources to find something else to do, and keep themselves occupied. But that's not to say that the deeply-ingrained habit of utter boredom and superiority imprinted on these children by inadequate primary school doesn't harm them! I actually didn't realize until the last several years how much it harmed me, but I am starting to think now that it was a lot worse for me than I suspected.
I am so accustomed to boredom, so used to it from the first day I transferred from a private Montessori school in New York to the Alabama public schools at age 6, that it didn't even occur to me until last night's lecture that the AIM of schooling is actually not only to "challenge" every pupil (a platitude I've often heard and which, let's face it, is problematic and in many cases not actually meant) - but to keep them occupied. The infinite variety of ways to occupy yourself "After you finish your work" was so familiar to me that I sat dazed and confused for several minutes while the lecturer talked about the ways classroom teachers can and do try to provide extra material and assignments for the above-average so they don't just sit twiddling their thumbs! "Isn't thumb-twiddling an essential, indeed, the MAIN point of school?", I thought at first.
I estimate that from age six when I started reading my own novels in class (first with Babysitter's Little Sister, quickly on to Babysitter's Club and Nancy Drew and thence to YA and adult fantasy from my parents' library), I was never without several personal books brought to read per day in my extra time, and I typically finished at least one per day all the way up through 7th grade, which was the first time I encountered classes I couldn't get through even if I kept reading the entire time the teacher was talking. I still remember the staggering force of my epiphany, in 7th grade "social studies" (really world history) that not only could I be engaged if I listened to the teacher only instead of reading while listening with one ear, what she was saying was actually complex enough to require more than one ear's attention to understand! Through high school, I was still able to finish a novel in a day to a week reading only in the time after I finished my work; but in primary school, I probably spent a good 50%-70% of my school hours reading.
And, hey, I have just fully realized the magnitude of that. Because... that is wrong. That is FUCKED-UP. And that should be obvious - should have been obvious to a long string of teachers who kind of weren't doing their jobs, not that it was really their fault with the utterly inadequate resources given to public education in Alabama.
Metafic about SPN meta
2 Dec 2009 06:32 pm(You probably know, even if you're not into the show, that Supernatural last season introduced a prophet, who receives visions of the real-life actions of the protagonists and has written a best-selling series of books about them, including fan communities, Wincest, and most recently, cons. And if you didn't, now you do.)
This is touched on not infrequently in fanfiction, but there's an ongoing series that's a pretty good example called Fourth Wall by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
libraryofsol that takes it father than usual (while being pretty funny, so that's also a rec if you're into such things, even though the rec is not my point at all).
So in this story, Sam goes back to the internet to check up on the Wincesters, and is butthurt because he's become unpopular in fanfiction, with Dean/Castiel shipping having become more popular.
(This is, in fact, what happened last season - for meta on the subject, see for example![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
esorlehcar.)
Next, Dean tells Castiel about the slash about them and Sam's hurt feelings, and Castiel, with typical solemn curiosity, demands to be shown the Dean/Cas fiction. Next, Dean, feeling sorry for Sam because he feels left out, starts looking for any fiction at all about him. What he finds is that the newest trend is Sam/Lucifer (this is also true of actual fandom, although it might now be the second-newest trend after Sam/Gabriel--if that's a trend? I saw it come up as secondary pairing a few times atdeancastiel). Sam is even more upset by this, and then Lucifer starts baiting him about it in his dreams. Next she explores wingfic (Dean's and Castiel's opinions), and then it gets even more meta: Chuck calls and asks them to stop reading the fanfiction:
Now, this is what I really want to talk about: when the meta gets layered! Because that is both awesome and funny. The canon creators started a potentially recursive infinity of fiction-meta-fiction when they put the fanfiction in the canon. Why not take it even farther?
Like an AU where Dean, Sam, and Cas are actors on the tv-show Supernatural (typically in this kind of AU the characters they play are named after the actors - whatever, that works for me) which still has fanfiction about itself on the show, and also, of course, there is RPS about them. (Or the show Dean & co are in is like an SPN RPF show, about actors making the show Supernatural, and they talk about RPF against the backdrop of their characters on the show discovering RPF by accident after the episodes of the characters' show where the characters' characters talk about fanfic!)
Or an AU where SPN canon as it stands is actually a series of books written by Dean, and Sam and Cas are his brother and friend who find the fanfiction about them-in-his-books-where-they-are-hunters-with-fanfiction-written-about-them.
...What? I'd read it.
This is touched on not infrequently in fanfiction, but there's an ongoing series that's a pretty good example called Fourth Wall by
libraryofsol that takes it father than usual (while being pretty funny, so that's also a rec if you're into such things, even though the rec is not my point at all). So in this story, Sam goes back to the internet to check up on the Wincesters, and is butthurt because he's become unpopular in fanfiction, with Dean/Castiel shipping having become more popular.
"Great, fabulous. So, according to the internet, I don't deserve to have sex any more. Not even creepy, incestuous gay sex with my brother."
"It's not that bad," Dean protests.
"Not even creepy, incestuous gay sex with my brother," Sam repeats. Because it's worth repeating he thinks.
(This is, in fact, what happened last season - for meta on the subject, see for example
esorlehcar.) Next, Dean tells Castiel about the slash about them and Sam's hurt feelings, and Castiel, with typical solemn curiosity, demands to be shown the Dean/Cas fiction. Next, Dean, feeling sorry for Sam because he feels left out, starts looking for any fiction at all about him. What he finds is that the newest trend is Sam/Lucifer (this is also true of actual fandom, although it might now be the second-newest trend after Sam/Gabriel--if that's a trend? I saw it come up as secondary pairing a few times at
deancastiel). Sam is even more upset by this, and then Lucifer starts baiting him about it in his dreams. Next she explores wingfic (Dean's and Castiel's opinions), and then it gets even more meta: Chuck calls and asks them to stop reading the fanfiction:"Is he writing about us reading porn about ourselves?" Dean expression is a complicated mess, like he's not entirely sure whether to be amused or horrified, or some sort of entertaining mixture of the two.
When it's phrased like that Sam's not entirely sure either.
"I don't know but if we keep doing it he's probably going to end up insane."
Now, this is what I really want to talk about: when the meta gets layered! Because that is both awesome and funny. The canon creators started a potentially recursive infinity of fiction-meta-fiction when they put the fanfiction in the canon. Why not take it even farther?
Like an AU where Dean, Sam, and Cas are actors on the tv-show Supernatural (typically in this kind of AU the characters they play are named after the actors - whatever, that works for me) which still has fanfiction about itself on the show, and also, of course, there is RPS about them. (Or the show Dean & co are in is like an SPN RPF show, about actors making the show Supernatural, and they talk about RPF against the backdrop of their characters on the show discovering RPF by accident after the episodes of the characters' show where the characters' characters talk about fanfic!)
Or an AU where SPN canon as it stands is actually a series of books written by Dean, and Sam and Cas are his brother and friend who find the fanfiction about them-in-his-books-where-they-are-hunters-with-fanfiction-written-about-them.
...What? I'd read it.