End goal is payroll or bookkeeping - something in that vein. I have an associates in horticulture and having difficulty getting hired in entry level admin work, although I think my resume highlights how well my retail management skills translate into office work (I order and keep plant Inventory in check, prepare skus on invoices for my bookkeeper, file paperwork, maintain vendor relations, etc).
Because of my experience with minimal admin work I am thinking of getting a career studies certificate in bookkeeping and payroll/tax studies at my community college. People say certificates are useless BUT it’s one year of school and it would supplement my admin work experience (as well as teach me how to bookkeep I’m assuming)
Other option is AAS in accounting at my local community college. I like this idea because it would open doors for me to get a bachelors in accounting and allow me to take the CPA exam down the road which would open up tons of opportunities. But it’s two years - none of the classes I took for my current AAS count.
Any suggestions? I know bookkeeping doesn’t require a degree technically speaking but entry level, no degree salaries offered on job listing hurts to look at knowing what I make now. I know I have to be patient but I’m 25 and I’m looking at where I will be in my 40s or whatever. I plan to quit my full time job and work part time for any path I take, as I am fortunate enough to have a good support system. I want to make the right choice as to not let down the people in my life supporting me.
I feel like I know the answer is the AAS but taking two years off full time work is a little scary to me

Sooo Im really confused onto what I should go to college for. I took almost 4 years of gap years and Im currently working on getting my CNA. I was planning to become a RN but mainly because they make good money. I am great with kids and have previously worked in a field with kids. So I am getting my Early education degree. But where I live they offer free early education certifications so you can be like a preschool teacher, and the class is only about 3 months or less to get. If I spend 2-4 years getting a degree in EE I will come out making the same as someone who took 3 months to complete it. Plus teachers especially early education get paid super low. I dont know what to do, I dont know what to pick. Im so confused, unfortunately money is happiness and it is freedom.

DAY JUNE 8 2024
6-8-2024

‘WE CANNOT SIMPLY GO, GO, GO.’ WHAT IS ‘GIRL MOSSING,’ THE WELLNESS TREND THAT REJECTS HUSTLE CULTURE?

On TikTok and Instagram, people are “girl mossing”: lying on a forest floor, staring up at a leafy canopy or caressing moss. The United States National Forest Foundation even borrowed the term to kick off its 2024 Instagram account. Girl mossing recognizes a need to step away from the pressures of modern, urban life, promoting spending time in nature as a restorative practice. The fast pace and pressure of neoliberal capitalism take an enormous toll on well-being: not just personal, but social and planetary.
6-8-2024

FIVE WAYS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CAN IMPROVE YOUR DATING LIFE

Artificial intelligence is going to transform how we date. The question is: will it be for better or worse? It’s already causing some real problems, especially related to “romance scams” and other fraud. But it’s not all doom and gloom. Used in the right way, AI can actually make dating better. It can help write profiles and find matches, provide dating advice and coaching and, if all else fails, become a date companion. I have spent the last few years studying the impact of technology, and especially AI, on our
6-8-2024

STUDY ASSESSES ‘THE DANCER PERSONALITY’

“Tell me if you dance and I will tell you who you are!” A study led by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (MPIEA) in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, has shown that both amateur and professional dancers are less neurotic than people who do not dance. They are also more agreeable, more open, and more extraverted.
6-8-2024

ONLINE SHOPPERS BEHAVE DIFFERENTLY AFTER CHATTING WITH STAFF OF THE OPPOSITE GENDER, RESEARCH SHOWS

In a digital world where people are mere pixels on a screen, gender bias can show up in unexpected forms. When people are online, anonymity and physical detachment embolden them to behave in biased ways
6-8-2024

INVESTORS BET BIG ON SUNNY DAYS, STUDY FINDS

It’s often said we can’t control the weather. But what if the weather controls how and when we invest our money? More specifically, what if the skies control how much we’re willing to gamble in the stock market? New research by the University of South Australia has found a connection between pleasant weather conditions and higher investment in lottery-like stocks. Lottery-like stocks are cheap compared to other stocks and, like lottery tickets, they can be seen as an opportunity to make a substantial gain. However, the chance of a higher
6-8-2024

TEENS TREATED UNFAIRLY BY TEACHERS MORE LIKELY TO HAVE POPULIST ATTITUDES

Perceived unjust teacher behavior is strongly and positively associated with populist attitudes among children and adolescents. Populist attitudes consist of ideologies including anti-elitism, people-centrism, and a dualistic perception of good versus evil, and where the foundation of political decision-making should be based on the general will of the people. In contrast to the association with teacher behavior, the correlation between young people’s relationships with peers and the development of populist attitudes is less strong, and the correlation between young people’s relationships
6-8-2024

MICROINCLUSIONS IMPROVE WOMEN’S WORKPLACE BELONGING AND COMMITMENT

New research shows how “microinclusions”—brief instances of positive treatment, especially from members of the dominant group—help women feel valued at work. Imagine your first day at a new job. You probably feel nervous, wondering how you’ll fit in with the team. It’s natural to worry if your co-workers will be supportive, or if they’ll take your contributions seriously. This experience is amplified for women in technology companies, who often face underrepresentation and
6-8-2024

BURNT OUT? HOW YOUR EMPLOYER CAN HELP YOU RETURN TO WORK FOR THE BETTER

The working world can be a pitiless one, as competition in the marketplace can put significant pressures on employees. Relentless deadlines, shrinking resources and shifting priorities all take their toll on employees’ well-being and mental health. In my home country of Belgium, more than two thirds (66.4%) of individuals on disability for psychological reasons had cases related to depression or burn-out. These worrisome statistics reflect broader trends across OECD countries, where nearly half (47.6%) of workers with mental-health problems have been absent from the office in the past year, compared
6-8-2024

FAMILY-FRIENDLY WORKPLACES BENEFIT EMPLOYEES, BUSINESSES

Paid leave and employee well-being are the focus of a three-part policy series on family-friendly business practices put together by the Brown School’s Clark-Fox Policy Institute at Washington University in St. Louis. “Creating a family-friendly workplace benefits both employees and businesses,” said Gary Parker, associate dean for external affairs and director of the institute. “For employees, it enhances work-life balance and job satisfaction,” he said. “For businesses, it leads to higher retention rates, reduced absenteeism and improved productivity. Policies such as paid leave, flexible work arrangements
6-8-2024

HOW TRUMP’S DEFINITION OF A ‘REAL’ AMERICAN HAS GRABBED HIS AUDIENCE—WHAT OUR RESEARCH SHOWS ABOUT WHY

Donald Trump has recently doubled down on his derogatory depictions of undocumented migrants in his bid to win the 2024 presidential election. In an interview with Time magazine, published on April 30 2024, Trump referred to migrants as “criminals,” who “come in and they steal our jobs, and steal our wealth, and they steal our country.” Trump was especially disparaging towards migrants from China, who he said are a “major force that’s forming in our country.” In short, according to Trump, undocumented migration is “an invasion of our country.” Trump’s
6-8-2024

NEW STUDY SHOWS MARKETING A BRAND’S SIMPLICITY CAN BACKFIRE

Irritability is a common side effect of heat. When companies tout the simplicity of their products, they may unknowingly invite customer dissatisfaction, new University of Oregon research finds. For decades, “simpler is better” has been accepted as a universal truth in marketing. Nick Light, assistant professor of marketing at the UO’ Lundquist College of Business, has tested that assumption. He found that most consumers prefer offerings that appear to be easy to use and understand. However, trumpeting simplicity can have a hidden, costly downside. “When marketing convinces consumers that things
6-8-2024

RESEARCHERS CREATE WINNING STRATEGY TO COMBAT VACCINE MISINFORMATION ON X

A new in-depth analysis shows that users who reply to misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine on X, formerly known as Twitter, with a positive attitude, politeness, and strong evidence are more likely to encourage others to disbelieve the incorrect information. Researchers from three Georgia Tech schools found the most
6-8-2024

STUDY SHOWS DISENGAGED STUDENTS MORE LIKELY TO USE AI TOOLS FOR ASSIGNMENTS

A Swansea University psychology study has found that disengaged students are more likely to use AI tools—particularly ChatGPT—for academic assignments, raising questions about academic integrity and the need for proactive interventions. Launched in November 2022, ChatGPT is an AI program capable of answering questions in detailed, human-like ways. Researchers surveyed 160 undergraduate students, aged between 18 and 24, in March 2023 to assess their attitudes towards and past usage of AI tools such as ChatGPT in academic coursework. The study is published in The Internet and Higher Education journal. Thirty-two
6-8-2024

HUMAN CULTURE IS CHANGING TOO FAST FOR EVOLUTION TO CATCH UP—HERE’S HOW IT MAY AFFECT YOU

Research is showing that many of our contemporary problems, such as the rising prevalence of mental health issues, are emerging from rapid technological advancement and modernisation. A theory that can help explain why we respond poorly to modern conditions, despite the choices, safety and other benefits they bring, is evolutionary mismatch. Mismatch happens when an evolved adaptation, either physical or psychological, becomes misaligned with the environment. Take moths and some species of nocturnal flies, for example. Because they have to navigate in the dark, they evolved to use the moon
6-8-2024

YOUNG PEOPLE IN THE UK SAY THEY ARE LESS LIKELY TO VOTE IF THEIR PARENTS REPORT DEPRESSIVE SYMPTOMS

With a U.K. General Election approaching, new research has found that parental history of depression can predict whether a young person is likely to intend to vote. The research, led by the Department of Politics at the University of Liverpool, found that, at age 26, people were less likely to intend to vote if they had grown up with a parent experiencing high levels of depressive symptoms. Published in the journal Electoral Studies, the research used the British Cohort Study (BCS), which followed more than 16,000 babies born across a
6-8-2024

WHO GETS TO DECIDE WHAT COUNTS AS ‘DISORDER’?

As a scholar of urban governance and data policy, I viewed the responses to protests on U.S. campuses as about more than threats to academic freedom and freedom of speech. They are also threats to the fundamental rights of people in public spaces. The protesters’ tactics, particularly their use of tents in encampments, have brought debates around definitions of public order and disorder to the fore. Over the past couple of months, students in universities across the country, from the University of California, Los Angeles to the Massachusetts Institute of
6-8-2024

STUDYING VIOLENCE TOWARD WOMEN AND ANIMALS CAN HELP US DEVELOP STRATEGIES TO PREVENT BOTH

We live in a world where not everyone feels safe and respected, especially women. Sexual violence and abuse are significant global health issues. Intimate partner violence continues to be a problem in Canada. According to Statistics Canada, of the 117,093 victims of police-reported intimate partner violence in 2022, almost 80% were women and girls. More than half of women in the United States have experienced sexual violence involving physical contact. Given these high rates of sexual abuse, it is imperative that we improve upon what we currently know about violence
6-8-2024

WHY THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY COULD DEPEND ON YOUR GROUP CHATS

I became newly worried about the state of democracy when, a few years ago, my mother was elected president of her neighborhood garden club. Her election wasn’t my worry—far from it. At the time, I was trying to resolve a conflict on a large email group I had created. Someone, inevitably, was being a jerk on the internet. I had the power to remove them, but did I have the right? I realized that the garden club had in its bylaws something I had never seen in nearly all the
6-8-2024

NET ZERO IS NOT JUST GOOD SCIENCE—IT’S ALSO A GOOD DEAL FOR ORDINARY PEOPLE

As the UK moves into a general election, a misinformed debate over the country’s climate transition and legally binding net zero targets risks further dividing people. Much of this debate in the UK focuses on the “cost” of net zero. For instance, energy secretary Claire Coutinho recently stated the government did not want a “net zero leviathan” to crush the nation’s “brilliant enterprise economy,” while the Labor Party had to backtrack on its own headline climate investment pledge, citing “affordability” and “fiscal rules.” But the true “cost” is tricky to
6-8-2024

THE FASCINATING PSYCHOLOGY BEHIND ‘DINE AND DASH’ AND WHY IT’S ABOUT SO MUCH MORE THAN A FREE MEAL

Sometimes when I read the newspapers, I think that going to a restaurant and leaving without paying has become something of an epidemic. My research into lying has taught me that the psychology behind acts of deception is often deeply complex. Let me start with a confession. I was guilty of dine and dash a very long time ago before it had a catchy name. I was in a group that hung about a chip shop at the turn-of-the-road in north Belfast, a poor and troubled area. I had a
6-8-2024

YOU CAN NOW BE FROZEN AFTER DEATH IN AUSTRALIA. IF YOU’RE REVIVED IN THE FUTURE, WILL YOU LEGALLY BE THE SAME PERSON?

In recent weeks, Southern Cryonics—the southern hemisphere’s only cryopreservation facility, located in rural New South Wales—announced it had successfully cryopreserved its first patient. There are only a handful of cryopreservation facilities across the globe—two in the United States, and one each in Russia, China, Australia and Switzerland. If the claims made on their websites and in the press are accurate, these facilities likely have no more than 600 patients in cryonic storage in total. Media reports however suggest interest in cryopreservation has risen since the onset of the COVID pandemic,
6-8-2024

ENGINEERS HAVE A DUTY TO PROTECT PUBLIC WELL-BEING, BUT LESS THAN HALF LEARN HOW TO DO SO EFFECTIVELY

Engineers who received public welfare responsibility training in classes are more likely to consider the societal impact of technologies they design and to take action when concerns arise, according to a study by University of Michigan researchers published in The Journal of Engineering Education. While engineers are professionally obligated to protect the safety and well-being of those their technologies impact, the study found that nearly a third of U.S. practicing engineers have never received any training in public welfare
6-8-2024

HIRING PRESSURES TO DIVERSIFY ARE INFLUENCING PATTERNS OF DISCRIMINATION IN UNEXPECTED WAYS

In 2004, a pair of economists published a landmark study to measure discrimination in the labor market. In the study, the researchers applied to real job openings with fictitious applicants but changed the applicant names to reflect a different gender or race. They found clear evidence of discrimination: White men and women received 50% more callbacks than Black men and women. More recently, Berkeley
6-8-2024

STUDY FINDS RACIAL BIAS IN TRAFFIC STOPS BY CHICAGO POLICE

Black drivers in Chicago are significantly more likely than white drivers to be stopped by police regardless of where the drivers live or are going, according to a new study led by a Cornell city planning expert that maps the racial composition of roads by using mobile phone GPS data. The study confirms a racial bias
6-8-2024

DO WE HAVE MORE EMPATHY FOR PEOPLE WHO ARE SIMILAR TO US? NEW RESEARCH SUGGESTS IT’S NOT THAT SIMPLE

How do people successfully interact with those who are completely different from them? And can these differences create social barriers? Social scientists are struggling with these questions because the mental processes underlying social interactions are not well understood. One recent concept that has become increasingly popular is the “double-empathy problem.” This draws on research looking at people who are known to experience social difficulties,
6-8-2024

HOW CAN WE MAKE GOOD DECISIONS BY OBSERVING OTHERS? A VIDEOGAME AND COMPUTATIONAL MODEL HAVE THE ANSWER

How can disaster response teams benefit from understanding how people most efficiently pick strawberries together, or how they choose the perfect ice cream shop with friends? All these scenarios are based on the very fundamental question of how and when human groups manage to adapt collectively to different circumstances. Two recent studies on collective dynamics by the Cluster of Excellence Science of Intelligence (SCIoI) in Berlin, Germany, lay the groundwork to promote better
6-8-2024

OTHERS’ WORDS, NOT FIRSTHAND EXPERIENCE, SHAPE SCIENTIFIC AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF FORMATION, STUDY FINDS

Three proposals explaining the differential confidence. (A) Intuitively, one might assume that confidence in scientific entities (e.g., germs) is higher than confidence in religious entities (e.g., angels) because scientific entities are observable in principle whereas religious entities are not. (B) The Dual- Pathway Model proposes separate information pathways for scientific versus religious beliefs; belief in scientific entities is primarily driven by direct experience of causal outcomes whereas belief in religious entities is primarily driven by testimony. (C) Contrary to these two models, the Unified Model proposes that belief in both
6-8-2024

TRYING TO SAVE MONEY? RESEARCH SUGGESTS PAYING IN CASH—WHILE YOU STILL CAN

Cash is in crisis. In Australia, it’s now only used for 16% of in-person transactions, down from about 70% in 2007. The situation is so dire that on Monday, independent federal MP Andrew Gee introduced a private member’s bill that would force businesses to accept cash or else face big fines. The reality is that over the past decade, technological advancements have utterly transformed the way we pay for goods and services. Phones and smartwatches can now easily be used to pay by card, and buy-now-pay-later
6-8-2024

MESSAGES CAN TRIGGER THE OPPOSITE OF THEIR DESIRED EFFECT—BUT YOU CAN AVOID COMMUNICATION THAT BACKFIRES

The best graduation speeches dispense wisdom you find yourself returning to long after the graduation tassels are turned. Take the feel-good life advice in Baz Luhrmann’s song to a class that graduated 25 years ago. Only on a recent relisten did I realize it also captures one of the research-based strategies I teach for avoiding communication that backfires. The tip is hiding in plain sight in the song’s title, “Everybody’s Free (to Wear Sunscreen).” Communication aimed at promoting a certain behavior can have the opposite
6-8-2024

DIFFERENCES IN EDUCATION, VALUES BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN CAUSE MISMATCHES WHEN SEEKING A PARTNER, FINDS SPANISH STUDY

The educational expansion of women has led to changes in the differences in educational level of men and women when looking for a partner. Research conducted by the UAB Center for Demographic Studies (CED-CERCA) has examined for the first time the role of discrepancies in gender role values and education among potential spouses. According to the study, about a third of women in favor of gender equality and with a higher education would not be able to find a homogamous male partner. The work is published in the journal Perspectives
6-8-2024

‘FUZZY’ MAPS OFFER INSIGHT INTO LOCAL PERCEPTIONS OF THE VALUE OF VOLUNTEERING

In the global South, volunteer programs are framed by policymakers and scholars as an effective vehicle for empowering women living in poverty. But this narrative often rests on scant knowledge of the perspectives and experiences of a key set of local stakeholders: the volunteers. A new study co-authored by Yale anthropologist Catherine Panter-Brick addresses this knowledge gap by engaging with Syrian refugees and Jordanian women from poor households in Amman, Jordan,
6-8-2024

EXPERTS SAY USE OF POLITICAL MEMES ARE A PREDICTOR OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE

In a study of social media activity prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, researchers at the University of Notre Dame say a sharp increase in politically salient imagery online—visual content designed to influence, dehumanize, manipulate and motivate audiences—was a predictor of the conflict. With collaborators at Colby College and Kennesaw State University, the researchers collected post history from a select group of 989 Russian milbloggers—a term used for “military bloggers”
6-8-2024

PROGRAMS TO PREVENT SEXUAL VIOLENCE SHOW NO EVIDENCE OF CURBING ASSAULTS, ANALYSIS FINDS

Sexual violence prevention programs effectively change ideas and beliefs that underscore assaults, but show no evidence of reducing their actual occurrence, a new comprehensive analysis shows. The findings are published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest. Researchers led by behavioral scientist Roni Porat of Hebrew University challenge the assumption that changing people’s thoughts about sexual violence will change their actual behavior. They call on scientists to study more behavior-centered approaches to reducing sexual
6-8-2024

DIVERSE FRIEND GROUPS PROMOTE BETTER SOCIAL COHESION AND WELL-BEING, STUDY FINDS

New research featuring more than 24,000 people has found that having diverse groups of friends improves well-being and social cohesion, despite people’s tendency to gravitate towards people more similar to them. Led by researchers at the University of Birmingham and published in Psychological Science, the study used data from 24,726 adults from over 10,000 English neighborhoods to examine the composition of people’s social networks according to age, ethnicity, income, and education to understand the implications of homophily (preference for similar people) on social cohesion subjective well-being. Dr. Miguel Ramos, lead
6-8-2024

STUDY SHOWS JUSTICE FACILITY DOGS BENEFIT WELL-BEING FOR CHILDREN FACING COURT

A new Edith Cowan University (ECU) study has revealed that having a four-legged friend at Children’s Court significantly reduces stress and anxiety for young victims, witnesses, and their caregivers. ECU criminology researchers Dr. Suz Rock and Associate Professor Natalie Gately have published the first Australian study to evaluate the impact of introducing a justice facility dog to a Children’s Court. The study “Kids, Courts and Canines: Evaluating the Justice Facility Dog Program through a Therapeutic Lens
6-8-2024

SEXUAL MINORITIES EXPERIENCE MORE EXCLUSION IN EVERYDAY SITUATIONS, FINDS STUDY

Lesbian, gay and bisexual people experience exclusion more frequently than heterosexual people. This is the finding of a recent study published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin by researchers from the University of Basel and the RPTU University of Kaiserslautern-Landau. According to the study, people who are perceived as less gender-conforming are more frequently socially excluded. This could also affect heterosexual people if they deviate from traditional
6-8-2024

STILL RIDING LA’S METRO AFTER THE PANDEMIC? YOU PROBABLY THINK IT’S SAFER THAN THOSE WHO DON’T ANYMORE

As Jon Regardie wrote last year in Los Angeles Magazine, “Metro’s raison d’etre is to get hundreds of thousands of people each day across Southern California.” But the COVID-19 pandemic sent the numbers of riders plummeting to a low of 13%, and ridership still hasn’t fully rebounded. The reason may now be clear, thanks to the latest USC Dornsife LABarometer survey, conducted by the Center for Economic and Social Research (CESR) at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. The survey found that although public transportation ridership in
6-8-2024

CAN VAGUE GO VIRAL FOR GEN Y?

Generation Y, Gen Y, is commonly referred to as the millennial generation. It usually includes individuals born between the early 1980s and the mid-to-late 1990s or early 2000s. This generation follows Generation X and precedes Generation Z. The millennials, it is said, grew up during the transition to digital technology and the rise of the internet, and this has shaped their perspectives, behavior, and the way they use technology and media. They are often characterized as tech-savvy, adaptable, and socially conscious, with a strong affinity for social media and digital
6-8-2024

ITALIAN MOMS WITH 3+ KIDS WORK FAR FEWER YEARS THAN DADS, WHILE FINLAND SHOWS EQUALITY

Over the past century, the number of working women in Western countries has steadily increased. However, numerous studies show that it is still primarily women who have to manage the balancing act between parenthood and working life. Compared to fathers and childless women, mothers often have a less straightforward career path and face greater hurdles to career advancement. Little research has been done on what happens to women’s employment trajectories from midlife when childrearing efforts are
6-8-2024

TOP IT INDUSTRY MANAGERS ARE DIVIDED ON THE NEED FOR FACE-TO-FACE COMMUNICATION IN THE WORKPLACE

Many managers are currently seeking a balance between digital and face-to-face communication. A recent study from the University of Eastern Finland published in Information Technology & People shows that top IT industry managers have different views on when and for what purposes face-to-face communication in the workplace is needed. “Some top managers felt that all work tasks can be performed remotely with the help of digital communication. According to them, face-to-face communication is only necessary for maintaining interpersonal relationships and a sense of community,” says Doctoral Researcher Lotta Salin of
6-8-2024

STUDY FINDS SIMPLE HEADLINES ATTRACT MORE ONLINE NEWS READERS

The competition for online attention in today’s news environment is fierce. High-quality news from credible sources must compete for attention with misinformation and a rapidly increasing amount of partisan content. How can a news organization stand out as a reputable and trustworthy outlet while driving readers to its site? The answer is simple: literally. According to research from Michigan State University, news readers engage more with simple writing, suggesting journalists should write simply—clearly and without ambiguity—to attract attention online. The study was published in the journal Science Advances. “Newsrooms want
6-8-2024

STUDY SHOWS BANNING FALSE INFORMATION TRAFFICKERS ONLINE CAN IMPROVE PUBLIC DISCOURSE

When Twitter banned more than 70,000 traffickers of false information from its platform in the wake of the violence at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the impact went beyond the silencing of those users. A study co-authored by UC Riverside public policy and political science scholars published in the journal Nature on June 5, found that the crackdown by Twitter (now called X after it was acquired by billionaire Elon Musk in late 2022) also significantly reduced the number of misinformation posts by users who stayed on the
6-8-2024

YOUNG ADULTS SAY STEADY SUPPORT FROM CARING ADULTS MADE DIFFERENCE IN TRANSITIONING FROM CHILD WELFARE SYSTEM

Young people who have exited foster care generally fare better—in work, school and relationships—if they get consistent support from adults who care about them during their teen years. My research team reached these findings by interviewing 21 people, now in their late 20s, who had aged out of foster care when they turned 18, had spent time in foster care as children or grew up in families that had active child welfare cases. These young adults relayed the degree to which they received support from
6-8-2024

HOW THE 1901 DISCOVERY EXPEDITION’S POLAR EXPLORERS STAYED HEALTHY DURING THEIR ANTARCTIC JOURNEY

Antarctica is the most inhospitable continent on earth. It’s dry, cold, and completely dark for months of the year. Edwardian explorers were some of the first to brave the Antarctic winter, developing new knowledge still drawn upon by scientists today. The Discovery expedition (1901–4) played a key role in the history of polar exploration. It was led by the Royal Navy commander Robert Falcon Scott, a pioneering polar explorer who died in 1912 after attempting to reach the south pole. The expedition’s third lieutenant was Ernest Shackleton, who led three
6-8-2024

SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS MODELS INFUSED WITH AGRI-INNOVATION SYSTEMS CAN REDUCE POST-HARVEST FOOD LOSS AND WASTE

developing sustainable business models that are multi-actor networked for integrating them with agricultural innovation systems initiatives can enable a systemic approach for reducing food loss and value loss at the post-harvest
6-8-2024

WILL THE 2024 OLYMPIC GAMES BECOME THE PLAYING FIELD FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE PROTESTS?

Yannick Kluch, a professor of recreation, sport and tourism at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, studies sport as a platform for promoting social justice. Kluch has worked with the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, U.S. Diving and the National Collegiate Athletic Association. He spoke with research editor Sharita Forrest about the history of Olympic athletes’ social justice protests and governing organizations’ efforts to avert them with Rule 50 of the Olympic Charter.
6-8-2024

STUDY FINDS WE SPEND MORE WITH CASHLESS PAYMENTS

A study found support for the existence of a positive “cashless effect,” which is when consumers spend more when using cashless payment methods in comparison to cash. The study suggests the cashless effect leads people to spend more when purchasing products that are typically used to signal status, such as jewelry. However, the
6-8-2024

LAWS MEANT TO KEEP DIFFERENT RACES APART STILL INFLUENCE DATING PATTERNS, DECADES AFTER BEING INVALIDATED

If you are single and looking for a romantic partner, chances are that you have used a dating app. But the likelihood that others will like, or even see, your profile may depend on your race. Studies have found that all people on dating apps, regardless of their own race, are more likely to contact white people using the app. And all people using dating apps are least likely to contact African American women and Asian American men. Until recently, some popular apps, including OkCupid, Match, Hinge and Grindr, provided
6-8-2024

VIRTUAL LABS IN PSYCHOLOGY RESEARCH BOOST DIVERSITY

University of Oregon psychologists are breaking down barriers to include underrepresented populations in research by bringing laboratories online. The researchers are trying to address a longstanding issue in psychology studies, which often rely on undergraduate students to volunteer as research subjects.
6-8-2024

ATTENDING LOCAL EVENTS STRENGTHENS NEIGHBORHOOD BONDS, SURVEY REVEALS

how often people visit and actively participate in local events and how this affects their sense of place or their connection to their community. A survey of almost 400 households in the state’s coastal council area of the City of Holdfast Bay found that people who frequently attend local events or participate as volunteers, organizers or exhibitors, have a stronger
6-8-2024

STUDY SHOWS ONLINE PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION WORKS FOR COMPLEX TOPICS

“COVID-19 forced educators to adjust their educational best practices to an unfamiliar virtual classroom, and professional development was no different,” said Karen Jo Matsler, assistant professor in practice for UTeach at UTA
6-8-2024

EYE-TRACKING STUDY REVEALS THAT SIMPLY LOOKING AT THE NATURAL WORLD IN URBAN AREAS CAN REAP WELL-BEING BENEFITS

Integrating more natural features into city landscapes can play a crucial role in enhancing the mental well-being of residents. A study by Bangor University and Technion- Israel Institute of Technology, published in the scientific journal People and Nature, involved city dwellers and showed how paying visual attention to greenery, rather than human-made structures, can alleviate anxiety and enhance restorative feelings. The 117 urban residents who took part in the study, were guided on a
6-8-2024

ADVERTISERS MAY BE INADVERTENTLY FUNDING MISINFORMATION

Companies in industries such as health care, technology and insurance have been found to advertise on misinformation websites, according to an analysis published in Nature. In a related experiment, consumers who were made aware that a company advertised on a misinformation website were likely to reject an offer of a gift voucher to spend with that company. The majority of digital advertisement placement on the internet is done via an algorithm-based distribution
6-8-2024

STUDY SUGGESTS EVOLUTIONARY BASIS FOR MALE RISK-TAKING BEHAVIORS

why we associate risk-taking with males rather than females, from an evolutionary standpoint. Study author Hannah Goodman, from UWA’s School of Human Sciences, said researchers found men engaged in riskier behaviors when crossing a busy traffic intersection, supporting growing evidence that risk-taking is predominantly an androcentric behavior. “Males

Thus, wounded, and less victorious than they might have preferred, but victorious nonetheless, the royal three returned to the Macedonian capital. The army returned to Philopolis in triumph, the trio at their head. Leonidas on a replacement for his slain mare, Cassandra astride a titanic black stallion which was exclusively used for parades, and Seramis in her full diluvian glory. Cassandra might have been disappointed that the battle hadn’t been as decisive as she preferred, but she wasn’t about to miss an opportunity for propaganda.
So the group returned to the cheers of their people, the cavalry shining in the summer sun, and the army marching in strict formation. Trumpets heralded their return. Banners flew from the corners of houses. The men sang bawdy songs, as is the tradition of soldiers. Not a spec of blood or rust nor dust was allowed, presenting the image of a spotless, unconquered army. It was all a magnificent production. It was all a lovely welcome home.
When Seramis had first seen Philopolis and Macedon, it had been a very different place. The realm had struck her as grey, very grey, and a place without much beauty. Then, under the rule of the wicked regent Tyndareus, it was a place of iron and blood, a totalitarian state dedicated primarily to a massive conscript army. The hills had been torn open by great pit mines for iron and copper. The forests had been cut down to fuel the fires of industry. The fields were endless, uniform masses of oats, grain, and hay, worked by uncounted slaves, or landless peasants just a bit better than slaves. Over it all, the ancient fortress of the Alexandrian dynasty had loomed as a great edifice; a leviathan of hewn stone and barred windows representing the absolute military power that held all of it in place.
Now, two years hence, it was more alike to how she had first found it than she would have preferred. But transforming a society was hardly a swift process, and the work done was already substantial. Once the place had been a land of iron and blood, and though industry remained, now the smell of olive oil, the sound of potters wheels, and the hawking of merchants filled the air. The monolithic collective farms had shattered into a patchwork quilt of small holdings. The men working them might still have brands, but they and the lands were their own.
Of course, there were still some great expanses of oats and wheat. Those were Cassandra’s lands. She’d been generous with the lands she’d confiscated from the nobility, and in turn with their wealth which now filled her treasury. But she hadn’t given up any of her own family’s territory, and had expanded them substantially. Something like a quarter of the land in the country was the Queen’s personal fief, and she managed it very carefully. The economies of scale she alone had access to provided much needed stability for staple food prices during the transition from a slave-based command economy to a citizen market economy. Beyond that, the lands also provided a substantial portion of government income.
Said income was further complimented by a wide-scale reform to the tax structure. Rather than outsourcing the work to tax farmers, or to any nobility, as that had been liquidated, taxes were collected from a variety of small, but inescapable requirements. The primary tax was simply the surplus tax, an in-kind tax taken from all production. Farmers gave a share of their produce, potters a certain number of pots for each produced, blacksmiths a certain number of finished goods, and so on and so forth. Only the merchants would return hard currency from the surplus tax, the rest a great cross-section of produced goods. These in turn went into great warehouses, which the government might release from to control prices, or sell abroad to bring in further profits. The majority of currency entering the coffers either came from selling such produce, Cassandra’s personal lands, or a variety of import and consumption taxes. No less than a tenth of the entire bureaucracy was funded by the consumption taxes on oil and salt.
Of course managing all this was a good lead more complicated, not least of which because Cassandra had liquidated the aristocracy. This required a rather extensive increase in the bureaucracy, which brought in quite the expense of its own. Overall revenue was vastly increased from the reign of Tyndareus, and indeed all former kings of Macedon. The problem was that expenses had increased in turn. Macdeon was a military stratocracy, and Cassandra was in the process of trying to reform that into a sort of enlightened bureaucratic autocracy. The amount spent on papyrus alone nearly rivaled the payments to the many new government servants, which were not cheap. Educated men and women, able to read, understand the laws, and understand mathematics were not common, and commanded higher prices.
Cassandra had responded both by working to increase the supply of educated citizens, and cut costs in other areas. Firstly, she enacted a massive increase in education, beginning with the orphans of Macedon’s many wars and educating them. Secondly, she had begun offering to pay for the education of the children of public servants as part of their compensation. This allowed her to cut down on salaries and ensure a future educated workforce. Third and finally, she had begun to subsidize educators throughout the kingdom, and begun work to gather and copy many books and tomes to further improve the kingdom’s educational outcomes. Unfortunately, this was work that would take years to bear fruit.
The second arm of this had been to cut costs in other areas, most notably the military. Under Tyndareus, the Macedonian army had grown to a terrifying, if bloated, leviathan. Between the use of conscription, and counting reserves, the former army could have raised nearly thirty thousand men under arms. Cassandra had slashed that, and abolished conscription for the regular army. After intensive cuts, purging Tyndareus’s loyalists, and serious reforms including the near complete reconstruction of the Macedonian Cavalry Corps, the Macedonian Army now numbered a mere nine thousand, with the ability to call upon a further ten thousand former soldiers, now spread out to create a variety of local militias.
Leonidas had taken charge of many of these reforms, bringing in military advisors from Marathon and Achaea. The young prince, in his role as Minister of War, set to work with vigor to refine the Macedonian army down to its purest and strongest form. His high standards might have earned him ire, if not for the personal virtue and discipline he showed to meet those standards. He demanded the best not only from himself and his soldiers, but even from his suppliers and quartermasters. Most of the Macedonian military exports were those arms and armor he found below standard, though many less discerning customers would gladly accept them.
More than simply focusing on the logistics, Leonidas sought to infuse in his army a certain esprit de corps and moral focus. He drew heavily on the legendary philosopher Aristotle, particularly regarding that philosopher’s education of Iskandar, the famed conqueror king who had defined Macedon for the past two centuries. Outside the direct military applications, the young prince kept an eye on the future, sponsoring the growth of sports leagues throughout the kingdom, particularly a great hunting association. The Hunter’s Guild was a particular passion project of his, and he worked tirelessly not only to cultivate skilled hunters to recruit for his scouts, but also to preserve what remained of Macedon’s wild lands, ensuring game populations remained stable, and dangerous animals were quickly eliminated. The prince’s skill at the hunt had even earned him the right to attend the games at Olympus, though it was his mastery of wrestling that had seen him returned crowned with the ultimate honor of the laurels.
Such participation with the rest of the Hellene world had been part of Sera’s work. The young dragonness had held no official position at first, as Cassandra worked to develop her talents. Seramis had loathed etiquette as taught as a set of rules to be followed, but Cassandra revealed their nature as tools and tricks as part of the great game of politics. Allowed to treat the illusion of statecraft as just that, Seramis thrived. Soon appointed as Minister of State, her talent for gathering information, forming schemes, and comprehending languages saw her unleashed as Macedon’s greatest diplomat. All the while, her true title was one that delighted her greatly. Master of Shadows, she wielded the diplomatic corps and her own personal stable of agents like a scythe, harvesting a hoard of secrets she feasted upon. They became as arrows in her quiver, aiding her as she stood alongside Cassandra to carefully guide the ship of state.
On a much less sinister note, Seramis had engaged in quite public work to revitalize Macedon’s stagnating cultural sphere. The dragoness was chiefly known not even as a diplomat, let alone a spymaster, but rather as a patron of the arts. She courted and drew playwrights, actors, bards, conductors, and composers from across the world, placing a great deal of personal effort into producing a cosmopolitan cultural sphere. Though diplomacy, culture, and her eternal scheming, she worked to put the sword of Iskandar in a flowered sheath, in hopes it would never need to be drawn.
The peak of her work in that regard was a mere week away, a grand festival of the arts such as had not been seen in Macedon before. It would be a great festival as if that of the Athenians, now long brought to ruin. For the first time since the wars of the Diadochi, Hellas would come together to celebrate the arts. Naturally, Macedon would be participating, represented by Sera’s own personal theater company: The Mount Ararat Company.
Seramis quickly moved through her remaining business for the day. She met with the Master of Investigations and also her deputy, who had been working to manage her department while she had departed on campaign. Pleasantries were exchanged, and reports given. There was little new, but there was confirmation that the Latins, a curious people from across the western sea, would come to attend the festival. This would have been of little concern, if not for how they were coming.
A long-standing problem of the western coast had been the pirates of Illyria. These seafaring brigands proved a routine nuisance for not only Hellene trade, but all throughout the seas. Achaea and Macedon had both extended offer to the king of Illyria to come and help remove the pirates, but had been rejected. However when the Latins offered, the king accepted. So, the Latins came in force, bringing with them a four mighty legions of men, and crushed the pirate havens by attacking from the land. The problem was, they didn’t leave. While three of the legions returned to Italia, the fourth remained to protect against the return of the pirates, and to protect their Illyrian allies from Achaean or Macedonian aggression.
This was already a provocative move, as the barbarian army now sat on Hellene soil, diplomatically shielded by the cowardly Illyrian king. However, now the Latins made a further move. They had informed the court at Macedon previously that they wished to send a delegation to observe the festival and improve relations. All this was well and good, and naturally they did request to send bodyguards to protect the delegates. This was agreed, but the unscrupulous Latins had interpreted the mention of bodyguards broadly, and deployed a third of the legion infantry as “bodyguards”. Seramis’s reports indicated that these were in fact the Triarii, the third and strongest line, composed of veterans. The remainder of the legion remained encamped alongside the Ilyrian-Macedonian border.
The presence of the legion was concerning, to say the least. It numbered some four thousand five hundred men, about the size of a Macedonian army. The Macedonians held a local advantage, as they maintained two armies. One was directed northwards, towards the barbarians, and the other towards the east, to ward off their Selucid rivals. So they outnumbered the legion present two to one. However, the problem arose with the Latin’s ability to deploy a further three legions, which would reverse that advantage. With aid from Marathon, the Hellenes could match the Latin’s numbers, and with Achaean aid, they would outnumber them. Unfortunately, the Latins had spent much of their recent war with the Phoenicians of Carthage demonstrating an ability to raise new forces frighteningly quickly. Sera’s analysis suggested that if they wished to, they might be able to triple the might of their armies to twelve legions. The sheer military mass of the Latins would be enough to equal all Hellas, but Hellas was still divided, and some, such as the Illyrians, preferred them as allies to their fellow Hellenes.
The simple arithmetic of war indicated that if the Latins wished to conquer Hellas, they probably could. The simple arithmetic of war neglected to account for the power of dragons. But, Sera had observed, it was rare to lose money betting on the arrogance and avarice of humans. The fortunate side of dealing with the Latins was that for all their military might, they had a peculiar custom. They were permitted by ancient law and religious principle from launching a war of aggression, and so only declared war when they or their allies were threatened. This iron law of ancient Roman kings aught to have kept their swords sheathed, but in practice it often meant that an ambitious man of that city would seek to provoke an attack or aggression, that they might have reason for war. This incident with the “bodyguards” was likely such an attempt at provocation by a glory hound.
So, the trio met, and considered how to deal with this. It was decided that they would monitor the Latins closely, and place forces in such a way that they could not be aggressive, but would certainly be ready. The Army of the North was still recuperating from their recent battle with the Scythians, and would remain on standby in the capital to respond to any moves from the Latins or Scythians. At the same time, the northern militias would be stood up, and reinforced by militias from the south. These southern reinforcements would travel along the roads that would place them directly between the two parts of the Roman Legion, ensuring that if hostilities began, the separated legion would be able to be dealt with in parts. Unfortunately, Leon was unable to deploy as many of his scouts to that region as he would prefer, and Sera’s own intelligence assets were likewise pointed northwards. Better to deal with the actively aggressive barbarians, and then the imminently aggressive ones.
So, it was with great care, and no small amount of tension, that the Latin delegates arrived, joined by some three hundred of their Triarii. This was the first that Sera had seen of the Latins, and her initial impressions were somewhat mixed. They moved with distinct discipline, and were in all senses quite well ordered. The Triarii were older, veteran soldiers, generally more in their thirties. As such, they were somewhat more moderate, and avoided the wicked behavior common to many young soldiers. However, this rendered them with an increased air of unmistakable danger. Be wary of old men, even relatively old ones, in professions where men die young, and particularly of a soldier without an obvious vice.
The leader of the Latin delegation introduced himself to the court with a somewhat imperious nature. It likely would have been more imperious had Seramis not taken on her true form. It is difficult, even for a roman, to remain arrogant when there is a fourteen-foot-tall (measured at the shoulder) dragoness looking down at you. He declared himself as Military Tribune Gaius Mummius, representing the Praetor Lucius Cornelius in command of the IV Legion. Though the head of the delegation, he was simply that by right of his military rank. The actual diplomacy was handled by diplomats, not soldiers, though by their attitudes, Seramis might have taken them for sergeants in fancy togas. However, one who did catch her interest was distinct among the delegation, an old man, and truly old, dressed as a seer. He remained close by the ear of Gaius, and the tribune heeded him. Sera watched him warily, for she smelled magic on him, an old magician, and that would be trouble.
Despite her concerns, the Latins did not cause trouble, not even their old magician. They established a small camp for themselves outside the walls of the city, and largely kept to themselves. They came into the city only in small groups based around some member of their number who spoke Greek. They paid with honest coin, and seemed intrigued by the preparations for the festival. They seemed unusually preoccupied with finding barbers, as they were each clean-shaven, in contrast to the bearded Hellenes. Leonidas found this utterly hilarious, as he had spent more time than he would ever admit trying to find ways of improving his own facial hair. Now that it had finally come in, he spent more time managing his admittedly impressive beard than he ever had dealing with his actual hair. Sera, lacking any hair whatsoever, found the human preoccupation with it utterly confusing.
Bearded or otherwise, Hellene, Latin, and miscellaneous others soon came to attend the great drama festival. The idea of cancelling was briefly considered, and summarily rejected. Continuing to have a great celebration in the face of Latin provocation and Scythian Assault showed not only the power of the kingdom, that its people could act without concern, but also its prestige through mastery of the arts. The fact that many of the participants in the festival were from elsewhere in Hellas was politely overlooked. After all, Macedon had gathered them, and thus got credit.
The festival went on for three days, and proved to be a generally joyous, if somewhat chaotic time. Even the dour Latins eventually became swept up in the atmosphere. While this wasn’t technically a Bacchanalian festival, mostly due to the fact that Bacchus was very dead, it certainly carried some of that legacy. Of course the highlight, at least for men who considered them cultured, was the great drama productions. All manner of productions were put on display, from great recreations of the Athenian classics, to new twists, foreign productions, historical plays, retellings of myths, and of course many a comedic tragedy and initially tragic comedy.
Seramis’s own company had three productions, set into place over three days. The first two were well known, and practiced. Sera’s company had begun expediting the revitalization of the cultural scene with regular performances. Some of these had been well-worn classics, but the Mount Ararat Company would bring none of these to this stage. Instead, they brought two original, but already tested plays, and one of excellent ambition.
The first was a Satire, in the style of The Clouds which Sera had dubbed Tartarus. This piece was set in the depths of the underworld, that darkest pit where wicked men and monsters alike were tormented. These tormented souls took on the role of the choir, being intensely irritated by the antics of the four main players. Those four were of course the three great Greek philosophers: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and their own tormentor; Diogenes. The play largely consisted of the main three wandering through Tartarus, further tormenting the tormented souls with long winded and pedantic arguments about the torments they witnessed. All the while, Diogenes routinely appeared to torment them in turn. The play as a whole made light of philosophies, and generally teased out the problems with focusing overmuch on the world of the mind while actual suffering could be addressed.
This play was well received, for it was humorous and mocked philosophers, which few people cared for. The humor wavered between high and low brow, with both clever jokes sprinkled in amongst the arguments of the philosophers, and cruder humor delivered by the tormented souls and Diogenes. A certain degree of slapstick was involved as well, often involving a great paper-Mache boulder being rolled by Sisyphus.
The second of Sera’s plays was a somewhat grander production, though was likewise satirical. It turned the classic play Oedipus Rex somewhat on its head with The Choir’s Apologia. The original play was an archetypical tragedy, following the story of Oedipus, son of the King of Thebes. Due to a prophecy, his father cast him out to be slain, but he would live, and later unknowingly slay his father, and wed his mother. The play detailed how the gods smote the city with a plague as a result of this kinslaying and incest. Oedipus sought the answer to this, and in doing so discovered the terrible truth, and blinded himself for shame.
The Choir’s Apologia put a twist on this, as the Choir itself determines to get involved. This broke their usual role as mere background singers, and saw them take the stage to try and prevent the tragedy. The play played out as usual, but regularly, the mortal actors would freeze in place before a great event. The Choir would then step to center stage, and petition the gods for redress. First they asked Apollo, bidding him not deliver the ruinous prophecy, for without it nothing would come, but he rejected them. Next they implored Hermes to warn Oedipus against his folly, but Hermes declared he was helpless before Zeus. Finally, the Choir dared to approach Zeus himself, demanding that he cease to punish all Thebes for Oedipus’s mistake.
This proved a failure in the end, as Zeus rebuked them and struck the choir down one by one. The message was clear, that the gods were cruel and arbitrary, delivering unjust judgements. They did what they would, for they were strong, and the choir suffered what it must, for it was weak. At last only Oedipus remained, able now to see Zeus and his murder of the choir. Oedipus and Zeus contested one another in song, and while Zeus struck down the king, it was not before the hero doomed by prophecy delivered a defense and a prophecy of his own. Oedipus defended his record as king of Thebes, how he had overthrown a tyrant, protected his people, improved their lives, and sought their good even at terrible cost to himself. He, the one the gods judged, had been a better ruler than the gods. If indeed the gods would persist in their arbitrary wickedness, then one day this would be their doom, for the world would not abide such tyrants. Zeus struck him down, but went in dread because of the prophecy.
This production produced some degree of controversy. It always had, and such was the intent. It was well understood that the gods were dead, and Olympus was silent, but this play indicated such was not a bad thing. Given it was written by a dragoness, a natural enemy of the gods, the take was not unexpected. Beyond this, its use of another play as a framing device gave it a rather meta feel, and some found it pretentious. Others, by contrast, found the reframing of a classic play refreshing, and enjoyed the novelty of the choir acting as a major character.
The third play was a new production, and meant to be the one to blow the sandals off the audience. It was a bigger, grander, and of much more spectacular production values. All of this was in theory. In practice, it was put on at the end of three days of performances and partying, and became more of a farce than an epic. The Davidiad told the story of the legendary Hebrew king David, of both his rise to power and fall from grace. It was told in three acts, and all three had some manner of disaster.
The first act told of the heroic youth of David before he was king, and how he defeated the giant Goliath. Goliath himself was a complicated costume made by having three already tall men standing on one another’s shoulders. When struck by a sling, he was to topple over onto his army, which would catch the performers and prevent any harm. Unfortunately, due to an earlier scene involving David being anointed with oil, there was a slick patch on stage. Goliath’s lower third slipped, and the towering giant fell flat on his face and collapsed into himself in the middle of a monologue. This was considered absolutely hilarious by the audience, and Seramis, upon seeing this, physically shrank from embarrassment.
The second act saw the conflict between the good future king David and the wicked king Saul. Saul was meant to begin more coherent, but gradually jealousy and fear would twist him into wickedness. Unfortunately, Saul’s actor had been out late, and showed up to the production very hung over. This made Saul’s descent far more predictable and robbed the second act of much of its drama. Unfortunately, the actor in question attempted to remedy this by using a hangover cure involving undiluted wine. This made him less hungover, and more drunk, so Saul went from being scowling and sickly to very obviously drunk. This became a minor peril during a later scene where Saul threw his spear at David. Not only did Saul miss, as intended, but he proceeded to hurl the (thankfully fake) spear into the audience, where it proceeded to hit a man in the chest. He was unharmed, but believed he had been slain and fainted, causing a minor panic.
The third act was nearly canceled, but went ahead anyways. The cursed production continued to be cursed, as a major set piece exploded earlier. The third act was meant to show how the throne gradually corrupted David, and led him to murder a man to cover up an affair with his wife Bethsheba. This would climax with the death of a son produced from that affair, and the collapse of a great temple edifice David had been constructing. The play would end with David weeping, but repentant, and turning to begin rebuilding the ruined temple, representing his disgraced morality. Instead of this, the temple collapsed immediately the moment David and Bethsheba locked eyes, which somewhat gave the game away.
Sera did not bother to see the audience’s reaction when the curtain closed. She’d already left from sheer embarrassment. She was helping the troupe pack up, so the lot of them could scatter to cope with this catastrophe in their own way. Once the curtain closed and the actors departed the stage, she handed Saul his last payment, a polite, if curt, farewell, and departed. She avoided the rest of the festival, marinating in her disappointment at the bottom of a nearby lake.
Eventually, evening did come, and Sera slunk her way back into the city. She spoke briefly with her troupe, congratulating them on the work they did, and laboring to encourage their spirits. The production of the Davidiad had gone horribly wrong, but these were technical and production errors, not fundamental flaws. They would try again, after taking time to rest, recover, and focus on building back up to such a grand production with greater skill and experience. Their reach had, quite simply, exceeded their grasp, and ruin had come because of hubris. They would recover from this, and move forwards.
Much as she managed the speech, she felt like she was having to put on her own performance to manage that. Privately, the failure on such a massive stage hung over the young dragoness. She quietly made her way into the palace, and made her way to where Leon and Cassandra were. Unfortunately for her, the pair were currently in the process of discussing the festival. Glumly, she sat silently, nursing a large bowl of wine as Casandra and Leon deliberated a victor.
“The first step is that we can scratch off any troupes that simply re-enacted an existing play. Those were simply derivative, and giving a victory to that in our first festival sets an unfortunate precedent.” Cassandra remarked, working off a clay tablet listing the various performances. Lines went through about a third of the participants. “We can also do away with anything that tried to relate to Iskandar or my own dynasty, and especially that gods-awful recreation of our little scheme to destroy Tyndareus.”
“I personally found that one funny.” Sera piped up, remembering the comically inaccurate play. “Though they did manage quite the trick with their costume for me, I’ll need to get in touch with their costume department to see how the internals worked.”
“It was funny, mostly because it was inaccurate enough we could probably bring a suit for slander, libel, and slanderous libel against them.” Leon grumbled with arms folded. He had been made the butt of many a joke in that production, with the comedy of the valiant warrior being utterly surpassed by two women being a common refrain. “Beyond that, we don’t want to give the wrong impression about what exactly is acceptable to say about a queen.”
“The Corinthians have something of an irreverent streak, that much is for certain. Unfortunately we can only bring slander, libel, and slanderous libel and not treason, as they are presently foreigners.” Cassandra demurred. “Still, delivering sanctions on the Ember Island Company could be an effective way to get the message across to Corinth that a more peaceful Macedon is not a pushover.”
“With regard to the reproductions, what about The Choir’s Apologia?” Leon asked, throwing Sera a metaphorical bone. She ate literal bones as well, but if Leon threw her one he’d soon find out what it was like to skydive before the invention of a parachute.
“Disqualified as well. It deviates from the standard formula, but relies on you already understanding it. Really, if you didn’t know much about theatre to begin with, at lot of it would be lost on you. It ultimately came off as pretentious, and despite its inherently kind of ridiculous premise, was more depressing than anything. This sort of meta-commentary might work better for the sake of humor rather than trying for serious drama. Trying it here simply made the play exhausting and the sort of thing Tartarus really felt like it was mocking. That said, its pretention and grim character could give a good impression that the Macedonian theatre scene is serious and educated, but then I’d have to watch so many more like it. I don’t have enough absinthe to get through more than about one of those in a single festival.” Cassandra replied to that, and drew a second line through Apologia to emphasize her point. Seramis shrank into her cushions.
“Ah, so you enjoyed Tartarus then?” Leonidas asked in turn, trying to navigate the conversation to something less liable to torment the dragoness.
“Oh I most certainly did, but we can’t give it the win. As amusing as it is, it’s ultimately a very limited production. I like it, but giving it the victory would indicate a degree of “small scale” theatre in Macedon. I don’t want to give anyone else opportunity to degrade the work that’s been done here by suggesting that the Macedonian theatre lacks ambition.” Cassandra said with a sigh, and began crossing out any plays of similar scale.
“Which would be possessed by the Davidiad, but we all know how catastrophically wrong that went, so pray spare me whatever salt you were going to pour into that wound. I know that with all the bacchanalian delights available, you probably have managed to find someone who enjoys being tormented, but I am not that someone. So please, if you’re going to continue trying to murder me with words, use the ones that summon that lightning ball that nearly splattered me across the wall. It was a gentler execution.” Seramis grumbled, finally speaking up for herself.
Cassandra realized she’d gone to far, and put down the tablet. “I’m sorry Sera, I meant to tease, but not be cruel. I actually would agree that the Davidiad’s ambition was most impressive, and if not for some production hiccups, I think it might have had a chance at winning. I do tease, but I really do appreciate all the work you’ve put in to this, not just your company, but allowing this whole festival to go off. So, please forgive me if I’ve stepped too far from jest into mockery.”
“It’s fine, simply a very fresh disappointment. I’m afraid I missed most of the festival as I was busy running things or, well, pouting in a lake.” Seramis replied, waving away the problem with her tail. “So aside from everything you’ve disqualified, what do you think actually won?”
“I do have a personal preference.” Cass admitted, though she seemed a touch embarrassed by it. “The Court of Autumn.” The other two looked at her carefully with that. The Court of Autumn had been a much more romantic retelling of the story of Hades and Persephone, focused on the courtship of the pair, and the conflict that arose from a disapproving and overbearing Demeter. Neither of the pair had expected Cass to favor a romance, and their expressions showed it plainly. Cassandra merely shrugged. “We all desire what we cannot have, and it comes to a question of character whether we become envious of those lucky enough to have it, or delight sorrowfully that another is so blessed, even if they might not realize it.”
“I mean, I can’t deny that it was very well done. If I didn’t know better then I’d say that the two leads actually were a couple.” Leon replied with a nod. “It certainly doesn’t lack for ambition either, nor courage to speak the names of the Dread Queen and Lord With Many Guests so commonly.”
Cass smiled at that. “The fact that they do so is also part of why I like it. Persephone and Hades are dead, all the Olympians are. The reverence shown to corpses is illogical.”
Seramis processed this information, and considered her memory banks. “The company behind it, they’re one of the Theban companies, the Men of the Muses, correct?” She asked, and Cass checked, then nodded. “Ah, then yes, the two leads are actually husband and wife, they’ve got something of a specialty for romances as a result.”
“Write, or as the case may be, act, what you know.” Cassandra said with a shrug. “So we concur, The Court of Autumn is the victor?”
“I can’t argue against it.” Leon replied.
“Nor can I, but that’s more due to the aforementioned lack of context. One can make arguments without information, but I have a bit too much respect for the pair of you to engage in full sophistry.” Seramis admitted begrudgingly.
“Well, that absence may actually work to our advantage, returning from these pleasant distractions to the business of rule.” Cassandra said with a smile. “The Latins were particularly delighted with Tartarus, and actually wished to see the director. Said director was currently indisposed, but they have extended something of an open invitation. I think that accepting would provide quite the opportunity. It isn’t often one has a chance to walk right into the midst of a potentially hostile camp and see what they’re up to under guest-right.”
Seramis rose in interest at the idea, and cracked her neck. Cracking such a long neck was a process, creating a rippling crackling sound as vertebrae popped along the serpentine trunk. She grinned in anticipation. “I’ll melt myself a new dress.”

A few years ago, I was a senior in high school and I was stuck choosing between pursuing a degree in Biology or Computer Science. I was good at both, but I felt a certain attachment to Biology because I had a great teacher who made learning about the human body and life so fascinating. But on the other hand, I loved coding and creating programs that could solve real life problems.
So, guess what did I do? I flipped a coin! Kidding, I wish I could solve important stuff like this with a coin flip. In reality, I decided to apply a mental model which I learned from Charlie Munger, called the Decision Matrix.
I made a list of pros and cons for both choices and weighed them based on my long-term career goals, interests, and passion. I considered the availability of jobs, salary ranges, growth opportunities, flexibility, and the impact I could make in each field. This type of analysis is also included in another mental model known as SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats).
It took me a couple of weeks to fully evaluate each side, but eventually, I chose Computer Science. Though Biology was fascinating, I knew I could make a larger impact and pursue more meaningful work in the tech industry.
Looking back, I can honestly say I made the right decision. Today, I work with a team of software developers creating programs that aid in medical research, essentially combining my love for both fields. Without such a structured decision-making process, I may have chosen a path I'd later regret.
P.S. This story, however well it might fit, is hypothetical (sorry, no Nobel Prize in Biology or Tech Billionaire here). But it's to show you that applying mental models like the Decision Matrix or SWOT analysis in your educational decisions can really help! Like they say, "It's all fun and games until you have to decide your career path".

I have been reading posts in this sub for awhile out of interest and just wanted to share an idea that probably no one has ever mentioned to you. If you are a more human services minded person consider a career working with people who are blind or visually impaired. You could potentially work with children or adults. Like the schools? Become a licensed teacher of the visually impaired. Love being outdoors and walking around? Become an orientation and mobility instructor. Passionate about tech? Assistive Technology Specialist. Love to teach people to cook and meet their daily needs? Vision Rehab Therapist. There is a HUGE need in this area with thousands of open jobs. You do typically need a specialized degree to do this work but places like the University of Massachusetts Boston for example have fully online, part time programs and most programs nationally have partial to full tuition support because there is such a personnel shortage. It’s really rewarding work that you can make a solid salary doing (50-90k a year depending on location typically) with benefits and retirement, etc. Work for the VA and get that great federal pension.
Just something to consider that you probably have never even heard of before!!

Hi, I'm writing because I am applying to be a 5th grade teacher. Before becoming a teacher, I was a paraprofessional that worked with all grades, but mainly 4th and 5th. After getting my teaching degree, I had to take a preschool teaching position because at the time, the Elementary schools were hiring people that had more teaching experience. I have had some inrlterviews over the years, but they have mainly been for lower grades. I would prefer to work with older grades, but each time i apply to a 4th or 5th grade position, its almost as if they don't see me as a teacher that can teach upper grades because I've been teaching preschool curriculum for the last 3 years. How do I explain to a principal I am capable of doing it?

I work in the Pacific Northwest for a large hospital system. Last year the nurses union negotiated pay that resulted in nurses making almost the same per hour on pay scale per experience than PAs and NPs (per leadership). This resulted in some complaints, discussions of unionizing, and ultimately we did get a minor pay increase which stopped union talks overall. Because I get paid for a 40 hour work week but am salaried and work closer to 50 hours/week, they are likely getting paid more/hour still. One nurse told me at the hospital he is making $75/hour, with about 20 years experience as an RN. My salary is based on $72/hour over 2000 hours/year (assumes 40 hour weeks) with 9 years experience as a PA. My prior work experience before PA school is not considered for the pay scale and I don’t think it needs to be. These same nurses are striking this month. This may not be fully over a wage negotiation, as I know staffing and patient ratios are always a part of these talks, but I imagine it’s included.
People are leaving nursing to become NPs, taking a salary, and getting their pay cut overall based on hours worked. When we offer to new grad NPs it’s clear the comp is a disappointment coming from their recent jobs as RNs.
Is the logical thing that nurse unions are so powerful in this area that they will just make more than us with less liability, or make less but only work 32-40 hours per week with actual breaks? Do we need to unionize too? It seems silly when overall the culture and pay is good, but i feel like I should be getting a little more than nurses given the extra education and liability. Some nurses only have associates degrees and I have a masters.
Please note, in case anyone misunderstands this, I do think nurses are great and deserve to be well compensated and have good work environments. I just also think that practicing medicine should result in a higher pay scale.

We all know just how bad our public schools have become, just look at all the recent teacher adjacent posts that often end up on our subreddit 1,2,3,4.
Educators, teachers, parents, researchers, and students accurately point out to a number of variables contributing to the deterioration of the quality of public education. Major ones include:

• Systemic defunding of the public education system
• Push to privatize the public system via charter schools
• Low salaries for teachers, and teacher shortages
• Overcrowed class sizes
• Decreasing parental involvement with at-home education
• Coroding influence of smartphones and social media
• Over-emphasis on standardized testing
• Funding inequities

But I argue that even if we found a way to address all the above we would still be left with an education system that is wholly un-equipped to impart the next generation with the skills, the knowledge, and the vision of the future needed for our civilization to successfully overcome the challenges that will be thrown its way as the great unraveling takes place.

Historical background on the origins of mass-schooling systems

Before i get into what i think are the root problems with our education system, I think it's important to have a look back at history and understand where our current education system came from. Without turning this into an askhistory thread, the education system that dominates america and the vast majority of the world is based on the prussian education system. Basically, the Prussian model was the first serious attempt at creating an educational system that was compulsory for everyone within a nation, which stood in contrast to the mainly religious and village-based education systems that existed prior that, where education was more decentralized and tailored to the needs of local population.
The motivating reasons for creating this compulsory national schooling system are diverse. Part of it came from the enlightenment-era humanist figures within the prussian state who believed in the moral good that came with making education, especially liberal education, more accessible to the masses, but a larger part of the motivation came from the ruling elites and their desire to maintain control over the population by instilling a nationalist sense of obedience and a deference to authority figures. This isn't just speculation, there's lots of historical records showing that this was an explicit goal of the Prussian state. For example, Johann Felbiger, a prussian goverment minister who was heavily involved in advising Frederick II on the new compulsory national education system argued that the main goal of the education system should be to foster "loyalty, obedience, and devotion to the King" (Melton 2002, page 186). According to Melton, the peasant rebellions of the 1740s–1750s were the primary reason that motivated the king’s interest in creating this national compulsory education.
The point i'm making is that contrary to popular belief the function of the education system as we know it today isnt to create a well-educated, creative, citizenry capable of critical thinking like was imagined by enlightenment humanists such as Humboldt. Instead, the primary function of national compulsory education systems is to serve the goals of those in governing positions, whether that be kings, dictators, autocrats, corporate CEOs, prime ministers, ect, to prevent the population from developing the cultural toolset to criticize and challenge dominant institutions of power.
Things like the pledge of allegiance, and signing the national anthem are quite explicit attempts at promoting loyalty to the state, but the prussian system excels at fostering a sense of obedience to authority through all the implicit messages it sends to students. For example, the huge emphasis on testing + grading ends up signaling to students that what's important isn't to think critically and independently about things, but rather what's important is to follow directives from authority figures and to do as you are told, because when you do this you receive the best grades. The more time you spend doing rote memorization of what your teachers tell you to study, the more you succeed in the system, and the more time you spend thinking deeply/creatively about the subject matter content the worse you do on tests.
Having gone through grad school, I always found it hilarious that all the top research universities are deeply aware of just how terrible the public educational system is at fostering a productive environment for real learning. All the best universities structure their programs in complete opposition to the prussian model, they intentionally create a culture where challenging your professors is actively encouraged, learning occurs mainly via roundtable style seminars (instead of predominately via the lecture model), learning occurs via doing instead of testing, learning outside the classroom is heavily encouraged, involving the greater community in your learning is encouraged, even the literal physical design of the best universities are done in ways to maximize spontaneous social interactions by creating lots of 3rd spaces where people are free to be "moved by external leisure or internal pressures toward learning and research.”, as Humbolt said about what education should be about. I'm sure the others here who have gone through grad school know what im talking about. I'd even say that a feature shared by productive and successful grad students is the ability to unlearn all the implicit ways of knowing taught to you throughout high school and even in the first half of an undergrad degree.

Our education system can't keep afloat if people start questioning the validity of the progress narrative

As I've established above, public education systems worldwide are modeled after the prussian education system, which aimed to instill in citizens a sense of obedience to authority. This approach was designed to minimize the risk of popular uprisings that could challenge the power of those in governance positions.
For the last 200 years this education model has had its issues but for the most part it managed to survive thanks to the carbon pulse and the age of constant economic growth that accompanied it. With the huge influx in public funding coming in from the massive energy surplus that fossil fuels introduced, lots of the core issues intrinsic to the prussian model where basically kept at bay by throwing trillions of dollars at the educational system (and even then only achieving very marginal improvements). The issues with the education system were also kept at bay because for the most part, the cultural zeitgeist around the myth of progress was true (atleast in the developing world). What I mean is that the dominant narrative about future expectations that you were told in school mostly turned out to be true. This shouldn't be overlooked when it comes to understanding the crisis unfolding in our schools today. Psychologically people need to be able to ground themselves in a narrative that affords them a certain level of stability. It's easy to overlook the issues with the prussian education system when at the end of the day most people irrespective of how well they do in school can expect a rising quality of life, affordable housing, and good paying jobs. People can tolerate a certain amount of authoritarianism and come to respect it if they know that at the end of the day if you do what you are told you will be rewarded for it.
Young people today know that the school system and the adults are lying to them about what the future holds. The buffer that the progress narrative once provided to grease the wheels of the whole system is quickly evaporating. Kids are now constantly put in a position that maximizes cognitive dissonance between the values they are taught in school and the reality they know to be true around them. This type of generalized sociological crisis, is precisely what is captured by the term "metacrisis".
This is why i think the solutions to fix our education system run much deeper than simply a discussion about teacher salary, class size, or funding inequities. The issues run to the spiritual core of what education means, what it's for, and who is meant to benefit from it? As long as we avoid trying to answer those questions when thinking about reforming our education system we will keep failing future generations.

No Child Left Behind shows just how far off the deep end we are

Here's a concrete example that illustrates just how far off the deep end we are when it comes to not only reforming our education system but also just being able to accurately assess the problems in the first place. Take the now infamous "No Child Left Behind Act", one of the most significant educational reforms in the US since the G.I bill. No child left behind? sounds good right? So what did the bill aim to reform? What did the goverment identify as being the most pressing educational issue in deep need of reform?... The major concern was the that America's economic security would be threatened if nothing was done to boost school performance (this meant increasing grades) in the face of increasing international competition....
As most educators know, in practice what happened is that this "reform" just ended up doubling down on all the worst aspects of the prussian system. It increased the emphasis on testing, leaving even less time for teachers to foster creative learning environments, and instead incentivized teachers to become mere tutors to help students learn the best tricks to achieve high scores on standardized test so that they can get a good college placement. This is the type of outcome you would expect of an education system that prioritizes valuing technical capacities (scoring high on your ability to memorize the periodic table) over capacities like being able to make sense of the world, or being able to find meaning and purpose in life.

The last domino to fall: Genuine teacherly authority

The worst part of all this is that apart form the carbon pulse, and the credible trust people had in the progress narrative, we are now losing the only other thing that held up our modern education system together: which is the value that truly exceptional teachers brought to the table. These amazing teachers were the only vehicles that allowed for those rare moments where meaning, life-purpose, and sense-making were informally introduced to the curriculum despite the fundemental logic of the prussian system working agaisnt it. We all know just how important these teachers were in the education system. Just ask people what their best memories of high school were. You are likely to hear many stories about that one teacher who changed their lives, that one teacher who was able to truly connect with them on a deep level and gain their trust. That one teacher who taught them invaluable life skills that motivated them to keep going despite all the forces working agaisnt them.
Those teachers are mostly all gone from the public school system, even the most dedicated and hard working teacher can only take in so much abuse, they can only be devalued for so long before they give up and move on to greener pastures. This is where we are. This is the situation teachers have been warning us about in recent years. Today millions of kids are going through an educational system where even the teachers are abandoning them. The social fabric won't be able to handle this for much longer. Civilizations that abandon their youth will collapse.
People who look at the situation honestly really shouldn't be surprised by the increasing lawlessness in classrooms, the decrease in literacy, and the mental health crisis in youth. Someone who looks at the situation superficially might conclude that we need to go down the strongmen route and force students to respect teachers. But again, those magical moments where students and teachers form a genuine bond that allows for deep learning can only be fostered in an environment where students have a reason to value the knowledge that the teacher possesses. When students realize that the way to succeed through the education system is by learning how to memorize information and how to cheat without getting caught, students no longer have the incentive to value the teacher for the knowledge they have related to their domain of expertise. As soon as schools lose the capacity to produce a relationship between students and teachers built on genuine respect and trust, where deeper, more vulnerable, and more meaningful conversations can be had, you lose the capacity to impart the knowledge required to not only maintain industrial civilizational structures, but more critically you lose all hopes of being able to teach future generations the skills and knowledge they will need throughout the great unraveling.

Nothing hurts more than being abandonned

Just try to place yourself in the shoes of a 14-year-old entering high school. You've been told repeatedly that your generation is suffering from a mental health crisis with suicide rates up almost 200%. You are repeatedly told that this is most likely caused by social media corporations having free-reign to design apps that directly abuse your under-developed limbic system to more easily hijack your reward system and create unwanted addictions that make you depressed. Despite this you notice that the adults of the world who are supposed to be protecting you from harm are not only failing to regulate these social media corporations but even your school administration can't even be bothered to enforce their own policies that prohibit smartphones from being used in class. Even worse, you come home after school and you notice that even your parents dont even bother imposing restrictions on phone use at home. This is the type of day-to-day environement that a majority of kids experience. Obviously, they are gonna start to internalize that the crucial institutions responsible for their wellbeing are actively abdicating on their responsibily to care for them and to prepare them for the future. In this environement it is quite logical to expect students to reciprocate with the same lack of respect shown to them by the institutions. You can make the same argument for a bunch of other issues our society is completely failing to adress, like the climate crisis. The kids aren't stupid they know we are failing them. And this is what hurts them. Nothing hurts more than knowing that those who are meant to care for your well-being end up abandoning you.
And so all this begs the question, how will our education system be able to cope in the age of the great unraveling? What happens when the ecological, economic, geopolitical, and energy crises become so severe that teachers are no longer able to imbue a sense of legitamacy to their authority when the curriculum they are forced to teach becomes so detached from the reality that encompasses the expectations students have about their future? Will those in positions of power allow radical reforms to the educational system to take place in order to ensure that future generations are equipped with the knowledge and skill sets required to thrive in a low-energy, simplified, and de-globalized civilization? Or will elite panic lead them to double down and further cement efforts to preserve the system as it is, with it's focus on piting students agaisnt each other via mass testing, prioritizing a cirriculum that instills dangerous expectations about the future, and a system that increasingly abandons millions of it's youth in a deep crisis of meaning and loneliness. I think i know the direction we are going, but hopefully i'm proven wrong.

Hello everyone,
I’ve just recently started working in the Toddler classroom at an international preschool in Japan. I could use some advice as it’s my first time working with kids that young (I have a bilingual teaching degree for elementary and mostly taught Kindergarten so far).
I’m the Lead Teacher with 6 kids in my classroom, I have help for bathroom and diaper changes from a bilingual Japanese teacher. The school is pretty strict with their schedule and classroom rules and I feel like some of it is not age appropriate?
The room is very small and I have to set up tables for lunch time with a large blue tarp underneath it. While I’m doing that the kids have to sit down by themselves in a tiny space on the floor so I can set up the tarp (to protect the carpet from food) and carry and open the tables.
It’s only been a week but I’m having a really hard time to get the kids to sit down and wait while I set everything up. They start running around which makes setting up difficult and dangerous. I’m not even allowed to give them anything to do as they have to learn to sit and wait. During lunch time also the 3 year olds come into the room so I have to set up 4-5 tables and my 2 year olds have to wait a long time. Clean up is even worse because now I have to keep the 3 year olds off the tarp as well so I can fold it up.
I know it’s going to take a while for the kids to get used to me but I’m really worried sb is going to get hurt. I also have a new girl who keeps running out of the room while I set up (the doors are all open). I feel like I need 4 more hands to do everything I’m expected to do. The legal ratio in Japan is 6:1.
Long story short: is it reasonable to expect 6 2 year olds to sit in a wide open room but tiny spot only while I carry and set up tables?
Edit: and if anybody has some classroom management advice for toddler classrooms I’ll gladly take it too. Especially for transitions and clean up time.

Need help. Best way to fine a new job. I’m middle aged. Masters degree and teaching certifications in early childhood Ed and early childhood special ed. Almost 20 years experience. Cannot get a job in a school district because I’m not elementary certified. At this point in my life I’m not going back to school. I've been working providing home based services. State keeps cutting the rates. There's no benefits or retirement. As mush as I absolutely love my job I need to move on. I'm in a very high cost of living area. At minimum I need to make 75,000-85,000 just to survive. Would rwaistucally need to be closer to 100,000. Many jobs in this price range I don't qualify for. Ive sent in many resumes but never hear back. I don't know if it my age or my resume being very specialized to early intervention. What's the best way to find a job and get hired? Directly email companies, websites like indeed? I love working with kids, I work well with families, I have expensive experience working in many different types of communities. I also, have a background in newborn photography, I am very creative. Would love to work from home due to some family issues, but not a must. Very Open to other fields. I do worry that after 20 years of working with toddlers that my personality may not work well in other jobs. I'm very upbeat preschool teacher like. Many people immediatly say I remind them of Ms.Rachel.

My problem is huge, and I could be spending weeks writing down how colossally-large this problem is, or at least, how large the problem appears to me.
Well, when I say "problem", I mean multiple problems, that just seem to join into a single & large problem.
I'm posting this under a new & separate account (mods, please don't delete this), as I do not want all of this being associated with my real identity. And just to clarify, these problems are real, and they are happening to me right now, and have happened to me all my life. I just want to be as anonymous with this as I can.
First paragraph starts here...
The first memories of my life started when I was only three years old. Well, not my first memories, but at least my first comprehendible blobs of memories. It starts off with me being woken up by my father, which at that time he was around his early 40s. After he woke me up, I [barely] remember me following my dad, at a hallway, at my dad's job. He worked as a professor at a university. I remember the ambient being very cold & dark, so I remember lying down on the sofa, at my dad's office. I'll go back to this in a moment.
I never knew that there was something wrong with me, until I saw how others perceived me. I've gone to many therapists & doctors in my lifetime, concerning mental health, and never had anything resolved, just more problems added. Although I am currently 16 years old, I turn 17 in a few days. A few years ago, I was in an argument with my father (I don't remember why), and he started saying somewhere along, that [whatever that started the argument], was because I had autism. I already knew/suspected that there was something wrong with me at that point in time, but that's the first time I ever was informed that I was diagnosed with autism, and that's the first time I knew that I was truly fucked up in the head. I believe he told me somewhere along, that he knew, because the psychiatrists, or whatever doctors I've met, had informed him about the diagnosis, but not me. He told me that many of my teachers already knew. I remember a few years before, a substitute was asking everyone in the classroom (while I was at the restroom), if I had autism, as what I assume that he was making fun of me. I only ended up knowing about this, because some of the kids told me about it. That's when I knew that his purpose of asking his question was to make fun of me. But about what my father told me, I was surprised, and when I went home, I asked my mother if I had autism, and she broke down and said yes.
Back to the first paragraph, I remember that many following days of the year, whenever my father would leave me in his office to go print some papers, I would start to cry very loudly, sometimes even getting other staff involved, as they were worried of what was going on in my dad's office. I don't know why this happened. I usually look back to those times, and sometimes make myself conclude that I was crazy, ever since I've ever gained consciousness. However, sometimes, I also feel like this isn't true.
Either before this, or after, I remember also attending a daycare, where there were many other kids my age. I remember only having maybe one or two issues there, but any normal person has one or two issues every once in a while—right? There, I was capable of socializing with the kids of my age, without any problem at all. Matter of fact, my best friend at that time, was actually a girl, completely opposite of my gender, something that isn't really common, or at least I believe isn't that common. I'll later reference this. I met her when I was three years of age, and the last time I met her, was around 1 or 2 years ago. Me and her hung out a lot, as the daycare was in the university that my dad worked at, and her parents also worked there too. Last time I saw her, she lost a lot of her family members, however I don't exactly remember who, and don't want to share what I do remember, because I believe that would be invading her privacy. So when I heard about this (my father told me), I realized that maybe my life wasn't as bad as it was (I'll reference this later as well).
At three years of age, I don't really remember having issues with my father, and only my mother. She was always a very strict person, however I would sometimes bypass/break her rules, no matter how strict she would get. And even with all of this said, I was still attached, and still loved my parents, despite these issues. Although me & my parents live in the U.S., they are from South America (I was born in the U.S., and both of my parents became naturalized a few years ago). I remember that also, around the age of three, my parents were visiting South America, to visit some family. My mother took me to her friend's house, and there, was a lot of toys, as a three year old, I wanted to stay there, and so when my mother decided that it was time to go, I refused. I remember that she grabbed me, and started to walk to a taxi (this was probably around 2010). As she was leaving, I started hitting her and pulling on her hair, because I wanted to stay. I've had tons of other incidents like this in my life, however I do not know if this is normal with normal people, and I assume it isn't. I guess I was always a violent kid, because I always attacked and/or insulted my mother certain times.
But if all children are born innocent, then how can one become violent? This is something that was never answered. I was never violent with my father, until I turned 13. But I was never violent with any other family members. I only remember attacking my mother, and my father. All of this violence ended at my mid 14s. And all of this always contributed to my belief that I was crazy. I always had this almost-involuntary sense of rage, which a lot of times I've felt that have been triggered by my parents on purpose.
And still up to this day, when I feel rage, I'll insult my parents. But I've never done this with other family members, or anyone outside the household. I've never in my life felt the same level of rage that it takes to be violent with people, outside of the household. I don't know why.
I feel like a lot of this has stemmed from the fact that as a younger child, my father has been violent with me as well. I remember that when I was a child, I would hyperventilate after being [what most call] "spanked" by my father. My father has hit me since the age of what—three years of age, all until around 13 or 14.
Sometimes, I feel like the only solution is to start again from zero; to find a way, to run away, or to find a new family. But for me, it would be really painful to do so. Practically all my life I've felt that I love my family, but that I also want to run away from my family.
Back to the end of the fourth paragraph, although I only had a few major issues, such as the violence going around between me and my mother, and my father and me, things would change.
Back then, temporary but periodic problems like this one occurred. But when there weren't issues, everything else seemed fine. I seem to had [at that time], no other problems. By age 4, my mother and I moved from the city to a town. At the town, I attended a preschool. I made friends with another kid, but for some reason (I seriously don't know why), I also bullied (maybe that's a too harsh word) the kid. I don't know why, but this is a behavior that I would repeat a lot later. Although this was the first time I reportedly done something like this, I didn't actually know that I did it until my mother told me about it a few years later, during an argument. And that's when a flashback came, a blurry blob of memory; we were being served our food at the preschool, and when we all sat down, I pushed his food off of his plate, and onto the floor, but I don't actually know if it happened or not, I just suspect so. With all of the other memories of the preschool, I don't really remember any other problems with anyone.
When I turned 5, I attended kindergarten, like many others did, right? In kindergarten, everything went fine, besides one incident that I remember, in which I was messing with my best friend's (at that time) glasses. Again, that bullying behavior that I had. I don't know why I did this. I feel like I felt pleasure doing it. But I have no other memories of that happening that year. When I reached first grade, nothing else really happened, everything seemed fine, except that I would only see my father every weekend, as he worked at the city because of his work. I would cry some nights, begging my mother to move from apartment and get a house where we could have a backyard and could live all three together. So at three-quarters of the school year, we moved into the city, into a house.
Everything went normal, I switched schools, and things were fine. When I moved to a new school, for second grade, everything suddenly went wrong. I was bullied, at a much larger scale, and probably went through what maybe a few of you (those who are reading) have faced. This was every day of every week, of every month, of the school year.
I continue to believe today, that this bullying has changed who I am. I feel like I lot a lot of my innocence in the second grade. Before, I was a clean kid, usually shy, and after, I became a dirty person, and one who got in trouble a lot. I remember coming home from school, telling my parents how much I hated my life. After the second grade, that's when I stopped getting good grades, when I started getting phone calls home, and when I took a very bad downward spiral into a pit of misery and hopelessness. And with all of this bullying, I started bullying others too, in third and fourth grade, and a lot, and not like single incidents, now I mean repeatedly. Fifth grade became much more calm, and things seemed to have been getting better, with no problems with bullying, both incoming, and outcoming.
Since second grade, my mother stopped working at the university in the town, and started working for a private school in the city. Matter of fact, this school was, and still is one of the best schools in the state that I live in. When I turned 11, during the summer, I was accepted into the private school, for the sixth grade of middle school. When I attended, it was great. Everything was going good. I'll come back to this in a moment, but I must mention something important.
I've always been a person who was interested in the wonders of technology, especially with computers. As a kid growing up, anything that belonged in the category of electronics, was my passion. For me, it was my only way of escape from problems I faced IRL. When people turned to books during times of boredom, sadness, or grief, I turned to electronics. I don't know why. Maybe because since the age of two, I ripped keys off of my parent's old laptop.
Back to the seventeenth paragraph, the school required us to bring our own laptops. With this, I started learning a lot of things, such as programming, and physics. I loved it. Me and my friends would sneak to the back of the school during lunch, and would sometimes play a videogame together, or watch a funny video together. It was like our escape from turbulent households, even when being in the household physically. My parents would argue a lot, and my escape would be through the wonder of the internet. But one day, I lost all of the benefits, and still had to carry out the responsibilities. My parents took my laptop away from me, and I don't know why, but this caused a load of sadness onto me. I begged my parents to just leave me in school, and to never pick me up. Believe it or not, this happened in September. This put me in a state of nonsensical depression that I still feel up to this day. I was only 11 at this time, and I started becoming extremely dirty with my language, and very pornographic. Nobody else that I knew was at this level of dirtiness. Up to this day, I still am this way. The only things I find funny are pornographic jokes, and pornographic material. You could show me a regular meme, and if it's not pornographic or pornographically-related, dirty, or vulgar, I wouldn't find it funny. This has destroyed my personality, and I no longer am capable of socializing with women, and a good portion of men, because how weird and obscene I have become. I find it a lot harder to socialize with even my own mother. Just right now, opening my Downloads folder, there's 17 videos and images that I saved as "memes", and they're all either racist, offensive, pornographic, or just gore material.
I know I'm really fucked up in the head. Back to what was going around in sixth grade, all of the racist, offensive, and vulgar jokes & actions that I've made have brought so much emotional distress to my parents, that they've chose that I'd no longer go to private school, and onto a charter school instead. I was loved by many, or at least they showed approval of me at the private school, despite the fucked up things I've said and done. But in the charter school, things changed a bit.
Charter school is when I had to do sixth grade again. No, I didn't fail sixth grade at the private school, but my parents instead made me do sixth grade again. I actually passed with all A's and B's. Of course, my behavior there in the private school was never good. I got multiple punishments, for pointing the middle finger at my math teacher, saying disgusting sexual comments about one of my robotics instructors, and insulting a trans student, all of which I deeply regret today, not because I truly feel any embarrassment, but because I have forever left a mark on my mother's reputation at her job (or at least that's what my parents have told me), and am no longer able to attend that private school. I do not believe that these victims by the incidents I mentioned still care about what happened, but I truly apologize to them, if they, by any chance, ever see me again, or are reading this themselves.
As I moved onto charter school, there were new people, new chances, new everything, but I fell into another downward spiral, and ended up doing the wrong things, and hanging out with the wrong people. At age of twelve, was when I first actually saw violent pornography, and gore. I was friends with a kid who, both of us, were very vulgar. He showed me porn for the first time, and that's where I actually got addicted. A lot of other shit has also happened, but from here to now, at almost 17 years of age, I am a very messy person. My appearance is all messed up, my humor is messed up, my capabilities of socializing are messed up, my hygiene is messed up, and now my intellectual abilities are worsening as well.
As the last major problem that I'll be listing here, my mind is rotting. I don't know if it's all of the vulgarity, me not sleeping right, not exercising, not having enough socializing, not being the happy person I once was, or if it's all of the new medicine I'm taking. Yes, lately the medicine I've been prescribed has been really degrading to my mind, and my health, and I don't know if that's another major contributing factor or not.
I really, really need help, guidance, or ideas, because not even the tons of different doctors, psychiatrists, therapists, and the different psychiatric hospitals have been able to successfully help me out of this endless & dark tunnel.
I don't want to take my own life as a solution, as my father has told me that it is an upmost cowardly act, and don't want to leave my family with all of this pain.
I don't know if I should or shouldn't separate away from my family & find a foster home, and I don't know how I would do so if I had to. If I had to separate away from my family, how would I forget all of the good times I've spent with them? How would I forget my childhood? How would I run away? How would I tell my parents that it's time for me to go? Where would I find a job? What would I tell the rest of my family when it's time for me to go? How do I fix this?
I really need your help, whoever is reading this, please, just drop me a suggestion.

Although I didn’t quite know it back then. I only had a vague sentiment that I didn’t want my children to associate church/God as being a place that lacked joy and agency, with our “Christian lives” being dictated by rows on a Google Sheet (the notorious What’s Up Doc). All I knew was that this (GP culture) was not the kind of faith I wanted to pass down to my children because that was an inaccurate picture of who God is. Of course, I never told this to anyone because like I’ve mentioned before, I didn’t know how to articulate (or I was too scared to admit to myself, lest I be called “rebellious”) what all the reasons were for me to want to leave GP. So the following thoughts have been brewing inside of me for the last couple of years since we left in 2019, and I want to share it here because I think there’s a lot of needed discussion around the effect that GP’s theology and culture has on families in GP.
As I read through Scripture, read and listen to Bible experts, and reflect on my own experience working with youth through Element and IH, I can’t help but see God’s wisdom in creating natural families as the first irreducible building block of his community, including the church. This is a helpful article that can explain it much better than I can. https://au.thegospelcoalition.org/article/families-and-the-household-of-god-not-rivals-but-allies/ (Please take particular note of the section called “The Church Does Not Replace the Family” and onward) Essentially, Scripture even demonstrates that our “ministry” (which simply means “to attend to the needs of someone”) is foundationally to our family, per God’s design. And ideally as we cultivate the spiritual health within our families, then we can connect deeply and minister to one another in the communities we are in, from a place of health in our family. GP dangerously frames our God-given responsibility to be the main stewards of our families as “idolizing family.” Like most things, they flippantly call things “idols” so that members are perpetually living in fear of possibly “idolizing” something (i.e. marriage, family, career, money, hobbies, etc., but I won’t get into that here.) So in calling some basic things like spending time with your kids, actually showing genuine interest in their sports/hobbies, having regular family getaways without needing an excuse that it’s grandparent’s 70th birthday, visiting parents just because you love them (not for a holiday, birthday, or they’re sick or dying), etc. as “idolizing family,” has inevitably created a culture where it encourages and even praises “sacrificing” your time with family.
Oh, and why were we encouraged to sacrifice time with family and flee from the “idol of family”? Irony of ironies: it’s for the idol of ministry! In GP, ministry trumps family. And this kind of theology breaks apart the most crucial institution that God ordained: the family unit. Firstly, deeper involvement with GP starts to create a wedge between members and their parents as their lives get busier with church activities as a college student, and then with ministry as they get older. I still regret that I never got to go on a longer vacation with my parents right after I graduated because I had been drilled in my mind that I will be tempted to leave church and God when I am away for too long, especially if it was on vacation which is full of worldly temptations, so my parents were heartbroken that I kept insisting that I wouldn’t go. I was told multiple times by my leaders to be careful of what I told my parents too, especially when it was time for me to join our first church plant team in Austin, in case they make it difficult for me to actually move out there. My leaders told me not to even tell them the main reason was to plant a church, and told me to up-play my attending MBA school, and not mention too much about church. However, this felt kind of disingenuous to me, so I did end up telling them that I was moving for church and my parents wanted to meet with my leaders, so I kind of got in trouble for that. Also, I was just reminded as I was thinking about this, that when Sam and I mentioned that we would love to go to SoCal to work with youth there, my leader’s first question was “But doesn’t your family live down there? That won’t work out then.” OK people, think about why she would’ve asked me this? It’s obvious, right? She then said “They are going to want to see you guys.” And guess what I said? “Oh, you’re right.” Ugh.
(As an aside, I have a theory, which I’ve read might be confirmed by psychology, that many of us who were pulled deeply into GP and truly came to a point where we saw it as “family” had some kind of brokenness or unhealth in our natural families, so that it left a deep gap in our souls that was supposed to be filled by our parents and extended families. But when GP came along, it filled that gap so that the first time we were told as college students the suggestion to spend less time at home during the breaks, that was a no-brainer for a lot of us because home wasn’t necessarily a life-giving place anyways. It definitely wasn’t the case for me since I rarely looked to my parents or any other extended family members for any spiritual or emotional support or guidance on real life issues when I was growing up. So starting freshman year as I experienced all these older sisters taking care of me and guiding me, when my leaders encouraged me to stay during Thanksgiving, summer, etc., I didn’t even question it. I already didn’t want to go home so it wasn’t a sacrifice. I probably can count on my fingers among the people I know who are currently in GP who actually have a very healthy relationship with their parents and families, and even now no one immediately comes to mind as I write this. This conclusion was further highlighted when I spoke with someone recently who had regularly attended GP during her freshman year and went to Thanksgiving Retreat. She grew up in church, and had a very tight relationship with her family, and wanted to be a pastor’s wife when she was older because she had so much respect for the ones she knew. But when she experienced TR, she was so appalled by how arrogant Kelly Kang seemed to be and how the videos were all about praising the staff, that her first thought was to call her mom right afterwards to discuss it with her and the both of them felt that GP was not a healthy church, and she never came back. I told her in that moment, that what took her only a few minutes in a phone call with her mom to realize, took me more than 20 years to figure out, and she really dodged a bullet thanks to the fact that she had that kind of relationship with her mom. All this to say, I’m realizing that those of us that don’t have that kind of relationship with our parents and family are more susceptible to be sucked into groups like GP.)
Secondly, I think GP’s culture does a lot of damage to the families they are creating within their church. I personally feel so bad for GP kids, because it’s not their fault, they have no control over how they are being brought up. I’m afraid they will grow up believing some version of a God who only cares about “ministry” that even their own parents are willing to neglect their parental duties to their own children as they deprioritize family. So either they will grow up perpetuating this belief in the church, or abandon this God who seems far from loving and caring. A pastor who heard about GP predicted that the aftermath of their theology will show up in the children. I feel like we’ve already been seeing this amongst some of the kids that are growing up. 😥 A former GP member once told me how bad she felt for some of the GP kids she interacted with. She remembers how she saw the disappointment on one kid’s face when she found out last minute that her mom had to go to some ministry house for a last minute staff meeting, and was frustrated that someone else was picking her up instead of her mom AGAIN. Much of good parenting advice talks about being present with your kids in their childhood, and to make sure that you as the parent has the most influence on your kids, and that it is through the parents that children will first learn about God’s character. Sadly, one ex-GP older couple told me that one of the deepest regrets they have was that because their lives were so busy with ministry and responsibilities, they actually don’t have that many memories of their first child. This child, now a teenager, has also voiced similarly, that they were always with “aunties and uncles” but don’t recall spending much time with parents and as a family, so they feel like they are still getting to know each other. One time, Sam told me how one of his peers said he felt like he should just “leave it up to Joyland teachers” to share the gospel and lead their child to salvation, and we were horrified, like why absolve your parental responsibility to tell your own child about God? 🤦🏻‍♀️ I still remember when I was serving in Element, and one of the students, who generally had a very somber countenance, was beaming one day. I asked her why she was so happy, and she said how her family read through the Bible together one night for the first time, and it was the best time she’s had in awhile with her family. That made me sad that it wasn’t something that was a common thing for this family who was high up in leadership, and it made me think how her spiritual health was outsourced to the youth teachers…
Now sharing from more personal observation… Our family has discovered to varying degrees, the joy of youth sports (oh no, we’re such bad Christians!). Being in Alameda, we actually come across a good amount of GP kids, some who have been on the same sports teams as our kids. What we’ve observed (not all the time, but still noticeably and consistently enough), is that the parents would: rarely attend the sports games to support their kid, rarely attend together as a couple, rarely bring other family/extended family members to watch even if they lived close by, rarely come to watch the whole thing as they usually come towards the end, rarely pay actual attention to the game when they are there since they are on their phone, and rarely interact with the other parents as they tend to keep to themselves. OK, I’m very far from being a sports fan, but for the sake of my kids, I’ve had to learn A LOT so I can cheer for them and be genuinely interested in what they’re interested in, so I feel like I’m loving them by simply showing up and paying attention, and perhaps letting my crazy cheering side come out too. 😛I was so saddened by some particular things, like I would hear a couple of GP kids mention how they wished their parents came to their games more often, or when some of the other sports parents talked about how the parents of so-and-so GP kid rarely show up and just seems like they don’t really care about him. And also when another parent told me (and this one really got me bothered) how so-and-so GP kid’s parent was complaining about how coming to his sports games is such a waste of time, these sports parents are too much especially when they try to coordinate fun walk-up songs for the players, and that she shouldn’t have even showed up at all, should’ve just stayed in the car… During one game, one GP kid got hurt pretty bad and was on the ground crying, but his parents of course weren’t there, and I thought as that kid, it would’ve been really comforting for him to at least get some acknowledgement or hug from his parent. (I’ve made extra effort to cheer for these kids… Sigh…)
So, I want to address specifically the college students here, and anyone who is new to GP and coming down that funnel. I was once in your shoes. I received soooo many benefits from the ministry that GP produces. I had leaders invite me over for dinner, hanging out almost every other night, studying together, outings, not to mention weekly TFNs and SWS. And apart from those times, the leaders were also having their own multi-hour staff meetings and bible studies. However, please know that this is what’s going on behind the scenes. The time our leaders spent with us and in countless meetings all stem from this idolatry of ministry, that this “work of God” should supercede their first God-given stewardship of their own families. This is why GP is able to get so much done, you have all these older people who are almost always parents, willing to sacrifice the health of their own families to bring you this “amazing”, well programmed experience. All while saying that it’s such a blessing that their kids have so many “aunties and uncles” (which is completely inadequate as a substitute for your own parents!) At the end of the day, it’s the kids that experience the brunt of all of this obsession over ministry.
Also, I think GP’s obsessive view of sin also shows up in how we believe we should parent. So much of GP’s disciplinary focus is for members and staff to fit the mold, comply, get in line and behave like a good GPer. So when they don’t, we harshly correct, yell, shame, belittle. And of course this is going to trickle down into how we parent. I was so appalled one time when I was at a wedding ceremony and one of the GP moms who was there was getting so frustrated with her little toddler walking around and not sitting still, that she pulled him into a side room and started yelling at him at the top of her lungs (I know because we heard her even though the door was closed), and saying he needs to sit down, why are you not listening, you need to LISTEN!... And I’m thinking, my God, he’s 2yo, he’s not capable of sitting still for 2 hours, just let him walk around outside or something! This is how early the abuse can start for GP kids. When your theology tells you that your child is going to always act out of sinful desires, then that kid has already lost in this world. When most of your parenting is borne out of behavior modification, then there is precious little that is going to connect that family deeply, even if it is a “Christian” family….
I recently watched that Dancing for the Devil cult documentary, and I also agree there are some similarities. But what really stood out was the disconnection with family as being so similar to GP. During Covid, I think a lot of people woke up to the reality of the importance of family, and I witnessed a lot of people moving to live closer to family. But it’s sad that GP is cutting so many of those necessary ties, whether it’s cutting students off from the families they came from, (and sometimes even between siblings who attend GP together!), or cutting the natural bonds that should have formed between children and parents at GP. I thought it was interesting in the documentary how when the girl in the cult all of a sudden started to talk with her sister and parents again, that the sister thought it was all for show when she would post pictures of herself with her family on her social media to show everyone how she’s with her family since that was the whole drama that was being brought up against the cult. I don’t know if others noticed, but there was a period of time like in the last couple of years perhaps? When a bunch of GP people who initially didn’t have social media (since Ed would preach that we should not be on social media) all of a sudden got accounts and started posting pictures of them with their families, like either for Thanksgiving, or birthdays. I even heard about one couple who posted a picture of their baby’s birthday party where they invited the students they were ministering to, but they didn’t even invite their own family members and one family member didn’t know about the party until they saw it on IG! Anyways, it just made me wonder if there was some MBS or email that got sent out letting their members know that hey, our stance has changed about social media, and you can get an account and try to post pictures of you with family so people don’t accuse us of being a cult…???
Anyways, in conclusion, I think any church that isn’t helping you cultivate healthier families is a massive red flag. I think GP tends to overutilize the reasoning that “oh you’re a college student, you don’t need to tell your parents everything or ask for their opinion, you’re an adult now”. That sounds very enticing to a freshman trying to be their own person away from their parents, and of course some of that does need to happen. But regardless of our age, we need healthy families in our lives. And to the extent that it’s possible, churches can play a beautiful role in patching up the brokenness in families. A controlling group will do what they can to take the place of our natural families. Every year I am reminded how my decision to leave GP has brought so much blessing into our family that I could’ve never fathomed. And I am filled with immeasurable gratitude whenever I think about the life-giving kind of gospel, the true Jesus, the true God, that we get to show our children. I hope that by intentionally doing this for our children, that it can somehow cult-proof them as they grow up. Side note, there really should be a mandatory seminar on “How to spot cults” for college freshmen. It is so bizarre how many high control groups and cults target colleges and universities….
I would love to hear people’s thoughts on this, and apologies in advance if I don’t respond to every comment. I hope my learnings have been helpful for someone here.
Lillian Kim (formerly Chung) c/o 2004

I finished a degree in Education. Nag try ako magwork as a teacher sa isang private school 8k ang sahod, madalas delay sa sahod, kapag late ka you will be deducted sa salary mo pero kapag nag overtime ka, salamat lang sapat na! Passion ko talaga ang pagtuturo kaso walang pera! 😢😢😢 Nagkakasakit pa ako, wala man lang benefit para doon. Abonado pa ata ako sa lahat ng gastos ko sa pagtuturo.
I decided to change career. Magcacall center agent nalang ako. Hayst!
Ang hirap maging mahirap.

I finished a degree in Education. Nag try ako magwork as a teacher sa isang private school 8k ang sahod, madalas delay sa sahod, kapag late ka you will be deducted sa salary mo pero kapag nag overtime ka, salamat lang sapat na! Passion ko talaga ang pagtuturo kaso walang pera! 😢😢😢 Nagkakasakit pa ako, wala man lang benefit para doon. Abonado pa ata ako sa lahat ng gastos ko sa pagtuturo.
I decided to change career. Magcacall center agent nalang ako. Hayst!
Ang hirap maging mahirap.

I finished a degree in Education. Nag try ako magwork as a teacher sa isang private school 8k ang sahod, madalas delay sa sahod, kapag late ka you will be deducted sa salary mo pero kapag nag overtime ka, salamat lang sapat na! Passion ko talaga ang pagtuturo kaso walang pera! 😢😢😢 Nagkakasakit pa ako, wala man lang benefit para doon. Abonado pa ata ako sa lahat ng gastos ko sa pagtuturo.
I decided to change career. Magcacall center agent nalang ako. Hayst!
Ang hirap maging mahirap.

Computer and information sciences: $105,890 Engineering: $98,040 Engineering technologies and related fields: $90,610 Business management, marketing and related services: $87,980 Transportation and materials moving: $84,100 Mathematics and statistics: $83,440 Legal Professions and studies: $74,650 Liberal arts and sciences, general studies, humanities: $72,680 Multi/interdisciplinary studies: $71,940 Health professions and related programs: $70,960 

I graduated in early 2022 with great marks (85+ GPA) and have been struggling to find a permanent position at a reputable company. Despite having around two years of co-op experience, the job market has been challenging. Over the past few months, I’ve had several interviews, but many of the positions are temporary contracts tied to government funding, with salaries ranging from CAD 45,000 to 50,000. Given the high cost of living in the Vancouver area, I’ve calculated that I need at least CAD 60,000 to 65,000 to live frugally with roommates.
When applying to companies in Ontario, recruiters on LinkedIn have mentioned that the influx of international students with similar diplomas or associate degrees has saturated the market. Although BCIT caps its international student seats, we are often grouped together in the job market, in terms of it being a loophole to obtain Canadian residency status.
I’m considering furthering my education by pursuing a BTech or BSc degree, but I’m unsure if it would significantly improve my job prospects, especially since these degrees may not be well-recognized outside the local area.
Has anyone who graduated between 2022 and 2024 faced similar challenges? I would appreciate any advice or insights on navigating this tough job market.
Thank you!

Crosspost teachers and waldorf
Hello!
I’ve been interested in becoming a teacher since high school, but haven’t really wanted to go into the public school system.
Right now, after graduating, I’m attending college in my first year and I’m studying to get a bachelors degree in Elementary Education with an ESOL and reading endorsement. I also work at a Primrose School as an early childhood teacher for 3 year olds.
I have very minimal experience in working in childcare/with children (just over 1 year of working at the Primrose, as well as doing a small observation at an elementary school for one of my classes). I also have my 45 DCF hours that’s required in the state of Florida for early childhood education teachers in preschools.
As I’m trying to plan out my career path more, I find myself more interested in working in or teaching at a Waldorf school. I really enjoy the style of learning that is presented there over the traditional style of curriculum offered in public/private schools. I’ve always wanted to be able to help children learn and grow to their full potential, and lead them to become happy productive members of society.
My real hang up is, I don’t really know what kind of credentials I need to be a successful Waldorf teacher. What kind of education is needed to get hired at a Waldorf school? Should I continue with my same degree or switch paths? How should I gain the experience necessary?

Crosspost teachers and waldorf
Hello!
I’ve been interested in becoming a teacher since high school, but haven’t really wanted to go into the public school system.
Right now, after graduating, I’m attending college in my first year and I’m studying to get a bachelors degree in Elementary Education with an ESOL and reading endorsement. I also work at a Primrose School as an early childhood teacher for 3 year olds.
I have very minimal experience in working in childcare/with children (just over 1 year of working at the Primrose, as well as doing a small observation at an elementary school for one of my classes). I also have my 45 DCF hours that’s required in the state of Florida for early childhood education teachers in preschools.
As I’m trying to plan out my career path more, I find myself more interested in working in or teaching at a Waldorf school. I really enjoy the style of learning that is presented there over the traditional style of curriculum offered in public/private schools. I’ve always wanted to be able to help children learn and grow to their full potential, and lead them to become happy productive members of society.
My real hang up is, I don’t really know what kind of credentials I need to be a successful Waldorf teacher. What kind of education is needed to get hired at a Waldorf school? Should I continue with my same degree or switch paths? How should I gain the experience necessary?

https://sci-hub.st/10.1057/fr.1988.4 Feminist Review, No. 28, Family Secrets: Child Sexual Abuse (Spring, 1988), pp. 56-64
In the early 1970s, when a radical feminist consciousness pulled [incestuous abuse] out of the closet, we thought we were engaged in an unprecedented discovery. In fact, charity volunteers and social workers a century earlier dealt with incest cases daily, understanding them to be a standard, expected part of the caseload of a child-protective agency such as a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. How are we to explain this historical amnesia? Like the suppression of so much women's history and feminist analysis, this hiatus was not created simply by the decline in feminism between 1920 and 1970, but by an active reinterpretation of child sexual abuse. I shudder when I think about what this meant: not only because of the incest victims rendered invisible and mute, but also because of its threat to us today, the threat that great achievements in consciousness-raising can be rolled back by powerful ideological tanks. My motives in writing a history of family violence were thus far from disinterested.[1]
Charity and social workers in the late nineteenth-century United States were familiar with child sexual abuse and knew that its most common form of abuse was intrafamilial—that is, incest. Ten per cent of the family-violence case records of Boston child-saving agencies which I sampled, starting in 1880, contained incest (Gordon and O'Keefe, 1986; Gordon, 1984). Moreover, in their upper-class way these child savers had a feminist analysis of the problem: they blamed male brutality and lack of sexual control. They could safely offer such explanations because they believed the problem to occur exclusively among the Catholic immigrant poor, whom they perceived as of "inferior stock," crowded "like animals" into urban ghettoes. Thus, ironically, the very upper-class base of child-rescue work at the time promoted the identification of problems unmentionable by standards of Victorian propriety.
Despite these class limitations, the sympathy for child victims entailed by this sensibility was one of the major achievements of the nineteenth-century feminist movement. The attack on male sexual and familial violence was often disguised in temperance rhetoric. American women's historians have recently conducted a reinterpretation of temperance, acknowledging its anti-Catholic, anti-working class content, but also identifying its meanings for women contesting the evils that alcohol created for them and their families: violence, disease, impoverishment, male irresponsibility. Moreover, the feminist anti-violence campaign had significant successes. In the course of the century wife-beating was transformed from an acceptable practice into one which, despite its continued widespread incidence, was illegal and reprehensible, a seamy behaviour which men increasingly denied and tried to hide (Pleck, 1979). Indeed, the whole movement against child abuse which began in the 1870s was a product of a feminist sensibility in several ways: first, in opposing corporal punishment and preference for gentler methods of child training; second, in challenging the sanctity of the Victorian home and authority of the paterfamilias. Most manuals of child raising by the last quarter of the nineteenth century recommended physical punishment only as a last resort (Reposter note: Of course, this would still be child abuse. "Child training" is still a dehumanizing term. They didn't go anywhere nearly far enough.), and women's legal victories in child custody created a preference for maternal rights to children for a century.
Consider a few examples of incest cases from the late nineteenth century:[2]

In 1900 a thirteen year old girl has been placed out with a family in which the wife is absent. The SPCC worker reports that the "child's bed not slept in but [the father's bed is] much tumbled. The girl cries and dreads the night." (Case #1820A)
An incest victim reports, sometime in the 1890s, that her father "told her that it was all right for him to do such things and say such things to her, for all fathers did so with their daughters. Tried to force her to go to a hotel in Boston with him once. Also advised her to go with fellows to get money. Said that if she got in trouble he would help her out.…" (Case #2058A)

There were hundreds of these stories telling us not only that [incestuous abuse] occurred, but that child-saving agencies were aware of it and taking action against it. The publicity and fund-raising efforts of the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children focussed on intrafamily "carnal abuse" directly, unembarrassed to include it as part of the need for SPCC intervention.
In the early twentieth century the child-savers' view of child sexual assault changed significantly, and incest was de-emphasized. By the 1920s, although child-protective agencies continued to meet many incest cases, a three-part interpretive transformation had occurred: the locus of the problem was moved from home to streets, the culprit transformed from father or other authoritative male family member to perverted stranger, the victim transformed from innocent betrayed to sex delinquent. In other words, the fact that child sex abuse is overwhelmingly a family problem was obscured; instead it was pictured as rape by strangers on the streets. (Anna Clark has shown how a similar reinterpretation of adult rape took place (Clark, 1987).) This is not to say that there was no extrafamilial sex abuse; there was, but, compared to incest, it was greatly exaggerated in both public and professional discourse.
Several factors contributed to this reinterpretation. The professionalization of social work tended to weaken the influence of feminists and social reformers among child protectors, even as, ironically, more women entered child welfare casework as salaried workers. After the women's suffrage victory in 1920 the organized feminist movement fragmented and weakened. During World War I venereal disease became a major problem for the armed forces (it was for this reason that condoms became widely available at this time, first issued by the Navy to sailors); servicemen were presented as victims of disease-ridden prostitutes. After the war, fears of Bolshevism, sexual freedom, and feminism combined to create a "pro-family" backlash.
The implications of this reinterpretation of child sexual abuse were pernicious for women and girls. The existence of sexual abuse became evidence requiring the constriction and domestication of girls, and their mothers were blamed for inadequate supervision if the girls were molested or even played on the streets. What was once categorized as carnal abuse, the perpetrators virtually all male, was often now categorized as moral neglect—meaning that the mother was the culprit and the behaviour of the victim was implicated. Some of the "sex abuse" was relatively noncoercive teenage sexuality. Female juvenile sex delinquency was constructed as a major social problem in early twentieth-century America, and it was a vague, victimless crime. Girls who smoked and drank, dressed or spoke immodestly, or simply loitered on the streets were convicted of sex delinquency in substantial numbers and sent to reformatories (Schlossman and Wallach, 1978). During World War I near armed-forces bases it was the servicemen who were the innocents, their girl partners the sources of pollution. Even girls who had been raped were no longer victims but temptresses. I do not mean to deny that some girls behaved in socially dangerous and self-destructive ways, nor that they sought out sexual adventure but, as many students of sex delinquents and other runaways today have observed, high proportions, quite possibly a majority of these girls, were first victims of sexual assault, typically familial. They were, so to speak, squeezed out onto the streets in search of safety and/or self-esteem from homes that were even more destructive than the street boys or men who exploited them.
Above all, this reinterpretation of child sexual abuse removed scrutiny from family and home, restoring the curtain of impunity that surrounded those sacred institutions. This was the period of the discovery of the "dirty old man," the "sex fiend," and the "pervert," the stereotypical culprit in child sex abuse cases in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. As before, I do not wish to deny that such figures existed. Child protection agencies uncovered child prostitution, pornography rings and sex criminals who molested literally scores of children. The victims were not always brutalized; the children of the very poor—not only in the Depression but in earlier decades too—could be bribed into acquiescence and silence with a nickel, an orange, a pail of coal. However, even these nonfamilial molesters were rarely "strangers." They were often neighbours, accepted members of communities, often small businessmen or janitors who had access to private space.
There were two peak periods of hysteria about sex crimes: 1937-40 and 1949-55. The panic had official government sponsorship, led by none less that J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI. In 1937 he called for a "War on the Sex Criminal." Hoover's rantings about "degenerates" threatening "American childhood and womanhood" assimilated these sexual anxieties to nationalism, racism and anti-Communism. It bears notice that, in contrast to earlier periods of public agitation against sex crimes, as in campaigns to raise the age of consent in the Progressive era, women's organizations played no role in this campaign (Freedman, 1987).
Meanwhile social workers became less likely to investigate girls' typically euphemistic accusations of their fathers.

In 1935 a mother turned her daughter in for sex delinquency. Investigation reveals that the daughter, fleeing from an abusive father, who also beat his wife severely, had spent most of her time for 4-5 years with her maternal uncle and aunt. She accused her maternal uncle of molesting her steadily. However, the MSPCC physical exam indicated that she was a virgin,[3] so no action was taken. (#3555A)
A battered woman, terrified of her husband, is told by their daughter, who has become a "sex delinquent," behaving "vulgarly," that her father has criminally assaulted her. The mother says "she would speak to him." At court the police chief says he is doubtful about taking up the case as the girl's word is the only evidence the Government could produce; he would not question the father "as it would be asking [him] to incriminate himself." The daughter was committed to an institution. (#2057A)
In 1920 a mother is so fearful that her new husband will abuse her daughter (from a previous marriage) that every time she goes out she hires a babysitter to chaperone them. Yet when the daughter, now eleven, says she has been raped by a "stranger" whom she refuses to name, the social workers not only fail to question whether she might be shielding her stepfather, but decide that her accusation is not credible and brand her a delinquent—a liar, immoral, and uncontrollable. She is boarded out as a domestic. (#3085A)
In 1930 a 14-year-old girl alleges sexual abuse by her widowed father and begs to be taken out of his home. No action is taken until the father brings her to court on stubborn-child charges and she, as well as her younger sister whom she has been trying to protect are sentenced, separately, to institutions. (#3585)

In addition to references like these, in which the agencies did not investigate or prosecute, there were many others in which agency workers simply did not pick up the broad hints that girls threw out, hoping to draw attention to their plight. Social workers ignored statements like, "I asked my mother for a lock on my door." These girls were not usually bribed or intimidated into silence. Some of the recent discussion of incest emphasizes victims' fearful silence, but this evidence is based on the work of therapists, counselling incest victims years later, who have often by then reconstructed their stories on the basis of their guilt; my evidence, contemporaneous with the abuse, showed that these children were usually very active in trying to get help, more so, for example, than victims of nonsexual child abuse (Gordon, 1986).
Not only did social workers de-emphasize incest, but academic experts dismissed it as an extremely rare, one-in-a-million occurrence (Weinberg, 1955). Psychoanalytic and anthropological interpretations, associated respectively with Freud and Levi-Strauss, attributed to incest taboos a vital role in the development of civilization; this logic brought with it the assumption that these taboos were effective and that incest was, in fact, rare; but in terms of impact on treatment of actual cases, Freudian thought did not so much cause social workers to deny children's complaints and hints about sexual mistreatment as it offered categories with which to explain away these complaints. As Boston psychiatrist Eleanor Pavenstedt commented in 1954:

Most of us have trained ourselves to skepticism toward the claims of young girls who maintain they have been seduced by their fathers… We must ask ourselves whether our tendency to disbelief is not in part at least based on denial. The incest barrier is perhaps the strongest support of our cultural family structure, and we may well shrink from the thought of its being threatened. (Pavenstedt, 1954)

So did the dominant sociology of the family, which inverted Levi-Strauss's functionalism to prove that the incest taboo was operative because it had to be. For example, "No known human society could tolerate much incest without ruinous disruption" (Gebhard, Gagnon, Pomeroy and Christenson, 1965: 208; Davis, 1949; Bell and Vogel, 1963). The few nonfeminist historians to study incest replicated that error by studying public beliefs about incest, not behaviour (Wohl, 1979; Strong, 1973).
The rediscovery of [incestuous abuse] in the 1970s was, then, merely a reinterpretation, and it did not come quickly. Nonsexual child abuse was resurrected as a social problem in the 1960s in a movement led by physicians but stimulated by the influence of the New Left, with its sympathy for youth and critique of authority and the family. Without pressure from feminists, [incestuous abuse] first reappeared as gender-neutral. Indeed, the very classification of all forms of intrafamily sexual activity as [incestuous abuse] obscures the meanings of these behaviours. For example, sibling sexual activity, or sex between other relatives of approximately the same age, is extremely common, difficult to identify and not necessarily abusive. Mother-child incest is extremely rare and, in my findings, more often than father-child incest, associated with adult mental illness; by contrast incestuous fathers have extremely "normal" profiles (Gordon and O'Keefe, 1984; Herman, 1981). (Reposter note: I am skeptical about these two claims. Maternal CSA is significantly rarer than paternal CSA, yes, but I doubt that it's "extremely" rare, and an analysis of adult supremacy as an axis of oppression intersecting with misogyny clarifies this. I am also skeptical of all pathologization and saneism-inflected broad claims about abuser psychology. I have reason to believe she and her sources were biased by heterosexism in reaching this conclusion. In contrast, youth liberation feminists would emphasize the adultism, domestic power, and authoritarian motives in an intersectional manner.) Yet many child abuse experts throughout the 1970s ignored these gender differences (Kempe, 1980; Money, 1980). Others found ingenious ways of explaining away actuality with speculation about possibility. Thus social worker Kate Rist argued that "society has created a stronger prohibition against mother-son incest" because "it is most likely to occur. This has led to the intriguing situation in which father-daughter incest appears to have a lower natural probability of occurrence, is therefore less strongly prohibited, and in practice occurs more often" (Rist, 1979; 682).
Historians do not usually like to speak of the "lessons of history," as if she were some objective, finally definitive schoolteacher. But in many years of work at the craft, I have never come across a story that so directly yields a moral. The moral is that the presence or absence of a strong feminist movement makes the difference between better and worse solutions to the social problem of child sexual abuse; more, that the very same evidence of sexual abuse will be differently defined in the presence or absence of that movement. Without a feminist analysis, evidence of child sexual abuse means that danger lies in sex perverts, in public spaces, in unsupervised girls, in sexually assertive girls. There are few ironies more bitter than the fact that rape of children—that most heinous of crimes—has also been the crime most drenched in victim-blaming. As with adult rape, child sexual abuse without feminist interpretation supplies evidence and arguments for constricting and disempowering children.
Such a reinterpretation arose again in the United States in the mid-1980s, a reinterpretation aided, of course, by the real and increasing incidence of deranged killers attacking strangers. In the school year 1984/85 my then second-grade daughter was taught three separate programmes in her classroom about how to react to sexual abuse attempts, all of them emphasizing strangers, and all of them gender-neutral. The most publicized sexual abuse cases have concerned daycare centres, and often female teachers, although daycare centres remain, on the whole, among the safest environments for children. The statistics about child sexual abuse remain what they were a century ago: the most dangerous place for children is the home, the most likely assailant their father. Similarly a panic about missing children not only exaggerated their numbers a thousandfold, but completely misstated the source of such "kidnappings": neglecting to mention that noncustodial parents are overwhelmingly the main kidnappers; and that teenage runaways, often from abusive homes, are overwhelmingly the majority of the missing children.
What then is the best policy? My argument should not be taken as an implicit call for de-emphasizing the problem. On the contrary. The children's educational programmes and pamphlets have strengths, particularly in so far as they offer assertiveness training for children: if it feels uncomfortable, trust your judgement and say no; scream loud and run fast; tell someone. Of course it is difficult and inadvisable to sow distrust of fathers, particularly because the more intimate fathers are with children, the more responsibility they have for children, the less likely they will be to abuse them sexually. (Reposter note: I get what she's trying to say here, but this is phrased poorly IMO. Sowing distrust is fine. If it's genuinely unjustified, then the problem will resolve itself.) However, education for children should contain a feminist and an anti-authoritarian analysis: should discuss the relative powerlessness of women and girls, and praise assertiveness and collective resistance in girls; should demystify the family and even discuss that ultimately tabooed subject, economic power in the family. Education for boys must be equally brave and delicate. Boys are children too, and often victimized sexually, but they are also future men, and school age is not too early to ask them to consider what's wrong with male sexual aggression, to teach them to criticize the multiple and powerful cultural messages that endorse male sexual aggression.
Probably the most important single contribution to the prevention of [father-daughter] incest would be the strengthening of mothers. By increasing their ability to support themselves and their social and psychological self-esteem, allowing them to choose independence if that is necessary to protect themselves and their daughters, men's sexual exploitation could be checked. In the historical incest cases I sampled, one of the most consistent common denominators was the extreme helplessness of mothers—often the victims of wife-beating themselves, they were often ill or otherwise isolated, they were the poorest, the least self-confident and the least often employed of mothers in these case records. This is not victim-blaming; their weaknesses were not their fault, but part of the systematic way in which male supremacy gives rise to [father-daughter] incest. It was a gain that wife-beating and [father-daughter] incest have become more criminalized, but we cannot expect women to prosecute aggressively if their prospects for single motherhood are so bleak.
Moreover, women's very subordination often contributes to making them child abusers and neglecters. Although women do not usually abuse children sexually, in these case records they were responsible for approximately half the nonsexual child abuse (the same proportion they occupy in many contemporary studies). Unfortunately, feminists have avoided women's own violence towards children and analysed family violence in terms of stereotypical male brutality and female gentleness. Women's violence should not be regarded as a problem that will somehow weaken our feminist claims; on the contrary, these claims should not rest on assumptions of women's superiority […]. Women's mistreatment of children also needs an analysis of the damages caused by the sexual division of labour and the pattern of women's exclusive responsibility for child-raising. In the US, too, the rather middle-class radical feminist groups never made issues of social services a political priority, although such services are fundamental to women's ability to resist violence, to protect their children, and to parent better themselves.
This is not to say that a good feminist line will solve the problems of child sexual abuse, especially not where the abuse has already occurred. Like everyone else, feminists who deal with policy or individual cases must wobble through many contradictions. For example: the victimization is real, but the tendency to exaggerate its incidence and to produce social and moral panics needs to be resisted. The problem emerges from the powerlessness, the effective invisibility and muteness of women and children, especially girls, but the adult anxiety has led to children's false accusations, and children's sufferings will not be corrected by eroding the due process rights and civil liberties of those accused. Child sexual abuse needs a political interpretation, in terms of male power. However, the prosecution of culprits—however necessary—and the breaking up of families that may result do not always benefit the child victims. Especially if they are incestuous, sex abuse cases have something of the tragic about them, because once they arise, tremendous human damage has already occurred, and a politically correct analysis will not ease the pain. Still, that analysis, situating the problem in the context of male supremacy in and outside the family, is the only long-term hope for prevention.
Notes
Linda Gordon is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin/Madison. She is the author of Woman's Body, Woman's Right and the forthcoming book on family violence noted below.
[1] My book, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The History and Politics of Family Violence, is forthcoming from Viking/Penguin US in early 1988. References to my sources and more information on my research methodology can be found there.
[2] These and other excerpts are from case records of Boston, Massachusetts, child-protection agencies (see Gordon, 1988).
[3] The standard response to a sex abuse allegation was to look at the condition of the hymen (Gordon, 1988).
References
BELL, Norman and VOGEL, Ezra (1963) editors A Modern Introduction to the Family New York: Free Press.
BREINES, Wini and GORDON, Linda (1983) "The New Scholarship on Family Violence" Signs 8, pp. 490-531.
CLARK, Anna (1987) Women's Silence, Men's Violence: Sexual Assault in England 1770-1845 London: Pandora Press.
DAVIS, Kingsley (1949) Human Society New York: Macmillan.
DUBOIS, Ellen and GORDON, Linda (1983) "Seeking Ecstasy on the Battlefield: Danger and Pleasure in Nineteenth-century Feminist Sexual Thought" Feminist Studies 9, pp. 7-25; also Feminist Review no. 11 (1981).
FREEDMAN, Estelle B. (1987) "'Uncontrolled Desires': The Response to the Sexual Psychopath, 1920-1960" Journal of American History Vol. 74, no. 1, pp. 83-106.
GEBHARD, Paul, GAGNON, J. POMEROY, Wardell and CHRISTENSON, C. (1965) Sex Offenders New York: Harper & Row.
GORDON, Linda and O'KEEFE, Paul (1984) "Incest as a Form of Family Violence: Evidence from Historical Case Records" Journal of Marriage and the Family Vol. 46, no. 1, pp. 27-34.
GORDON, Linda (1986) "Incest and Resistance: Patterns of Father-Daughter Incest, 1880-1930" Social Problems Vol. 33, no. 4, pp. 253-67.
GORDON, Linda (1988) Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence New York: Viking/Penguin.
HERMAN, Judith (1981) Father-Daughter Incest Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
KAUFMAN, Irving, PECK, Alice L. and TAGIURI, Consuelo K. (1954) "The Family Constellation and Overt Incestuous Relations Between Father and Daughter" American Journal of Orthopsychiatry Vol. 24, pp. 266-79.
KEMPE, C. Henry (1980) "Incest and Other Forms of Sexual Abuse" in KEMPE (1980).
KEMPE, C. Henry and HELFER, Ray (1980) The Battered Child Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
MONEY, John, (1980) Introduction to the incest section in WILLIAMS and MONEY (1980).
PAVENSTEDT, Eleanor (1954) Addendum to KAUFMAN, PECK and TAGIURI (1954).
PLECK, Elizabeth (1979) "Wife Beating in Nineteenth-century America" Victimology Vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 60-74.
RIST, Kate (1979) "Incest: Theoretical and Clinical Views" American Journal of Orthopsychiatry Vol. 49, no. 4, pp. 680-91.
RUSH, Florence (1980) The Best Kept Secret: Sexual Abuse of Children Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
SCHLOSSMAN, Steven and WALLACH, Stephanie (1978) "The Crime of Precocious Sexuality: Female Juvenile Delinquency in the Progressive Era" Harvard Educational Review 48, pp. 65-94.
STRONG, Bryan (1973) "Toward a History of the Experiential Family: Sex and Incest in the Nineteenth-century Family" Journal of Marriage and the Family, Vol. 35, no. 3, pp. 457-66.
WEINBERG, S. (1955) Incest Behavior New York: Citadel Press.
WILLIAMS, Gertrude J. and MONEY, John (1980) editors Traumatic Abuse and Neglect of Children at Home Baltimore: Johns Hopkins.
WOHL, Anthony S. (1979) "Sex and the Single Room: Incest Among the Victorian Working Classes" in The Victorian Family: Structure and Stress ed. Wohl. New York: St Martin's Press.