Sorry for admitting that I listen to musicals do you still think I'm hot
Musical Theatre Song Contest: Round Three D
Submitter’s propaganda under the cut
As a writer, the thought of being paid $260 for helping write a show that has over 12.8 billion minutes viewed is sickening. The writers strike is absolutely crucial for the future of script writing, I can’t see anyone in this generation wanting to work for so little when the workload and potential payout is so massive
anyway jeff bezos could eradicate homelessness. he could literally give each homeless person 100k and it would only take less than .5% of his entire wealth. what the actual god giving fuck
Why do you think they deserve it
Well shelter is a basic need, and would at the very least allow them a place where they can get back on their feet. Food water and shelter are necessary for a healthy body and psychology. There’s also the fact that they’re people too, and a little help goes a long way in making a decent community. There’s plenty of reasons
Yeah they need stuff, but why does every homeless person deserve 0.5% of someone’s income
You have five hundred apples, and just one day to eat them all.
You pass by a small crowd of hungry children, and decide you’d rather 455 apples go rotten than give them to some snotty brat who isn’t your problem.
It doesn’t matter how hard you’ve worked for your 500 apples, or that you aren’t the parent of any of those kids. in the moment you decide to walk away, it doesn’t matter why they’re hungry, or who owes who what.
You had the opportunity to help people, you had the ability to help people, you had the resources to help people. You had everything you needed to make a small, tiny little difference in someone’s life, and you decided not to.
What are you going to buy in your lifetime that’s worth more to you than your own humanity?
What are you going to buy in your lifetime that’s worth more to you than your own humanity
A musician wakes from a terrible nightmare. In his dream he finds himself in a society where
music education has been made mandatory.
“We are helping our students become more
competitive in an increasingly sound-filled world.”
Educators, school systems, and the state are put in charge of this vital project. Studies are commissioned, committees are formed, and decisions are made— all without the advice or participation of a single working musician or composer.
Since musicians are known to set down their ideas in the form of sheet music, these curious
black dots and lines must constitute the “language of music.” It is imperative that students become fluent in this language if they are to attain any degree of musical competence; indeed, it would be ludicrous to expect a child to sing a song or play an instrument without having a thorough grounding in music notation and theory.
Playing and listening to music, let alone
composing an original piece, are considered very advanced topics and are generally put off until college, and more often graduate school.
As for the primary and secondary schools, their mission is to train students to use this language— to jiggle symbols around according to a fixed set of rules:
“Music class is where we take out our staff paper, our teacher puts some notes on the board, and we copy them or transpose them into a different key. We have to make sure to get the clefs and key signatures right, and our teacher is very picky about making sure we fill in our quarter-notes completely. One time we had a chromatic scale problem and I did it right, but the teacher gave me no credit because I had the stems pointing the wrong way.”
In their wisdom, educators soon realize that even very young children can be given this kind of musical instruction. In fact it is considered quite shameful if one’s third-grader hasn’t completely memorized his circle of fifth.
“I’ll have to get my son a music tutor. He simply won’t apply himself to his music homework. He says it’s boring. He just sits there staring out the window, humming tunes to himself and making up silly songs.”
In the higher grades the pressure is really on. After all, the students must be prepared for the standardized tests and college admissions exams. Students must take courses in Scales and Modes, Meter, Harmony, and Counterpoint.
“It’s a lot for them to learn, but later in college when they finally get to hear all this stuff, they’ll really appreciate all the work they did in high school.”
Of course, not many students actually go on to concentrate in music, so only a few will ever get to hear the sounds that the black dots represent. Nevertheless, it is important that every member of society be able to recognize a modulation or a fugal passage, regardless of the fact that they will never hear one.
“To tell you the truth, most students just aren’t very good at music. They are bored in class, their skills are terrible, and their homework is barely legible. Most of them couldn’t care less about how important music is in today’s world; they just want to take the minimum number of music courses and be done with it. I guess there are just music people and non-music people. I had this one kid, though, man was she sensational! Her sheets were impeccable— every note in the right place, perfect calligraphy, sharps, flats, just beautiful. She’s going to make one hell of a musician someday.”
Waking up in a cold sweat, the musician realizes, gratefully, that it was all just a crazy
dream. “Of course!” he reassures himself, “No society would ever reduce such a beautiful and
meaningful art form to something so mindless and trivial; no culture could be so cruel to its
children as to deprive them of such a natural, satisfying means of human expression. How
absurd!”
Meanwhile, on the other side of town, a painter has just awakened from a similar
nightmare...
I was surprised to find myself in a regular school classroom— no easels, no tubes of paint.
“Oh we don’t actually apply paint until high school,” I was told by the students. “In seventh
grade we mostly study colors and applicators.” They showed me a worksheet. On one side were swatches of color with blank spaces next to them. They were told to write in the names. “I like painting,” one of them remarked, “they tell me what to do and I do it. It’s easy!”
After class I spoke with the teacher. “So your students don’t actually do any painting?” I
asked.
“Well, next year they take Pre-Paint-by-Numbers. That prepares them for the main Paint-by-Numbers sequence in high school. So they’ll get to use what they’ve learned here and apply it to real-life painting situations— dipping the brush into paint, wiping it off, stuff like that. Of course we track our students by ability. The really excellent painters— the ones who know their colors and brushes backwards and forwards— they get to the actual painting a little sooner, and some of them even take the Advanced Placement classes for college credit. But mostly we’re just trying to give these kids a good foundation in what painting is all about, so when they get out there in the real world and paint their kitchen they don’t make a total mess of it.”
“Um, these high school classes you mentioned...”
“You mean Paint-by-Numbers? We’re seeing much higher enrollments lately. I think it’s
mostly coming from parents wanting to make sure their kid gets into a good college. Nothing
looks better than Advanced Paint-by-Numbers on a high school transcript.”
“Why do colleges care if you can fill in numbered regions with the corresponding color?”
“Oh, well, you know, it shows clear-headed logical thinking. And of course if a student is
planning to major in one of the visual sciences, like fashion or interior decorating, then it’s really a good idea to get your painting requirements out of the way in high school.”
“I see. And when do students get to paint freely, on a blank canvas?”
“You sound like one of my professors! They were always going on about expressing
yourself and your feelings and things like that—really way-out-there abstract stuff. I’ve got a degree in Painting myself, but I’ve never really worked much with blank canvasses. I just use the Paint-by-Numbers kits supplied by the school board.”
Sadly, our present system of mathematics education is precisely this kind of nightmare. In fact, if I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of destroying a child’s natural
curiosity and love of pattern-making, I couldn’t possibly do as good a job as is currently being
done— I simply wouldn’t have the imagination to come up with the kind of senseless, soul-
crushing ideas that constitute contemporary mathematics education.
Everyone knows that something is wrong. The politicians say, “we need higher standards.”
The schools say, “we need more money and equipment.” Educators say one thing, and teachers say another. They are all wrong.
The only people who understand what is going on are the ones most often blamed and least often heard: the students. They say, “math class is stupid and boring,” and they are right.
—Introduction to "A Mathematician's Lament" by mathematics educator Paul Lockhart. Full essay here:
Do YOU have a favorite play?
Welcome to the straight play showdown, a poll to find Tumblr's favorite play.
Some basic ground rules:
- Despite the title, the play you submit doesn't have to be a straight play. Plays with music are fine! I just really enjoy alliteration.
- The amount of acts doesn't matter. Any length play is fine.
- Feel free to submit as many plays as you want! Just please don't send the same one over and over again :-)
- I'm just putting this out there: there will probably be a cap on the amount of plays by playwrights who have written a LOT of plays (Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams, &c.)
- Honestly? That's it.
Submissions are OPEN until August 21st! You can submit your favorite play here. Tags below the cut.


