u/Complete-Gur7023

Hey guys! I’m a senior Education major, and I want to work in Special Education eventually by applying to the M.Ed + teaching credentials program at UCR. I’m considering whether to take a gap year between undergrad and masters, because I want to get some real world experience as a paraprofessional and study for the CSETs. I just don’t know how letters of recommendation would go. I built some good relationships with some of my professors, and I know they’ll write me really nice letters of recommendation, but how do I make sure they don’t forget about my accomplishments in their classes, or our meetings in office hours? Is there any way I can have them write letters for me now, and then submit it fall 2027 with my applications? Have you dealt with this, and if so, how’d you handle it?? Thank you so much in advance 🙂‍↕️🙏🙏

TRIGGER WARNING: MENTIONS SEXUAL ASSAULT AND ABUSE

Hello, I’m (23F) new here, but I have qualified to be part of this community for a long time, and I feel the need to be heard by people who get it.
My mom (47F) has been an alcoholic for her whole life and she now has fatty liver. It got significantly worse after my uncle -her brother - died from alcoholism, as well as the influence of her bf who is far deeper into the addiction than she is.
She’s had a really really hard life. My dad was abusive to all of us. She was SA’d for years growing up by a family member and is physically disabled and has severe mental health issues which should be medicated but she refuses. I don’t blame her for being emotionally stunted. But I’m tired of being put in the role where I’m the one looking after her. I know I’m not a kid anymore, but is it so crazy to want your mother to behave like your mother? It pisses me off so much when she says “call me on this date to make sure I’m sober. I’m quitting on that day.” As if this is something she can willpower her way out of. As if it’s a child’s responsibility to hold their mother accountable for something completely out of their control.

she talks as if she’s about to drop dead and is completely okay dying before the age of 50. Every time she calls me on the phone she slips in a little “preparation” by talking about wills, where her money is going to go, how she wants me to handle her cremation, and more stuff like that. I understand her behavior here is coming out of fear, but I’m terrified too and I just want a mother. I just want to be a child. She’s not dying. Her prognosis is not terminal. She still has the opportunity to turn it around and slow or reverse the liver damage.

But I feel like it’s impossible for her. She is incredibly codependent and cannot stay single. She moved 80 miles away from me and my younger sister (who I have also kinda become a parent to bc dad isn’t around much either. bailed her out of jail when she got arrested for public intoxication at 18 years old) for a man who she’s not even with anymore, but then has the nerve to complain about loneliness and us never visiting her. Does she think her kids don’t miss her too? She moves away and then guilt trips us for not being able to commute 2-4 hours every time she orders us to?

whenever mom has an argument with her boyfriend she calls me to cry about how lonely and unsupported she feels. Every time she does that I feel so resentful towards her because SHE moved away from US. She chose a man over me and my sister. The man she moved away for, his son SA’d my sister. And my mom didn’t believe her. She blamed my sister for “seducing” him. When I was SA’d on a first date with someone who showed no warning signs, I called her expecting some comfort or warmth. She yelled at me and berated me for my stupid choices. I understand she was SA’d too, and her mom silenced her and enabled the predator’s behavior. But doesn’t she recognize how much pain that probably caused her in the moment? Why would she replicate that pain with her daughters if she’s experienced the exact feeling of being minimized or ignored or blamed for being a victim of SA? Stunted emotional growth. I know. I just. I don’t know. It’s so confusing. I love her so much and I miss the idealized version of her that lives in my mind. But I don’t know if that person ever existed, or if I have just finally begun to recognize the reality of what her patterns have been my entire life.

It’s just frustrating watching her kill herself slowly and constantly make bad decisions. I can envision a path out of this situation but she just refuses to make those choices. I think the biggest barrier to her quitting right now is her current shitty bf. He pressures her into drinking and now she also omits the depth of her conflicts with him bc she knows I fucking despise him and she doesn’t want to give me more reasons to hate him. I just. I know any advice to this is probably gonna be something like “you can’t change her.” Or “this is out of your control.” Because is there really no other way? Do I really have to watch my mom slowly kill herself and there’s nothing I can do?

Thank you if you read this. I appreciate you. This was very cathartic to write.

It’s because successful Reddit posts/Instagram posts/Twitter posts/Academic Writing/etc. have a very specific style of prose, and we’re very good at mimicking it.
I think about how I used to write fan fiction back in middle school and I was very good at matching the prose style of the authors, or at least I think so.
I also tend to adopt the texting style of people I’m close to as well.
I think it’s the same thing with writing online. I’m sure it depends from person to person, but I think for those of us who tend to mask, it’s very easy to adopt the writing style of successful posts to increase visibility and to be more comprehensible.
What do you think?

I just feel so full of anger because I literally can’t take care of myself. My room is a fucking disaster. I don’t live with any family and don’t talk to my roommates. I need help I feel so trapped in my body.

I have been having pain in my lower left back for several years now. I’m only 23 and I wince worse than my grandmother when standing up. I went to primary care several times about it. They did a forward bend test, found no issue, told me to get on a Mediterranean diet and take some Advil.

I’m bedridden and miserable so I went to ruminate by looking at my medical logs, only to find that the last time I went to the ER (for an unrelated reason, 4 years ago), they took a frontal chest x ray and had an unrelated impression, “there is a levoscoliosis”. They didn’t even tell me during my ER visit, or maybe they told me when I was so disoriented that I didn’t remember. Either way, this was news to me.

It felt vindicating but I also feel so angry that my pain has been dismissed for years as a weight problem. I can’t fucking manage my weight when I can’t even get out of bed to toast a bagel, let alone cook a full healthy meal for myself. I can’t go to the gym are you fucking kidding me? I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to go to that primary care physician anymore. But I can’t live like this. I can’t function as a human being and I don’t have a support system to help me get back on my feet. I’m bedridden and it’s gotten exponentially worse lately. I can’t fully sleep without being woken up by the pain. My mattress sucks and it’s probably making everything worse.

I’m sorry for being so miserable. I just don’t know where else to vent without being dismissed.

My mom never got to heal or explore the world or figure out who she was the way I do. She got married at 21 and had me at 22. I’m 23 now, and I still feel like a child. I have no idea what I’m doing with my life and am nowhere near ready to have a kid.

She probably had no idea what she was doing and probably wasn’t ready to have a kid either. She never got to finish college or figure out what her hobbies were or how to cope emotionally.

I feel so blessed to be able to have my 20s to figure out who I am, but I feel a weird kind of grief almost, knowing my mom never got to do that. I’m proud to be breaking generational curses and being the first woman in my family to get a college degree, but I cry knowing my mom never got to experience life like I do. Has anyone else experienced this weird grief?

Honestly, if I get downvoted, I’ll be pleased. For the record, I’m pretty far left. But I see a LOT of liberals on social media completely condemning anyone that uses AI. (I’m not sure if conservatives as doing this as well, tbf, I don’t see a lot on my apps.)

I understand the harm of AI, for mental health, for the environment, for artists, for jobs and the economy, but that doesn’t change the fact that these platforms are essentially crack for lonely people. I see posts that say things like “just go outside and talk to real people. What happened to community???” Okay, but these same people who boast about “community” are immediately blocking people for even confessing that they once downloaded ChatGPT.

When it gets to people who are using it for companionship, 9/10 times it’s because they have no support system. It’s an addiction. Does shaming your relatives for drinking or smoking inspire them to quit??? No. It often just pushes them deeper into the addiction.

We on the left pride ourselves on the progress made towards mental health awareness and acceptance. But the minute there’s a new variable introduced that complicates the relationship between the issues we care about (I.e. environmental conservation, and mental health), we throw nuance out the window and default to our old ways of thinking without considering that this is a developing field and perspective. We are so quick to jump on to pre assigned perspectives without critically thinking through WHY someone might seek out AI for companionship. I think that’s messed up.

That’s my take, thanks for listening >_<

EDIT: you guys completely ignoring my argument and focusing on some idea that I’m secretly a conservative are fuckin ridiculous. I have published my profile history which overwhelmingly confirms the fact that I am far left. Classic liberalism to focus on the identity of the person rather than the content of what they are saying.

Hello, I’m in a teacher ed program, and currently online tutoring some at risk children. This is my first internship working with children. My current tutee is a 4th grader reading at a 1st grade level. She has been very aversive to reading, not wanting to read more than 10 minutes. However, through the use of this system I haphazardly threw together, she has been wanting to read upwards of 25 minutes in our 1 hour session. My system is as follows:

1. We read through our book for the day. I try to find a book that caters to her interests.
2. Whenever there is a word she is unfamiliar with, or she cannot pronounce, we track it in our vocabulary log. First, I ask her what she thinks it means. We look at context clues. Then, we search up what it means together on the dictionary.
3. For each word we log, she gets 1 token.
4. Those tokens are redeemed next session for items for her virtual desk pet.

However, I am worried that this system doesn’t encourage an interest in reading, and it doesn’t really help with retaining the vocabulary words either. I am also worried about the whole premise of a token economy. Teachers, what do you think? Is this method actually helping her at all? How would you adjust it? I only get to see her 2x a week, for an hour each session.

I wanna know if it runs decently before wasting my time with the download… I don’t mind playing on the lowest settings.. I just wanna be able to play BG3 away from home 😔

Okay, so for those of you who have watched this episode, you know that Jacob promotes Amazon in a way that, I feel, is very out of character for him. This isn’t to say that he would never shop at Amazon. I could see him saying something like “Amazon is evil and killed small town America, but the systemic underfunding of public education has forced me to use it because it’s all we can afford.” He isn’t a PERFECT ally. We know this. There have been instances of him disregarding his morals solely due to convenience, i.e. the smoothie shop opening up to replace the deli. At first he’s vehemently against the possibility of gentrification, but after he tastes it, he decides it’s okay if the small business deli gets pushed out by the corporate smoothie shop. BUT!!!! the smoothie episode shows him grappling with his ethics and the cognitive dissonance. The Amazon episode absolutely does not, which is why I feel like it’s so out of character for him… idk. What are your guys’ thoughts on this?