During the construction of London’s massive “super sewer,” archaeologists discovered something unusual in the mud: a 500-year-old skeleton of a man still wearing his thigh-high leather boots.
The Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA) announced this week that the skeleton was unearthed on the shores of the Thames, near a bend in the river downstream from the Tower of London.
“By studying the boots, we’ve been able to gain a fascinating glimpse into the daily life of a man who lived as many as 500 years ago,” said Beth Richardson, a finds specialist who analyzes artifacts at MOLA Headland, a consortium of archaeologists. “They have helped us to better understand how he may have made his living in hazardous and difficult conditions, but also how he may have died. It has been a privilege to be able to study something so rare and so personal.” Read more.
What’s so funny is like….I read the first three books in college, and my reaction was “Well, they’re fun books in the Boarding School trope – gosh, it’s nice she included a gay couple in the third book!”
Like. I in my naievete just assumed she had done it on purpose and that it was rather sweet of her to have done so.
The Harry Potter years also happened to coincide with the Wild West era
of the internet and the rise of abstinence-only sex education; as a
result, for better or for worse, erotic Harry Potter fan fiction played a
major and under-discussed role in millennial sexual development. This
was especially true if you were queer—or, not to put too fine a point on
it, if you were me—and had picked up on the secret gay love story that
existed between the lines of Rowling’s text.
Because treating people fairly often means treating them differently.
This is something that I teach my students during the first week of school and they understand it. Eight year olds can understand this and all it costs is a box of band-aids.
I have each students pretend they got hurt and need a band-aid. Children love band-aids. I ask the first one where they are hurt. If he says his finger, I put the band-aid on his finger. Then I ask the second one where they are hurt. No matter what that child says, I put the band-aid on their finger exactly like the first child. I keep doing that through the whole class. No matter where they say their pretend injury is, I do the same thing I did with the first one.
After they all have band-aids in the same spot, I ask if that actually helped any of them other than the first child. I say, “Well, I helped all of you the same! You all have one band-aid!” And they’ll try to get me to understand that they were hurt somewhere else. I act like I’m just now understanding it. Then I explain, “There might be moments this year where some of you get different things because you need them differently, just like you needed a band-aid in a different spot.”
If at any time any of my students ask why one student has a different assignment, or gets taken out of the class for a subject, or gets another teacher to come in and help them throughout the year, I remind my students of the band-aids they got at the start of the school year and they stop complaining. That’s why eight year olds can understand equity.
