It’s October! You know what that means... 🎃 (via kxvo)
all my life I’ve somehow only ever seen the gifs of this. I never even knew that the pumpkin man was dancing to the Ghostbusters theme. This whole thing is so much better than I ever could have expected from the gifs omg
A cat can jump up to five times its own height in a single bound.
The little tufts of hair in a cat’s ear that help keep out dirt direct sounds into the ear, and insulate the ears are called “ear furnishings.”
The ability of a cat to find its way home is called “psi-traveling.” Experts think cats either use the angle of the sunlight to find their way or that cats have magnetized cells in their brains that act as compasses.
One reason that kittens sleep so much is because a growth hormone is released only during sleep.
A cat has 230 bones in its body. A human has 206. A cat has no collarbone, so it can fit through any opening the size of its head.
A cat’s nose pad is ridged with a unique pattern, just like the fingerprint of a human.
If they have ample water, cats can tolerate temperatures up to 133 °F.
A cat’s heart beats nearly twice as fast as a human heart, at 110 to 140 beats a minute.
Cats don’t have sweat glands over their bodies like humans do. Instead, they sweat only through their paws.
The claws on the cat’s back paws aren’t as sharp as the claws on the front paws because the claws in the back don’t retract and, consequently, become worn.
Cats make about 100 different sounds. Dogs make only about 10.
Researchers are unsure exactly how a cat purrs. Most veterinarians believe that a cat purrs by vibrating vocal folds deep in the throat. To do this, a muscle in the larynx opens and closes the air passage about 25 times per second.
A cat almost never meows at another cat, mostly just humans. Cats typically will spit, purr, and hiss at other cats.
A cat’s back is extremely flexible because it has up to 53 loosely fitting vertebrae. Humans only have 34.
Some cats have survived falls of over 65 feet (20 meters), due largely to their “righting reflex.” The eyes and balance organs in the inner ear tell it where it is in space so the cat can land on its feet. Even cats without a tail have this ability.
A cat can travel at a top speed of approximately 31 mph (49 km) over a short distance.
A cat’s hearing is better than a dog’s. And a cat can hear high-frequency sounds up to two octaves higher than a human.
A cat’s brain is biologically more similar to a human brain than it is to a dog’s. Both humans and cats have identical regions in their brains that are responsible for emotions.
And that’s how cats work.
I learned more about cats in this post than I did in my freshamn biology class in college
Don’t tell me that if you find a cardboard box large enough to fit you that you don’t have an urge to crawl inside it, that some part of your brain doesn’t go “ooh! fort!” before you tell yourself that it’s better to not have a large box take up space. Cats just don’t have inhibitions about it.
“National teacher shortage” is a fun way of saying that the USA has made a passion driven job so ungodly inhospitable that even people who “just care about teaching, not the money” don’t even care about teaching anymore.
It might also be that the USA has made it economically impossible for people to “just care about the teaching, not the money”.
It’s fine to not care about the money, as long as the wages are enough to live by. Not caring about making more money than you need, is one thing.
But if the wages are no longer enough to live by? Not caring about making what you need to get by, that’s something else entirely.
Of course, knowing the US, I guess OP is probably right too.
Well, first off, the wages are a joke; the average teacher’s salary in the US is $60,000 (broken down by state here). Compare the cost of student loans and teacher certification, and it’s just something that most people can’t afford.
Second, the atmosphere is actively hostile. The joke in the US is, “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” Teachers are viewed as losers who can’t get a real job, as failures and as somehow incompetent just by dint of being a teacher. The curriculum is dictated by politicians on the school boards who rarely actually listen to best practices or whatnot–since, to their minds, teachers are failures and incompetents and anybody can teach, why bother listening? And then there’s the religious and culture war motivations by those politicians–everything from “Must teach Creationism/Intelligent Design in schools” to “Blacks were ‘workers’”, recently spotted in Texas textbooks! (And since Texas is one of the biggest textbook markets in the country, the Texas school board has an outside influence on the rest of the country’s education)
And then there’s No Child Left Behind and its legacy of teaching to the standardized tests; the thing about the US school system is that it is not designed to create citizens who are independent thinkers. It’s designed to churn out compliant worker cogs for the needs of industry (and the industry of three generations ago, at that!). So the standardized tests are useless from an educational perspective, stressful on both the teacher and students, and waste time that would be better spent educating–but from the perspective of US oligarchs, standardized tests are valuable quality control over their next batch of drones.
As a subset of point two, schools are funded by property taxes, so if you’re not teaching in one of the rare well-off zip codes, then you’re straight up screwed for resources. In poorer districts, funds can be so strapped that teachers have less than two dollars per student for the entire damn year.
As a subset of that above point, while the educational and enrichment aspects of school are routinely underfunded, sports suck the school budgets dry. “We can’t afford to properly funds the arts, science, history, or any educational programs… but we CAN built a multi-million dollar sports stadium!”
To illustrate that last point, here, the Louisiana State University Locker Room:
And the LSU library:
Very often, the highest paid public employees in a state are sports coaches:
And THEN, after they’re underfunded, dictated to like they’re automatons too stupid to know how to teach, stressed out by oversized classes and overscheduling because there’s not enough teachers…
And then, in the last twenty years…
“Did the fire alarm just get pulled so we’ll all go out and get shot by someone with a gun?”
As the damn cherry on top of everything else.
It’s so ungodly inhospitable, as @legsdemandias put it.
i hate how reward systems never work for me like i can’t just say “if i finish this assignment i can have a cookie” bc my brain is like “…..or u could just have one right now” and i can’t argue with that logic
Self-imposed deadlines don’t work either because I know the guy who set them and he’s full of shit
I recognize and relate to the humor here. I just wanted to add on, in the off chance that it could help even one person who relates…
A public service announcement:
I preface this by saying I am fully aware that everyone can struggle with this stuff sometimes. But, if this is a constant in your existence, and you haven’t looked into it already, this is actually a possible indicator of ADHD. There are a lot of symptoms of ADHD that aren’t really talked about.
Normal motivation methods don’t really work for people with ADHD. In fact they usually do more harm than good.
We tend to have time blindness which is hard to explain but among other things, means we are frequently late, even to things we want to go to.
Our brains give zero fucks about important. I can tell myself something is important all day long and my brain gives me the middle finger. People with ADHD are motivated by interest, so trying to find a way to make important things interesting helps.
Also, lots of people with ADHD don’t exhibit the hyperactivity that is often associated as the main indicator.
ADHD is not all bad. There are some really cool perks. But the world and most of the generally accepted methods of getting your life in order aren’t designed to work for people with interest based nervous systems, so trying to use those tools is almost guaranteed to fail and make you feel like shit.
If any of that seems familiar, do some research. Please, don’t self-diagnose, ADHD symptoms can actually look like a lot of other mental health issues (and vice-versa, I was treated for depression with limited success for YEARS before I was diagnosed with ADHD). But look into it. See if it feels right. Look at multiple sources. Look up information related to your age range and gender (as it so often does, the science has focused mostly on boys and men with ADHD and women usually exhibit very different symptoms which means it’s often overlooked or misdiagnosed). If it feels right, see a doctor, get a diagnosis.
And let me be clear, whether or not medicine is right for you, realizing that a lot of struggles with basic life stuff isn’t a flaw in you can make a huge difference. Understanding WHY you do things and why the normal methods that neurotypical people use tend to fail can make it SO much easier to be kinder to yourself. Learning how to work with your strengths instead of against them can be life changing.
If you’ve already been diagnosed but haven’t looked into how ADHD impacts the way you experience the world, I highly recommend it. I was diagnosed for something like 5 years before I finally started to figure it out and I know that I would be a different person, stronger and a little less broken, if I had known this information earlier in my life. The good news is, I’m getting there now.
