What kind of asshole-filled school can't find at least two people to say something nice about a new sweater?
Sweaters are like assholes - everyone has one and everyone thinks everyone else's stinks.
Anyway, I remember the school sent and a notice about kids on the internet and Shrek. Then I asked somebody here what they were talking about. That's how I learned that I don't really want to know.
3: I guess if you've lived most of your life in Texas and Florida it might seem normal to only have one sweater.
I have a dozen, but they all smell like butt.
NICE SWEATER IT WOULD BE A SHAME IF SOMETHING HAPPENED TO IT
like it got a thousand likes and ten thousand tweets and went viral in multiple media contexts and cognitive scientists analyzed its patterns and it got memed and your face was in the photo and now youre cyanosweater kid and some people didnt like seeing you get the attention and hold you resposible for its virality and now you have to move to the tropics and never wear warm clothes again
Isn't this how adults try to present the world to kids in general? That if you are good and follow the rules then bad things won't happen to you?
9: You all saw that "Good Bones" poem, right?
They bone you up, your mum and dad?
The Royal Navy was built on juice boxes, special grown up hugs, and time outs.
I really liked Heebie's OP commentary and teasing out (3) as the thing we don't say. I suspect another reason it's avoided is to prevent defeatism -- "If people are going to hate/mock me, no matter what I do, why try?"
The people presenting (1) and (2) might worry that their case is undermined by the existence of (3).
"If people are going to hate/mock me, no matter what I do, why try?"
That's when you give them the lecture out the stochastic nature of reality and how you can't be sure of things, but you can shift the odds. Then you can go into the usual lecture about probability distributions.
I'm glad you identified yourself as the author of 15, or I'd think my parents had found this place.
Lots of parents decorate the baby's room with normal curves and poisson distributions.
Poison distributions in the baby's room will maybe get you a visit from Child Protective Services.
It's a risk, but you have to prepare them for dealing with event-count data.
Yeah, certainly if you are going to teach them pee-hacking.
Marginally on topic, but well aligned with the blog's interests- my kid who is super sweet and always obedient because he breaks down at any criticism got in trouble at his after school program. At pickup I was called into the program director's office and told that he had disrupted the class... because it's an animal interaction class and he wouldn't pet the snake. He said he was scared and the teacher got mad because she thought he was being disobedient for not touching the snake. Honestly not a metaphor at all. I had a hard time not laughing at the director as she was telling me this.
You can get e coli or something from touching snakes. The experience isn't worth the hand-sanitizer burn.
I'd have a hard time not getting angry. Kids' fears, especially like that, should be treated carefully. Also, forcing kids to touch something just seems wrong. Inverse bad touch?
I had a sixth grade teacher who had a classroom tarantula. Feeding it live crickets was a classroom "duty" to be performed by all students on a schedule. My friend was terrified of the thing (named "Visigoth" because of course). I can't remember exactly, but students were not allowed to opt out because they'd face some disciplinary penalty that seemed really, really harsh to me. My friend spent months anxious, then weeks panicking as his turn approached. The fateful day was anticlimactic - he got through it somehow and fled, but I remember the teacher as an awfully cruel guy.
I'm sure it was a longitudinal empathy study.
omg I love this place - I haven't been here in quite a while, but in 25 comments you reminded me why the commentariat is so great.
off to teach my kids pee-hacking.