having the power of one Gillette

They had to write a letter to the NFL team they were assigned to, they had to do a research project to find out where the teams practiced, they had to write a letter to the mayor of the city the teams practiced in, they had to keep track of their team's statistics, they had to do research about the state history of the team they'd been assigned to, and they had to do a presentation.

It was a big project. She provided all the materials, she made sure there were copies of the newspaper sports section in her classroom so the kids could stay on top of stats. The students got this project in their first week at school and it wrapped up right around winter break, so it wasn't like it was an all-day "today we are doing statistics" thing or "today we do research, today we write a letter, today we make a presentation" one-week project, it was five to ten minutes a day in various subjects that got organized into a presentation at the end of the semester. The kids could work together, they could work independently, they could ask my mom or the librarian or their parents or their older siblings for help. They just had to end the semester with a report on the team's history, the stats for the season organized into a chart, copies of the letters they'd sent (and copies of any of the responses they'd gotten), a two-page social studies report on the state where the team played, and a presentation to the class about their favorite thing they had learned while doing the NFL project.

The kids fucking loved it. And for years I spent my winter break going to the classroom and organizing the bulletin board with a huge map of the US and materials from each student's report, showing the work that the students had done that semester. It was a way of getting kids engaged with classwork, because who cares about statistics at 10, probably nobody, but if you get a set of pencils from the Jets NOW you want to learn about the team. The Jaguars sent one kid a jersey one year. The city in Minnesota where the Vikings practice sent postcards for every student. Part of this was happening when Schwarzenegger was governor in California so one kid got the Terminator's autograph for part of his project.

I think maybe the thing that I admire the most about it in retrospect was the way that it taught actual project management to young students. I don't actually know of that many schools that have projects more than a month long for 10-year-olds, and I think it's a great concept. I didn't get something like that until I was a senior in college, and it would have been a great skill to learn younger.

Anyway, in 2006 my mom had to stop doing the NFL project because the district wanted to focus on raising their test scores. She was specifically told that if she kept doing the NFL project she would not be rehired at her school.

She even wrote up what standards each part of the project worked toward - the kids had to make graphs because "organizing information into a bar graph" was a specific standard for students that age. "Writing multiple paragraphs on the same subject" was a standard, which is why the letters to the cities and states were multi-paragraph. The project WAS standards based.

But the administrators wanted to make sure that the students had more practice with reading the kinds of questions that would be on the tests because most of the student body spoke Spanish at home.

My mom taught at that school for another ten years; the school's test scores never showed any marked improvement with test-based lesson plans.

My mom's project wasn't the only thing like that that got cancelled. There was another teacher who had a craft-based thing that was similar, and a 7th-grade teacher who did a kind of history/social studies Magic Schoolbus LARP thing who was told not to do that anymore. Eventually my mom was told to stop having her students write journals for ten minutes a day because it wasn't being taught from the textbook and wasn't being taught to the test.

Because apparently this is a literal actual thing that retailers hate cuz you think more before spending a lot of money, they want you to spend a lot without thinking about it so much

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Instead of bottling it or lashing out, he took the time to stop in a quiet place to process an upsetting event. He validated his anger, and stated he felt his needs were going unmet. He then humanized the person who upset him, and considered their intentions. He then found perspective on the event and his own emotions. This then genuinely calmed him down.

To contribute to the critically endangered pygmy raccoon fund, you can donate:

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Panel 2. The cat tree now has cats in it, and the front door no longer has a dog door. The narration continues: 'Lately, it's been filling up with cats I don't recognize. I don't know how they keep getting in. We don't have a dog door or anything.'

Panel 3. The cat tree looks slightly different, the cats are gone, and other small details around the room have changed. The narration continues: 'So, we have this cat tree at our house. I don't know how it keeps getting in. We've never had a cat or anything.'

Panel 4. Instead of the room, we see an illustration of several cats walking single-file in a void, weaving around the text of the page and several heaps of pills. The narration continues: 'When I was a kid, I used to be on this medication. Long after I'd stopped taking it, it was revealed to me that one of the potential side-effects was memory issues. For the longest time, I couldn't recall a single thing that had happened to me during the years I was on it.'

Panel 5. We're back in the room from before, only the design of the front door has changed, a table has become a cupboard, the window now has blinds, and the cat tree is gone. Three cats levitate in the air, occupying the positions they were previously in while the cat tree was present. The narration continues: 'So, we've got these cats in our apartment. I don't know why they're arranged like that.'

Panel 6. Several cats gather around a giant human brain in a void. The narration continues: 'Some things came back to me eventually, and I wasn't sure whether I was still missing pieces, whether I'd totally recovered, or whether there was never anything wrong with me in the first place.'

Panel 7. Illustration showing the inside of the cat tree, looking outward, as if we're seeing from a cat's perspective. The narration continues: 'So, there's this room in my house. I don't know how I keep getting in.'

Panel 8. We're back in the room, but the window has moved to a different wall, the cat tree has grown, and a portrait that used to hang on the wall is now gone, among other changes. The narration continues: 'So, I have these trust issues. If I forgot something important, would I even notice?'

Panel 9. The room continues to change, and the cat tree continues to grow. The narration continues: 'I think a lot about how little the human brain is actually understood. So, there's this cat tree in my house.'

Panel 10. The cat tree grows. The narration continues: 'Did you know that the diagnoses for a lot of mental health conditions are practically baseless? There's this cat tree in my house.'

Panel 11. Illustration of a pencil next to several mental health assessment worksheets. The narration continues: 'The doctor essentially gives you a 'What Simpsons Character Are You?' facebook personality quiz, full of statements like 'I often feel bad', and you're expected to rate how relatable these statements are on a scale of one to ten, with no frame of reference for what these numbers actually mean.'

Panel 12 is mostly text, but we see the carpeted insides of a cat tree slowly encroaching in on the words. The narration continues: 'There's no real metric for any of this. What's the 'normal' amount of anxious? What's the 'normal' amount of autistic? What amount of feeling bad is the 'normal' amount of feeling bad? How much of that is my body, and how much of it is my circumstances? Which number do I circle to get them to take me seriously? Which number communicates that something is wrong, but that others probably have it a lot worse? Six? Eight? If I answer nine or ten, will they assume I'm exaggerating? Will I be immediately hospitalized against my will?'

Panel 13. The carpet encroaches further, and the page grows darker. In the light at the end of the tunnel, the narration continues: 'What percentage of my life is a normal percentage to forget? If my mind can't be trusted, how can my answers be trusted?'

Panel 14 shows several posters on the walls of the doctors office, demanding patience to turn off the phone, asking patients to use their phone to scan a qr code to leave a review, advertising services to patience, and demanding that patients 'only have one problem per appointment'. The narration continues: 'When the quiz is over, the doctor decides which Simpsons character you are based on vibes and their own personal biases, and if they think you're a Marge they won't help you. 'Thanks for taking my quiz! You seem totally normal. That'll be one thousand dollars. You can leave it in the trash next to the four hundred forms that I made you fill out and then didn't read. Yeah, the ones that already asked you all the same questions I did.'

Panel 15. We're back in the room. All windows and furniture are gone, and all that remains is the ever-expanding cat tree, and its ever-expanding population of cats. Even the door has begun to disappear, and the walls and ceiling are slowly turning into carpet. The narration continues: 'So, there's this cat tree in my house. I've spent my entire life pretending to be normal in order to survive, and now I don't know how to turn it off, so now no one believes me when I say there's something wrong with me.'

Panel 16 shows an extremely close-up illustration of a cat's eye, accompanied by a single sentence: 'Did you know that cats tend to hide their symptoms when they're sick?'

Panel 17. We're back in the room, which has completely transformed into carpeting, and the cat tree has expanded to fill the entire room. Cats climb and sit and loaf about all over the room. The narration continues: 'There's a cat tree in my house. I've taken a lot of different medications in my life, for a lot of different reasons. Most of them either did nothing, or made things worse. At least, I think they did. If I was getting better, would I even notice?'

Panel 18 is completely blank, except for a single sentence: 'What are you supposed to do when neither the doctor, nor the patient, nor the treatment can be trusted?'

Two people do not decide that they are "courting". One person decides to "court" someone else. It's an action, not a stage in the relationship. A man decides to court a woman because he wants to encourage her to have romantic interest in him. He's trying to win her favor. It's not an exclusive relationship--a woman could be courted by multiple men at once. She'll spend time getting to know the guy who's interested in her, but they won't officially define their relationship as one where they only show romantic interest in each other. If they reach a point where they want it to be exclusive, that's when you propose.

bizarrely, America has in many ways gotten more conservative about dating since World War II.