Clowders and Kindles

Sorry that I've been MIA for a few weeks. I've been quite busy with some pre-summer preparations. I will admit that lately, most of my learning has been merely situational for me and wouldn't do much good for others to read about. I did have one situation that came up and proved to be quite educational. My husband and I are going on vacation for a week and a half and I needed to board my cat. Now, me being the over protective "cat mom" that I am, I was not happy at the prospect of leaving poor puss in a small cage for 10 days. Logically, I knew that he would be just fine and even quite happy because he enjoys spending time in his travel cage at home. 


So after I had made a reservation for him at the vet, I started looking into different ways to keep him calm and happy while he was there. While searching, I came across some very interesting facts about cats. Now if you are a dog person, I apologize. This post won't be all that interesting to you. Perhaps I'll do a post about dogs later. But now I present, the top 10 most interesting facts I found on the Internet about cats*.


1. We will start off with the basics. A group of cats is called a clowder and a group of kittens is called a kindle. (Yeah, just like the Amazon e-reader. If anyone has an idea where the connection of those two came from, please let me know.)

2. "According to National Geographic there may be more tigers being kept as pets in the USA than there are remaining in their wild habitats in Asia." This fact was imparted to me by Stephen Fry's BBC show "QI: Quite Interesting." If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend looking it up on youtube. 

3. The pattern of dots on a cats nose functions just like a human finger print. No two cats have the same nose print.

4. Cats can make over 100 different vocal sounds, while dogs can only make about 10. Interestingly, cats will only "meow" at humans, they won't "meow" at other cats. (From dailyrandomfacts)

5. When cats are sleeping, they are still alert to incoming stimuli. That's why they twitch when you touch their tail or ears while they are asleep.

This is one of my favorite pictures I have of my cat. 

He's all grown up now though.

6. Sir Issac Newton invented the cat door. He actually had one door for a mother cat and a smaller door for her kittens, not realizing that the kittens would just follow their mother through the larger door. Oops. (From Wikipedia)

7. While most people know that cats were seen as sacred by the Egyptians, few probably know that evidence leads scientists to believe that the last few remaining ancestors of the Egyptians' cats are living  on Kenya's Islands in the Lamu Archipelago.

A statue thought to be a representation of the

Egyptian goddess, Bastet.

8. The first cat in space was a French cat named Felicette (French for "Astrocat".) She went up in 1963 and happily, she made it back to Earth alive.

I imagine it went something like this.

9. Cats and humans have identical emotion centers in their brains. Cats are also highly receptive to human emotions based on tone of voice. (Even if they look like they are ignoring you.)

10. Ailurophobia is the irrational fear of cats.

I've never really been scared of cats, but this episode of  "Friends"

 made me think twice about that.

So there you have it, cat facts. I did have a few more technical facts that I picked up, but they wouldn't have fit very well into my list format. Also, I'm not sure that the origin of the word "puss" would be interesting to anyone but me. 

Hopefully there won't be such a long hiatus before my next post. Happy learning!

*A majority of this information came from PetMD.com. I will note if another source was used.

A Quick Lesson

I recently realized that I have gone from typing OK, or Okay, or ok to typing O.K. The reason behind this is actually an interesting story. My husband is currently taking a couple of linguistics classes, so he has shared his newfound love of the English language with me.

Apparently, in the early to mid 1800's, editors had inside jokes about comical misspellings. (Think LOL Catz) One of the jokes was about the phrase "all correct" or "oll korrect." So, they started using "oll korrect," abbreviated O.K., in place of "all correct." Eventually it was used so frequently (written and spoken) that it just became an American colloquialism.

According to Wikipedia, some other examples of the comic misspellings were:

• "know yuse" or "no use" abbreviated K.Y.
• "nuff ced" or "enough said" abbreviated N.C.

Here is the link to the Wikipedia article in case you want further information. They have explained the whole etymology of O.K. a little more eloquently than I have. Based on the article, there are several etymologies that have been debated, but I thought that this one was the most fun.

Good Advice

O.K. after my last post I took some good advice from a comment a friend of mine posted. I gave up (mostly) on MSNBC and took up NPR. I have learned so much more from NPR than I ever did from cable news sources. Today, I was listening to the podcast while I did the dishes, so I was doubly productive! I was listening to this podcast, which was talking about Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee's Pulitzer prize winning book, The Emperor of all Maladies. The book is referred to as biography of cancer. I don't really think of myself as someone who is science minded, but cancer is such a prevalent problem in modern society that I think I should have at least a basic understanding of it. I was so impressed with Mukherjee's ability to translate descriptions of complex medical procedures and advances into layman's terms. The podcast is only about 30 minutes long, so if you have a few extra moment, I highly recommend it.

One thing that I found particularly interesting about the podcast was the advances in the way cancer is treated. That may sound simplistic and silly, but I didn't realize that only 20 year ago, a cancer patient was treated as a case, not a person. It has only been recently that doctors have started to treat cancer and all of the other symptoms that come with it. They have started providing psychological as well as medical treatment for cancer patients. They also talked about the slow realization (spanning almost 90 years) that a heavier dose of medication won't always fix the problem. They describe the kinds of procedures that were done to get rid of breast cancers. Doctors used to remove a woman's entire breast, many of the lymph nodes, and even tissue as far up as the underarm, all under the assumption that the more breast tissue that was gone, the less likely the cancer was to show back up. 


I was interested in the discussion about breast cancer because I have always wondered why the Susan G. Koman foundation is a separate organization from the American Cancer Society. I guess it seems silly to me to pull money away from all cancer research in order to focus it on a type of cancer that has had huge leaps forward in finding a cure and quelling the symptoms, while there are still cancers out there that doctors still have little idea as to how to cure them, let alone what causes them. Don't get me wrong, I am all for cancer awareness, I just don't think that we should focus on just one type. Based on a chart put out by the American Cancer Society, approximately 19% of cases of breast cancer were fatal, while something like brain cancer has nearly a 60% mortality rate. Brain cancer is something that was actually brought up by Dr. Mukherjee, saying that ideally, he wants to see advances in the medical field's ability to deal with brain cancer because it's cause is widely unknown. I know I am not a scientist, nor am I an expert an any fields relating to this topic, I just see something that doesn't quite add up. Unfortunately, the interview only covered the advances in breast cancer, and did not really address (in a way that I understood) the differences between breast cancer and all the other types, except to say that they have found the genes that can cause breast cancer so it is easier to trace in a family in order to prevent it.


Overall, I feel much more informed on the subject than I did before, and even if I didn't get everything I'd hoped out of it, I still learned a lot.

The News

The lesson I have been continually learning over the past few months: The news can not be trusted. As a learner, I am constantly seeking out information. For obvious reasons, news channels and websites tend to draw me in. Lately, I have been trying to make sure that everything I hear from the news, I take with a grain of salt. Today pushed me over the edge. I went on to MSNBC's website to look at current headlines. The first two that I read were as follows:

"Kiddo couch potatoes have narrowed arteries: Sedentary kids have arterial narrowing behind they eyes, an early sign of high blood pressure"

and I couldn't find the exact wording again for the 2nd one but it was something along the lines of:

"Study showed that surgeons commit more errors the day after drinking"

Seriously? This is news? Kids who don't exercise aren't healthy and hung over doctors shouldn't operate.  What ever happened to common sense? Who are the people that don't realize these facts to be true. Now I understand that in order to appeal to the masses, the news needs to direct some of their stories at the lowest common denominator, but come on, even America's dumbest citizens should be able to put those facts together.

Now I know that the news isn't just crazy, unnecessary studies. But it does seem like all the other stories are just there to horrify you. I was reading my news updates on my iPod a few weeks ago and after reading only 2 or 3 stories I was in tears. I'm extremely sentimental when it comes to animals and children. That night the stories that came up for me to read were about a puppy that a shelter tried to put down, but it wouldn't die, an abortion clinic that was shut down because of practices that not even the Nazis would have condoned, and the effect that war was having on children. I didn't stand a chance. The news is really just there to make money, so they use anything with shock value. In that sense, they really aren't any better than a "Saw" movie. I tend to forget that and I need to be reminded.

Like most other people, I support freedom of the press and I'm glad we have it, but it just seems like a wasted resource. This is really pushing me to find other sources of information. The news is just so easily accessible that I forget to question it sometimes. When I remember to question it, it reminds me why I am doing this project in the first place. Information needs to be easily accessible, but it needs to be relevant and correct information. I realize that this post was more of a rant than a learning experience, so I'm going to do some research to find good sources of relevant information to make up for it.

Self Confidence = Lack of Disappointment

For those of you who don't know, I really want to be a middle school teacher. I have my degree and now I'm just looking for the right job. Today, I had an interview for a position that would be perfect for me. I walked in and gave it my all. It was probably the best interview I have ever had. (And that's saying a lot. Finding and interviewing for jobs is almost a hobby for me.) Later, when my husband was asking me how everything had gone, I started talking about how great it was, that I had really given them a sense of who I was, and what I wanted to do with the teaching position. After going on and on and on about awesome I would be at this job, I realized that if I didn't get the job I would be O.K. with that. Obviously, I would be disappointed. But, if I gave my best interview and was able to truly communicate all of my skills and they still didn't want to hire me, that job probably isn't for me.

I started to think about that in broader terms. It's almost like a math equation.

(I'm good for the job)+(They know all about me)=(They hire me)

or

(I'm not good for the job)+(They know all about me)=(They don't hire me)

O.K. so it isn't quite like a math equation. Give me a break. I'm an English person.
But either way, if they don't hire me, we are all probably better off.

In this situation, I'm lucky enough to also have life experience to pull from. Last summer, I was hired for a job that I was perfect for, however the people who hired me did not communicate that everyone else who worked there had an ENTIRELY different style of approaching things than I did. I quit the job as soon as I could because we all tried to keep our relationship professional, but when you disagree with someone so fervently, it is hard to avoid confrontation. So, if the principal who interviewed me today doesn't think I would fit with the way everyone else works, I don't want the job. I'm learning to trust the judgment of other people. This one is difficult for me because I have always been a "let me see for myself" type of person. I have made more mistakes because I didn't listen to the advice of someone smarter than me. (aka my husband) Hopefully I am smart enough to sit back and listen to others for a while.

Any thoughts? Similar experiences?

Young Teachers

Well, I had my learning moment very clearly today. I was sitting in a classroom, with my legs under a desk that only just fit over the top of them. I had two fourth grade girls explaining new words from other countries to me. Back to school I guess...

I have found that I really love doing volunteer work. As much as I want to say that I do it because I "love to help others," as the standard response would go, I do volunteer work selfishly. Is that even possible? I do volunteer work because I like to feel busy, I like to be productive, basically because it keeps my mind alert. I have met so many wonderful people and had so many exciting experiences through volunteer work that I can't say I do it for other people because I have gotten so much out of it for myself. Currently, I am leading a Girl Scout Troop of third and fourth grade girls with a friend of mine. We've been with these girls since the beginning of this school year, so at this point, we know them pretty well.

One of the badges that we have been working on is teaching them about world cultures other than their own. After my co-leader read them a story about paper cranes in Japan (which I learned is Japan's national sign for peace, thanks to another teacher today!) we let two girls talk about experiences they had had with cultures that were new to us. One girl talked about spending her summers in Egypt with a relative. After an interesting description of the turmoil that happened just recently in Egypt, she began to explain how frustrated she got when she was not allowed to walk on the grass, ever. I'm not sure how much of what she described were just rules that were set for her by her family and how much came from a cultural/environmental practice. She even went so far as to explain that while the people in Egypt were protesting, they all stayed on the pavement and off the grass. It is interesting to see how a child uses her experiences with what she sees on TV.  After her explanation of the culture, she taught us how to say "let's go," (YaLLah) "goodbye," (ma'a salama) and "thank you," (shokran). After she finished, another one of the girls talked about her father's family, who was raised (I think) in Algeria. She taught us a little bit of Arabic and some French. I wish I could describe what she talked about, but unfortunately I had to chastise some other girls for being rude and not listening. Ironic, that by scolding them I was then doing what they got in trouble for.

While going back and trying to remember all of the words that the girls taught me today, I realized that doing a Google search is how I get a great deal of my information. I'm not sure if this means that I should be thankful that I have that resource or if it means that I should be more careful, double checking my information with more educational sources. (AKA not Ask.com or Yahoo Answers) I'm even skeptical when I use Wikipedia. (even though I swear by it!) Not because I'm worried about getting incorrect information (I'm actually convinced that an encyclopedia that is edited by the public on a regular basis will ALWAYS be more up to date and correct than an old dusty encyclopedia on a library shelf.) but because I'm afraid that other people won't trust me as a reliable source if they find out that I use Wikipedia. I don't know, what are your thoughts on Wikipedia? I know my teachers always warned against using it, but I think that it is a fantastic jumping off point if you just need to know the basics about something. Along the same lines, what qualities do you look for in a person before you consider them to be a reliable source of information?

What is learning?

Learning as defined by the dictionary is a verb that mean:

1. to acquire knowledge or skill
2. to become informed.

While those are fine definitions, I think that looking at the origin of the word makes more sense. Based on several supposed origins of the word, to learn came from words that translate to ideas such as "I know," "to be on the right track," and "having gained by study." These all seem to play into the modern sense of learning which as we all know, happens at school. But when I look at all I have learned since I left school (only just one year ago) I realize that if learning stops when we are finished with school, I am seriously under prepared for the rest of my life.

After I graduated from college in May of 2010, I took a mental vacation. I stopped reading, I didn't keep up with current events, I didn't really even ask questions. I just went about my life, content with just existing from day to day. In talking to my husband one afternoon, during that mental vacation, he mentioned a prominent world leader. I had no idea what he was talking about, but I played along and pretended that I knew exactly what was going on. Unfortunately, my husband, being the intuitive man that he is, caught me in my fib. This led to a discussion about intellectual curiosity. It was then that I realized, quite abruptly, that learning is up to me now. I have to seek out information. I no longer have someone to stand in front of me and tell me what I need to know. Luckily for me, my husband is the most intellectually curious person I have EVER met. He doesn't believe me when I tell him that, but he really is brilliant. So I have a wonderful guide to help me.

While I am no longer attending an institution focused on making sure I am ready for my career path, I do still have teachers all around me. When I say teacher, I don't mean in the conventional sense. When most people hear the word teacher they think of someone writing on a blackboard and assigning homework. However, I mean teacher as someone who offers knowledge. I see teachers as co-workers, friends, children, experiences, books, or anything/anyone else I come into contact with that offers me something I didn't already know or understand.

Lately, I have made it a daily goal to learn at least one new thing. I don't always have to learn a factiod about the environment or the origin of a phrase, for example. Sometimes, I'm happy to learn something new about myself or a friend. Hopefully, "Learning Forever" will be an incentive to ensure that I am learning every day, because, as much as I love learning, I love helping other people learn even more.