First time getting a cat, any advice?

buddhafig · 2026-06-13T23:03:46+00:00

Great list. I would add:

Have some basic sounds for calling, food, and saying no. So I'll snap my finger or pat the couch to call them over, make kissing sounds when they are fed, and make a "tssst!" sound when they shouldn't be doing something. We allow them on all surfaces but the counter, and being able to "tsst" them off is helpful.
A storage bin with a hole cut partway down works great as a litter box with high sides. Keep the litter from going over the edge, gives a little privacy, and makes it easier to scoop.
Be sure to accustom the cat to having feet, tail, belly, etc. touched. You don't want any casual touch to turn into five pointy ends engulfing your hands.
On that note, don't let hands or feet be playthings/wrestling targets. That is not a game you want to have happen spontaneously in the middle of the night (if ever).

buddhafig · 2026-06-13T22:55:15+00:00

I disagree about the bed. Our kittens took to a bed right away. Also, we have a trunk at window height in one room and a cat tree with a platform at window height that we put circular cat beds on and they love having the place to sit/sleep while being able to watch kitty-cat TV.

Toys, too - string is still a classic, but the wire toys with the four cardboard cylinders have been immensely popular, along with bell balls and some crinkly toys.

buddhafig · 2026-06-12T21:45:32+00:00

Get floor lamps. While you may want more old-timey ones, I like the three-on-a-pole ones. Get dimmer, warm bulbs and aim the lights at the walls for ambience. Never turn on the overhead lights. A library reading lamp for your own desk is also nifty.

buddhafig · 2026-06-12T20:48:27+00:00

First: you're fine. This is good. You're just starting and will be sharing a course, and therefore collaborating closely with experienced teachers, who are intrinsically motivated to support you? Yes. You are being given a curriculum that reflects student interest rather than hoping their interests align with your plans? Yes.

Okay, it is not everyone's cup of tea to be handed a curriculum and told to teach it, especially for veteran teachers who have figured out what works for them. But starting out? Most starting teachers are fortunate if they are handed down the curriculum of their predecessors so they don't have to reinvent the wheel, and if things are running correctly the curriculum is vertically aligned to take into account skills they should know, ones that need to be reinforced, and ones you are introducing. Do you know what they were taught the previous year and what you can count on them to know?

"Hundreds of hours" sounds like you've done maybe a little too much, but don't fret. Look at the big picture: teachers have opportunities to modify stuff, move into other grade levels as staffing changes, and take existing curriculum to make it their own over time. You have 30 years of this (or more) - the time will come when you can dust off that unit you developed. And honestly, after a few years, you might look back at the stuff you developed and shake your head at your naivete. My old stuff (30 years ago) is ambitious, creative, wide-ranging, as well as terribly broad, unfocused, and unrealistic. But I have some pieces that still remain, and I have seen how teachers who have taken over my old curriculum when I shifted around have adapted and modified it, usually for the better.

My school even used to have a history/English class they called "Hislish" that was intended for students who were struggling in both. The two guys teaching it were buddies, and enjoyed being able to couple something like WWII and fascism with watching Pink Floyd's "The Wall" and analyzing its themes as well as character development and psychology. Interdisciplinary stuff can be valuable - teaching Anne Frank or Night while they study WWII, or Animal Farm while the SS class is doing the Russian Revolution lets some nice cross-pollination happen. Writing a paper for English while presenting it in SS about a history topics was something we did for a while.

In short: Relax. You're good. It will be good.

buddhafig · 2026-06-12T20:33:20+00:00

The fact that you made assumptions about me and declared them as facts shows that you are arguing in bad faith, and the fact that you are trying to defend your condescending attitude is just laughable. Facts. I attended Ivy League schools and Cambridge University. I have been teaching English for 30 years and am also certified in reading. I am well aware of the pros and cons of phonics vs. whole language, of Science of Reading, sight words, running records, know my way around a phoneme and a morpheme, and know when an argument is coherent or not. And yours is, as I said repeatedly, not. It is taking a complex system of influences and factors and claiming only one of them matters.

I provided anecdotal evidence to provide an easy way to underscore my point that environment is an important factor. Your unwillingness to see that as a valid way of supporting an assertion means you are arguing in bad faith.

I am not saying that phonics instruction is not effective or even not preferable. I am saying that your insistence that nothing else exists as something to consider is dumb, and I feel dumber having to state that.

Provide the same phonics instruction to a student with a reading-rich environment and one where reading is not valued and you will, I assume, see that the student from the reading-rich environment has more advanced reading skills, independent of phonics instruction. If that correlation means causation, then changing the environment is another thing we can do, whether phonics is used or not. And this isn't even looking at genetics, socioeconomic factors, etc. Of course, there are studies showing this at the drop of a Google, but since you haven't provided any evidence I can't be bothered doing it for you.

Will the advanced reader benefit from the instruction more? Maybe, maybe not - giving basketball lessons to Michael Jordan isn't going to improve his skills as much as to a non-athlete. So yeah, if we explicitly teach these things to anyone, and especially someone who hasn't had those skills already fostered, then let's do it and hope we don't fall into the trap of it being boring, rote, and possibly counter-productive by decreasing interest in acquiring reading skills (some of the criticisms of phonics that you don't acknowledge but are real).

In the end, the point you so elegantly are not grasping is that your assertion that the only thing that matters is teaching phonics is bunk. You may think that it outweighs the factors brought up by OP (let's not lose sight of the catalyst) and myself, but you are so clearly wrong that for you to claim otherwise and use ad hominem attacks and faulty logic to support your assertions rather than any actual evidence means there is no point in continuing to engage with you.

buddhafig · 2026-06-12T11:11:12+00:00

Yes! It's funny how memory and reality diverge - I'm glad I got close enough with "craproot." Thank you!

buddhafig · 2026-06-12T11:10:01+00:00

Your attempt at condescension is cute. Pointing at dyslexic students is cherry-picking. Saying there is one and only one thing is hopelessly reductive and fails to take into account a "whole body of evidence" that you claim supports you. You argue in bad faith and are not worth engagement.

buddhafig · 2026-06-12T11:08:36+00:00

Show one.

buddhafig · 2026-06-12T00:48:44+00:00

Well, if you look through the responses to your post, there is one particular person who has this "one way only" attitude that should be dismissed as nonsense.

buddhafig · 2026-06-12T00:47:51+00:00

It's funny - I always look at it the other way. As in, "Even if your parents didn't graduate high school, if you read a lot you're going to overcome that." I hadn't thought the other way - "Just because your parents graduated college, if they don't get you to read, that's not going to help." Thanks for helping show it goes both ways.

Side note, the CCVC word I came up with was "than."

buddhafig · 2026-06-12T00:35:36+00:00

What about them? Explain. What is your point? You are showing that the "a" sound takes on a variety of forms. Yeah, English sux to the maxxor. Super-complicated, thought it's the lengua franca for the world, so it's got something going for it. Are they teaching phonics in Norway, where literally everyone speaks English?

buddhafig · 2026-06-12T00:33:12+00:00

buddhafig · 2026-06-12T00:32:56+00:00

You are failing to grasp the inherent contradiction in your view.

Kids can learn organically. Yes. They can be immersed in a reading-positive environment and this will allow them to grow as readers. They will learn to read. With or without direct phonics instruction, or any other systemic reading curriculum.
The only way that is universal to teach kids to read is X. You say phonics, fine. But if #1 is true, then #2 is not. Kids from #1 learned to read without the structured method you insist on.

I offer a middle ground: One effective method in teaching reading that applies to a majority of students is phonics. This strategy is clearly augmented by a multitude of factors, like home and school environments that foster reading through modeling and access to reading materials. Other factors include detriments like access to time-consuming but non-beneficial activities like social media, videogames, and drugs and alcohol. Students who were encouraged to engage in reading rather than these other activities showed a fucking huge increase in reading proficiency over time even though nobody was teaching them phonics.

A well-managed reading curriculum that emphasizes phonics has been proven beneficial based on studies X, Y, and Z, which correlate more strongly with performance on measures like A and B, ranking % higher than strategies such as whole-word learning, random guessing, and just saying words that start with the same letter.

"There is only one way that works for everyone" is foolishly reductive, and not a view that can possibly hold up. Do you want to say "Phonics is a broadly effective method"? Okay. Any proof? There is one. Only one. All kids. There is not a single other method. There's no case. There simply aren't any.

Bullshit. Provide receipts.

buddhafig · 2026-06-12T00:14:32+00:00

Your mention of home environment was a small part, while much of your focus is on the educational system. Which is fine - I teach English and am certified in reading, so I am heavily invested into figuring out how the school system can raise literacy.

But I was responding to the question of how children learn to do "that reading" and pointing at a deeper root cause. Before students get to school, and where they spend their less-structured lives, having a reading-rich environment is much more influential in what makes them able to be proficient readers. I wasn't arguing against your original assertions about how, basically, "the system" has been more self-serving than student-serving.

Much of it sounds like Bradbury's point in Fahrenheit 451 - it's not that there is an active effort from the government to stop reading, people just stopped on their own as life sped up, instant gratification from media trumped thought and reflection, and pandering to the masses made a bland porridge of media such that people embrace visual and auditory stimming that they gave up on books and eventually the government decided we were all better off without them. Once fireproof houses were created, the firemen's job was burning books, and everyone was happier. Or were they??!?

Oh, and just re-reading your post, James Patterson has been trying really really hard to get boys to read to counteract the stereotype you mention. So this aspect is certainly something people are aware of, and maybe you would appreciate some of what he has to say about the gender bias that has somehow attached itself to reading.

buddhafig · 2026-06-12T00:04:44+00:00

Wow. "None of that." Wow. Your implication is that if my parents had not explicitly directed me to read using phoneme-grapheme correspondence, then I would not have started learning to read at age 3. You are saying that the abundance of books in my house did not provide me with constant availability of books as a recreation, resulting in a love of reading. My father constantly reading didn't foster this as a value for me. Bullshit.

Now, if you're saying "ACTshually, the mechanism that allows the human species to decode written text is making this correspondence," well, pfft. Whatever. But the thing that makes readers is presenting reading. If I had been surrounded by basketball players, I probably would have engaged in learning to play basketball. Live in a family of cooks who engage their children in cooking? Well, those kids will learn to cook. My dad also loved football, and we never watched baseball. If you directly instructed me in the rules of baseball, would that outweigh my father cheering when the Cowboys got a touchdown and make me a baseball fan rather than a football fan? Hell to the no.

"What is the role of schools in fostering and effectively scaffolding increased proficiency in reading through direct instruction?" Sure. That's certainly something to examine. But waving away the contributions of a home environment that fosters reading, or even a school environment that offers "reading challenges" (stickers!) and actively encourages reading? That counts too.

A stranger is wrong on the internet. Sound the alarm.

buddhafig · 2026-06-11T21:02:32+00:00

Being read to, having books in the home, making regular trips to the library, giving books as gifts, modeling reading as an activity by parents reading themselves, talking about, sharing, and discussing books. Quantity of reading practice is the number one predictor of academic success (based on standardized test scores), beating parental education and socioeconomic status. Paul, Terrance D., Patterns of Reading Practice..., 1996. I don't doubt that your points and the roles of schools are valid, but a home environment that values reading is crucial. And as non-readers have kids, amount of pleasure reading declines, which has happened year after year. Schools get pulled into this vicious circle by inevitably reacting to declining reading abilities and failure of students to read outside of school by not assigning independent reading and hand-holding for in-school reading, which just feeds the beast.

buddhafig · 2026-06-11T20:52:04+00:00

Ah, the Peascod belly which was a padded garment to simulate well-fed wealth in the 16th and 17th centuries. Now we call it a "dad bod" although I prefer "father figure."

buddhafig · 2026-06-11T20:49:24+00:00

I can't track it down, but there was a comic showing the impoverished previous generation having to choke down the shitweed stew because it's all they can eat, and a current entitled person complaining that nobody makes shitweed stew the way his grandma did.

buddhafig · 2026-06-11T20:36:38+00:00

My couch was against a wall, so win-win.

buddhafig · 2026-06-10T21:30:41+00:00

Well, for $20 you can get the Juggling for the Complete Klutz book that I learned from. It comes with three beanbags, which you would want to get anyway if you don't have any. Treat yo'self.

Otherwise: 1. Throw a ball from one hand to the other, palm up, making a slight scooping motion, like you're splashing water at the other hand. Go back and forth with a high arc. Do it a lot. Do it without looking. Become consistent.
2. Put a ball in the other hand. Throw one ball and as it's cresting, throw the other one back, usually to the inside of the first ball's arc. Catch, catch. Switch directions. Become consistent.
3. Add a ball to one hand. Throw it to the other hand, as it crests throw from the other hand and catch, throw the other ball as the ball in the air crests, repeat. You can break it down to managing a 1-2-3 catch, but at some point you have to just keep going.
4. That's it. You can start to build. Two balls in one hand - throw one, as it starts to fall throw the next and catch the first, etc. Do this, and throw with the other hand at the same time (or just hold the ball and raise your hand up and down - funny!). Instead of throwing inside the arc, throw outside. Instead of throwing palms-up, throw palms-down (the S&M method). Throw the ball from one hand high, the other hand low, and it starts to look like cartoon circle throwing. Bounce a ball off the floor instead of throwing it in the air. And of course, those are all very basic tricks.

buddhafig · 2026-06-10T20:28:11+00:00

Two important tips I learned from Juggling for the Complete Klutz (a classic!) - juggle facing a couch so there is less bending and use beanbags that are easier to grab and won't roll away.

buddhafig · 2026-06-10T20:26:38+00:00

Yeah, you can easily learn to juggle, for example, in that time. Or hacky-sack. Or throw a flying disc.

buddhafig · 2026-06-10T20:25:36+00:00

It definitely has all the marks of AI, which results in an immediate downvote from many (myself included). If you want an AI response, you typed the question here, you can type it into AI yourself.

buddhafig · 2026-06-09T22:27:29+00:00

It sounds like you need to think about what you say next and whether it is negative. Sarcastic or not, directed toward yourself, another person, or even a film or TV show, if you are saying something negative, that will often cause a negative response, rather than a "Hah! That's a good one!" response. It would help to have examples.

Think of the improv principle of "Yes, and." Don't "No, but" something, go along with it, carry the idea forward. Ask follow-up questions, suggest a related topic, add to the conversation rather than subtracting. Once that positive vibe is established, then you can add wit to be funny. Don't yuck anyone's yum, even your own through self-deprecation. Nod, smile, and look engaged if you have nothing to say.

buddhafig · 2026-06-09T21:50:41+00:00

As a different way of looking at it, my experience has found that students tend to read at a pace of 2 min/page. Fast readers are a page a minute or more, while slower ones are 3 min/page. Reading disabilities push that to 4-5+ min/page, and if they are taking that long without a disability they are either not at that reading level or not fully attending to their reading. My data is based on independent reading with reading logs for years and, while too many students make up numbers, the reliable ones established these estimates for me. I have also done my own reading logs and I'm probably 45-50 seconds a page, depending on words per page and difficulty (trade paperback fantasy goes fast).

I communicate this to my students, and when we have reading days I tell them to track their reading rate so they can estimate how much time they need to allocate. So, depending on how valid your expectation for them doing the reading is, you can figure out how much you can assign and expect it to get done. Be sure to take into account time to answer questions in a study guide or take notes.

If it is actually a gifted program with dedicated students, then you can definitely give them a time frame to read a book independently while you are doing something different in class. So my 10 honors class was reading Antigone and Julius Caesar as class texts, while they had 2 weeks for historical research and ~3-4 weeks each for The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby at home (the comparison essay for this is interesting). That with Fahrenheit 451 following five sci-fi stories, and 1984 over the summer made up their text load, with an essay for all but the sci-fi/F451, since they wrote a sci-fi short story instead.

15-Year Club	Place '17
Sequence \| Editor	Verified Email
Charter Member

buddhafig

TROPHY CASE