Links: Two fun, one art, one serious

Between the captions and the photos, some of these made me laugh out loud. 50 Funny Examples Of Cat Beds And Cat Logic collected by Viktorija Gabulaitė and Liucija Adomaite. My favorite: "#47 Why Lie Down On The Cat Bed When You Can Use The Fruit Basket Instead?"

Find Out What Your Name Would Be if You Were Born Today by Chris Wilson. Yeah, giving them data, but I tried it anyway. My name is not super popular and I like it a lot better than the similarly unpopular alternatives of other decades! The page is also useful to generate character names for stories.

Day 12 | Peace, Love & Good Health (Easter Sunday) by Ruby Silvious. The series is called COVID blues and a lot of the art pieces are made from used teabags. The one I linked to is gorgeously decorated blown eggs. I also liked Day 4 | Six Feet Apart, small figures scattered on paint chips exactly evoking my experience when I go on walks these days. If you zoom in, you can see that one of the colors is "pensive blue" which is just perfect.

Cheating, Policing, and School Surveillance by Audrey Watters.

When I talked to students about cheating, I found it was rarely a matter of not understanding how to properly cite their sources. Nor was it really a lazy attempt to get out of doing work. Rather, students were under pressure. They hated writing. They weren't confident they had anything substantive to say. They were struggling with other classes, with time management, with aspects of their lives outside of schooling — jobs, family, and so on. Students needed more support, not more surveillance, which as I find myself repeating a lot these days, is too often confused with care.

So much this. We need compassion, not punishment for people struggling within the system (as opposed to people trying to take down the system). I say the same thing about medicine - too often tests are confused with care. Medical tests do not prevent a damn thing. At best they detect a problem, but all tests (including COVID tests!) have false negatives and false positives, sometimes at far higher rates than we assume.