Requiring students to cite work is pretty common in academic writing after middle school.

Most species of wasp are not aggressive towards humans. I work out in my garden a lot and almost never have encounters with aggressive wasps–the only time I really do is when yellow jackets create a nest in an area that I haven’t been to in a while.

https://xerces.org/blog/wasp-world

I’m having a hard time actually finding a source for this. Just a few poorly written articles that basically cite this video as a source. Something this potentially impactful seems like it would make the rounds more, so I’m very skeptical.

I’m working on converting my entire yard to natives eventually, so I’ll make sure to get a bunch of seeds or plugs for it when I do. Joe pye is so awesome. Absolute butterfly/bee magnet.

Have any of you seen hollow joe pye (Eutrochium fistulosum) in the wild? It gets absolutely enormous, I’ve seen it 8-9’ tall and supposedly it can exceed 11’ in height. I want to get some for my garden but I suspect unless I really crowd it like it would be in its native environment, it’ll get really tall and get knocked over by the wind.

I remember wanting to be a forum mod when I was like 15 and thought that it would make me cool on the forum. As a grown adult… no way. I am so busy between work, grad school, and my personal life, I have no time for such silliness. I have a lot of respect for mods that donate their own time to run communities.

There are native mice all over the place. Yes, some are introduced/invasive, but there are also plenty of native ones too. If you live in the Americas, here’s the subfamilies they make up:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_World_rats_and_mice

Mice serve as food for animals like owls, hawks, falcons, snakes, skunks, etc. Cats killing these animals’ prey makes it harder for them to find food.

Humans are not an invasive species. We migrated to everywhere we currently live. Invasive species are usually defined something along the lines of being a species that was introduced somewhere (by people) where it didn’t previously exist and is harmful to its new environment. We meet the harmfulness part of the definition but not the introduction part of it.

What’ve persimmons got to do with it though?

As someone with a background in linguistics, my jimmies are indeed rustled.

As a teacher, I’m not going to write a student up for disagreeing with me. I’m sure that there are some who do (and it would be warranted if the kid started name calling, yelling, refusing to let it go if the teacher said they wanted to look into it more after class to double-check etc), but in the years I’ve been working in schools, I have yet to see it happen. Here’s an example of what I mean:

A few weeks ago, I was talking with the class about how I study Spanish on Duolingo to help do a job of teaching my kids. One of my students spoke up and said that Duolingo sucks and won’t help you learn language. He actually said it sucks, not exaggerating there. I chose to ignore the wording and just talked about how it wouldn’t be good to use it in isolation, but I also study with a flash card app for vocab, read in Spanish, listen to podcasts in Spanish, and talk with native speakers in Spanish all the time. He still disagreed with me and said so, I told him it is my specific area of professional expertise to know how language learning works, he still disagreed but we moved on.

When a student disagrees with me and I’m not sure I’m right, I try to look it up then and there or consult with a colleague if it’s possible to. If not I make a note (like literally write out a note then and there, I keep sticky notes around at all times) to check on it, and I’m pretty good about getting back to them. Being able to admit you were wrong is extremely important as a teacher, and it can actually help your kids grow as people because you’re modeling how you want them to behave as an adult–owning up and admitting it when you make mistakes. Seeing authority figures do it is powerful!

The rapid-fire memes and acknowledgment of them being memes made it cringe, IMO. If they’d just dialed it back and said something like this I think it would have been fine:

“Here’s our beautiful thicc girl, Abby! She loves to eat fish and swim with her friends. Come see her at our aquarium any time!”

Something I’ve learned as a vegan is that it’s pretty socially acceptable to kick vegans (and I guess vegetarians?) even among leftists. To the point where it’s almost a meme in some vegan social media circles I used to frequent.

I don’t expect shit from anyone. That said, when I’m at one I’m still going to ask if there are options, because why wouldn’t I?

Try iNaturalist, it works pretty well. Also, learn plant morphology, makes it easier to narrow things down when you get a couple suggestions within the same genus or family.

Yeah early-mid summer is about the worst time to plant. I’ve put plants in the ground during the summer but I’m out there watering them nearly every day when it’s this hot, at least for the first few weeks.

“But they drop leaves in the yard and that’s messy!”

Ok?

“And then I have to rake the leaves up!!”

Why?

“Because that’s what you’re supposed to do!”

Why?

Brain has BSOD

I honestly don’t get why so many people are so reckless and impatient on the roads.

Driving provides you anonymity and a getaway vehicle. It also anonymzes other people on the road, which I think kinda gives people like, main character syndrome?

AI-generated articles, books, coloring books for example, are all a thing now. Behind the Bastards did a podcast episode on the latter two.