education

 When I came back home, Gambit was in a state of Who is this guy and what is he doing in my house. It took me a good twenty seconds to find him inside my TV stand out of all the places he could be. He slowly recognized me.

I gave him his food. I warmed up my food, and we had another episode when I was sitting on the couch and wanted to eat my food, but he wanted to rub himself against me and smell the food. I wanted boundaries, so I lifted my plate up and did not give him the touch he was craving. After my food, I gave him a couple of treats, and he came back for a brief interaction. 

He didn't come for the extended belly rub and cuddles. I wondered why, then I remembered I had left him by himself after a morning of talking loudly to him. And now I refused his first attempt to touch.

I made myself a drink and turned on the computer. I saw him on his cat tree leaning towards the opposite direction from me. I felt like this was not right. He will sleep till late and act at night again. 

So I put on some jazz and picked him up to the couch and made him sleep on me. Then I tapped him with the rhythm. This would be his music lesson for tonight since he wasn't patient enough for a few pages of the book. 

Even today in the office, I was thinking of the education system and talked to a couple of coworkers about their experiences. This was actually brought up by a coworker in the kitchen, and we chatted about how different schools are nowadays vs before. The topics we discussed were 

1- Mentorship and whether it is replaceable by training videos, and how people are certified nowadays by others, and whether that is a monopoly or is effective? Is it being done properly? 

2- The same way some of us weren't supposed to be using calculators (or programmable ones) at exams, are kids supposed to be banned from using AI tools like Chat GPT? 

(1) led to talking about the bandwidth of information in videos vs text, being able to take the judgment and point of view of an author who has been able to write a book, vs seeing a picture and having your own thoughts in it, while it might carry thousands of sentences.

(2) led to thinking about the sharpening of the brain and differences between math sharpness (being able to calculate in your head) and essay sharpness (thinking about a problem critically). 

One thing I realized is that this cat doesn't mind the background noise or being tapped on. Which is surprising to me since they have sharp senses. What he cares about is the environment. He ignores a lot of things, but sometimes a distinct move, which results in a noise, can make him move from napping to walking around the room.