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Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Antiquated immigration Laws.
I think this kid's Patronus will have to be all of us.
08.03.12
"That boy who emailed...his parents must be incredible."
Teacher starts period in front of class, turns into a lesson
Teachers are almost always teaching even when it's not in their lesson plan.
Those that were born to be teachers find teachable moments everywhere and one woman found herself in one of those moments. Though this one was likely just a bit more personal than she probably would've liked.
Emily Elizabeth posted a TikTok video about how she found herself in a predicament in front of her classroom full of 10 and 11-year-old kids. The teacher explained that she was noticing a lot of commotion and whispering among the little girls in her class while she was wearing white pants. After reminding the girls to stay on task, the whispering continued, prompting Emily to be more direct.
That's when one of the girls asked to speak with her privately dropping the bomb that no one that gets periods wants to hear in public.
"She goes, 'I'm sorry Ms. Emily, but I just want to let you know that I think you might have got your period,'" the teacher recalls.
But instead of freaking out or being flustered, Emily decided to swallow her embarrassment and use the moment as a teachable experience. She promptly told the concerned girls that it was fine and that she had a change of clothes that she could wear. Just before excusing herself, the boys noticed something was wrong so they curiously asked. Emily informed them that she had gotten her period and while she was annoyed, she was perfectly fine.
One of the boys even sent her an email double checking that she was okay in a less public way. The sweet reaction from her class warmed her heart and the hearts of viewers.
"That boy who emailed...his parents must be incredible," one commenter says.
"You set an excellent example! And to not hide it from the boys who asked because that would have spoken SO LOUDLY to the boys and girls about normalizing periods," another writes.
"The email, you sound like an amazing teacher with an amazing group of kids," someone says.
You can watch Emily tell the entire story below:
@emilyelizabeth.w Let’s normalise talking about periods for girls AND boys … trying to find the silver lining 😅 #fyp #melbourneteacher #teachersoftiktok #teacherlife
"Are you guys that attached to your phones?"
Mario Mirante criticizes a mom he saw at the park.
TikTokker Mario Mirante is going viral for his video that brings up two significant issues: smartphone addiction and whether people without children have the right to criticize parents.
It all started when Mirante saw a young boy playing alone in the park.
“The kid is just playing quietly, not being annoying. I don’t hear a peep from him; he's just doing his thing on the playground,” Mirante said in a video that has nearly 6000,000 views. “The mom the entire time is on her phone, staring right down at her screen. Doesn’t look up one time.”
The boy climbed up to the top of the slide and called down to his mother, who didn’t even look up from her phone. “I hear, ‘Hey mom, watch. Watch, Mom,’” Mirante recalled. “And at the top of her lungs, shrieking like a Velociraptor, this mother screams, ‘One second!”
The mother’s shriek was so intense that it shocked Mirante and the boy.
@mariomirante Please watch the whole video before you comment. Thanks
“He wasn’t doing anything wrong,” Mirante said. “Mom never looks up from the screen as the kid goes down (the slide).” After witnessing the parent with her face in her phone, ignoring her child, Mirante decided to call out parents who make their children feel as if they are less important than their parents’ phones.
“Are you guys that attached to your phones?” Mirantes demanded. "All that I was simply trying to say was that I see that happen all too often. And then I see parents complaining about how exhausting it is and how society and social media is ruining their children. Meanwhile, they can't look up from their phones. Can’t give ‘em the time of day.”
Many people thought Mirante didn’t have the right to criticize the mother because he doesn’t have children. "I thought the same way as you. And then I became a parent. Until you become a parent, you do not understand the struggle," Sophia wrote.
While others thought that his criticisms of the mother were warranted.
"I am a single mom, I 100% agree with you. Kids remember who is actually PRESENT with them, not glued to their phone, the TV etc etc," i.am.kristen wrote. “Sometimes it takes two seconds to make a child feel seen and heard, I could've used that in my childhood. love this," Dez addded.
Mirante pushed back against those who said he doesn’t have the right to judge by noting that he’s been a child. “I am an adult that went through a childhood,” he said. "If you want to justify screaming at your kid for no reason when they're not doing anything wrong and how your phone is more important than the attention from your child, go right ahead. I'm all ears."
There’s no hard-set rule on whether people without children have the right to criticize parents, but Mirante was right to point out a big problem in today’s world: parents who spend too much time on their smartphones.
Even if a parent isn’t a full-blown social media addict, spending too much time on our phones can hurt a child’s development. “Often, the effect of looking down at a screen can eliminate the opportunity and space kids need to say what’s on their mind,” warns Jeanne Williams, a child psychologist and play therapist, told Today's Parent. “When a kid is distressed, and you completely ignore them, their distress is going to grow. They won’t build neural pathways that teach them how to soothe themselves.”
We’ll never know the entire situation that happened that day at the park and whether the mother normally pays attention to her son. But Mirante’s video brings up a much-needed conversation about the amount of time we spend staring at our phones when we could be engaging with those we love.
This sparked an important conversation about family responsibility.
A middle-aged woman holding a baby.
A story that recently went viral on Reddit’s AITA forum asks an important question: What is a parent’s role in taking care of their grandchildren? The story is even further complicated because the woman at the center of the controversy is a stepparent.
The woman, 38, met her husband Sam, 47, ten years ago, when his daughter, Leah, 25, was 15. Five years ago, the couple got married after Leah had moved out to go to college.
Leah’s mom passed away when she was 10.
Last year, Leah became pregnant, and she wanted to keep the baby, but her boyfriend didn’t. After the disagreement, the boyfriend broke up with her. This forced Leah to move back home because she couldn’t afford to be a single parent and live alone on a teacher’s salary.
Leah’s story is experienced by many young mothers who are facing difficulties. The father isn’t involved in the baby’s life as a caretaker or financially. Sadly, 33% of all children in the U.S. are born without their biological fathers living in the home.
The new mother is a teacher and can’t afford to live on her own with a child. A recent study found that out of the top 50 U.S. cities, Pittsburgh is the only one where a new teacher could afford rent.
The stressors of taking care of the baby made Leah realize she needed help.
“But once she had the baby around 4 months back, Leah seemed to realize having a baby is not the sunshine and rainbows she thought it was,” the woman wrote on Reddit. “She barely got any sleep during the last four months. All the while Sam was helping her with the baby while I did almost all chores myself.”
“Now her leave is ending. She did not want to leave the baby at daycare or with a nanny,” the woman continued. “Sam and I both work as well.”
Leah asked her stepmother if she would stay home with the baby. The stepmother said no because she never wanted to have a baby and she has a job. “I asked why Leah can't stay home with the baby herself,” the woman wrote. “She said how she was young and had to build a career. I said many people take breaks to raise kids, and she broke down crying about how she was so tired all the time being a mom and needed something else in her life too.”
A middle-aged woman with a baby.
via Pixabay
After the woman told her stepdaughter no, her husband pressured her to stay home with the baby. But she refused to give up her job to raise her stepdaughter’s child. “Leah said yesterday how she wished her mom was alive since she would have had her back. She said I didn't love her, and my husband is also mad at me,” the woman wrote. The woman asked the Reddit community if she was in the wrong for “refusing to help my stepdaughter with the baby,” and the community responded with rapturous support.
"[The woman] should tell her husband to knock it off and stop trying to pressure her into raising his daughter’s baby. If he wants a family member to look after her baby while she works, then he can do it," Heavy_Sand5228 wrote.
"This is Leah's baby that she alone chose to have. That doesn't obligate you to change YOUR life to suit her desires. The whole business of saying you don't love her because you won't quit your job to watch her baby is manipulative and messed up, and I'm shocked your husband is siding with her," SupremeCourtJust-a** added.
Leah and many women like her are in this situation because, in many places, teachers are underpaid, rent is high, and not all dads pay child support, even those required by law.
Another commenter noted that the baby is much more the father’s responsibility than the stepmother's. "To add, Leah should consider seeking child support from her ex. Her kid should be getting that money," Obiterdicta wrote.
Dorothy Hoffner tried skydiving for the first time on her 100th birthday and loved it.
Dorothy Hoffner is pure #agingoals.
If you're looking for some aging inspiration, look no further, because Dorothy Hoffner is about to blow your mind.
At 104, Hoffner just became the oldest person to parachute out of an airplane in a tandem skydive. That's right, skydive. At 104 years old—or to be exact, 104 years and 289 days old—beating the previous world record set by a 103-year-old in Sweden in May of 2022.
But it's actually even more impressive than that. It's not like Hoffner is someone who's been skydiving since she was young and just happened to keep on doing it as she got older. She actually didn't go on her first skydiving adventure until her 100th birthday.
On Oct 1, 2023, she joined the team at Skydive Chicago in Ottawa, Illinois, for the world-breaking tandem skydive. Though she uses a walker to get around, she manages the physical toll of plummeting through the air at 10,000+ feet before parachuting to a skidding stop strapped to a certified U.S. Parachute Association (USPA) tandem instructor with impressive ease.
“Let’s go, let’s go, Geronimo!” Hoffner said after she boarded the plane, according to the Chicago Tribune.
Watch her do what many of us would be too terrified to attempt:
The way she rolls right out of that plane cool as a cucumber! Hoffner told the Tribune that on her first skydive, at age 100, she had to be pushed out of the plane. But this time, knowing what she was in for, she took charge with calm confidence.
“Skydiving is a wonderful experience, and it’s nothing to be afraid of," Hoffner shares. "Just do it!”
That's some seriously sage advice from someone who knows firsthand that age really is just a number. Learn more about skydiving with Skydive Chicago here.
Frances 'Effy' Jones, one of the first women to be trained to use a typewriter and to take up cycling as a hobby, recalls life as a young working woman in London.
Two Victorian women discuss being teens in the 1800s.
There remains some mystery around what life was like in the 1800s, especially for teens. Most people alive today were not around in the Victorian era when the technologies now deemed old-fashioned were a novelty. In this rediscovered 1970s clip from the BBC, two elderly women reminisce about what it was like being teenagers during a time when the horse and buggy was still the fastest way to get around.
While cars were just around the corner from being the common mode of transportation toward the end of the 19th century, it's pretty wild to imagine what these women experienced. Frances "Effy" Jones explained how, at age 17, she was encouraged by her brother to check out this new machine in a storefront window. Turns out that machine was a typewriter and, after being trained on how to use it, Jones would sit in the store window typing while people outside gathered to watch. Before long, classes began popping up for women to learn how to use a typewriter, starting a new movement for women of that era.
The second woman, Berta Ruck, told the BBC that she would get into a bit of trouble at boarding school for drawing instead of completing school work. This talent took Ruck to art school in London where she rode buses around town, attempting to avoid mud getting on her long skirt. But the woman explained that it never worked and she would spend hours brushing the mud from her skirt before wearing it out again. I'm sure you're thinking, buses? They weren't the buses we would see nowadays. These were double-decker horse-pulled carriages.
I know, that's hard to imagine. That's why you should check out the video below:
This article originally appeared on 08.29.22
We "modern" folks don't even have all of these luxuries.
Can we bring back some 50s fridge features, please?
There are very few things that would make people nostalgic for the 1950s. Sure, they had cool cars and pearl necklaces were a staple, but that time frame had its fair share of problems, even if "Grease" made it look dreamy. Whether you believe your life would've been way more interesting if you were Danny Zuko or not, most would agree their technology was...lacking.
All eras are "advanced" for their time, but imagine being dropped off in the 50s as someone from the year 2023. A recent post by Historic Vids on Twitter of a 1956 commercial advertising a refrigerator, however, has some people thinking that when it came to fridges, maybe they were living in the year 2056. I don't typically swoon over appliances, yet this one has me wondering where I can purchase a refrigerator like this.
Of course, there's no fancy touch screen that tells you the weather and asks how you'd like your ice cubed. It's got more important features that are actually practical.
Like a fruit drawer that not only pulls down so you can quickly check your inventory, but also pulls completely out.
"A big picture window hydrator for fruits and vegetables," the actress says while demonstrating. "It tilts down to show you your supply at a glance, and it also lifts out, so you can take it over to the sink when there's a fresh supply to be washed and put away."
Yeah, that could be helpful and reduce the clutter in your fridge from all those clear storage bins companies designed to essentially do the same thing but maybe in a more cumbersome way. But the cool factor of the vintage refrigerator didn't stop there. You know how sometimes it's like playing Jenga removing leftovers? Well, this fridge has shelves that slide out nearly completely. Oh, the amount of reduced stress that would give folks sneaking a late snack after a holiday meal.
Watch the fascinating video below:
\u201cThis refrigerator from 1956 has more features than modern day fridges\u201d— Historic Vids (@Historic Vids) 1682958373
One commenter said, "Can we vote to bring this back?" and I have to agree. Take my money.
For a little extra fun, check out the full commercial below and marvel not only at the refrigerator but at how our attention spans for advertisements have diminished over the decades.
This story originally appeared on 5.3.23