a waste of good suffering

This is hilarious to me…

I have to write a comparative paper on different psychologists for my Social/Emotional Development class and first up is E.L. Thorndike.

So far I’ve learned that he locked cats up into puzzle boxes to see how they escaped. Kind of a Schrödinger meets Hellraiser kind of a thing. Kind of. That image was funny enough by itself. Add to that how often the general chaos of working in a preschool is referred to is ‘herding cats’ and boom! Insight! Why bother keeping them in a herd when I can just funnel them into some sort of maze?

I can set up a lawn chair at a good vantage point and call down hints to the ones that can count to 20 or know their colors. They’re safe, active, and involved. It could work!

I haven’t read far enough to find if Thorndike suddenly disappeared and became a new paradox of his own. (Is he inside the cats? We won’t know unless we open them, but we won’t because every time we think it, all their yellow eyes focus on us and just burnnnnn…Has anyone else read Felidae?)

Speaking of focus, back to work.