Halfway There

And even the eleventh hour is too late! May flowers are supposed to follow April showers. Well, an even more reliable sequence is the ar...

Oops, dropped another! A funny thing about being a writer: Once you've published a book, it makes it exceedingly difficult to keep w...

A new strain of tardiness The old pattern was very familiar, especially since I tend to give my students lots of short quizzes, often at...

Lesson unlearned My students were not happy with me and they weren't keeping it a secret. After a unit on scientific notation, I gav...

Another growth opportunity It was a coincidence. On Thursday I stumbled across a television program devoted to the life of Nathaniel S. ...

His eminence Boba Cardinal Fett? The next pope of the Roman Catholic Church will be elected during the month of March, taking over as su...

Escape from the valley Or perhaps I should say, “Cows in The City ,” as San Francisco is wont to style itself. In a few hours I will be ...

This ought to hurt a little It usually happens right after the first exam of the semester. Somewhere between one third to two thirds of ...

Where is an editor when you need one? Perusing the San Francisco Chronicle over breakfast this morning, I lit upon an article on the i...

Non carpe diem If it weren't Saturday, my reaction would have been different. Cartoonists like Stephan Pastis have confessed that S...

Déjà vu with Lucy Van Pelt In place of the “eternal feminine,” Lucy from the Peanuts comic strip provides us with the “eternal fussbudg...

Jewelry and reality A regional jewelry chain has dug into the vaults to unearth a pair of commercials from a couple of years ago to prom...

Armored with irrationality Ruben Navarrette was outraged by the behavior of some people in the wake of the massacre of schoolchildren in...

Praying instead of studying? I'm not sure what Bob Christopher was doing in college during his years as a biology major, but it sure...

A different fine-tuned argument The resident curmudgeon at the American Record Guide decided to share a few theological nuggets in his ...

Being good during the holidays I first saw the anti-Obama LOL sticker last year on the back of an SUV that also carried the logo of a lo...

Rather missing the point  One of my favorite negative reviews on RateMyProfessors.com is the following: I don't understand why peo...

Several moves ahead The president's most devoted advocates believe that Barack Obama is a political genius who plays eleventh-dimens...

Cain and Abel? A student was talking to a friend. He sounded a bit irked. “My brother is enrolled in a college in Oakland. He's ha...

A cry for help One of my students—let's call him “Dick”—sent me a distressed e-mail. He was not doing well in class and was hoping f...