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My summer vacation, which began 10 days ago, unfortunately started out with a whimper. I have a tube put in my ear – the same kind of tube that little kids get placed in their ears – and it became blocked and infected just before my school year ended, resulting in an ear infection. While…

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It’s been done before under similar circumstances, but every time it happens, I feel great joy and hope for the world.  A short-sighted, authoritarian school regime arbitrarily decrees that shorts are not permitted in accordance with the school’s purposeless dress code. At the same time, the school maintains that skirts, which are essentially shorts without…

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One of my friends famously described me as a “neckless stump with legs for arms.” This wasn’t nice, but when I use that description onstage to describe myself, it always gets a laugh, so I embrace it. Anything for the laugh.   Another friend watched me golfing one day and described me as having T-Rex…

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For more than a decade, I’ve been refraining from commenting on student’s physical appearance, both negatively or positively. It’s a policy I explain to parents and students at the beginning of the year, and it’s one that my students have always appreciated. My reasons are many. There are far more important qualities in a child…

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This is real.  A photo of a man in Alberta, Canada mowing a lawn with a tornado swirling behind him. Cecilia Wessels snapped the picture of her husband, Theunis, as the twister passed near their home in Three Hills. She said cutting the grass was on her husband’s to-do list, and as he started the…

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I can’t stand stupidity. This is stupidity. The senior class President in Exeter, PA is delivering a speech at commencement. He decides to go off-script and criticize the school for the limited role that the student council makes in decision making.  He does not swear. He does not insult anyone specifically. He doesn’t even raise…

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I’ve been teaching in the same elementary school since 1999. This year I said goodbye to my 18th class of students.  Spending almost two decades in the same workplace has become an anomaly in America. Americans work in an average of 12 jobs over the course of their lifetime, and changing jobs every five years…

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Another Moth StorySLAM at The Oberon in Cambridge, MA meant another night using an all-gender restroom. This time I brought friends who found themselves in the presence of the opposite sex in a restroom for the first time.  One of my male friends walked in on four women in the restroom and had to confirm…

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My daughter, Clara, is a bit of a geography nut. At the tender age of eight, I would venture to suggest that she knows more about world geography than most human beings. And it has nothing to do with her intelligence or our attempt to instill a love of geography in her. She simply became…

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