When she was a teenager, my wife worked as a waitress for a couple of summers.

So she is very sensitive to the needs of waitresses — and whenever we go out to eat, we always overtip.

Starting the summer of my twelfth year, I had several different labor-intensive jobs, including installing and removing huge circus-sized tents, caddying, doing lawn care, bagging groceries and [more...]

Babies are cute. They lay there and smile and giggle and gurgle and drool.

They’re a lot of work — but at least they stay in one place.

Once they learn to walk, however, it takes exponentially more work to keep them safe and out of trouble.

Especially if you’re alone with your two preschool kids, and you [more...]

I’ve only taken an IQ test once in my life — back in fourth or fifth grade.

I remember what my score was, and, looking back, I know that it qualified me to join Mensa.

But, with a tip o’ the hat to Groucho Marx, “I would not join any club that would have someone like me for a member.”

And besides, the fact that I was the [more...]

As humans, we owe the survival of our species to our ability control the often-dangerous world around us.

So we’re kind of hard-wired to try to do that as much as possible.

And, to help us, we invent technologies.

Only later do we realize that the inventions that we’ve embraced have [more...]

Cheaters never prosper — that’s what I was taught when I was a kid.

But, since then, I’ve learned that academic cheaters often prosper very well.

First of all, it’s a low-risk crime because they rarely get caught.

Some say that’s because, nowadays, it’s really easy to [more...]

Waldorf schools are very expensive.

But they have no problem recruiting students.

In fact, they have students from many affluent Silicon Valley families.

Children whose parents work for big, high-tech companies.

Parents send their children to Waldorf schools because [more...]

It’s been more than twenty years since I chose to leave my doctoral program in Curriculum and Instructional Systems as an ABD instead of a PhD.

Back then, the University of Minnesota would have allowed me to go back and finish my dissertation without having to retake any of my coursework for up until ten years after I had first begun my coursework.

In other words, they gave me a total of ten years to complete my doctorate — if I had needed more time than that, I would have [more...]

Have you ever known an old person?

Or are you an old person?

I’m guessing that you’ve experienced at least the former.

And you probably hope that, far, far in the future, you’ll also experience the latter.

At work, a couple of months ago, a [more...]