What? Can’t I be both a computer geek and a literature geek?

Why is it that every baby I’ve had has felt the urge to grab a fist-full of my chest hair and pull? It’s not like I have a pelt of body fur, and I don’t walk around the house with my shirt off, but all four of my children have decided at some point to completely ruin the father-infant bonding.

And it hurts!

Am I alone in this? or does it happen to other new fathers? (Female readers with children, please ask your husbands.)

I’ve been reading Chaim Potok’s My Name is Asher Lev while I’m up with one of the twins. Brooke’s been stealing it from me too. Last night I read the following:

That Thursday afternoon, a Washington-New York airliner came down in the East River on its approach to LaGuardia Airport.

OK, so it’s not a New York-Charlotte plane in the Hudson, but still freaky, huh?

Yeah, now I really feel like an Upstate New Yorker. I spent a couple of hours shoveling snow yesterday, and I’ve been out twice today. I’ll post pictures later.

I couldn’t help snapping a picture of my odometer when it rolled beyond short integers.

My main job is teaching elementary and high school teachers to properly assess their students’ progress. Yes, traditional testing is a part of this, but so are interviews, observations, performances, etc. The first step is deciding what the students are supposed to know and do, then brainstorming some methods for checking whether or not they actually know and can do these things.

One history teacher wanted to assess some emotional (we call them “affective”) traits such as empathy. He proposed that his students take the role of someone in the past and write a letter to their present class. This forces them to relate the past to the present. His description of the activity was thus:

Students will write a letter from the perspective of a person living during the Cuban Missile Crisis to a person alive today.

I’m not sure if he realized that many people who were alive in 1962 are still living today.

Brooke: Jeremy, there’s something totally wrong with the blog.

Jeremy (thinking that maybe the site got hacked or some spam slipped through): What’s wrong?

Brooke: You said that Louisa Musgroves is Anne Elliot’s neice, but she’s not. Anne’s sister was married to Charles Musgrove who was Louisa’s brother.

Jeremy: Oh, yeah? (Stops his head from spinning) OK, go ahead and change it. My point’s the same.

I don’t know how I could have gotten so confused. I mean, Louisa’s father is Charles Musgroves, which is also the name of Anne’s brother-in-law. They never mention Charles (Mary’s husband) is a “Jr.” or a “II,” nor that Charles’ (II) son named Charles is a “III.” And it gets really confusing when Charles is talking to Charles about Charles breaking his collarbone in a fall from a tree.

–

Note: I’ve updated my review of Persuasion to refelect that Louisa Musgroves is a more distant relation than Anne’s niece.

Eighteen months ago I posted about an annoying, but uncommon event: Googling for something only to find what I had written on the topic. Today the same thing happened to Brooke. She was googling for more information on one of the chocolate bars she reviewed here. Less than half-an-hour after posting her review of a chocolate bar, our blog appeared in the Google results for the same bar.

Of course, Brooke’s posts tend to score high on Google for some reason. One is the fourth results for “Camille Bloch Mousse Chocolat Noir,” and just “Brooke Chocolate.” Why don’t my posts rank that high?

Last week, Ben misbehaved badly in public, so we took away a week of computer time. So, tonight, as we were prodding him to practice his piano, he made the following bargain.

“There’s something you could say that would get me to practice. If you told me that I would get my computer time back if I practiced piano, I would do it.”

I thought it over, then proposed this counteroffer: “If you don’t practice your piano right now, you will lose another week of computer time.”

“That would get me to do it.”

Yesterday I drove Brooke and Miles to their playgroup. I didn’t know where it was being held this week, so I asked.

“It’s the orange house by the turkey farm.”

I don’t know which is scarier: that response from Brooke, or the fact that I knew the exact house to which she was referring.