Craig produced this week’s Friday Five topic: The biggest advantage to being a teacher is the time off in the summer. Yeah, the annual salary isn’t the best, but I get two friggin’ months off a year! Not to mention two weeks for Christmas, a week for Thanksgiving, Spring Break, and other assorted days off. If you were paid for two months of not going to work, what are five things you would do with your time off? This is the time when I say with a big grin, that this will happen to me every four months in my …

The latest Friday Five, courtesy of Dave: I’ve been reading a lot about Neurology lately, and the rhythm’s behind our thought processes. As if by fate, I came across this article yesterday that sums up one of the most insidious kinds of mental loops we all fall into. They’re known as earworms. “Earworm” is the term coined by University of Cincinnati marketing professor James Kellaris for the usually unwelcome songs that get stuck in people’s heads. Since beginning his research in 2000, Kellaris has heard from people all over the world requesting help, sharing anecdotes and offering solutions. “I quickly …

Gina asked: I don’t have children myself, but I love to hear the knee-slappers that my godson, his siblings, and my nieces come out with. Or, for that matter, the “logic” espoused by the adults around them when speaking to them. To wit, what are the most amusing things you’ve ever heard in a household with children? Well, to be honest I haven’t gone into a household of children in ages, but I have two sources to draw upon: my childhood, and life in Korea. As a teacher, I used to deal with kids every day, but I also sometimes …

Sorry this is late, I just had a very busy weekend. More about that in another post, as you probably will have seen above. The latest Friday Five topic, from Chris: People once thought that it was important for boys to study the works of the great Roman orators so that they would develop both their language skills and their sense of honor, duty and propriety. (This was a particular theme in the biography “John Adams,” as the love of these boyhood texts stayed with the honor-bound Adams all his life.) I often think about the books that had a …

This week’s Friday Five question courtesy of William: Heinlein’s Number of the Beast theorizes that all realities, even ours, come from someone else’s imagination. And therefore, if you could learn to travel across dimensions it would be possible to find the worlds where every story occurred. The more fully realized story (and the better the story-teller) the more fully realized the world. So, What five fictional worlds would you like to visit once William perfects his inter-dimensional mini-van? I think I answered a question like this once on a mailing list, but the answer’s gone and anyway, I’m sure I’ll …