How to replace a Surface Book keyboard

I have a Microsoft Surface Book (one of the originals) that I bought a couple of years ago, and the keyboard was starting to act up…

The bees are gone

The bees left last week. It was a rare warm winter day on the mountain, a day when they might have been inclined to emerge briefly from their warm hives to buzz around a bit and answer the call of nature so to speak. So my wife and I decided to go check on them…

A better post-test review

One of the teachers I work with, Ms. C, recently gave her students a test and was disappointed in the results. Too many of her students had missed too many of the test questions, and she felt like they needed to master that material before she moved one. She felt like she needed to teach it again, but she didn’t want to cover it exactly as she’d done before and she wasn’t sure what to do differently.

We talked a little, and here’s what we came up with…

The squandering of enthusiasm

When I was 5 years old, I decided I wanted to take swimming lessons. I had been to the swimming pool many times with my family, and while I played around in the shallow end I had seen the older kids and adults actually swimming in the deeper water. I thought it was some kind of magic to be able to float and move around in water that was over your head without drowning, and I wanted to learn this mysterious and magical power.

An English teacher, a cosmetology teacher, and a math teacher walk into a bar

A few weeks ago an English teacher I work with was telling me about a problem she used to have with her senior English students. They had to complete a fairly extensive research paper over the course of several weeks, and during those several weeks she would schedule certain days to take them all down to the school library to “do research.” Which was fine, except she discovered…