Oh my god, that is so cruel! I hate her.

I agree that it’s a bullshit excuse put in place to help schools stay open. The very least they could do is tell a teacher if they’ve had a student in their classroom who has tested positive for COVID without naming them. We have a lot of students—it’s hardly violating anyone’s privacy.

That is so inconsiderate! I am a nervous presenter and would have fallen to pieces. Bullet dodged?

My absolute best friend from high school ghosted me in college. Not right away, but a couple months in. We went to college in the same city but not same school and she just stopped answering my calls or responding to my AIM messages. My roommate and I went so far as to go to her college and try to find her. There is…

After being rejected by every graduate school I applied to my first application year, I was encouraged by the chair of a department to apply to their PhD program the following year and then rejected by them. This was not a generic “we did not have room this year but encourage you to apply again” but an email exchange…

It’s the same with us. Over Thanksgiving break, several students tested positive for COVID and this was not announced to our school community or to the faculty, with whom they’d been in the classroom just a couple days prior, because “it happened over break.” We found out through the students themselves, not through…

Yeah, it was absolutely written by lawyers. Not only does he need to save his career by making a “heartfelt” apology, but he cannot admit guilt because she is suing him. As far as scripted apologies go, this one would actually work a lot better if he could have left it at the first email. But the second lets us know…

I like it because he doesn’t keep me awake. If that changed, I would not hesitate to change to separate beds. I love him, but I need sleep.

Yeah, we had an island but we were not middle class. All of the walls but one had a bunch of doors going to other rooms in the house (or the outside), so there was no choice in the matter. The island was not more or less expensive than cabinets and counters along the wall. (I think—I don’t really know. We got the…

We drool over butler’s pantries. Anytime someone renovates an old house on HGTV and destroys the butler’s pantry, we scream at the screen.

We had a big island growing up and it was, at all times, half clutter. It didn’t help that the kitchen was where you walked into the house and everything—mail, gloves, tools—ended up on it. I have never once had the desire to have an island in my own kitchen.

We see nonsensical renovations like that all the time around here—and flips with really ugly materials. Everything painted a dull gray. Housing inventory goes no matter what—I think that house flippers don’t realize that they could actually have better profit margins by trying a little harder to understand what people…

Not very outrageous, but I miss wine in Nalgenes in theaters. Good in movies, but especially good for community theater productions.

It was called the Royal African Company for a reason...

No, we’re generally encouraged (much to my relief, because I have worked with young adults with eating disorders in another job and still don’t feel qualified to address this problem helpfully) not to intervene, and never in front of the rest of the class. We alert the counselors and they talk to the students and…

It comes from different places—sometimes the students themselves, sometimes counselors, and sometimes other parents (once, from a spouse).

The struggle for non-white and non-cis male students to access texts that are relatable to their own experiences is a struggle that has existed from the outset of organized education.

A lot of the teenagers I teach have coffee for breakfast and skip lunch, or have a VERY light lunch. They have sports and the like after school—usually, they are going until 5 p.m. or later on just a couple hundred calories. It’s terrifying how normalized this is. And how absolutely dull they are in class because…

This is particularly important with dogs because a shelter or a reputable breeder will not let their animals go to someone they have not met. If you are buying someone a puppy, no questions asked, you are likely buying from a puppy mill. Do not support puppy mills--they are evil. 

Oh, totally. I think Charles actually wants to be king. William, not so much, but I don’t see him shaking the boat.