I think if you're a single mom, then that's a viable option. If you're part of a couple, though, the other person might not be so keen on you giving away their kid, and it would almost certainly end your relationship. That's probably why many people soldier on.

I am afraid to have children, because my childhood was so awful that I don't think I am emotionally equipped to care for them properly, and I wouldn't want them to suffer as I did.

I have been promoting the adoption of Yiddish words to replace "problematic" English words like ghetto. May I recommend "haimish" or "ongaputchkit" instead?

Maggie Gyllenhaal?

Most of the kids who had them in my high school weren't going to need them after they graduated, so I don't know why the school didn't ask for them as donations at the end of the year. I recently found two of mine in the garage and gave them away to children of my mother's coworker.

My other sneaking suspicion is that the school district got some kind of money that could only be spent on capital improvements. Either way, probably not the best use of money.

Oh so you were more into the Mat-Lab computer stuff, then. My weirdo engineering-based school made everybody take tons of higher-level math even if you were majoring in English or something.

And then you'd get arrested and lose your job and be worse off than before.

It's possible that it was full of asbestos.

Yeah, telling students to steal $120 calculators is totally the solution. Then if they got arrested for shoplifting, you'd tell them they had it coming.

Well his other option was to tell them to fuck off, so I think he at least tried to do the right thing.

You would not be able to make it through a modern calculus class without a graphing calculator. It literally cannot be done. I speak as someone who went up through very high levels of math and physics in university.

They don't teach slide rules anymore. I doubt the teachers could even use one. If there are 30 kids in a class and 29 have graphing calculators, and only 1 doesn't, who do you think is going to be the slowest on every homework assignment and test, and who do you think will get the worst grade? This issue is simpler…

I used mine in college, but I guess it depends on what your core requirements are.

My family was pretty regular middle class, but we moved to a snooty-snoot suburb. I will never forget sitting in my Calculus class on the first day of school, listening to the teacher tear into, berate, and humiliate the one kid who hadn't followed the instructions that were sent out over the summer to show up with…

I know, I'm being silly. :)

It's like nicknaming a fat guy "Tiny." They call them "littleneck" because they're effing huge.

I was gonna sell you walnut loaf, but then I got high.

Well, for optimal quality you want bread crumbs from bread made from locally sourced flour baked the day before.

In my tiny hometown, the cops were all sweet as pie, maybe because they didn't have the anonymity that comes with working in a big city. I was surprised to find that all cops were not that way after I moved.