A Few Words Before School Starts
It’s back to school time, so get ready to sit down and have a talk with the kids about the importance of an education, be they your kids, your sibling’s, or the ones that live next door who spent most of the summer tied up and gagged in your tool shed so you could have some peace and quiet. In case you don’t feel comfortable having this discussion, you can relax. I'm here to do it for you.

Seeing Red Over Purple Pens
In a show of educational Kumbaya-ism not seen since English became Language Arts, teachers are dumping their red pens faster than plans for Gigli II and grading students’ papers using purple ones. They say marking errors in red has a “negative connotation.” What next? Stop giving out gold and silver stars, eliminate letter grades, and only hand out two grades, pass and  passable?

Back to School Special
You can tell summer’s over. The barbecue grill’s been unused for weeks, movies are coming out with fewer asteroids and more plot, and the newspaper’s filled with Back to School ads for $200 sneakers designed by NASA for Nike’s money-making program.  That makes it a good time to sit down and talk to your kids about the importance of an education. Try to sneak it in during one of the (True Statistic Alert!) 10,000 commercials the average kid will see over summer vacation.

Why Johnny Shouldn’t Go to College - It’s now being revealed that education is bad for your health. This came to light in a study published in the February issue of American Demographics magazine (motto: "They cut down trees for this?") which claims that the more education you have the less sex you have. Who would have thought you’d trade one sheepskin for another?

So That's What's The Matter With Kids Today
If you can trust two recent studies, and I can’t think of a single reason why you should, two of the biggest problems facing kids today are that beer is too cheap and cars have too many seats. Believe it or not, people actually got paid to come up with these conclusions. What I can’t figure out is how I get their job.

Why Johnny Can't Read Good
In the past, spelling was a particularly thorny problem in the English language, but not anymore thanks to the advent of the spell checker. In the early days of personal computing, word processors didn't have spell checkers. Of course floppy discs were hand carved out of stone then too. The first spell checker I used made me run each file through a separate program which then checked it against a massive dictionary of 251 entries, putting its vocabulary on par with Sylvester Stallone's. As the software progressed, so did the spell checkers. Unfortunately Sylvester Stallone didn't.

Summer vacations and summer not
Open your notebooks class, it’s time to write that traditional back-to-school essay about what you did on your summer vacation. If you were lucky like Chelsea Clinton you got to travel. Or maybe you spent it trying to meet members of the opposite sex by SpeedDating. Eva Brugeura of Palo Alto, California spent her summer turning kitchen appliances on their side. And in Iowa people flocked to Nehama to watch tractor square dancing. Hey, it beats staying home and repainting the barbecue grill. Again.

Testing...one, two, three - On one side of the discussion are those who say national or statewide testing is the only way to ensure that all children learn the same things in school while offering a way to see how they rank among other students. On the other side of the argument are those people who are too busy watching America’s Funniest Multi-Car Collisions to form an opinion.