A unicorn and the tendency towards loss aversion result in cleaner teeth and a new idea in behavior management.

The pre-gifting of the stuffed unicorn as a reward for the excellent behavior that we expected from my daughter during her recent dentist appointment was a stroke of genius on my wife’s part because of the nature of loss aversion.

In economics, loss aversion refers to people's tendency to strongly prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains. Studies suggest that losses are twice as powerful, psychologically, as gains. The unexpected loss of $100 is significantly more painful than the joy of suddenly finding $100.

This tendency has been demonstrated again and again across cultures in a  wide range of contexts. 

But how often do we ever take advantage of this tendency?

As a teacher and parent, I normally establish an expectation and an associated reward, and only when that expectation is met does the child receive the reward.

Complete your chores and receive your allowance.

Write an essay that meets my requirements and receive an A+.

Work hard all week and behave well and you can eat lunch in the classroom on Friday.

But my wife flipped that paradigm in an effort to get my daughter to sit in the dentist chair and allow the dentist to do her work. She pre-rewarded Clara with a toy and the knowledge that if she did not behave well, the toy would be taken away.

She utilized Clara’s tendency toward loss aversion to change a behavior, and it worked beautifully. Clara refused the fluoride and balked at the flossing, but she sat more patiently than ever before.

   

Could parents and teachers do this more often when attempting to change the behavior of children?

Here is your allowance. You’ll need to pay me back at the end of the week if you don’t finish all of your chores.

I’ve entered an A+ in my grade book for the essay that I am assigning to you. If you complete the essay on time and meet all of my expectations, that A+ will remain.

I’ve planned for you to eat lunch in the classroom on Friday unless your effort or behavior cause you to lose this privilege.

Should parents and teachers be utilizing loss aversion more often?

Could employers find ways of utilizing loss aversion to improve employee performance and production?

I think so. With four months left in the school year and a lifetime of parenting ahead of me, let the experimenting begin.

Teaching is not quite a minimum wage job, despite what my students may think.

My students were reading an article about the proposed increase in the minimum wage in their Time for Kids magazine.

I was secretly listening to their conversation.

Student #1: “If they increase the minimum wage, at least Mr. Dicks will get a raise.”

Student #2: Mr. Dicks doesn’t make minimum wage.

Student #1: I thought teaching was a minimum wage job.

Student #2: I don’t think so. Maybe? I don’t know.

Fourth greatest compliment ever

I have a list of the three greatest compliments I have ever received.

The first was a ridiculous, albeit appreciated, comment about my physical appearance (though the person complimenting me may have been blind).

The second pertained to my video game prowess.

The third was a comment that my wife once made to my doctor.

I received my fourth greatest compliment ever last week:

One student told another student:

“Mr. Dicks is not the kind of guy who says something and doesn’t do it. He only says what he means. Even if it sounds crazy.”

I could’ve done without that third sentence, but it’s still pretty good.

Helicopter parenting has gone national

I feel so lucky that my wife and I were teachers for so many years before becoming parents.

As a teacher, I have come to understand the value of allowing a child to struggle. I’ve learned the value of clear limits and high expectations. I know the perils of false promises and idle threats.

I’ve also been fortunate enough to witness and, in some cases, befriend outstanding parental role models over the years. These mothers and fathers have taught me parenting lessons that I use every day with my children.

I’ve also born witness to the results of less-than-ideal parenting: Inconsistent, uninvolved and overly-involved mothers and fathers who love their children dearly but make decisions that are oftentimes not in the best interest of their children.

Of all the less-than-ideal parents, I tend to think that the overly involved, helicopter parents are the most detrimental to their children. In the process of incapacitating their sons and daughters with their constant involvement, they also strip the self-confidence and dignity from the kids.

And now helicopter parenting has gone national, at least in Thailand, where government psychiatrists are warning about the effects of unappreciated selfies on a young people.

Before you start to wonder if I’ve been fooled by The Onion or some other satirical news website, let me assure you that this story is real.

I checked twice because I couldn’t believe that I wasn’t being fooled.   

From a piece in TIME entitled Selfies Threaten Thai Development:

On Sunday, government psychiatrist Dr. Panpimol Wipulakorn warned that young Thais who post pictures of themselves on social media but don’t receive enough positive feedback are encountering emotional problems, which in turn is creating a dearth of well-balanced citizens and could eventually spell trouble ahead for the Southeast Asian nation.

“If they feel they don’t get enough Likes for their selfie as expected, they decide to post another, but still do not receive a good response,” she said in a statement, according to the Bangkok Post. “This could affect their thoughts. They can lose self-confidence and have a negative attitude toward themselves, such as feeling dissatisfied with themselves or their body.”

She added: “This could affect the development of the country in the future as the number of new-generation leaders will fall short. It will hinder the country’s creativity and innovation.”

Dolly Gray Children’s Literature Award

Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend has been named the 2014 Dolly Gray Award “for promoting high quality children’s literature that includes positive and realistic characters with developmental disabilities.”

As an author, it’s thrilling whenever your book wins an award, but this one is extra special because in addition to writing novels, I am a teacher in a school with a large special needs population, and every year, I have one or more of these extraordinary students in my classroom.

To be recognized for my ability to portraying a character with developmental disabilities both effectively and positively is an incredible honor, just as it is to teach these students every day.

For sale: Stolen Childhood Dreams

This is fascinating:

An archive of toys taken from London schoolchildren by teachers in 150 different schools over thirty years.

The exhibit, entitled Confiscated Cabinets (currently on display at the Victoria & Albert Museum of Childhood in London) was assembled by teacher and artist Guy Tarrant, who became interested in the toys as tokens of resistance to school routines and discipline. He enlisted other teachers to donate their own confiscated items to his project.

Each year I have my own collection of confiscated items, though it usually consists of pens that students incessantly clicked and small trinkets that continued to find their way onto students’ desks and interfered with learning.

Last year I collected more than a dozen pens from one student alone.

Years ago, however, I had a class of third graders who were obsessed with toys and brought them in constantly. Action figures, Pokémon paraphernalia, Matchbox cars… it was endless.

As I confiscated one toy, another took its place, so I began placing these confiscated items into a large, clear, plastic pretzel container. When the container was full, I sealed it, photographed it and placed it for auction on eBay until the title “Stolen Childhood Dreams.”

The children were appalled that I would dare to sell their toys, but to their credit, the parents supported the decision. In the end, the jar sold for $87.00, and we donated the money to charity.

I tell my students that story at the beginning of every school year, and not surprising, I’ve never had to deal with toys to the level that I did that year.

My TED Talk: Speak Less. Expect More.

In August of 2013, I gave a TED Talk on Education and Innovation at the AT&T Conference Center in conjunction with Center for 21st Century Skills.

Unfortunately (and incredibly frustratingly for both me and the producer of the event), the sound on the recording was poor.

I can’t tell you how annoyed we both are. They have hired a sound studio to attempt to clean up the audio, but I’m not holding my breath,

I hope to give this talk again at another TED conference, but until now, this is all I have, poor sound and all.

I’m reposting it by request.

Killing a mean teacher with the help of Santa and a pony

Except for the location, date and the gender of the teacher referenced in this newspaper clipping, there have probably been a few students over the years who would’ve written this about me.

That said, I think Garnet Thompson and I would’ve gotten along marvelously.

The Moth: The Boy’s Mother Was Dead

The following is a story that I told at a Moth StorySLAM at The Bitter End in New York City earlier this year. 

The theme of the night was Scars. I told a story about a terrible mistake that I made while student teaching.

I finished in second place.

Teachers should use their first names. Honorifics confer artificial and meaningless respect. Even worse, they are sexist and demeaning to women.

If it were up to me, my students would call me by my first name. I find the use of last names and titles in education to be an artificial means of respect that doesn’t amount to any actual respect at all.

In my fifteen years of teaching, I have learned that if you’re depending on a title to confer even an ounce of respect from your students, you’re in a hell of a lot of  trouble. 

I’d much prefer the freedom to use whatever name I choose in my professional life. This has nothing to do with my last name, though I can understand why you might think otherwise. I tend to despise unnecessary formality and meaningless artifice, and in my mind, the use of last names represents both of these things.

Unfortunately, asking my students to use my first name is not a relativistic option for me. I work in a school where every teacher is identified by their last name and in a district where educators and administrators with doctorates almost always use that honorific as well.

I have a friend who possesses a doctorate, yet he has never used the honorific in any part of his personal or professional life. I wasn’t even aware that he possessed a doctorate for years.

I admire him a great deal for this.

Even if I were allowed to have students use my first name (and I suspect that I am not), I’ve also come to understand the hazards of stepping out of line in regards to decades-old, tradition-laden practices in the workplace, and especially in a school.

Breaking this norm would be challenging to say the least. I have colleagues who have never referred to me by my first name. Can you imagine how they might feel if students were suddenly calling me Matt?

Traditions are difficult to break. It can be done, but you need to be prepared to be despised by many for doing so. This is not an issue that I feel strongly enough about to absorb that kind of flack.

At least not yet. 

However, I make the argument for using first names whenever anyone will listen, hoping that one day I will build a large enough coalition to affect change. And I specifically make the argument to women, who should be more opposed to the use of last names than me.

When a woman uses her last name in a professional setting, the honorific that is attached to her name is an indicator of her marital status. Unlike men, who enjoy a universal honorific, women are forced to identify themselves based upon their legal relationship to another person, and most often, a man.

Miss if you’re unmarried and young (whatever young is).
Mrs. if you’re married.
Ms. if you are older and unmarried or choosing to be deliberately vague.

And yes, it’s true. Ms. is intended to be the default form of address for women regardless of marital status, but it’s also used by unmarried women who feel they are too old for Miss, thus muddying the waters of what was meant to be a solution to this problem.

Even if Ms. was used exclusively as a neutral default, the existence of the other two female honorifics invariably confuses matters.

Even if a married woman chooses Ms. as a way of keeping her marital status out of her name, she is doomed to a lifetime of slipups from colleagues who know that she is married and who will automatically use Mrs. until corrected and will likely make the same mistake again and again.

Students will make these errors even more often and will likely ask about the decision to use Ms. over Mrs. Despite her attempt to use the the neutral honorific, the woman will invariably be forced to discuss her marital status anyway, probably more often  and in greater detail than if she had simply used Mrs.

And the change in last name and honorific when a woman gets married or  divorced complicates matters even further.

Ms. becomes Mrs. or vice-versa.
Last names sometimes change but sometimes don’t.
A woman may be divorced but continues to use her ex-husband’s last name.

I have colleagues who have been married for a decade, and yet I still occasionally slip and refer to them with their maiden name.

By the way, the phrase maiden name should also enrage women.

Maiden?

If I were a woman, all of this would make me crazy.

Women should oppose the use of last names in education based solely on the sexist, demeaning way in which marital status pre-determines the way in which students and colleagues will address them. A person’s name should not be dependent upon the woman’s personal life and her legal attachment to a spouse.

It’s that simple.

Even though there are many schools in America where students refer to teacher by their first names, I realize that proposing a shift in a school absent this tradition is a radical one, but I am surprised that women have not complained and attempted to affect this change already.

They should be clamoring for the change.

Stop complimenting students.

In a a piece entitled How to Talk to Little Girls, Lisa Bloom writes:

Teaching girls that their appearance is the first thing you notice tells them that looks are more important than anything. It sets them up for dieting at age 5 and foundation at age 11 and boob jobs at 17 and Botox at 23. As our cultural imperative for girls to be hot 24/7 has become the new normal, American women have become increasingly unhappy. What’s missing? A life of meaning, a life of ideas and reading books and being valued for our thoughts and accomplishments.

I like Lisa Bloom's philosophy a lot.

As an elementary school teacher, I have made it my policy for more than a decade to avoid commenting on a student’s physical appearance for similar reasons. A student’s appearance should be the last thing of concern to a teacher, but more importantly, these comments, even when positive, can be damaging and hurtful to kids.

A few years ago, just prior to a performance by my school’s choir, I watched a teacher compliment a young man on his appearance. The boy was wearing an impeccable suit and tie, and even his dress shoes gleamed in the dull glow of the hallway’s fluorescent lighting.

The teacher doing the complimenting was aware of my “no commenting on physical appearance” policy, and after praising the young man, she turned to me and asked how her complimentary words could ever be construed as hurtful to the child.

I pointed out that while the young man was probably feeling great about the  compliment, the boys to his left and right, who were not wearing suits and had not received a similar compliment (and who were perhaps from families who could not afford suits and ties and gleaming dress shoes) might be feeling very differently as they take the stage.

Therein lies just one of the dangers.

As a person who grew up in relative poverty, I know how it feels to hear your classmates and friends receive compliments for their appearance while you do not.

Worse, I know how it feels to receive the compensatory compliment from a teacher who suddenly realizes that he or she has probably made you feel lousy while gushing over the appearance of your best friend.

There are simply too many other things worth complimenting for any educator to be discussing physical appearance. Effort, sportsmanship, empathy, helpfulness, rigor, respect, friendship, grit, and charity are just some of the areas in which teachers can offer meaningful, productive comments.

Not to mention that a student’s choice of clothing and haircut, especially in elementary school, are often not entirely within the child’s control. Oftentimes a teacher’s compliment about appearance amounts to little more than a comment on how the student’s parent chose to send their child to school, making the words even less meaningful.

So more than ten years ago, I decided to stop commenting on students’ physical appearance, and I have held this line ever since.

It hasn’t been easy.

A girl walks into class with a new haircut and asks me what I think.

I say, “I don’t know about your hair, but I love the way you use that brain underneath your hair to solve math problems.”

A boy walks into class with a new shirt promoting his favorite basketball team and asks me if I like it.

“I didn’t really notice the shirt,” I say. “But I noticed the way you played kickball yesterday. You were a great sport. Good job.”

Sometimes these exchanges are a little awkward, and sometimes the kids think I’m a little crazy, but I would choose awkward and crazy over the alternative.

In order to counter the furrowed brows and confused stares, I have made it a policy to tell my students about my policy, and in ten years, I have never had a student disagree with my rationale or debate my decision. In fact, almost every student responds positively to my policy.

Nevertheless, I have been told by many educators and parents that my policy is unrealistic and unnecessary. They typically bolster their arguments with statements like, “My teachers complimented me when I was a kid and we survived” and “These kids are going to hear compliments for the rest of their lives, so there’s no reason for us to be sheltering them now.”

These types of arguments boil down to this:

If it worked for me, it should work for them.

These are people who did not wear the same pair of sneakers through three New England winters while in middle school.

There are people who did not receive the majority of their childhood wardrobe from their much older, much larger cousin.

These are people who are unable to place themselves in the shoes of a student whose shoes will never gleam in the dull, florescent light of a hallway.

These are people who believe that you do not need to do what is right if everyone around you is doing otherwise.

These are people who do not believe that one person can make a difference.

From tiny acorns mighty oaks grow. Someone needs to be the damn acorn. As awkward and crazy and divergent as that acorn may seem, someone must take the first stand.

Don’t tell me that my policy is foolish because no one else adheres to it.

Don’t tell me that my policy is useless because everyone else in that child’s life will comment on physical appearance.

Change often begins with a few lone voices, and it turns out that I am not alone.

In a piece entitled  One Hundred Things Restaurant Staffers Should Never Do, Bruce Buschel writes:

42. Do not compliment a guest’s attire or hairdo or makeup. You are insulting someone else.

This is a man who understands the inherent hazard of a compliment, particularly when it addresses physical appearance.

In the end, regardless of whether or not you believe that physical appearance should be a matter of discussion with students, there are far too many more important things to comment on during the course of a school day for me to waste an ounce of breath or a second of time on a student’s dress or hair style or shoes.

I am too busy on a minute by minute basis helping children attain the skills they need to be successful in the future to waste a single moment on the way they look.

Every educator should be doing the same.

I split my pants EIGHT YEARS AGO. Strangers are still talking about it.

Not surprising: My wife knew the people sitting behind us at dinner last night. She’s knows everyone.

Surprising: One of the women in the party asked if I was the elementary school teacher who once split his pants in front of his class.

Surprising because the splitting of my pants in front of my class happened eight years ago when I attempted to stand atop a student’s desk to make a point. I raised and planted by first foot on the desk top with relative ease but heard the unholy sound of tearing fabric as I attempted to propel my other leg forward.

That was eight years ago, and the moment wasn’t publicized in the local newspaper and did not appear on the evening news.

Word just got around.

I shudder to think what other stories might be alive and well in the general public.

My new favorite writer and her amazing piece: Ashton Kutcher Fan Fiction - The Middle School Dance

Lisa Bell has graduated high school by now and hopefully moved onto college, but I don’t care. She was a hero back in seventh grade, and I’m sure that she’s still amazing today, wherever she is.

Everything about this performance, starting with the moment that she corrects the teacher for misidentifying her until the very last moment, is amazing.  

Also, let this serve as a reminder for teachers to always take the time to review what a student is going to read on stage prior to the performance, lest you want something like this to ever happen again, which was both slightly unfortunate and seriously AWESOME. 

Why do people cheat? Why do children misbehave? The reason is oftentimes simple.

A new study entitled “The Cheater’s High: The Unexpected Affective Benefits of Unethical Behavior” has shown that as long as you didn’t think your cheating hurt anyone, cheating often makes people feel great. Researchers attribute the exhilaration that people feel to pride and admiration in their own cleverness.

Apparently, this is not good.

“The fact that people feel happier after cheating is disturbing, because there is emotional reinforcement of the behavior, meaning they could be more likely to do it again,” said Nicole E. Ruedy, the study’s lead author and a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Washington’s Center for Leadership and Strategic Thinking.

None of these findings come as a surprise to me. Nor should they.

Of course cheating feels great. Conquering the system, subverting authority, sticking it to the man, profiting from your wits and taking advantage of loopholes have always been reasons for celebration.

As long as no one is being harmed, I would feel great, too. 

One of the advantages that I have as a teacher is that I wasn’t a well behaved student throughout much of my childhood and teenage years. This offers me a perspective that the average teacher, who tended to love school and was exceedingly compliant, does not to possess.

I often find myself in a conversation with a colleague who says something like, “I just don’t understand why he would run down the hallway like that.”

My response is always something along these lines:

“Don’t you understand? Running down the hallways is fun. Fooling around with your friends instead of summarizing an magazine article or solving a division problem is fun. Interrupting the teacher to make the class laugh is fun. This is why many students misbehave. They are simply making the choice that will lead to the most immediate enjoyment.”

This isn’t only true for children. As an adult, I still think that running down the hallway is fun. I still think that fooling around with my friends is better than writing the required report or attending the latest professional development workshop. I may be more compliant and feel a greater sense of responsibility now that I am an adult, but there is also a part of me that desperately wants to do whatever the hell he wants, regardless of what the rules or expectations are.  

This makes sense. It’s certainly not a novel concept. Most rules are in place because the alternative is more appealing. If driving fast wasn’t so much fun, we wouldn’t have speed limits. If simply taking whatever you wanted from the store shelves without the exchange of effort wasn’t an ideal way to live, we wouldn’t have laws against theft.

There would be no need. 

I often tell these teachers that if given the chance, I would love to sprint down the hallway, throw rocks through windows, toss televisions out of eight story windows and slam sledgehammers into drywall because destroying things is fun, too.

Still. Even at my age, these things are appealing.

We misbehave because it is often the choice that leads to the most immediate excitement and happiness, oftentimes at the expense of our future selves.

Misbehaving is fun. It’s often costly and detrimental to your long term goals, but try making a ten year old understand that.  

Or even a forty year old.

 

The perfect encapsulation of my teaching philosophy

Best moment of the week for me was when the mother of a former student informed me that her daughter had gotten herself into trouble in math class.

When caught daydreaming in the middle of a lesson, her teacher asked what she was thinking about.

She replied, “My fifth grade teacher. He was mean, too. But in a fun way.”

What teachers know about bedtimes

New, compelling research on the connection between sleep and student success:

Researchers reporting in the journal Pediatrics studied more than 10,000 kids when they were three, five and seven years old and compared reports of behavior issues to their bedtimes. Kids with irregular sleep were more likely to have lower scores on tests that measured their ability to problem solve, and higher rates of hyperactivity, emotional difficulties, and problems dealing with peers.

While the research is good, teachers have known this for years.

I routinely ask my students about their bedtimes, the consistency of their bedtimes and the presence of a television in their bedrooms, and this is what I know:

Student success can almost always be determined by these three factors.

Students with later bedtimes, students with inconsistent bedtimes (or no bedtime whatsoever) and students with a television in their bedrooms are almost always my most struggling students.

These three factors are quite possibly the most predictive of student achievement and behavior than any other.

Of course, these these factors might also be symptoms of an underlying problem, but the recent research would appear to indicate otherwise.

This should be good news to parents and would-be parents everywhere. Impose a consistent, relatively early bedtime and keep your child’s bedroom television-free, and you’re child’s academic and behavioral performance will almost surely improve.

There are no easy fixes when it comes to kids, but in comparison to many, this one isn’t too hard at all.

Hashtag excuse

A student interrupted me yesterday. When I told him to knock it off, he said that he wasn’t interrupting.

“That was a hashtag, Mr. Dicks. Not an interruption.”

Sometimes an excuse is so original that it works.

My brothers are gone, and my heart hurts.

I leave for Camp Jewell with my fifth graders this morning for three days of outdoor adventures in the woods of northwestern Connecticut.

This will be my fifteenth year at Camp Jewell. When I first brought students to this camp back in 1999, I was a rookie teacher who had been asked to go because of the limited number of men in our elementary school and my years of experience at Boy Scout camp.

It was soon discovered that I know every camp song ever sung, play a mean game of Simon Says and can yell loud enough to be heard on the other side of the lake.  

I’ve been going ever since.

The memories that I have from the last fifteen years spent at that YMCA camp are astounding. Many are hilarious. Most are unforgettable. Quite a few are truly inspiring.

Camp Jewell is also a deeply personal place for me. I had my first real conversation with my wife at Camp Jewell as we hiked around the lake together with a group of fifth graders on a bright, Wednesday afternoon. Elysha and I first got to know each other while camping in the forests around that lake.

She and I brought students to camp for six years before she switched grade levels and then stopped teaching entirely in order to raise our children. We started out as friends for those first two trips to camp before we returning as a couple for the next four.

It’s been five years since Elysha returned to Camp Jewell with me, and I think about her and all the times we shared constantly while I’m there.

For my first fourteen years at camp, I was joined by a group of three other men: my former principal and two music instructors. Other male teachers have come and gone during that time, and some still return from time to time, but these three men were the core group who have been camping with with me every year that I have returned to Camp Jewell. Combined, we had almost 75 years of experience bringing students to the outdoors. Once the kids were in bed, our evenings were filled with stories of all the previous adventures that we had shared together. We would laugh well into the night at tales already told dozens of times before but still as funny and moving as the first time we heard them.

This year marks an enormous change in my life. While I return to camp for my fifteenth year, there is only one other male teacher with any experience at camp, and his totals a single year.

My principal has retired. 
The instrumental music teacher has been promoted and now wears a suit.
The vocal music teacher won’t be able to join us this year.

The three men whose lives and experiences were so intertwined with my own at camp are now gone.

I was texting with my former principal about this last night and he wrote, “You are the history and tradition keeper now.”

I told him that this makes me sad. I don’t want to be the history and tradition keeper. I don’t want to be the bearer of all the stories and memories from the decades that our school has been bringing children to Camp Jewell.

Who will chime in when I tell the story of the time I recited French love poetry to my former principal while he wore a mop on his head as part of our rainy-day, spur-of-the-moment, teacher talent show?

Who will tell the other half of the story about the time I got lost in the woods in the middle of the night during a thunderstorm? The half about how no one noticed that I was missing even though I was gone for almost two hours?

Who will tell all the stories about the years before I first arrived to Camp Jewell? All those stories I love and remember but did not actually experience firsthand?

Who is going to play the guitar on Friday morning and sing, “It’s Time To Get Up!” to darkened rooms filled with bleary-eyed children?

When you spend fifteen years doing something with people, and especially when that fifteen years includes living with them, side by side, they become a part of you. You get to know them in a deep, fundamental way. You find yourself finishing their sentences, anticipating their movement and trusting them like few people in this world.

This morning I return to the woods feeling a little bit alone for the first time. There are female teachers joining us, and I have known some of them for just as long, and a few are some of my closest friends, but they will be up the hill, in a cabin of their own, and they are like sisters. Not brothers.

My brothers are gone. I am the last man standing from our group of four. This year’s trip marks an enormous change in our school and my life, and while I normally invite and even embrace change, this change involves the absence of friends. The journey forward without those who matter most.

Sometimes change is hard because it hurts your heart.

Unbridled enthusiasm

I’m always a little excited about the new school year, but that excitement is always tempered by the fact that it spells the end of my summer vacation.

This is apparently not the case for my daughter, who just began her last year of preschool  (though in fairness, she only had a week of vacation, so perhaps the transition was a little less jarring).

Left handers rejoice! Ink smears be gone!

My friend (and fictional character), Mrs. Gosk, has a tradition of giving me a new pen at the onset of every new school year.

This year she has outdone herself, introducing me to a product that I did not know existed. 

 

To think that I could’ve spent my childhood free of the smear of ink that could always be found on the side of my left hand.  

Kids have it so good these day.