spiced ham

Seeing as I've been working on a particularly unwieldy [read: unpublishable] piece on the death of note passing in the classroom--it's much simpler to send a text message--I was delighted to meet two high school-aged boys who don't even own cell phones.

One has an email address, but he doesn't really use it for correspondence, although he gets a lot of emails.

I was incredulous. His friends send emails but he doesn't write back?

No, he said. People email me--do you know about it? I think it's called Spam?

teacher school

"What's another word for initiative? Initiative...initiative..." mumbles one. She spends her evenings in master's classes, plans her lessons during lunch.

"Use the thesaurus," says the other.

"I know, but I don't know how to get it on this computer." She types in initiative, hesitating over the i-n-i-t-i-a...t-i-v-e.

Two sets of hands fumble with the mouse.

"Click on the word. Right click," says the other.

"Oh! Right click!" She clicks. Scans. "Inventiveness... originality... ingenuity! That's what I want. Ingenuity." She selects the word, replacing initiative with ingenuity. "I don't want to plagiarize," she says, with parentheses.

She types a few sentences and clucks. "Man, this essay is supposed to be 15 pages. I'm at 12. I'm going to have to puff it up a bit. Fifteeeeen pages." She saves her 12 pages and goes off to teach her next class.