A listener leaves us a voicemail about a sign his high school science teacher posted in the classroom to encourage students to keep the noise down. It read “Laboratory — more of the first 5, less of the last 7.” As in more of the first...
The long popular and newly legal-to-sing “Happy Birthday to You” has always been ripe for lyrical variations, particularly at the end of the song. Some add a “cha cha cha” or “forever more on Channel 4,” but a...
When is it okay to correct someone’s grammar? A listener from Madison, Wisconsin, says a friend went for a parent-teacher conference only to notice that a sign in the classroom read “Things your thankful for.” Should the teacher be...
Does a statement have to be true to be a fact? Eric in Dallas asks after his eight-year-old practices a school lesson contrasting fact and opinion, where a fact was described as something that can be proven true or false. Some dictionary senses do...
A Texas caller says her child’s middle-school teacher insists that students should never begin a sentence with a preposition. The hosts are shocked, shocked. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Beginning with...
Carol in Lawrenceville, Georgia, wonders whether nails on a chalkboard will keep its skin-crawling force as classrooms trade blackboards for whiteboards. The question came about via a Peter Sellers Pink Panther movie scene with metallic fingernails...