What is the title of your autobiography?

I take attendance by having the students answer a question.

What is the title of your autobiography?

I've expurgated names below to protect the innocent. As a side effect, this protects the rest, too.

Some people went with an extremely literal title:

• A Book about ME
• "Don't Read This Book"
• I
• [student's own name]'s Autobiography by [student's own name]
• "Book"
• A Book about [student's own initials]
• The Life + Times
• [student's own name]: A Life
• "I Should Write an Autobiography -- Selected musings of [student's own name]"
• The Brief Wondrous Life of [student's own name]

I'm a bit worried about that last one --- does that student for some reason expect to live a particularly "brief" life? Yikes.

Others made obscure references (?) that I hope would be thematically highlighted and tied together in the text of the autobiography:

• "Thoughts About Everything"
• "The Little Engine that Could"
• My Life by Bill Clinton (<-- amp="" art="" cover="" have="" li="" might="" misleading="" publisher="" the="" trouble="" with="">
• "Sir"
• "Eh,"
• Content Free
• "No"
• Untitled
• I don't know
• 1337
• "ε"

Others chose something self-deprecating:

• "Fashionably Late and/or Asleep"
• A look at where it went wrong
• The Science of Laughing at Yourself

My favorite was easily "A look at where it went wrong", not only because it's a good hook --- I'm interested! I want to read that book! --- but also because either this student already thinks it's gone wrong, or this student anticipates that it will all go wrong sometime, for sure, and so that's a reliable autobiography title. Plus it's already funny. The title, at least, is going right!

This post's theme word is proem, "an introduction, preface, or preamble." My autobiography consists of a series of proems --- I just haven't gotten to the significant stuff yet!

What is the longest amount of time you have gone without using the internet?

I take attendance by having the students answer a question.

What is the longest amount of time you have hove without using the internet?

Sorted by size, the answers ranged:

• 0 secs
• just now
• dunno, let me google it
• seconds
• does time exist outside the internet?
• at least a minute
• the time it takes to use the bathroom
• 5 days (not including before)
• 1 week
• 2 weeks
• not sure; 2 weeks since starting
• 5 weeks (not including the before time)
• 1 year
• age 0-4
• age 0-5
• 6 years
• 6.5 years
• 7 years
• 8 years
• 9 years
• not long enough

This seems a fairly bimodal distribution, and it just tells me who took the question literally (and thus had to include all their pre-widespread-internet existence) and who took it to mean time since they first used the internet. I suspect that in a few years, this bimodality will shrink, as today's middle-schoolers could easily have been using internet-enabled devices in their preliterate days. Maybe even preverbal.

This post's theme word is apheresis, "the loss of one or more sounds or letters from the beginning of a word." A common example is the change in pronunciation of knife from (k-nyf) to (nyf) or the formation of till from until. Another meaning of apheresis is "a method in which blood is drawn from a donor, one or more blood components (such as plasma, platelets, or white blood cells) are removed, and the rest is returned to the donor by transfusion." I wonder if the written archivability of the internet means that written apheresis has slowed, or if the prevalence and ease-of-transmission of abbreviations will speed apheresis of letters in written words.