What's your favorite fruit?

I take attendance by having the students answer a question.

What's your favorite fruit?

Students had a clear plurality winner: mango, with 8 votes. Huzzah! Tied for second-place were grapes and pineapples; tied for third place were strawberries and apples. (It's a good smoothie so far.)

Other fruits that appeared: orange, banana, dragon fruit, peach, blueberry, lychee, cucumber, squash. (The smoothie has slightly derailed.)

One worrisome student wrote simply, "nightshade." (No longer a recommended smoothie.)

One fruit-lover picked the entire category of "stone fruit."

The Professor's Apology for a Bureaucratic Mix-Up Award goes to the student who wrote, "the 'being on the list' fruit".

This post's theme word is shermanesque, "brutally thorough, especially in defeating someone." The mango's popularity was shermanesque; other fruits cower in fear.

If you were a superhero, what power would you have?

I take attendance by having the students answer a question.

If you were a superhero, what power would you have?

Listed from usual to much less usual, students replied:

• invisibility
• flying
• run fast / super speed
• teleportation / being in multiple places at once
• shapeshifting
• time travel / ability to stop time / napping, but while I nap, time stops
• slowing time
• existing forever / immortality
• I would just be Aquaman
• superior intellect
• honestly this might be awful but reading minds
• rearrange atoms - make whatever I want
• greening the world
• produce infinite pasta

I appreciated the computer science-themed answers, too:

• brute-force algorithms in constant time
• moving nondeterministically
• solving P vs. NP

The "Wait, does that mean... ?" prize for most thought-invoking superpower goes to "breaking the fourth wall". A Most Meta Medal goes to the superpower, "make one more person a superhero."

But my favorite was the keep-your-dreams-manageable student whose superpower would simply be "to not be lactose intolerant."


This post's theme word is acnestis, "the part of the body where one cannot reach to scratch." (Etymology: from From Greek aknestis (spine), from Ancient Greek knestis (spine, cheese-grater).) My superpower would be the ability to eliminate my acnestis and satisfy an itch by scratching anywhere!