{{{Fay}}}

Tell him you have a craving. What father-to-be can refuse his wife's pregnant cravings?

I'm nearly certain that there's even a Talmudic injunction about this -- if a pregnant women is having a craving, her husband has to go get her whatever it is.

really? Not to sound like Annoying Goyische Officemate or anything...

I'm nearly certain that there's even a Talmudic injunction about this -- if a pregnant women is having a craving, her husband has to go get her whatever it is.

Not according to my husband. (And he's Jewish.) Late one night when I was pregnant with Nate, I had an overwhelming craving for a Hershey's bar. Just a plain old Hershey's bar. We lived two blocks away from the grocery store. I told Lewis I wanted a Hershey bar. He refused to go get it. His reasoning? There was a blizzard going on.

I still maintain that it was a tiny little snowstorm. He swears blizzard. Needless to say, he didn't go.

I have never let him forget this.

in spite of which it struck me that it would be very, very apt to dig out my grandfather's poetry book, which I inherited, and which had a bookmark stuck into a page with a poem named 'Mabel' - I've assumed that it was put there by him, since he was utterly and totally besotted with his Mabel, by all accounts. I mean, so besotted that some 30 years after his death, one of the guys who was in his batallion in WWII showed up at my grandmother's door and said: "Are you Tom's Mabel?" and she was all "????" and he said "Hi - I was just passing through your town, and I had to stop by and pay my respects. Tom was such a wonderful bloke, and he spent the whole War talking about how much he adored you - we all felt like we knew you!"

I think reading this poem is a lovely idea.

OK, a bit of googling tells me that I was only remembering it half right. The ruling is that, if a pregnant woman smells a food and gets a craving from that, then "you" must get the food for her, even if it's not kosher. It doesn't specify the husband in particular for that "you." (They believed that a pregnancy craving was a vital need, and that not eating a food you were craving could cause a miscarriage.)

ok the plant is gone!

yay

OK. My grading system for my students, which I explained to them quite a few times, is that I don't curve, but everybody will get at least the grade that their average would dictate based on a normal grading scheme -- so a 90 will be at least an A-, an 80 will be at least a B-, and so on. I determine exactly where the break points are between grades by looking at the averages -- there are generally obvious places, like if a bunch of people got around 85, and then a bunch more got between 78 and 80, then the bunch around 85 get a B and the bunch between 78 and 80 get a B-.

Throughout the semester, maybe five times, I've calculated the students averages, posted them on Blackboard (a website where they can check stuff like that), and sent out an email telling them approximately where the dividing lines between grades would be if they were being calculated from those averages.

One of my students emailed me to say that his grade isn't fair, because he has an average of 60, which would be a C- based on the last breakdown I emailed them (after the last quiz -- it would be a D+ on some of the previous ones), but he got a D+ based on the way the grades ended up after the final. He says it's unfair, because based on that last breakdown, he was aiming for a 70 on the final, which would give him a 60 as an average, which he thought would give him a C-, and he got the 60 average that he was aiming for but didn't get the C-, because the breakpoints changed.

I'm kind of unsure here. I feel bad that he thought that he'd get the C- with a 60 and didn't, but I also know that I told them that the earlier grade breakdowns were approximate and were only based on the averages at that point. I'm a little bit iffy on what to do here. Any suggestions?

Who the hell aims for a 70 on their final? Or on any test?

Well, I've been that lost before, but I'm not sure I'd confess it to my instructor at this late date.

Yeah, I guess that's really my question. Who tries to use that as a defense?