Frazz by Jef Mallett for April 26, 2024

Just be glad you don’t have class on Sunday. Reading time could vary from several hours to a couple days.

NY times is kool since, mon and tue are sorta basic, wed and thu are interestingly difficult, fri and sat can be diabolical, sun is a sorta pacthwork of the lot! sometimes a wed can be harder than a thur, but it’s always entertaining!

She’s good. My personal best Monday is 8 minutes; average 15.

Does the NYT crossword puzzle get more difficult in the run of the week?

I must point out that the L.A. Times crossword does the same thing: Monday is the easiest, Saturday is the hardest, Sunday is the big fun one. (I subscribe to the NYT Crossword Puzzle and get the LAT Crossword for free online)

Don’t ask me, I do the Jaily Dumble,….. I mean the Daily…..

Same with Sudoku.

Given the NYT’s history with factual accuracy (ahem), reading it can make you smarter — eventually.

In the sense that P.T. Barnum taught a bunch of people the meaning of the word “egress”.

She is, and what’s the problem

Today, it took me 34 minutes and a bit. Monday was 7 or 8.

I liked the Boston Globe with one ground rule: you can choose which word of the puzzle to solve first. After that subsequent words must connect with an already solved word…

Try doing a current NYT puzzle with a mind that spent its first 65 years in the 20th century, then didn’t take up puzzles again for 15+ years. By then, history had changed dramatically and the lingo of new generations was another language entirely. Thank goodness for reprints from the last half century pages, otherwise I would have no fun at all with puzzles.

Cute joke, but totally unrealistic.

About 40% of those people who major in education, get a teaching job and start teaching find another job before their tenure year. Very few who survive that five years are poor teachers. I have taught and I have worked in an office. The major difference is that when you are working in an office you do not have to be paying 100% attention 100% of the time. This isn’t a demand from the front office. It is necessary to maintain the classroom discipline and get the job done. A poor teacher pays for it in student disrespect, and they pay for it heavily.As for summers off, there are mandatory inservice classes and meetings that take up a lot of time. And, time will be needed to work on your graduate work, since most districts have the bachelor’s track set up so that raises after about 5 years don’t keep up with inflation. The masters is pretty much necessary for a living wage. Another option is to work a summer job. A friend of mine started mowing lawns and within three years was making too much to make it sensible to come back to teaching.And, when you leave work, you leave work. Each class requires about 20 minutes of prep time if you are revising lessons you have done before. If it’s a new lesson, an hour or two is more likely.After getting a total of 6 1/2 years of college and working for 32 years, I was making about 75% of what my nephew was two years into a sales job.All of the ideas for improving education add about 20% to the classroom hours, and no additional money seems to be available to get extra people to help with the job. Paying the people who are doing it more might make them happy, but it’s not going to increase the quality, because it would be an overwhelming amount of work. Eventually, they are going to get to the point where no one with the intelligence to do the job is going to be dumb enough to take it.

You don’t have to be smart to finish a crossword puzzle. You have to have a good memory for crossword-related trivia.

AAUGH! When, oh when is that ‘much’ saying ever going away?

The ‘gets harder throughout the week’ is pretty common.

Mine always seem to devolve into cuss word puzzles.

Besides the New York Times and LA Times, the Washington Post daily crossword puzzle also gets harder during the week. I don’t know how the kid would even know this (he does NYT puzzles?), but in this case he and Frazz are making assumptions, not deducing facts.

“You’re sure Mrs. Olsen solves crossword puzzles during reading time?”

“Solves? No, not sure. Works on? Yup, I think that’s a fair bet.”

Not just the NYT. Every newspaper I ever got had that pattern; Monday is easy, by Saturday it’s not just hard but obscure and convoluted, and Sunday’s puzzle is always HUGE.

One thing that irritates me is answers that I don’t believe match the clue. A favorite is where the answer is “gas” and the clue is something like “fuel for autos.” Autos do NOT run on gas, they run on gasoline. If they were to indicate that the answer is an abbreviation, it would be ok, but they do not do that.