I'm thankful for Sarah Palin's vice presidential bid which taught us that Alaska is not in a box off the coast of California.

I don't need a holiday or a feast to feel grateful for my children the sun the moon the roof over my head music and laughter but I like to take this time to take the path of thanks less traveled.

I am thankful for laughter except when milk comes out of my nose.

I have taught history on the high school and college levels and am or have been a lecturer at the Smithsonian The National Institutes of Health and numerous colleges and universities mostly on science fiction and technology subjects.

We're competing with everything: the beach the mall bookstores. Libraries are in a transition right now caught between two forces the old ways and technology. Libraries are under a lot of pressure to provide both.

As children many of us were taught never to talk to strangers. As parents and grandparents our message must change with technology to include strangers on the Internet.

Technologists provide tools that can improve people's lives. But I want to be clear that I don't think technology by itself improves people's lives since often I'm criticized for being too pro-technology. Unless there's commensurate ethical and moral improvements to go along with it it's for naught.

In some cases inventions prohibit innovation because we're so caught up in playing with the technology we forget about the fact that it was supposed to be important.

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators in every nation by children being taught mathematical concepts.

My mother a teacher encouraged me to use my creativity as an actual way to make a living and my father a Mississippi physician did two things. First he taught me that all human beings should be treated equally because no one is better than anyone else and he never pressured me to become a doctor.

I am a teacher and I am proud of it. At Cornell University I have taught primarily undergraduates and indeed almost every year since 1966 have taught first-year general chemistry.

As the daughter of a schoolteacher I feel very strongly that the most important thing in school takes place right there in that classroom and the interaction between the teacher and the child.

When I started out back in Louisville there was Harry Collins. He was my first teacher. He saw that I was so obsessed with magic that he taught me the love of magic.

I taught in a small teacher's college for three or four years at which point all the administrators got a pay raise and the teaching faculty didn't.

Both my grandmothers had upright pianos and I just knew how to play since I was a child. Nobody taught me. I sounded like a grown-up and then I learned how to read music. I played so well by ear I could fool the teacher to believe I could play the notes. She'd make the mistake of playing the song once and I could play it.

My grandmother was a teacher my sister was a teacher my daughter was a teacher and is now a superintendent in northern California and my son-in-law is a high school principal. I am surrounded.

If you become a teacher by your pupils you'll be taught.