Laurence Steinberg, a psychologist at Temple University and one of the country’s foremost authorities on puberty, thinks there’s a strong case to be made for this idea. “It doesn’t seem to me like adolescence is a difficult time for the kids,” he says. “Most adolescents seem to be going through life in a very pleasant haze.” . . .

In the 2014 edition of his best-known textbook, Adolescence, Steinberg debunks the myth of the querulous teen with even more vigor. “The hormonal changes of puberty,” he writes, “have only a modest direct effect on adolescent behavior; rebellion during adolescence is atypical, not normal.”

Sweet Jesus on the cross. And this “scholar” works at my dream university, a place were I wanted to work so much that I totally bombed the phone interview. (It was also the only one among the 180+ places where I applied that specifically attracted me. The rest were pretty indistinguishable to me.) I was so nervous that I couldn’t have done worse even if I’d downed a bottle of rum right before getting interviewed. And all that stress was for a place where people of this scarily low intellectual caliber work.

I’m now really glad I didn’t get a job there. This way I don’t have to work with somebody who obviously does his research “in a very pleasant haze.”

An interesting article about smartphone use:

Some of the most highly touted smartphone innovations are barely used at all. A 2012 Harris Interactive poll showed that just 5 percent of Americans used their smartphones to show codes for movie admission or to show an airline boarding pass. Whether that’s because of a lack of interest or lack of know-how (or both) is not entirely clear, but experts who study smartphone use, as well as tech-support professionals who work with the confused, say they see smartphone obliviousness at all ages and for all kinds of reasons.

I’m an app maniac, meaning that I use apps all the time on my iPod, cellphone, and Android tablet. Each device has its own apps that serve a specific purposes. My favorite apps are:

aTimeLogger – the best productivity app in the world that makes tracking the exact time I spend on research, teaching and service a breeze

Feedly – this app helps me keep up with what other bloggers are writing and read Spanish press

PicStitch – this is where I create the collages I keep inflicting upon my readers

WordPress – obvious

Habit List – an app that helps me track my Seinfeld List which, as of today, stands at 56 days of writing

TurboScanner – this is an amazing app that has buried scanners forever. I can scan any text I want and place it on Blackboard with my iPod in matter of seconds. The quality of scans is sensational, and I don’t have to deal with the copy center that bugs me over every text that is even a line over 3 pages

Lose It! – a weight loss app (more about this soon)

Holiday Cove – a game where I create cities and defeat pirates

Westbound – a game where I help a group of cowboys expand to the Wild West.

Of course, there are many more apps I use but these are the ones I access many times a day.

However, I don’t use any apps to show codes for movie admission or to show an airline boarding pass. This puts me in the category of app-Luddites the article discusses. The reason I avoid these apps is because I have a strange fear they will make me look pretentious.

Which apps do you use? And if you use none, then what is preventing you from joining the app craze?

Three of the 14 students in my course had A Game of Thrones on their desks during class. I’m facing very stiff competition here, if they like these books so much that they need to have them close at any given time.

I did manage to win the contest today with the help of one of my favorite contemporary writers Benjamín Prado. But we’ll see how long my winning streak lasts.

It really pays off to do things for people. A colleague asked me to swap my big and spacious classroom for her smaller and cramped one. I agreed because I’m a nice, accommodating person, and when my colleagues say they need something, I never doubt that their need is real.

At first, I didn’t recognize this new classroom but a few minutes into teaching, I remembered that this was the same room where I conducted my sample teaching class during my campus visit to this department. This was a place where I triumphed over a person who tried to sabotage me in a very nasty way so that I wouldn’t get the job. And I wiped the floor with her.

Now I have an enormous surge of energy and positive feelings whenever I enter this classroom. Today’s class has been fantastic as a result.

In a once-in-a-lifetime bureaucratic glitch a student got onto a list of people who placed out of the Spanish 101 course by mistake. The way this works is that people who place out remain on the list of students who are enrolled in the course. They don’t have to attend (because it’s a waste of time for them to attend a course that contributes nothing new to their knowledge). At the end of the course, they are automatically assigned an A for it.

Last semester, a student who simply didn’t attend somehow ended up on the list of people who placed out. I take full responsibility because this was ultimately my course and everything happening in it is on me.

What really stunned me, however, is that the student in question wrote me an email saying, “Dear Professor, I was given an A for this course but I don’t deserve it. I didn’t attend because I was lazy and irresponsible. Please change the grade to reflect that I failed the course. I will take it again and I promise to do well and deserve a good grade in it.”

Everybody complains about students begging for good grades they don’t deserve, so I wanted to share this story about a student who actually asks for a low grade she does deserve.

It is very heartening to see this kind of robust mental health in such a young person.