"Man lies at the heart of a web ... extending through the starry reaches of sidereal space, as well as backward into the dark reaches of prehistory.... Like the orb spider, man lies at the heart of it, listening. Knowledge has given him the memory of earth's history before the time of his emergence.... [O]ne can see him reaching forward into time with new machines...until elements of the shadowy future will also compose part of the invisible web he fingers." Anthropologist Loren Eisley

I've never met most of my teachers -- only their papers and books. My greatest teacher is Charlotte. You know Charlotte. Of course, you do! the spider in E. B. White's delightful, Charlotte's Web. I've told students, "To mean is to weave a web of connections about a term". I often say, "Charlotte struck again!", regarding "a great idea". Or, "Charlotte, please weave connections between these strands."

Two blessings sustain me. Often, putting my head to the pillow at night, I can murmur, "How ignorant I was this morning!" And, when a "teacher" explicates math or physics puzzles, often I can say, "Thanks to Charlotte's connections, I know more about that than this other teacher."