What is your favorite color?

Welcome back! Today we celebrated labor in the traditional manner: by laboring!

'Twas the first day of classes. I took attendance by asking students a question. Here at the beginning, while I'm getting to know them and they are getting to know me, I try to ease them in to the practice of answering a question.

Usually, of course, these questions are rather open-ended and have no correct answer. I ask them for the sake of amusement, and a chance to make a silly joke, and a way to occasionally learn something new about my students. However, this question has a correct answer.

What is your favorite color?

Among the wrong answers, "blue" was again a clear crowd favorite, with purple and gold far behind, and everything else isolated singletons. "All in the spectrum of ocean blues" covered most of this swath, plus added poetry to the otherwise terse answers.

Two outliers liked "beige" and "gray", respectively, which seems like it might hint at a hipster trend in preference for blandness? I'm old, what do I know, these millennials, am I right? Last year someone liked "light tan", so maybe I should collect these students and help them form some sort of special interest group.

Several students correctly answered "green", though they might have outside knowledge that informed this answer.

The One-Quirked-Eyebrow Prize goes to the student who, following their heart, answered "heron."


This post's theme word is handsel or hansel, which is either a noun, "a gift for good luck given at the beginning of a new venture," or "a first payment or installment", or a transitive verb, "to inaugurate or do something for the first time." Declaring "green" is a good hansel, but I will expect much more from you in the future.