No Cookies for You

When I was a faculty member at the University of Oklahoma (August 1998 to May 2005), each year, I hired a student grader to assist me in grading the assignments from my classes. After meeting with my grader one afternoon to talk about a recently graded assignment, my grader told me that she had baked cookies that afternoon before she came to meet with me. She was going to bring some fresh cookies to me but then remembered that "Mormons don't eat chocolate."

When I asked her about that statement, she said that chocolate has caffeine and Mormons do not eat caffeine. Therefore, Mormons do not eat chocolate. I reassured her that I did eat chocolate. We then had a nice conversation about the Word of Wisdom.



As a side note, this particular student had taught English and Language Arts (ELA) at a junior high school in Tulsa before she returned to OU to get a second degree. She and I had many discussions about the books that I read.

When I was younger, I was at the Knowles house. While we were there, the "older kids" were watching an animated version of "The Hobbit". My memory is not too clear about why. But, for whatever reason, I saw only a little bit of the movie and decided I did not like it. I was 10 or 11 years old. From that time until the time I hired the student from this story as my grader, I had never read "The Hobbit" or the "Lord of the Rings" series. One basis for why I never read these books was my "bad" memory of the movie snippets I saw at the Knowles house.

My student grader told me how she loved these books and used them in her ELA class to get young teenagers interested in reading. Based on her recommendation, I finally read "The Hobbit" and the books in the "Lord of the Rings" series.