Not only smarter than the average bear, but also somewhat nicer than the mean bear.

Of all my college math instructors, Dr. Baer was the worst. A huge man, hirsute like a musk ox, he had an irritating habit of speaking in rhymes. Was it supposed to be cute? It didn’t help me make sense of the material. Above a certain level, mathematics gets hard enough to understand on its own. You really don’t need your professor taking the long way around an explanation for the sake of a rhyme.

He had no sense of personal boundaries, either. I remember the whole class watching in horror on two separate occasions as Dr. Baer helped himself to a sack lunch belonging to one of our classmates. He was, like, compulsive about it. There was nothing he craved more than other people’s take-along food. It was some kind of mad lust he had. It was extremely weird.

Worst of all, though, was when a student was called to the board to work out some problem in front of the class. The public blackboard solo is a high-pressure situation in any classroom. You’re filled with anxiety about making a mistake in front of your peers. Dr. Baer had a way of ratcheting up the nerves, though. Whenever some poor student would inevitably fumble a calculation, Dr. Baer would point it out by affecting this ludicrous Art Carney impression, and saying “hey there, boo-boo!”

Ugh, it was terrible, I’m telling you.

Wear this shirt: to your AP phys-a-nics class.

Don’t wear this shirt: to wilderness areas with names kind of like Yellowstone, but not quite Yellowstone. They are to the real thing as “cheez” is to cheese. Insist on authenticity!

This shirt tells the world: “I’m a whole different kind of ‘problem bear.’”

We call this color: Grrrass

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