Abstract Gail Sher is a San Francisco area-based writer, teacher, and psychotherapist. She earned her B.A. in English from Northwestern University, received a Ford Foundation Fellowship to study linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin but chose instead to study middle English and (later) harpsichord at the University of California, Berkeley. She won a Teacher of the Year award from the combined education faculties of Berkeley, Stanford, and San Francisco State for her high school teaching of...