After pandering to a failed school district and its failed parents for firing the teachers, President Obama and his thuggish Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, want to "overhaul" the No Child Left Behind abomination of the previous administration. What this means is more testing-testing-testing and more pointing the fingers at the educators instead of at the parents and the administrators, especially the parents, where the whole child as a learner actually starts and ends.

Heaven forbid our New Age Neocon President would tell the parents to get off their fat, lazy asses and do their jobs, and Lord knows his Chief Bully in charge of the Education Department isn't about to tell his comrades in the fancy suits running school districts into the ground to actually construct schools that foster learning and not rote compliance and penetrating fear.

No, it's better to terrorize the kids with ridiculous, "zero-tolerance" (for being human) policies and terrorize teachers with mass firings for trying to do something with children of self-indulgent parents who expect everyone (including the government) and everything (including brain-sucking pharmaceuticals) but themselves to do the work of making their children ready to learn and capable every day of doing so.

Go for it, Mr. President. Maybe all the failed parents like Sarah and Todd Palin and the tens of millions of others who want someone to blame but themselves will vote for you in 2012.

I won't, but that's just because I'm one of those failures of a teacher the system is purging, right?

Former Labor Secretary and perennial Leftist literary figure Robert Reich is calling for a bailout of the nation's public education system.

Mr. Reich is a professor at the University of California at Berkley, where he shares prestige and faculty doughnut deliveries with former White House counsel and unindicted war criminal John Yoo on the extreme Right and mealy-mouthed, obtuse, Paul Krugman pal Brad Delong on the Left. They and their fellow well-paid, tenured elites of academia must surely be feeling, at least in small ways, the catastrophe that is happening to public institutions of higher education in California and elsewhere throughout the nation, although the extent of the pain wafting to their lofty heights is measured in little more than slightly larger class sizes and slower upgrades to the nice computers in their big, professorially messy offices.

On my end, the catastrophe is quite personal, and I shall first address, in an admittedly rather non-linear manner, that minor matter before ending with a robust dose of macroeconomics. The macroeconomics portion is a follow-on to the years I have spent writing here about the consequences of our taxation and spending policies that were combined with years of allowing China and other Asian countries to undervalue their currencies against the dollar. Along the way, I will provide readers with further evidence of my toxic disdain for the Right-wing fools who got us into this mess and the whining, self-appointed Leftist Defenders of The Unprivileged like Robert Reich who perennially bleat for public money to be thrown at every problem, regardless of the fiscal consequences of uncontrolled federal spending and the social consequences of giving the government yet one more excuse for imposing its out-of-touch, overbearing expectations on constituencies already drained of essential freedoms.

First, though, I shall write about what I am seeing, what I am experiencing on the ground in real time, with very real, quite dire consequences for my life.

For the first time in my memory of 30 years of teaching, this Summer, I will not have the maximum of two classes I am permitted under law to teach. Summers are always a most difficult time financially for me, but with half my usual course load lost, I am facing wreckage.

Thanks to state and federal rules, I am never allowed more than 12 hours of teaching—that's four, three-semester-hour classes—at any given college since that would mean the school would have to extend to me a benefits package I, quite incidentally, neither want nor need. In the absence of any opportunity to get more than 12 hours at any one school, I have to run from one college to another every day. It's okay for me to teach more than a full-time "full load," but only if I do it the hard way, racing back and forth from one school to another, sometimes from one city to another. The sheer nonsense of the rules that place this burden upon me is palpable, yet no one in a position of legislative power will do anything about it.

I teach about one-and-a-half times the load of a full-timer, and I make less than a third to a fourth of what the privileged profs do. In the case of the top-paid professors, my yearly salary is less than a tenth.

During the Summer, though, only one school available to me ever has work, and the maximum load has always been two courses, given that the semester runs half as long and each class is compressed to be go twice as fast. That makes Summers rough for me financially, but I've always managed to make it through, one way or another.

The bad news was fairly evident before it arrived with my schedule for this Summer. The state had failed to pay three of its four quarterly contributions to the school, and the current president of the college, whom everyone had thought would stay until his dream of massively expanding the institution's infrastructure was completed, is leaving before the ribbons are cut. Notwithstanding his detractors' long-time assertions that he is a hard-nosed, uncompromising bully, he quite apparently is not stupid.

(Never mind his flagrant, years-long extra-marital affair with one of the school's employees; never mind that the building frenzy was done on a bond trick that required no approval from the voters whose property taxes sky-rocketed as a result; and never mind that the bond funding did not include debilitating, continuing costs of maintaining all those new buildings and a whole new athletic program, complete with its own fields, well-paid coaches, and facilities. When the mob is gathering to chase a scoundrel out of town, this is the soon-to-be pariah who not only gets in front of the mob like he's leading it, but also prints out a Google map to plan the parade route.)

The writing on the wall for me goes beyond mere budget cuts that will send me into a personal financial crisis in a few months. There are quite a few course offerings this Summer, but most of them are online, and I was decertified as an online teacher several years ago by the none other than the Associate Dean of Information Technology, a man reviled by at least a few old-school professors who deem him an incompetent twit. (I cannot comment on that assessment: I haven't taken the necessary training class.) He was angered that I had taken the abominable software called "WebCT," which used to be the love child of higher education's emergent high-tech activists, and customized it so it would be effective for me and inviting for my students. That did not fit with the one-size-fits-all, everything-must-look-the-same requirements (unstated, of course) of those in IT who have no skills other than to ensure compliance with their self-invented standards for how things should be.

The out-sized power of Information Technology departments in some schools comports with broader trends in higher education, though. The mania with what used to be called "Assessment and Evaluation"—now reduced to the catch-all word "Assessment"—has had, as one of its toxic results, a drive to standardize, routinize, and compartmentalize the scope and sequence of curriculum across each discipline. The phenomenon of "PowerPoint professors" has gotten so pervasive that many students are bitterly complaining to me that virtually every class they're taking is nothing but a daily exercise in sitting in a darkened room while some prof reads to them what is projected on a big screen at the front.

This trend works for "Assessment" standards, however, because every class in a given course is pre-packaged, with even the standards, themselves, already met and set forth (in standards-compliant form, of course) by the publisher of the chosen course textbook. The professors do not need to do any prep and really don't need to know, much less care about, what they are teaching. In the darkened rooms pervading the halls of academia, those professors need not even see their students' faces, perplexed, confused, beginning to understand, struggling to learn as they might be. Why have that kind of feedback when assessment instruments—pre-packaged and certified to standards by the publishers—can do the job, instead?

For the personal touch, and in line with yet another higher-ed fad sometimes called "Writing across the Curriculum," some online instructors have their students submit an essay or two, despite the pervasive, palpable lack of writing skills these learners possess and despite the dubious grammar and composition skills of those who are their "teachers" in these courses.

Online courses are enormously attractive to colleges, however. Publishers deliver each course as a fairly complete, out-of-the-box package, and the "teacher" can do little more than be a supervisory quasi-Webmaster, scheduling tests, collecting results, and overseeing the big "classes" that cost the school less than brick-and-mortar delivery media and modalities. Better still, the power center shifts to the school's information technology services, which then has legitimate claim to pose as the center of teacher standards, teaching expertise, and funding. I have seen this happen: at the college where I was decertified as an online instructor, the so-called "Faculty Academy," which runs teacher training, is under the authority of Information Technology, which is not an academic department, but which is run by that fellow who personally decertified me, despite the fact that I was named Faculty Member of the Year that very same year. (That was the same year I launched my own education Website, complete with all kinds of resources, including professional-quality podcasts of all my lectures, which are also available by free subscription on Apple iTunes.)

The Information Technology services division whose Associate Dean decertified me also runs such programs as the one that "trains" teachers in everything from ethics (yet another fad in higher education, right now) to "instructional development" (whatever that is).

As an aside, this is the same Information Technology services department that cannot maintain standardization across the PCs on campus, fails to keep the software even on faculty workstations current, and becomes righteously furious with anyone who points out critical flaws, security gaps, and uninstalled but necessary software on campus computers.

Returning for two final, somewhat broader points on the topic of those online courses that are now the cost-saving choice of cash-strapped schools, let there be no understatement about how bad they are for both students and educators. The department chairwoman whose decisions led to my looming financial difficulties, in defending the tilt toward these courses (while denying that any substantive shift is occurring), told me they are "popular," especially in the Summer when students want to go on vacations and do lots of other things that would preclude attending real classes. She is right about that: far too many students sign up for those online sections fully intending to get course credit for less effort than they would put into a classroom-based course. The downside is this: at least in my disciplines of expertise, especially in economics, virtually no online student can learn what I want that student to learn. I know this for a fact. In the cases where a student took the first of a two-course economics sequence online and then tried to take the second course in my classroom, almost never did the student pass unless he or she pretty much re-learned the material from the first course. In the past two years, students who had earned a course grade of A or a B in an online, first-semester section almost always failed or nearly failed my brick-and-mortar, second-semester class. Most of these students, in fact, dropped my course and eventually went back to the online way of getting their college credits in economics.

Finally, online courses certainly disserve students, but they also disserve educators who fall into the trap of getting work by agreeing to be "trained" to run online courses and then accepting online sections just so they can have a teaching job. The work might seem attractive at first, given that all it seems one must do is sit at a computer to deploy pre-packaged materials, then collect and report results; but the bad part comes if the "teacher" actually cares about student learning. A class of thirty-five students who have no means of communicating otherwise are going to be pounding that educator with written questions every day and every night, each question requiring some response of lesser or greater detail about subject matter. Considering the mode of communication, some of the most effective means of conveying knowledge will be completely unavailable. Even worse, at least in this state, there seems to be some kind of regulatory prohibition against online teachers using what are known in customer service as "standards" — canned answers that are the first pass at answering a question. This was barked at me in a department meeting by none other than a tenured professor, sitting as she was on her high pedestal dictating truth and consequences to those who do the dirty work she would not. Tenured professors, rarely willing to run online sections, themselves, are nevertheless sometimes veritable geysers of knowledge when it comes to the ghetto work percolating in the burgeoning, LCD-lit sweatshops under the ivy of Higher Education Hall.

I end this part of the article with an unqualified stipulation: what I wrote above was venomous, biased, self-aggrandizing, and parochial.

I have for myself no champions, save myself, and I have learned from too many personal experiences that reserve, resignation, dignity, understatement, and patience work only capriciously; too often, they are the ways of the dominant insisting upon safe passage through the enraged ranks of those they exploit. When the mainstream media whips hysteria in the wake of angry people who resort to violence, they give ever more power to those who make incomprehensibly large numbers of people fight progressively bleaker lives, almost all of them quietly, in despair, disillusionment, and surrender.

Therein lies the transition from my personal prospects of a degraded future to the large picture, which actually has nothing whatsoever to do with me or with anyone else in my position. What happens at the scale of the small is mere anecdote, offering neither affirmation or refutation of the grand scale. To hold otherwise is to go down a corrosive path all too common in the laws of this nation, where any and every incident has the chance of becoming a bloody red shirt to wave for yet another law, another regulation, another polemic's demand for a pogrom. American law is fast becoming a modern Lex Romana, so vast, so intricate, so complex, so detailed, that it serves no one but those who construct and enforce this or that set of provisions which advance an interest or protect a group at the expense of the body of the governed. In the case of the Roman Empire, by the time the Visigoths entered Rome in 5th Century, the wise generals had already made their alliances with the hordes, the most powerful of the city had in many cases already made their plans to the extent that they could, and the citizen commoners and others saw nothing but yet another unstoppable plunge into terrifying, if all too familiar, darkness. A barbarian and a centurion look pretty much the same to the man being put to the sword of one or the other hateful brute.

Nothing important remains of those who were already traveling the road with their backs to the sunset.

Nightfall then, nightfall now.

Professor Rubin wants a bailout of education. After all, the U.S. government has bailed out the economy and the banks, and it has engaged in decades-long, life-sustaining, wildly expensive support systems for everything from agriculture to the military hardware industry. Why not education now that the system is in a crisis of such proportions that courses are being canceled, teachers are being furloughed, and students are becoming restive enough to engage in public, vocal protests?

We bailed out a bunch of greedy, incompetent bankers.

We bailed out an economy with a huge number of people who had voted not once, but twice for the staggeringly incompetent former President and his equally incompetent minions who hauled us down an eight-year road to the economic and financial meltdown that finally got the people's attention once it slammed head-long through the info-tainment that masquerades as evening news into their own tunnel-vision lives.

Why not bail out the education system?

Professor Rubin (and anyone else who thinks this is a dandy idea whose time has come), allow me to succinctly explain why we should not, and I preface the emphatic words I write below by pointing out that I wear the hats of an economist, a financial analyst, a parent, and an all-around realist who does not care whom I offend. Read my explanation and imagine for yourself how bad it would be if I were actually leaning over your diminutive, Leftist head, sir, my voice thundering, my saliva flying, as happens all the time when I am teaching and when I am ranting on my talk radio show:

Mr. Rubin, we can't afford it, you Leftist academic airhead simpleton.

Again, sir, WE CANNOT AFFORD IT.

We are running unsustainable, unconscionable federal budget deficits, and our Congress is too cowardly to do anything about this madness other than to allow China and other countries to keep lending us literally trillions of dollars to keep our ludicrously low taxes and our bizarrely childish spending habits going, all while those countries peg their currencies at a half to a third of their purchasing power parity values against the dollar, thereby wrecking millions of American jobs and destroying billions and billions of dollars of our industrial base.

We can't get our tax structure put right because our President cowers to self-promoting clowns who squeal and bawl for even lower taxes.

We can't get our spending under control because our President and his Democratic allies are so obsessed with one-issue health care "reform" legislation that they'll sacrifice more important issues like antitrust law modernization and privacy law reform to some shifting vision of "fixing" a health care system that first and foremost desperately needs a hard dose of exposure to a real fist of antitrust law enforcement that includes no-exemption price transparency and, where necessary, government-sponsored, brutal competitive pressures.

More money for education, Mr. Rubin? Find it.

Go ask the Federal Reserve; for years, they've been printing money to keep the economy twitching through the slow death spiral of the Bush years and right on into the spending spree of the Obama Administration.

Oh, wait, that's right: all that money the Fed has printed in excess of the real growth rate of the economy is sooner or later going to create a massive tidal wave of inflation, isn't it? Or do you think clicking our heels and wishing real hard will make the so-called equation of exchange not come to bear in the long run with steel teeth? It's happening in China right now: our benefactor's years of currency exchange rate manipulation against the dollar (and against our interests) are now coming to a head with inflationary pressures that are scaring the living Hell out of those addled communist thugs running the show in Beijing.

Oh, just another minute, there: the Chinese are trying to pretend they can ratchet up their domestic interest rates to quell the inflation while still playing their currency rate manipulation games. Those are two mutually exclusive economic policies. The Chinese mercantilists' gambit is running into the long-run end result of years of spinning their yuan printing presses at near-light speed. Despite continued efforts to peg the yuan at a low level against the dollar to keep the growth of the Chinese economy high, the value of the yuan will rise as the People's Bank of China, with increasing fear of inflation expectations embedding into the Chinese economy, pushes their domestic interest rates up. The value of the yuan against the dollar will inexorably rise, and this will throttle down hard on the ability of the People's Bank to get American dollars by inducing its merchants to sell us cheap trash. Once the Chinese goods on American store shelves start getting expensive for us to buy, we will stop exporting greenbacks to China in exchange for their not-so-cheap-anymore stuff, which means the People's Bank of China won't have all those American dollars to lend back to our government (and consumers and businesses, by the way) so we can keep spending beyond our means like we have for so many years, now.

Nightfall coming: nightfall for them, nightfall for us.

Our government will no longer be able to get cheap money to squander on worthless war-making, which is the Right-wingers' favorite sport, or on some ridiculously expensive government solution for every sparrow that falls from the sky, which is the Leftists' preferred opiate.

The Federal Reserve can't keep printing money, not with the magma dome of inflation set to blow like Uncle Ed's trombone-oriented bowel after the Thursday night all-you-can-eat chili supper at the Second Methodist Church Jubilee Revival and Ladies Quilting Circle.

The government's gargantuan, out-sized demand for capital will push domestic and global interest rates upward, and the domestic economy, recently recovered from a pretty nasty recession, will teeter on the brink of an even worse economic crisis as those rising interest rates choke off private investment and consumer spending.

No, Professor Rubin, we can't afford to bail out another failed industry. We're going to need all the money we can just to postpone the end of yet another of history's failed empires.

Nightfall can certainly be forestalled, there's no question about that. All we have to do is close our eyes for a while longer.

The problem with that solution is sort of obvious, though: when we finally open our eyes—as eventually we will, if for no other reason than out of morbid curiosity—twilight will be over, and we will be entirely unprepared to see our way through the darkness.

Yes, morning will inevitably and someday follow this long and gathering night. It's just that we won't be around to see it.

On a well-known social networking forum, I was just asked the question that is the title of this post: "How's School Going This Year?" My correspondent was a student of mine some years ago. I decided to answer her here:

Teaching is always a pleasure and a frustration: I am passing to my students shards and evidence of civilization, along with the ability to sustain it through the development of learning and other cognitives faculties; but I know the students are becoming less and less capable not only of learning, but more importantly of caring. The modern "solutions"—like "No Child Left Behind," "Zero-Tolerance" school policies, and even "Abstinence-Only" sex education—are worsening the situation. Failed generations are trying to craft policies and prescriptions to rectify failures magnificently evident in their own lives. All too easy is the noble task of repairing others compared to the tedious work of reforming ourselves.

I must stipulate that the lament of youthful ignorance, indolence, and sloth is as old as time, and few are the generations that can honestly claim their own moral, intellectual, or spiritual superiority over generations that followed. We are swift to condemn those whose youth reminds us of our own that we have lost, and we are even quicker to the judgment that we would do better if only we were once again young yet endowed with the wisdom of long lives, even if poorly managed as they have been.

Still, I see the end of America as empire of knowledge, craft, ambition, and abiding intellectual curiosity. If I am right, I must acknowledge that I have no one to blame but myself—not because I am a failed professor, though, because I am, in all honesty, a fine college teacher, one of the best of a vanishing breed of face-to-face lecturers with fiery oratory and unrelenting interest in his many disciplines of specialty. The blame I carry is that I am undeniably a member of a generation that failed, both in its whole and in far too many of its constituents. We failed in the leaders we chose, the policies we pursued, the self-indulgence we embraced, and the paths to rectitude we feigned.

Now, I must fail far too many students in my classes.

To that extent, I am, if nothing else, consistent.

In a recent blog discussion thread on an unrelated topic, the passing claim was made that Americans are unable to contemplate complex ideas, and from that proposition, blame was laid upon "[T]he school system [which] is set up in this country to prevent free thinking taking roots." Republished here in edited and expanded form is my response to that and other claims about the principal cause of the problems with our education system in this country. In foreword, I caution readers that, when I address issues of education, I am often less than diplomatic, and I tend not to mince words to spare the feelings and edify the ideas of others with opinions that differ from my own. For one thing, I'm too old to care; for another, little is to be gained by the overly cautious word against cultural, academic, and societal trends that have the force of hurricanes in imposing their half-baked, poorly constructed theories upon the uninformed, the unwilling, and the vulnerable. In summary, as a people, we have been getting hit by one shock wave after another for decades, and the meek voice is one that will be swept aside; thus—and even though the strong voice will likely be swept aside, as well—I write upon education matters with other than the meek voice.

Speaking as an educator of almost thirty years, the free-thinking student is generally undesirable if that freedom of thought has no tether to knowledge of facts, ability to reason, or capacity for meaningful expression. We long ago abandoned teaching students how to think in the disciplined, rigorous ways that require the use of valid logic as the framing guide in which accurate and deep understandings of history, the arts, science, and mathematics can be brought to bear upon a problem, proposition, or idea at issue. Modern American pedagogy offers not even so much as a worthwhile mechanism by which to implement standards for effectively, consistently teaching and insisting upon proper grammar, even though mastery of constructive thinking and expression are at the very heart of shaping a young mind for higher expressive thought and communication. From long and grueling personal experience, I can assure readers that, unless one is very much in love with subject matter at its deep, technical level, teaching is no fun when it requires as much discipline, effort, and continuing thought on the part of the teacher as on the part of the student.

When I was the director of education at a school for court reporters, I had an English teacher with a Master's degree from a most reputable university. She resolutely refused to teach English grammar, even though the course to which I had assigned her was "English Grammar I." She hated grammar, did not understand essentials of it, and knew very well that "grammar is dead," anyway. She wanted to give her students "writing assignments" because that's what is important: all students have to do is write and write—and especially, they should write about their feelings and their opinions—and they will get the education in English they need. She stormed into my office one night after class, frustrated to no end because my curriculum was hard-core grammar, and she was supposed to have covered the topic of what are called "gerunds" that night, and she simply could not, for the life of her, understand what these gerunds were all about. She said, "F*ck gerunds." I fired her.

Ultimately, she was the winner in a way. The accreditation board for the school finally ordered me, under threat of pulling the accreditation, to abolished the two-course sequence in English grammar. I was told, "Grammar is dead."

It is important to point out that exceptional writing does not flow from perfection in form and grammar. I have invited a number of bloggers to contribute at Websites of Dark Wraith Publishing, and many of these writers are not top-notch grammarians; nevertheless, they are good or great writers, and that is why I deem their work important and worthy of publication and exposure to a wide audience. My assessment is good, too: the ability to write well is, to some extent, a gift, but it is a gift enhanced by elements of early life in school, at home, and in other venues that brought forth something special, perhaps not entirely well-formed in terms of grammar and composition lessons retained, but special nonetheless in terms of essential understanding of what makes for a good read.

People learn in different ways and, to some degree, at different rates; and it is surely insufficient to anticipate that teaching will, in and of itself, be enough. Some students will emerge of their own accord as great in math, writing, art, or some combination of areas; most, however, will have to be given years and years of prescriptive, structured, and (unfortunately) repetitive lessons to induce retention and usage. Higher-level expectations brought to bear too soon and in inappropriate venues do not have positive effect and can, in many cases, have disastrous long-term consequences. This is true whether it be the average fifth-grader being taught algebra or the college student being harangued to write and write, regardless of individual ability to form essential thoughts, much less the capacity to express thought in a readable way.

Specifically, that fascination with simply "writing" at the expense of writing from clarity of thought and productivity of expression has gone from brushfire in the 1980s to full-blown conflagration in the current era. Colleges have become nearly obsessed with "writing across the curriculum," holding seminars, pumping out e-mail newsletters, and going so far as to stand upon the precipice of evaluating teachers in part upon how much they integrate "writing" into assessment and evaluation at the course and classroom levels. The assumption, of course, is this: if students write and write and write, sooner or later, they'll write well and communicate meaningful thoughts about the subject matter at hand. (I must note, here, that I am valiantly resisting the urge to conflate this myth with the somewhat erroneous idea that, if a bunch of monkeys are allowed to type long enough, a Shakespearean sonnet will emerge from one of their pages of random characters.)

Old methods and methodologies are the stuff of trash bins when it comes to academia. Our education system flits from one pop-academic airhead theory to the next, and I have seen enough of these brainstorms pushed into service to make me thoroughly suspicious of anything new, whether it be a new idea about how teachers should be "learning facilitators" or some new, high-tech toy the IT department has been suckered by academic-corporate marketers into buying for every classroom on campus. As the uselessness of one pedagogy or toy after another becomes too obvious to ignore, and as a new crop of academics desperately publishes reams of research to get doctorates or tenure, what do we get? Why, we get a brand new banquet of pop-academic airhead ideas, the latest and biggest of which these days is stampeding the ivy under the banner of "assessment," which is the Son of Frankenstein billowing forth from the "accountability" craze that expressed itself legislatively with the abomination of No Child Left Behind and other initiatives that have now fully infected and misdirected critical and precious resources in schools from kindergarten through college.

Whatever the academic fad du jour might be, the results are predictable: in K-12, teachers who are, themselves, the products of woefully inadequate education from their youth clear through to their suspiciously easy degrees in education are expected to impose upon their students standards that the students cannot meet because the teachers cannot teach to standards that are utterly detached from genuinely worthwhile arcs of education; and all of this happens in the context of administrators whose academic training is even more miserable than that of the teachers they oversee; and those administrators are flogged along by school boards comprising ambitious know-nothings cowering to the mindless masses of voters who will shoot down pathetically inadequate school levies, then go out and mortgage their lives to the hilt for their own consumption overdrive.

Do people want something better? No, not at the price they have clearly, unambiguously—over and over again, from one school district to the next, from one state to the next—demonstrated that they are willing to pay. No, not at a price that would include a direct cost in the fifty to sixty thousand dollar-a-year range for starting teachers; no, not at a price that would include giving up the economies of scale of giant, mausoleum-style, mass-education schools and replacing them with lots of small, intimate, localized learning centers; and, no, not at the awful price of resolutely and consistently standing up to pop culture by telling the kids, "No, no, no. Not television, not your iPod, not your friends at the mall. First, foremost, and every day and night, your studies... and I will be there to support, help, and believe in you."

The price of educating kids the right way—the way a whole lot of people know very well is the right way—is far, far too high.

Oh, yes, and one more thing. No more of this 'some people just aren't good at math or science or reading or whatever' nonsense. Do Americans have even the slightest clue as to how ingrained in our culture the excuses for academic failure are? Finding excuses for failure are so much easier than living for reasons to succeed.

As a side note, when the kids decry the difficulties of living in a household where parents insist upon high academic standards, those youngsters can be comforted with the certain knowledge that, when they grow up, they can go on the Oprah Winfrey Show and tell the world about how terrible their childhoods were. (Dear GOD! Expectations?! O, the horror... the horror!)

I need to address one last, really important matter, here. To be a good teacher means commanding respect rather than demanding compliance. The teacher who bullies, cajoles, threatens, and otherwise terrorizes students is doing nothing even remotely related to teaching.

The same goes for the society, itself, and its instrumentalities in law enforcement: we are ruining one generation after another of kids by terrorizing them with massive police raids at schools, making them accept that they have no privacy or speech rights we don't "let" them have, and refusing to deal with the school bullies who create miserable hierarchies of brutality.

And finally, the same goes for parents: violence in word and deed is not merely the raised voice, the threatening hand, or the inappropriate willingness to punish; violence can also be done to children by giving them the awful example of a parent unwilling to live a circumspect life, full of learning, occasioned by fun and games, and always willing to show love even in the most difficult of times. It is, indeed, hard to grow up; do it, anyway. It is also hard to remember being a child; do that, anyway, too.

Here's some good news. At the end of the day, nothing of what I wrote above is actually important, necessary, or even advisable. We are in the decline of Empire. Quite honestly, we would be wasting our time trying at this late hour to do for our children that which we willfully declined to do when we had some chance of making their lives better than ours. At this point, it is better to go out and spend that tax rebate check, bemoan the price of gasoline, and whine about all the ills of society that some new President should fix at the behest of an electorate standing in the breach of a society unable to cure itself through the will and personal sacrifice of its citizenry.

Here's one last piece of good news. Given the current state of our education system, only a few of today's kids will grow to adulthood smart enough to grasp who is to blame for the grim world in which they will live. At the very least, we had damn well better hope these kids don't figure it out before we are all safely in our graves.


The Dark Wraith has spoken.

Your host here at The Dark Wraith Forums herewith announces that Podcasts of his lectures in four courses are now available via Apple iTunes. Click on the logo at left to go to the iTunes store and subscribe to lectures in the following subjects: Principles of Microeconomics, Principles of Macroeconomics (day class and night class), and Legal and Regulatory Environment of Business. Each Podcast is a full lecture, ranging in duration from just over an hour (for day classes) to about two-and-a-half hours (for the night class). Subscription to the Heartland Collegiate Compendium is free.

For those of you more or less unfamiliar with Podcasting, you do not need an iPod to listen to Podcasts, and you can use Apple iTunes software right on your Windows or Mac computer not only to subscribe to Podcasts, but also to listen to them.

To provide some background, this project was a lot like work. The first step, recording lectures, requires relatively good audio equipment as well as marginally decent acoustics in the classrooms. A few donations made it possible to get a fairly high-quality digital recording device (on eBay, of course), although one room in which I deliver lectures is proving to be the sound stage equivalent of a large, noisy cave, and I'll probably have to get a better stereo microphone to deal with that problem. The next step, editing the recordings, is an on-going, time-intensive process. The NCH audio software I was using decided at the most inopportune time to announce that my free trial period had ended, so I went to a freeware package called Audacity, which is pretty impressive in terms of features, but it crashes like the Hindenburg on files as large as the ones I'm trying to use it to edit.

Recording and editing are the on-going work of this Podcasting project. The up-front chore was creating a valid Podcast RSS feed, which proved somewhat more challenging than I was anticipating. What made it a whole lot like real work was constructing the RSS feed to make it "iTunes-friendly"—that is, to make it so Apple iTunes, the 800-pound gorilla of Podcast aggregators, could see it and consider it worth checking out for approval. That required special iTunes tags in the RSS feed, several of which had to be generated by a PHP script that could read the information in an mp3 file in an article, do some calculations, and echo the results back out to the XML file (which is sort of like a Website's shadow page that aggregators favor: this page has a special, strictly structured grammar and syntax with all the important information—article titles, dates of publication, author, contents, etc.—from the Webpage that end users usually see).

Having finally gotten the RSS feed "validated" by W3C standards, with the iTunes supplemental tags validated by Apple, the final step in making the whole project go live was to submit the feed to Podcast aggregators, most notable among them being iTunes, itself, which not only has to ensure that the RSS feed meets its technical criteria, but also that the Podcasts, themselves, meet with Apple's approval. I am still unsure of what that latter process entails, but the Heartland Collegiate Compendium lectures got approved sometime yesterday.

As of the dateline of this article, I am still in the process of catching up to the end of last week's lectures. Right now, each one is taking a couple of hours to edit, but I'll get more efficient as time goes on and as I free myself from the repeated crashes of the audio editing software. (I am, of course, mindful that the crashes might be the result of the software dying of boredom from the audio content.)

Enough about that, and I do apologize for the boring grind above. I had to tell someone.

The lectures are in mp3 format, and a computer user can always simply click on such a file to play it, provided audio software like QuickTime or Windows Media Player is on the computer. The principal advantage in subscribing to a Podcast feed is that the aggregator a subscriber uses will go out to look for new episodes to a subscribed feed and fetch them automatically. Feed aggregators like iTunes will also make the task of saving the Podcasts and transferring them to portable devices like iPods, Zunes, and other mp3 players more routine. Nevertheless, again, because the lectures I am posting on my server are mp3 files, an interested visitor can just click on the link for a given lecture and listen to it at a computer.

As a sample, below is the link to one of the first lectures I delivered.

Principles of Macroeconomics, Lecture 1: Origins of the Discipline.

Lecture Date: 15 January 2008.

Run time: 1:02:38
Type: mp3 audio file
Bitrate: 128 kbps
Size: 57.3 Mb

Notice that this is a huge file. On fast broadband, it will take about a minute or two for the buffer to fully load so the file can start playing. On dial-up service, you should start the download, then go out, have dinner, catch a movie, maybe take a yoga class, work for an end to world hunger, take that trip overseas you were thinking about, return to the country and organize a new political party, then go home to listen to the lecture, which should have downloaded by that time.

For those of you who watched my YouTube or Revver video lectures, the one to which I've linked above will be old material: the script is about the same from one semester to the next, although I do vary content a bit. The advantage of audio-only for my lectures is that you don't have to look at me flailing about; the disadvantage is that visual content—information I would write on a whiteboard, for example—is not visible; however, I do try to say in words much of what I write on a whiteboard, anyway. Perhaps more importantly, in economics classes, although I do draw graphs, I believe that such graphs are far too often a crutch that economics educators use when oral and written explanations fail them. This has the bad result that students come to the conclusion that the answer to an economics question is a graph they can draw on an exam. A graph is not an answer to anything, nor is it, by itself, an adequate basis for a well-formed response to an economics question. A good answer might or might not have one or several graphs to visually supplement a written, expository explanation; but a graph, in and of itself, cannot be the answer I want. Because of this, I don't turn to the whiteboard and draw a graph every time I need to explain something.

Anyway, Podcasting is now available for my lectures. Follow the episodes for one or more courses, and you'll hear an entire semester's worth of material. By the end, either you'll love the subject matter of the lectures, or you'll be so sick of it you'll never want to hear another economist again as long as you live.


The Dark Wraith is unsure of which scenario is more undesirable.

In a completely rational society, the best of us would aspire to be teachers, and the rest of us would have to settle for something less, because passing civilization along from one generation to the next ought to be the highest honor and highest responsibility anyone could have.

— Lee Iacocca

Whatever.

Twenty-seven years, maybe two dozen institutions, literally thousands and thousands of students: that's my claim to a worthwhile life.

All manner of place: great lecture halls at enormous, public universities; abandoned shopping malls, where fly-by-night schools shared space with homeless men sleeping in the corridors; prison; beautiful corporate facilities; for-profit little schools in urban ghettos; private colleges with perfect students and back-stabbing, if quite friendly, faculty; big and small community colleges; even a private little K-12 school. I've run hundred-mile circuits in a single day, teaching in different cities just so I could make ends meet.

I've taught more subjects than I can sometimes recall: math, from arithmetic to differential equations and everything in between, including developmental math, remedial algebra, probability theory and statistics, the calculus, and drafting math; managerial finance; real estate finance; economics; financial accounting; marketing; paralegal; business law; transcription and proofreading; learning study skills; English grammar and composition; computer software skills; keyboarding; court reporting; psychology; sociology; and Western civilization. I've been a director of education and a dean (at the same time, and at the same time I was teaching at the school).

I've had stunningly bright students, thunderously stupid ones, and countless thousands in between. My students have ranged in age from five years to almost eighty: "normal kids" and whole classes of the "learning disabled," which once included in a single classroom a quadriplegic, a couple of epileptics, several TMJs, a handful of dysgraphics and dyslectics, and some who, in a later era, might have been diagnosed as autistic. I've had my chops busted for nailing star athletes for cheating; I've had my throat slit by administrators who didn't like my style; I've had parents, spouses, and friends ruin students' hopes of achieving academic dreams; and I've seen people I wouldn't have bet a dime on succeeding walk up to get their diplomas.

Students have broken down, sobbing in my arms, and former students have given me firm handshakes years after I last saw them.

I've seen students on their way to nowhere, and I've marveled at kids on their way to the stars.

I've bemoaned hot-headed boys and crazy girls more interested in their soap-opera lives than in their homework. Oh, yes, and I've run across the occasional, albeit rare, post-adolescent female looking for a rather less-than-academic relationship with a male authority figure, and I've had occasion to encounter a few young gentlemen rather too timid to say much other than to discreetly let me know they were gay.

On streets near campus, I slept in my car through a brutally cold Winter in the Midwest and crashed in the cockroach-infested basements of rooming houses, all because the pay for non-tenured college teachers comes with a choice of food, soap, and clean clothes or a comfortable place to live. I've bummed money from caring friends; I've worked side jobs; and for more than twenty years, until my body and veins were too weary to do it anymore, I sold my blood plasma twice a week.

I've watched academia flop from one pop fad to another, and I've seen excellence in teaching beyond what I could ever hope to attain, myself.

In my life, I've been many things; but always—always—I've been a teacher.


For all I know, this will be my last semester at the college that has kept me for the past few years. I have no guarantees. If the truth were to be told, I'm going to start wearing out my welcome pretty soon if I don't move on voluntarily. That's how it's always been.

In the morning, as is my unfailing way, into the classroom I'll stride, the swaggering, angry professor, the harsh, loud, in-your-face, bad nightmare who wouldn't mind flunking everyone on the roster. Unfortunately, at least some of the students will know the whole thing is a scripted act. Reputation precedes a teacher no matter how loudly he tries to shout it down.

Nevertheless, I'll be out there in the spotlight one more time, voice raising to a yell, then nearly vanishing into a whisper, long hair flying, arms waving, fingers pointing, eyes staring right at students, then straight through them into the vast depth of material I know and that I am inviting them to know, too.

I might have to move on, soon, I think. I'm getting old, and that should bother me, but it doesn't really. There's always a gig somewhere. It might not pay much, it might be a long ways away, and I might not even make it there. All of that is okay, though: every day of my professional life, I've been turning the page, anyway. That's just how it is when you cannot live your life anywhere but in the spotlight. It's the best place imaginable for those of us who want to hide from the wasteland of our own failure to be anything other than the object of high, rhetorical praise.

Again, though, whatever.

I am a teacher. That's what matters to me. More to the point, that's what matters to the future.

Information Technology Services (ITS) at the college where I teach has in the past couple of years been a veritable fountain from which has flowed a slew of new technology products for the classrooms and, just this semester, a whole new student e-mail system supported by Google G-mail. The people in ITS haven't heard much in the way of faculty dissent, but they are nonetheless dismayed: my conversations with several people in ITS have revealed that they are frustrated with the many professors who are not rapidly embracing the idea of fundamentally integrating the students' new campus Google accounts into curriculum. It seems that, among other things, ITS wants us to make e-mail messages through the system a key means, if not the primary vehicle, by which information, assignments, and messages are communicated to students.

My own efforts to convey to these specialists a few of the issues surrounding the use of e-mail as an integral part of courses has fallen for the most part on deaf ears. For example, not one of these computer "experts"—such as what passes for an expert on the budget of a public institution of higher learning—has even the slightest clue that there might be an issue with handing a suspect behemoth like Google wholesale access to faculty-student communications. For another example, the folks in ITS seem put out by suggestions that professors are genuinely and legitimately concerned with the possibility that ITS technical people are encroaching on the absolutely sacred ground that is the academic freedom a professor has in his or her own classroom.

In the continuing effort to harp on the theme of teachers at the college getting with the program, the chief of ITS late last week sent out a mass e-mail to every faculty member; the subject line of the message was, "Worth a Look," and the body of the message was nothing but a link to a YouTube video, which is herewith presented below.

Readers are encouraged to watch the video in the entirety of its four minutes and forty-four seconds before proceeding to the remainder of this article, which resumes with the e-mail message I sent out this afternoon as a "Reply All," meaning that everyone who had been sent the original e-mail message with the link to the YouTube video has now received my response to it.

Enjoy the show.



Now, this is the message I sent to every faculty member. It also went to several deans and the director of education, those being people to whom I did not realize I was broadcasting until about two seconds after I had hit the "Send" button.

I am deeply unimpressed by the latest in centuries of calls for a "new" way for a "new" age. Until such time as we can effectively teach students the fundamentals of coherent, rational thought processes conveyable through constructively coherent writing, the digital age can find its acolytes and promoters in another teacher's classroom. Google is not part of the solution; neither is Wikipedia; neither are any of the legion of online and other innovative ways to "connect" and "collaborate." To the extent that they are treated as other than convenient tools of modernity, they are all part of the problem, and that problem has persisted from age to age. (Here's a hint: the problem, for lack of a more diplomatic wording, is called ignorance with a side of cultural sloth.)

To represent that those signs the students in that act were displaying were shocking messages from the post-modern world of the young is to deny that students have been bemoaning their teachers, their assignments, and their very lots in life since the beginning of time... or, at the very least, since the first professor held up a stone tablet and called it "Neolithic PowerPoint."

Nothing is new. The only differences from one generation to the next are the particulars of the "solutions" that avoid the hard-core duty of teachers to teach well, test rigorously, and show compassion while awaiting their students' slow, uncertain decision about whether to find an individuating reason to succeed or a tired excuse to fail.

Forgive me my bluntness. I'm a teacher. (I'm also a blogger.)

Having sent the above e-mail message to everyone, I awaited what I expected to be the brutal backlash against my Luddite-oriented lifestyle. I was quite surprised at first to find that the messages to me were uniformly favorable, some even glowing. Words such as "erudite" were used. One commenter wrote to me, "I was beginning to think I was alone."

Another faculty member wrote, "Hurrah! I have been meaning to reply to the video but wasn't sure how to put my thoughts into words with sounding like something out of the stone age. I found your response on the money. I'm sorry to think the next generation cares more about the internet and text-messaging than reading a book or actually researching a paper without the benefit of the internet."

I was most happy that my thoughts had resonated with so many of my peers. How uniformly favorable were the comments I was receiving!

It then occurred to me that I had become the academic equivalent of toast.

In higher education, praise is readily at hand, generally conveyed in unabashedly kind words, friendly banter, and the occasional, stale doughnuts left over from meetings among important people. Praise comes quickly and generously.

Retribution, on the other hand, comes slowly, in its own time, in its own way. Almost always, it comes from behind, and its effect is as a blade of unforgiving certitude. Revenge in academia has both patience and stealth.

How do I know I am going to face the wrath of a few who matter? That's easy: I received compliments from many who do not.

I shan't concern myself with that eventuality, though. The worst that can happen to me is the punishment which has already occurred, perhaps the greatest curse and the highest reward a teacher could anticipate. For the sin of speaking my mind—indeed, for the far worse error of doing so in such a manner and tone that I was for a moment actually heard—I shall remain in obscurity.

Economic poverty and bouts of self-condemnation are just the gravy on the banquet meal of hierarchical intolerance at once so vigorously enforced and so roundly denied by the practitioners of group-think in higher education.

Here at The Dark Wraith Forums, of course, I can speak my mind without much concern; and that is the most delicious of ironies for one who cannot countenance this "Information Age" that is inexorably separating me from relevance in my own profession. It is, in fact, irony of the highest order, irony worthy of a good belly laugh.


The Dark Wraith will try to muster that laugh once the smell of toast has dissipated.

Yes, it's one of those infernal quizzes your host here at The Dark Wraith Forums publishes from time to time. You might recall that the last one was on the subject of law. For this one, we switch gears pretty dramatically and face down math word problems, something I am sure everyone here just adores... or not. The problems are in no particular order of difficulty, although the last one seems for most people to be something of a headbanger. Just keep in mind that, even though all of these problems come from my remedial college math courses, it's not the end of the world if you don't score well. Not that you won't score well, mind you; it's just that this might not be your day to ace a math quiz.

As fair warning, although this would qualify as perhaps a 30- to 45-minute affair in a typical classroom setting, it might take you longer, given that you are being blindsided by it from out of the blue, and given that you might need some time to get those math brain gears of yours to start spinning with some degree of efficiency. That means you should set aside maybe an hour or so for this little project, bearing in mind that doing something like this is a far better use of your valuable time than many other things you could be doing, instead.

Indeed, it is.

Enjoy.




The Dark Wraith appreciates your effort.

(No, this isn't one from my own stack: there would have been a justifiable homicide involved if it had been.)

This last Friday afternoon was quieter than most. After a surprisingly cold spell for the past couple of weeks, the weather has finally begun to moderate. Spring has arrived. With temperatures in the mid-70s on Friday afternoon, the campus buildings were like mausoleums: the student body had passed on to a better place, leaving nothing but the old school spirit to haunt the halls and accompany me as I went from my office down to the classroom where I would conduct my last class of the day and week.

"Irresponsible students," I thought to myself, half grinning about the prospect of teaching in a room where I was the only living soul. It wouldn't be the first time; and besides, this wasn't really my class, anyway. I've sort of ended up adopting it because the regular professor has been absent quite a bit.

This particular class is the last pre-calculus ("pre-calc," we call it) course. The few young people who take the "hard science" track and make it this far are going into the heavy-hitter fields: one student wants to be a physicist; another plans to go into computer science; a third sees astrophysics as the way to go; two others want to be engineers; and the sixth isn't sure, but he thinks he'll go into physical chemistry.

That's all: six young people, five males and one female. Not very many, considering how important their technical and theoretical work will be to the world of tomorrow. This course has the content they should have learned—or should have been taught—in their Junior or Senior year of high school. Some of them did take higher algebra and trigonometry, but the knowledge was not imparted in such a way that it infused to their minds to become the set of routine thinking and symbolic manipulation skills necessary for survival in the rigors of the calculus. Several of these kids had even taken a "calculus" course in their last year of high school, a choice that almost invariably leads to an entering Freshman college student who has nothing other than the ability to say, "But I took calculus in high school. How come I'm having to take pre-calc here?!"

The much-vaunted "No Child Left Behind" ruse has done nothing to bring us better-prepared students. It has made them unable to comprehend why most professors won't teach to their tests. Some students are bitter about this. They think we're trying to blindside them with unfair questions; they rightly claim that we have questions and problems on exams that we "didn't cover in class"; and some believe we waste a great deal of time on material that never shows up in assessment instruments. However, all of that being the fact of the matter with respect to the way students are these days, it's always easy as a long-time teacher to fuss about how students were better in some grand time of yesteryear. A whole lot of that is nothing more than an application of the fantasy about the utopian past that never really existed even though everybody is absolutely convinced that it really did.

These kids are no stupider—and certainly no brighter—than the kids I taught in 1981. At the same time, I'm no better—but fortunately no worse—than I was in that same year, the one when I began what would become my lifelong, enduring profession among the many pursuits I would engage as I tried to earn enough to keep body and soul together in the scholarly ghetto of non-tenure track higher education.

Sure enough, Room 1302 was empty when I walked in. I flipped on the lights and headed over to the behemoth of a computer/audio-visuals console, which in that room is situated on the far left side at the front. In many classrooms, those awful monstrosities are plopped right smack in the middle at the front of the room, serving as beastly, low-lying fortresses for the teachers who would prefer not to interact at close, unprotected range with their audiences.

I sat down and started shuffling through papers to find the pile of exams I needed to grade before Monday. If I got through that mess, I'd have more time to spend on a stack of essays through which I would have to force myself to plow, a chore that always takes hours and hours because I cannot keep myself from meticulously addressing the atrocious grammatical errors that pervade student writing. We professors are being flogged into a big "writing across the curriculum" fad. To my misfortune, having been trained in the old-fashioned notion that a cogent thought cannot be conveyed—indeed, cannot quite exist—without a structured, consistent framework of exposition, the essays I read are simply awful, and it's because the students cannot write worth a damn. Still, if I could get those remedial algebra exams graded, I'd have the whole evening to sit in the coffee shop and delight in cursing comma splices, sentence fragments, and utterly incoherent chains of unshaped thought striving to pose as college-level writing.

I hadn't even so much as opened my plastic fold-over case when I heard approaching voices echoing in the hallway outside the classroom. I absently thought that it must be a couple of ne'er-do-well students who hadn't quite figured out they're not supposed to be in the building when it's 76 degrees outside.

The voices got louder. I heard laughter: several male-types and a female.

More yakking. They were almost to the door.

"You have got to be kidding," I thought to myself.

Yes, it was five of the six students in that class. They had shown up, all of them rolling in, talking, laughing, heading to their usual seats.

The young woman, her long, curly hair wet from having just been at the pool, was grinning from ear to ear, protesting, "Look, so I've lived a sheltered life. I've never even heard of these groups."

The young men were having a heyday. "So you're saying you've never heard any of their music?" one of the boys insisted.

"No... maybe. I don't know!"

Another of the young men said, "This is tragic, man."

They bantered back and forth as I sat there staring at them. That flash of mild exasperation I had felt a moment before was gone. I just stared at them. Three of the four boys were dressed in baggy clothes. Their hair was long. The fourth boy, who always sat on the side opposite the others, wore a crisp sport shirt and had a slightly nerdy, John Edwards-style haircut. He, too, was smiling at the exchange going on, but he said little other than to nod in agreement with what the other boys were saying.

I wanted to keep looking at them. My God, they were so... beautiful. It was as if I were looking at a timeless antique, still perfectly new. They were so modern, but at the same time, they were the very embodiment of something so old, something I almost forget sometimes, something I almost forget to love sometimes.

"Awright," I huffed in the best snarl I could feign, "what's this all about?"

The one young man, slender, with a wild mane of red hair tied back as best he could, turned around in his seat and said to me, "She is so out of it!"

"Okay! So I've lived in a cave!" she interrupted. "I admit it!"

"She's never heard of Nine Inch Nails, Professor."

"Can you believe that?" another of the boys said as he shook his head.

Knowing very well that this whole conversation was not going to take the class in the direction I wanted it to go, I still gamely turned my attention to her and asked, "Well, I'm sure you've heard of, say, Barry Manilow."

"Well, duh," she answered as she put her head down and looked up at me with a grin of exasperation. The young men started hooting and howling.

I started naming groups, mostly from the '70s and '80s, that she might recognize.

Pink Floyd. ("Yeah... I'm pretty sure.")

The Police. ("The who?")

No, that was another group. More guffaws.

Grateful Dead. ("That's creepy. Didn't he, like, die or something?")

Okay, moving forward, Metallica. ("Their music is supposed to be evil, isn't it?")

REO Speedwagon. ("Yeah.")

Aerosmith. ("Duh. Who hasn't?")

Devo. ("Never heard of them.") The young men surprised me by having a fit about that. They started talking about the hats and all that strangeness. I made a minor point about the explosion of talent and different directions music took in the 1980s. I mentioned the Eurythmics, Sting and The Police, and other extraordinary individuals and groups. When I got to Klaus Nomi and some others in the hard-core avante-guard movement that came out of the '70s, the boys got a little quiet. I let it go, knowing I had slightly opened a door I could push open further a little later.

The young fellow with the fiery red hair fumbled with his portable CD player, finally managing to get the CD out. "Would you play just one track from this so she can hear Nine Inch Nails?"

That computer/audio-visual workstation had been used for quite a few presentations over the course of the semester, but I was pretty sure it had never been put to a task like the one it was about to take on. The stereo speakers in that room, crummy as they are, were certainly mounted high enough to ensure that the sound would practically rip the drywall down were I to leave the volume up where most professors like to have it to play educational videos.

I opened the CD drive on the computer and put in the latest Nine Inch Nails album. Windows Media Player came to life and offered me fifteen tracks of what to many would not qualify as "music" in any classical sense of the word.

"Play track 3. That's a good one," the redhead announced.

"Track 3 it is, then." A flurry of track requests followed: track 7 was "totally awesome"; so was track 10; and she'd have to hear track 15, which starts out with vocals but then goes into a long, instrumental second half.

It was only when I hit the faux play button on the Media Player that I realized I hadn't adjusted the volume control. The sound that issued forth from those speakers could have awakened the dead. I scrambled to bring down the volume as the room instantly filled with raw noise.

I got it under control and said, "I have to keep it down because I'll get my ass kicked if anyone else hears what we're doing in here."

"I can't understand anything they're saying," the young woman protested as she walked a few steps at a time toward the speakers. Two of the boys started singing with the music. The lyrics contained words like "bomb" and "nation," and she quickly got the idea. "This is, like, social commentary, isn't it?"

"Some of it," I volunteered. "At first, this sounds like nothing but loud, awful noise; but once you get used to it, the words start making sense... although no one seems to know what some of these groups are saying in their songs. Nine Inch Nails isn't like that at all, though."

She sat down on a table at the front and just looked at the speakers as the music played.

We all started talking. First, it was about horror movies. We went from lame Stephen King stuff to violent but artful movies like Sin City and Pulp Fiction. I brought up The Mariachi Brothers trilogy, something no one was familiar with. I suggested the Evil Dead trilogy, along with Bubba Ho-Tep, which got roars of agreement that those were some of the best. One of the young men asked me if I knew about Dark City, and I affirmed that it was a classic, except for the corny final confrontation scene. We all agreed that trying to make Dune into a movie was a wrong against nature.

"Of course, the movie that defined science fiction movies ever after was Blade Runner," I declared to enthusiastic agreement.

One of the students asserted that the last truly classic science fiction movie was Chronicles of Riddick, and I told him he was right.

We kept talking as the music moved from track to track. Several times, I asked the young woman if she was getting used to the music. The last time, she said, "Yeah. It's pretty cool. I guess this means I'm not living a sheltered life anymore, right?"

We all talked some more. Science stuff. Several times before in that class, I had made passing mentions of where technology was going and what they'd see during their lifetimes. Teleportation—the Star Trek stuff—really fascinated them, especially since they were hearing me talk about it as an engineering problem rather than as a wildly silly science fiction idea. It's all about extremely high-speed information storage, transmission, and retrieval, really. Data compression. Quantum entanglement. Plasma fields.

Beyond teleportation lies true star navigation, sort of like how it was portrayed in Frank Herbert's Dune, except that it won't be drugs that will turn people into star navigators. At least I don't think that's how it will be done; but who knows?

The fractional quantum hall effect gets them excited, especially since the hunt is on to find minerals that actually display this odd, non-standard state of matter. Maybe we've found one, maybe not. String theory is cool, too, especially since it's all based on equations some guy did over a hundred years ago that were pretty useless until someone noticed that the sub-atomic universe behaves just like in that dead guy's equations, which had to do with how springy things like rubber bands work.

The class was supposed to end at ten minutes to the hour, and I had maybe ten minutes left when track 15 was finishing up on the CD. I had mercifully skipped some of the songs that would have gotten us behind where I wanted to take the students before the end of the period.

I fired up the overhead projector so the computer screen would display on the front whiteboard, and I said, "I'm going to turn you people on to something really different."

Rare is the time when something so brazen could be done to kids that age; but I had a moment when they would not just listen, but maybe even buy into the possibility that they could get something totally new into their repertoire of cultural standards.

"Back in the 1930s, there was a really great singer named Billie Holiday, a woman who sang a lot of different songs that made her about as popular as an African-American could be in that time. One of the songs she did, they made her change some of the lyrics because the song was so depressing. There are stories that, even with the less depressing, sort of upbeat ending of the song, people committed suicide and left notes quoting some of the morbid lyrics that were still there.

"What I'm going to play is a YouTube of the song, done with the original lyrics, from a performance by Diamanda Galás, a modern performance artist whose voice can go from the stunningly operatic to the utterly frightening. The video is really disturbing, so sit back and enjoy."

I had managed to find the YouTube video of Diamanda Galás doing "Gloomy Sunday," and I launched it.

During the runtime of almost five minutes for the video, those young people in that room didn't move a muscle, nor did they say a word. They all stared at the screen, just like their classmate had stared at the speakers when she was listening to Nine Inch Nails.

I had so much to tell them about what they were seeing, especially about the face of Galás contorting, looking almost masculine, and how all of that was related to the theatrical devices of "burlesque" and "travesty" from clear back to ancient Greek performance traditions. I wanted to tie that in to the cycles of plays in Medieval England and to the Shakespearean devices that captured audiences, and how modern performers from Kiss to Snoop Dogg use burlesque and travesty, as have comedians like Milton Berle and Benny Hill and political pundits like Ann Coulter.

I especially wanted to tell them about how Diamanda Galás is famous in her performances for unintelligible vocalizations, which are part of an expressive tradition called "glossolalia," which connects unbelievably diverse human behaviors ranging from shamanistic ululations to evangelical Christians speaking in tongues, and along the way picks up the cadenced non-word sounds that make certain old Blues music so interesting and that was embraced in some early Rock-and-Roll songs. This is the stuff of "signal processing theory," a really intense mathematics field. We can find ways in our minds to discern meaning and value in what sounds at first like the sheer, random noise of Nine Inch Nails and other auditory and visual artists who are inviting their audiences to use the power of consciousness to reach for and acquire meaning in the chaos that isn't chaos to those who are willing to let their senses adapt, just like I want my students to do when they learn math. We can write computer programs that tease out and reconstruct human voices with nothing but zeroes and ones. This is the same idea behind the brutally complicated math of handing off a cell phone signal from one tower to another as a person drives down a highway, and it's the same idea behind how we'll eventually understand the way millions and millions of patterned firings of brain neurons create consciousness and construct representational reality. And someday, long and far into the future, it is these same ideas we'll use to build the tools with which the star navigators will cast our descendants across the universe.

I needed to be quiet, though, and let my students take in something they'd never before seen but were in the frame of mind to accommodate.

The song ended, and the screen went black. After a brief, dead silence, the nerdy-looking young man mumbled in a small voice, "Shit... That was awesome."

The girl said, "I'm so depressed, now," as she and the others got up to leave. She kept going on about the lyrics and the visuals and how she couldn't tell whether Galás was a man or a woman and how she was wondering how she'd ever catch up with all the music and movies she's been missing.

I shut down the audio-visual console and killed the lights as I left the classroom behind the others.

We got to the lobby area. The students all headed out the main doors, and I went up the stairs, back to my office where I could spend an hour grading papers before going somewhere to get a fresh cup of coffee.

By the time I finally left the building, it was almost dark, and I was tired.

It had been such a good day at college.



The Dark Wraith still has papers to grade for Monday.

Several nights ago, I completed a series of classes designed for high school students preparing to take the ACT. Over the course of the past two months, the students had periodically come in for two-hour sessions covering what they will face, subject by subject, on the exam. I also walk them through standards on how to take the exam in terms of time management, problem-solving strategies, and answer choice selection under conditions of uncertainty about which answer is correct. From previous offerings of this series, we know that the students subjected to this prep score higher. We offer seats in the program at a very low price just to level the playing field, since kids from well-to-do families are frequently attending similar seminars run by professional test preparation services.

The high school students who enroll in our ACT test preparation program are generally in their junior year, mostly 16- and 17-year-olds. They can be rambunctious, especially when there are a lot of them in one of the sessions; but in general, they get pretty serious as soon as I start speaking. For many, I'm their first experience with being taught by a college professor.

That's unfortunate. As readers here who have watched my YouTube video lectures well know, I am most decidedly not the shy, quiet, reserved type when I'm at the lectern. I bellow, I growl, and I thunder; sparingly, I use the words "ass" and "damned"; and I conjure the occasional, very odd example to make a point. My students in regular college classes, be they held in a rough urban school or at a nice suburban college, get used to my ways pretty quickly, and although I do have the rare student who makes a meager complaint about me to someone in administration, most students enjoy and appreciate my style. It seems to me that I can make that statement with some degree of certainty considering I was just named Faculty Member of the Year.

I ought to be concerned about how my style plays with the high school students in those ACT prep classes, but I'm not, this despite the program coordinator's rather timid mentions of a "few parents" who have called her to condemn me.

Whatever. The program coordinator cannot find many people who will blow whole evenings prepping kids for tests, and she knows very well that the overwhelming majority of the kids write post-program reviews in which they rate me highly; thus have I always been pretty sure that my over-the-top, hard-driving, arrogant style would not cause the directors of the program to tear up my $210 contract.

Until, that is, this time.

I swear, I didn't see it during the first prep session for the science component of the exam. Only in retrospect do I vaguely recall what was going on, so I was a bit blindsided when the program coordinator mentioned (again, quite timidly) that a "group" of parents had called her to complain about me. She cited a cluster of problems, all of which had been stated by each parent. While I just smiled and laughed while she was telling me about this matter, in my head I was trying to recall if there was anything during the session under discussion that I had done differently.

Readers must understand that, although my stage behavior appears to be wholly extemporaneous, it is, in fact, a highly structured, polished act. I change the jokes, the silly references, and the allusions to pop culture, but the framework is identical from one session to the next, from one year to the next. It's how I teach college classes, too. So what could have gone wrong in such a big way that a "group" of parents, rather than the usual one or two, had called?

The second session of the science review provided the answer, confirmed by seeing it again in the last session of the entire program, the session where I actually administer to the students a miniature version of the entire ACT and then give them some last-minute advice.

At that second session of prep for the science component of the exam, the room was not nearly as crowded: 20 students, clustered into three groups. The students wanting to show their sincere dedication were sitting at the front. Most of them were girls. Another group was scattered about the middle seating in the lecture hall. This group comprised an eclectic mix of kids, some of whom sat near the middle, others—the more reclusive—huddled against the walls. It occurred to me that some of those types of kids would be more likely to choose seats at the rear of the classroom, as far away and as symbolically detached as possible. That they were not sitting at the back of the class didn't make sense, since only five students, all sitting in a row, were occupying rear seats.

Those five back-benchers were wearing shirts that all looked exactly the same, with the color combination of one of the local high schools. "Ah," I thought to myself, "jocks." It made sense that the more reclusive kids, and most certainly the others who wanted to display for me their high motivation by sitting right at the front, would want to be as far away as possible from the prized, pampered athletes.

It was only when I had been in my lecture for about 15 minutes that I noticed something wasn't quite right about my assessment of those boys at the back of the room. I had made it to the part of my speech where I had to explain to the students that, when taking the science part of the ACT, students should not use prior knowledge or beliefs about science. While it's important to have a solid, albeit basic, understanding of certain terms (their prep book has a glossary of terms with which they should be familiar), they must use only the information provided in a given passage for answering questions about that passage.

"For example," I always say, "you might very well have a problem with discussing the evolution of a certain species or about the lineages that have led to the modern forms of certain animals. Now, you might believe on religious grounds that evolution is wrong, but your beliefs are irrelevant when taking the test. You are being assessed on your ability to read, understand, and then use information given to you. That's what we at the college level need to know about you to assess whether or not you'll be able to successfully complete dozens of college courses, where you'll have massive waves of information poured into you from every direction."

As I was nearing the end of that little rant, I noticed that those five young gentlemen sitting at the back were no longer leaning forward, taking notes; they were, instead, all sitting straight up in their chairs, arms folded, scowling at me.

I walked back and stood in front of what appeared to be their ringleader, and I said, "Unfold your arms, son. I want to see what your shirt says." Some of them were visibly uncomfortable with the turn their display had taken, but they all unfolded their arms. The fellow to whom I had addressed my order proudly withdrew his arms, puffed out his chest, and pulled at the bottom of his shirt to make the graphic as legible as possible for me.

There they were: five shirts, all identical, complete with the colors of their high school, emblazoned across the front with a giant, three-dimensional, faux relief, white cross.

I just couldn't help myself: "JESUS!" I exclaimed, and then I walked back up to the front of the classroom and finished the seminar, complete as it was with a blistering example of a problem involving the evolutionary history of a group of vertebrates falling (loosely) under the taxonomic classification Creodonta.

I have just sent my letter of resignation to the program coordinator. I figure that will save her the aggravation of having to figure out how not to offend me when she tells me about a group of parents who have called her demanding my head.

Besides, whether I'm teaching at a rough urban school or in a nice suburban college, I won't teach gang members who wear their colors in my class.

I'm quite a bigot that way.