But for a social studies teacher, it was an abhorable stain on the fabric of time management. It involved attending odd classes (one, three, and five) on odd calendar days. The Ides of March, for example. And even classes (two, four, and six) on even days. Like I said, it was an odd day.

My second period class was slowly filtering in. Usually, I was just getting there at 8:00 a.m. and was myself quietly filtering in with the students. This was a mixed blessing.

I was teaching that semester as an intern. At the time I was 22, only a few years removed from the students themselves. I was regularly mistaken for a student, even though I wore a coat and tie every day to distinguish myself from them. Even if I wasn't successful differentiating myself from the students, I did manage to ostracize myself. I was the only person at the school who wore a coat and tie.

The schedule I was forced to keep wasn't human. The commute to the small rural town from the college town took about an hour. To add to that, I car-pooled with another education intern for whom punctuality was never a prominent trait. So a good two-and-a-half hours of the day were eaten by the stodgy drudge of the commute. But on this day I was a bit early.

I always had a secret theory that I was forced to do my internship at such a commute out of revenge. There were those in the College of Education who would have rather seen my head on a silver platter than walking down the aisle at graduation. The month before my internship began, I wrote an op-ed column for the local newspaper about the local school system. My roommate used the word "scathing" to describe it. It involved the intentional districting of schools along socio-ecomomic lines. In observing the local schools the semester before my internship, I noticed a disturbingly disproportionate balance of resources within the schools. In other words, all the rich, white kids went to the new school with all the best resources and teachers and all the poor black kids went to the old schools with inadequate resources and teachers. It’s the kind of thing you know goes on, but then when you see it you want to kill the Commissioner of Education with a fork. Especially when he is seen on cable television proposing that our children be taught 21st century skills. Our children.

So I wrote a column about it. For all intents and purposes, a scathing column. Not only did I discuss the classist (and therefore discretely racist) undertones of the local school system but I also used my supervising teacher as a symbol of the problems the school system was facing.

He was a smallish man who had long ago given up on attempting anything other than survival. "Keep the kids occupied and quiet," he used to tell me, "and you'll make it through the day." Actually teaching the children wasn't included on his typed lesson plans, approved by the principal and written in the cold language of an annual report or a corporate mission statement. He had quit half-way through my pre-internship.

I found out later that my academic advisor just happened to be good friends with the teacher to whom I threw such a harsh public indictment. Higher-ups in the college told me that they had to answer for my remarks at departmental meetings on more than one occasion. I'm still not sure if that was a compliment.

Like I said, I always had a sinking suspicion my internship placement was some sort of revenge. The College of Education could have very easily placed me in the city where I lived. But instead I was cast aside like some enemy of Stalin sent to the work camps, never to be seen or heard from again. It was a safe distance. It was my own personal Siberia.

By the time I unlocked the classroom door, there was already two students waiting to get in. The reluctant greeting was always the same: "We're not going to do anything today, right Mr. Pope?" My response, incidentally, was similarly as predictable. "What? Of course. Am I gonna put you to work today! Do you think I would just waste the day?" Most of the students I used this line on were confused by it. Their other teachers wasted their class periods, why shouldn’t I? The class periods, incidentally, lasted an hour and forty minutes. Those are the blocks of which block scheduling consist; huge chunks of time infinitely longer than anyone who has ever attempted 64-bit graphic violence could ever comprehend. My reverence for the value of time and the importance of knowledge invariably confused my students, assuming that they even noticed.

Before I began my internship, I was under the misguided impression that my own frantic trivial pursuits might be inspiring, or, at the very least, cause a healthy confusion. This never happened.

It was like trying to fit a square peg through a round hole. I've always been a square. The students were used to circles. After what seemed like an eternity of trying to force the issue, the matter was mournfully buried and resigned to cruel fate. It was like one of those episodes of Love Connection which Chuck Wollery concludes by saying something like, "Well, I'm sorry it didn't work out for you, but we’ve got these great parting gifts."

As I opened the door, I noticed that the makeshift dais my supervising teacher had made me (an unsturdy concoction of leftover house-wood, three too many coats of cheap gray paint and ten too few nails) was gone. When he had first brought it, I thought it was an opportune moment to distinguish the difference between a dais and a podium. The students just stared at me like I was from Mars.

"Well, what am I going to put my notes on?" I quipped to one of the more friendly students. The reason I needed a dais in the first place was to prop my lecture notes on so I could easily access them while I was ranting about Thomas Jefferson, or the difference between democracy and capitalism, or whatever was the flavor of the day. This, incidentally, had been one of the decisive features of teaching which attracted me in the first place. "What, you mean there's a job where I can just talk about history all day?" I used to say jokingly. "Where do I sign up?"

Unfortunately, that's not what happened. The main obstacle to delivering lectures to kids with a half-hour attention span during a class lasting an hour and forty minutes didn't have anything to do with not having Internet access in the classroom. Mainly it revolved around environmental problems endemic to the Deep South: depressingly low literacy skills (usually below a fifth-grade level), an unsupportive teaching staff (most of whom did waste the hour and forty minutes of blocked scheduling), infrequent class meetings due to the shifting numeric tides of the calendar (which, coupled with already low attendance, resulted in seeing some students only once a week), gargantuan class sizes (except senior classes, which had the privilege of having already screened out all the incorrigible felons and thugs) and a general inability to see anything remotely relevant about American History, Economics, or World History to their isolated, rural lives in the Deep South of Panhandle Florida.

By the second week of teaching, I was counting the days until the end. Constantly explaining to my college friends the reason I was infrequently seen (and, when seen, disturbingly preoccupied) because I was always writing a lesson plan or writing a test or researching for a lecture wore thin.

I stopped wearing my seat belt. My hairline began receding. I stopped drinking wine. I began to miss my parents. I always felt tired. I would suit up every morning in my battle gear (coat and tie), make the hour commute, and return utterly defeated. Every day was slow, awful psychological torture.

I began relating to prisoners of war. Not because I was tortured or because I underwent the massive poverty of doing a full-time job for free, but because I began to understand the emotional strain. I realized my efforts where not only unappreciated but loathed. I often associated my internship with taking the audience of a rodeo to a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or pouring Chateau Lafite down the funneled throat of a brother at a Sig Ep hayride. Or beating your head up against a wall so hard that you weren't able to notice that your head wasn't even making an impression in the thick, impenetrable surface.

It was a trap. Most internships merely involve pushing a few pencils or gleefully filling coffee cups. Mine went well beyond the scope of a full-time job. Indeed, at times it pushed the limits of my sanity (which, incidentally, most of my college professors had questioned anyway). To add to that, I wasn't getting paid for doing someone else's full-time job. They got the semester off with pay.

When I would come home, my roommate would ask me how work went. "Work! I don't have a job. Work would involve some sort of pay. What I do is indentured servitude."

When I explained my full - time - job - yet - living - below - the - poverty - level - because - no - one - pays - the - interns situation to one of my economics professors, his comments were typically economic. "Even if you don't get paid," he told me, "your actions are perfectly rational."

Well, that would have been the case if not for one small quirk of the educational institution. Listen up, because no one ever tells prospective education majors: It is quite possible (and is in fact done all the time) to major in a subject area (say history or economics), then get a job teaching and contract to take the proper education classes. By the way, this method does not require an internship.

"Oh, well you have a point there," my economics professor responded. "Sounds like some sort of racquet to me."

Everyone gives lip service to the work-load of teachers. It usually falls before or after a heartfelt indictment of American society’s lack of veneration for the profession. But between breaths, what they don't realize is that teaching is much more than just a full-time job — it’s a full-life job. It doesn’t just last from 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.; those are just the hours you’re physically on the school grounds. As I soon found out, the hours between getting home and going to work were spent trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do the next day. There was nothing else. Nothing.

With an hour and forty minute class, you can't just wing it; you have to pull out a horse and pony show. It’d be one thing if I could just lecture for an hour and forty minutes, but the kids would never have that. Even with a fifty-minute class, you have to have two things for the students to do. But with an hour and forty minutes, you'd better have not only a world of plans, but an equally extensive backup in the event that the overhead projector’s light bulb burns out. Or the school suddenly decides to reschedule classes to accommodate a state- administered high school competency test. Or the agriculture club has a hog slaughter.

Any of these events could suddenly and without notice reschedule the class. There were days when I would have to improvise a two-and-a-half hour class or a thirty-minute class on the drop of a hat. Keep in mind that usually you only see these kids about twice a week and with all these shenanigans, once a week it you’re lucky. So you’d better have make up work for those on the track team, or the construction academy, or the honor society.

Not only are the non-working hours of a teacher filled with planning, but they are also heavily scrutinized. I was warned never to buy cigarettes or alcohol in the town in which I was teaching. Nor could I be seen at certain establishments. The monthly columns I wrote for the local newspaper were read with a careful eye to ensure I wasn’t shoving communism or Nazism or commercialism or anything remotely questionable down the throats of impressionable young minds.

By the end of my first month teaching, the horrible truth began to dawn: I wasn’t an intern, I was a hostage. And more than anyone else, I was my own captor. It would have been very easy to write fifty vocabulary words on the board and give a test every week, but I couldn’t bring myself do that. It would have been very easy to give in to the educational malaise, to fold under the pressures of a seemingly insurmountable task, to go with the simulated wood grain of automation.

Keep in mind, I was no hero. There was no Dead Poets Society, no Dangerous Minds, no Mr. Pope's Opus. My efforts were looked upon with contempt and scorn from the moment I began teaching until the day I left. This was as true, if not more true, for the staff as for the students themselves. "I know I don't like to have someone talk at me," one of my supervising teachers once scolded. "History is boring," she explained.

These kids had been locked into an insidious cycle of production. They perceived school as if it were some sort of information factory. They were to take the product (knowledge) off of the first conveyer belt (the textbook) and indiscriminately move it to the second conveyer belt (worksheets, tests, quizzes). At no time in this process were they required to, nor did they have any desire to, evaluate the commodities they were shuffling around. For all they were concerned, the information could have been in a foreign language (I often wondered if English could be included in that category).

That’s why the students took such a dislike to me (especially at first). I refused to take part in their thought industry. Plato used to tell a story I often thought of as the students were screaming and shouting to have their precious conveyer belts promptly returned. In this story, Plato wrote of men who were imprisoned in a cave. The prisoners saw only shadows and mistook them for reality. One man escaped and saw the trees and the grass and waterfalls, and ate at McDonalds (Plato was a capitalist). When he returned to the cave to set the other prisoners free, they looked upon him with suspicion and contempt. Then they resigned themselves to continue watching the shadows.

The students at Madison were used to shadows. They didn't like some young upstart coming around challenging long-held views about what the world was and how to view it. They didn’t like being forced to examine the relevance of the intellectual commodities they had been so dutifully hurtling from one conveyer belt to the next. And they certainly became uncomfortable at the barrage of questions I would throw at them.

Socrates has always been a hero of mine and at the college of education they stress the importance of "Socratic" questioning. But let's not forget that Socrates was executed for corrupting the youth. He asked more questions than people could answer. The people of Athens hated him for it and eventually killed him.

My students didn’t sentence me to execution. But they did declare an all-out war against me. Many students would go to great lengths to keep from doing anything that vaguely required effort. For example, I once gave a review sheet in which a series of questions about the writing of the Constitution to give them an indication of what material might appear on the test. One of the students told me he didn’t understand number five. This was always a pet peeve of mine. "That's simple," I would tell my students. "Five comes after four and before six." This, of course, would result in them looking at me like I was from Mars. "Five has no meaning in and of itself, it is only an arbitrary assignment I have given to a piece of information I want you to know about Alexander Hamilton." More alien looks.

"What should I put down as the answer?" the student asked me, expecting me to play the usual role of a teacher in the Madison County Thought Industry. Instead, I would explain Hamilton’s role in the shaping of the Constitution. After I had finished, the student would ask, "So what do I put for number five?" So I would give an even more detailed explanation. We would go back and forth like this until either the student would give up and put nothing or one of the other students would tell him what to put. This was the grueling work of forcing a square peg through a round hole.