Q: What are some good books to read before taking the acceleration test?

A: When it comes to test preparation, there's only one book you'll need:

The Bible.

It's thick enough to hold several cheat sheets. 

Q: How do you bleed a ford puma coolant system?

A: Couple of years ago I nicked my finger breaking down cardboard boxes in the storage room of an electronic stores. I had, as they say, "fallen on hard times" and my blood didn't coagulate like it's supposed to. Started gushing everywhere, all over the boxes and the floor on my khaki pants, and I started freaking out and kinda crying. I guess "kinda" kind of undersells the moment. I was sobbing, wailing some, my face all red and wet. Snot bubbling out my nose. You could say I lost my composure.

My co-worker Bret, he was the one breaking down boxes with me, he said something to me that made me laugh and took my mind off my pain and the gushing blood, something that put the whole scene in perspective. He said, he looked down at my finger and back up and me and he said, "If it bleeds we can kill it." I found that real funny.  And he said it with kind of a German accent. I found that funny, too.

We stood around that storage room laughing and bleeding - me bleeding, him not, both of us laughing - for what seemed like hours but was probably only about ten minutes. By the time we stopped laughed I had stopped crying, and, wiping the snot from my nose and wrapping some paper towel around my finger, I looked him in the eye - rare for me at the time - and said, "Bret, you're a real funny guy. How do you come up with this stuff?"

I'll never forget the way he looked at me. He stopped laughing and his face went slack and he looked at me like how you would look at a slow child or a dog that shat all over your Wonderbread and he said, "That's from Predator."

And it stopped being funny.

And I started crying again. Like how I'm crying right now. And he kept looking at me in that way, the same way you're all looking at me right now.

When announced that I would end today's class with a Q&A session about automotive maintenance  I didn't expect any of you to ask anything that would trigger such a painful memory and reduce me to such a helpless state.  But here we are.

That's going to be all the questions for today. We still have about eight minutes left before the bell rings. How about you kids play a game of Seven Up while I curl up into a ball in the corner? Those of you without thumbs can come join me if you want.

Q: How do kids feel if they can't bring their phone to school?

A: Angry. Really, really angry. Often to the point of violence. If not that, at least yelling. Load, constant yelling that goes on for hours.

Kids rely on their phones. For today's youth a phone is more than a status symbol. It's a best friend. A buddy. Someone to cheer you up when you're feeling maudlin. Someone to remind you that you are not alone, by showing you naked pictures of internet celebrities. Someone to use as collateral to prevent a beating in the locker room. Those kids, the ones who make friends with the phone, those kids yell.

The kids who get angry are the kids who see their friend as more than a friend. They see their phone as an employee. They don't want their phone. They need it. Drugs may sell themselves, but not if potential buyers can't reach you.

There are a lot of opportunities to sell drugs for the modern high school student. Because teachers are sad. And they do a whole lot of self-medicating.

Q: Is throwing an object by a minor at another minor and hitting them considered assault?

A: Throwing the object is assault. As soon as it hits someone, you've entered the magical land of battery. Put them together and you have assault and battery, two great crimes that go great together, like breaking and entering, false imprisonment and kidnapping, and my personal favorite, loitering and mopery.

You're probably too young to remember, but back in '86 we had a rash of loiter/moperies back.  The foot shacks on Bowery sat dormant, the tourists dried up, the myopic were too scared to leave the house. We were a city under siege,  until some hot shot detective figured out the pattern, posed as a blind street flutist and put down roots on 3rd and 3rd, waiting for that sick bastard to show himself. The cop waited for sixteen days, and on the seventeenth, just as he was about to quit, who should come walking up to him but a cheesy vacuum salesman, whistling some made up tune and holding a handful of his dirty junk.

The detective, having found his loitering moperer, took off his sunglasses to reveal he was not blind, took out his badge and his service revolver to reveal that he was a cop, and revealed that the gun was loaded by emptying its contents -  bullets - into the stomach, head, neck and groin of the vacuum salesman.

Time stood still in the park that day, all you could here was the sound of justice, followed by the sound of screams - the moping son of a bitch was still hanging on - followed by more justice in the form of bullets, followed by the tepid applause of innocent citizens saved from a diabolical rampage that many did not know existed.

The word "hero," gets used a lot these days, but on that day, no one said it. No one even thought it,  despite the officer's pleas, not even when he passed out the commemorative t-shirts featuring a cartoon rendering of the detective standing in the 'O' of the word hero.

You might be shocked to hear that I am that police officer. I'll pause now to allow you to take in this new information and compose yourselves.

Take your time. There's no need to feign apathy. It's only natural to feel shocked and begin to doubt the very nature of your existence. If you feel the need to hyperventilate, no one will judge you.

Okay, it looks like, due to the reality-shattering nature of my admission, it may take some time for the shock to kick in. I'll just keep going and hopefully be able to finish before you succumb to the shock.

For the past few months you have all known me as Dennis, the new kid, the one with the mismatched socks, and the divorced parents, and the love of Strat-O-Matic Baseball.  I'm sure you all thought the same thing, "Sure, Dennis might smells a little and run funny and spend too much time talking to that Racquel Welch poster in his locker, but he's basically just like us, a 13-year old kid trying to figure out his way in this crazy world."

You all thought wrong. I'm nothing like you. I've been  undercover this whole time. And I know all your secrets.

You might have thought that by throwing a rock at fellow minor you'd be safe from criminal prosecution, but again you'd be wrong. You didn't throw that rock at any kid, you threw it at a cop. And not just any cop, a highly decorated 51 year old cop only three years from a pension and assigned to our new Jump Street division due to budget cutbacks. You picked the wrong day to pick on Dennis.

Dennis isn't my real name by the way. It's Detective Peter Milligan.

Anyone feeling any shock yet?

Q: What does a s mean in math?

A: An 'S' on a report card means 'Satisfactory'. You have achieved satisfactory results in math. Not the smartest kid in the class, but not the dumbest. You're right in the middle with most everyone else.

But here's the weird thing. Teachers give grades like 'S' and 'S+' and 'U' in elementary school, in subjects like basic arithmetic and penmanship and playtime. You're in the 12th grade. High school teachers traditionally award letter grades, A's and B's and C's, to indicate a specific level of achievement.

In fact, if you take a careful look at your report card, you will see that in every other class you have a letter grade, except in math, where, right on top of a glob of moist Wite-Out, you have an 'S' written in pen.

This means one of two things. One, you received a grade so poor in math that you didn't want me to see it, so you doctored your report card in the hopes that I would fail to see through your ruse. Considering the rest of your report card is C-'s and D+'s, that must have been one poor grade. Two, you failed math so spectacularly that your teacher felt that a simple 'F' insufficiently expressed your incompetence, that the letter wasn't low enough, that he had no choice but to grab your report card from the printer and write, by hand, a new, incredibly poor grade. .

Either way, I'm going to stop saving for your college tuition.

Q: What is the purpose of the Strive Program?

Q: The STRIVE Program helps the terminally unemployed find jobs by teaching them the tools necessary to be a productive member of the modern workforce. We do this by Striking Them Repeatedly with Increasing Violence Everyday until they get off the couch and get a job.

If you have a son or daughter or uncle or brother who spends all day sitting on the couch watching TV, making excuse after excuse about how, "You need a graduate degree these days," or "It's a competitive hiring environment," please give us a call. We will be at your home within hours, subjecting your loved ones to increasingly savage beatings, starting with open handed slaps, continuing with phone books and cherished childhood toys, ending with baseball bats and lead pipes, until they haul their ass down to McDonalds and fill out an application. Their excuses will not work on us, mostly because they will be drowned out by all the screams. And the laughter. We enjoy our work and we're not ashamed to admit it.

We've never had to use the lead pipes. Most people get off the couch once we reach for the cherished childhood toys. There's something about being beaten with a Man-E-Faces action figure that makes them see the error of their ways.

Our program boasts a 100% success rate, as long as you don't count the deaths. Which we don't. Many of those people had heart problems or weak spines. Since they wouldn't offer much to an employer anyway, we refuse to let them taint our statistics. I doubt they'll be missed. I would assume. I wouldn't actually know. We make it a policy not to stick around the house for too long after the beating. People get weird after seeing a family member beaten like that. You'd think they'd thank us, but usually they're too busy crying and calling us monsters and tearing up the bill and threatening to call the police.

We're not monsters. We are businessmen. Businessmen who sometimes dress like monsters in order to persuade someone back into the work force. And if they'd bothered to read the fine print, they would know that they have waived the right to press charges, as well as forfeited all potential royalties from the sale of beating videos.

The videos are huge in Finland.

Q: Are there schools to study swordsmanship in America?

A: If you yearn to be a master swordsman able to vanquish your foes with a flick of the wrist and a thrust of the arm, look no further than Dan T. Chesterfield Swordfighting and Hazardous Waste Disposal Academy. located behind the condemned K-Mart on US-42. right next to the pile of screaming babies. If your nostrils burn of sulfur, your skin tingles, and your clothes are melting, you're in the right place.

At the Dan. T. Chesterfield Swordfighting and Hazardous Waste Disposal Academy, or the DTCSHWDA for short - we pronounce it Ditschwada, kind of like "dish water", but, you know, with a "t" in there - at DTCSHWDA you'll study under some of the world's greatest swordsmen from Japan, Spain and Italy, many of who still have all their facilities and barely suffer from any of the long term effects associated with exposure to radiation and toxic waste.

Thanks to our method of round the clock teaching, you'll be able to spin, counter, dodge, parry and thrust in now time, or die trying. (The Dan T. Chesterfield Swordfighting and Hazardous Waste Disposal Academy is not liable for any all deaths resulting from sword fights, sword cleaning, sword swallowing, sword dodging, sword catching, sword juggling, sword diving, or exposure to chemicals know to cause cancer in the state of Iowa.)

Upon arrival to DTCSHWDA, our experienced staff will steal all your belongings, beat you senseless, and cut off your ear. If you happen to bring along a mother or girlfriend to wish you well, she will be abducated and forced to wear revealing clothes, but nothing too slutty, as the Dan T. Chesterfield Swordfighting and Hazardous Waste Disposal Academy is a family friendly environment.

Once your possessions have been stolen, your will broken, your body bloody and beaten, you will have one goal in mind: Revenge. We willl hand you a sword and our faculty of award-winning swordsmen or waste disposal technicians (sometimes the swordsmen call in sick) will help you learn the skills required to slay your foe, save your wife, mother or vintage tee, and restore the honor to your family.

Our grading policy is simple: If you gain revenge, you pass. If you fail, you fail. Failure will result in immediate expulsion from the academy and forfeiture of any and all trophies, monies, clothes, pets, spouses, and mothers.

Tuition costs $5,000 and we accept anyone who can pay.

So, do you care to enroll?

Most people say "No" at first. Why don't you stick around awhile, breathe in some of the fumes and reconsider?

Q: How can a teacher tell if students have developed responsibility?

A: Invite them to join you in a secret society, making clear up front that the goal of the society will be the overthrow of the schools current administration and they will have to do a few things that are not technically legal but are harmless.

Start out small by having them repaint the principal's parking every day, making it slightly smaller each time, until his car no longer fits in his space. Then have them do the same thing with his pants.

Once they've grown accustomed to seeing the school's administration as a target for practical jokes rather than an authority, assign them a new task. Tell them you need them to lure the principal into a seedy motel, seduce him into wild night of cocaine-fueled bondage and videotape the whole thing. Remind them of the importance of secrecy.

If they carry out the assignment, without speaking a word to anyone, and deliver the videotape to your desk by Monday morning, they have developed responsibility.

And you will finally get that raise.

Q: What Are The Top Ten Things To Stress Out Teens?

A: When I feel helpless and hopeless after a long day of clock watching and pretending to work at my awful job, stressing out teens gives me a chance to regain a feeling of power. I may not be able to control my own life, but I can briefly control the anxiety of a teen. On most days that's enough. On the rest, there's alcohol.

You can:

 - Steal their girlfriend with the promise of alcohol, which as an adult, you can legally purchase.

 - Pretend to be a big-time college football scout. Call their home. Eat dinner with the family. Imply that his parents have a loveless marriage. Watch highlight videos. Ask if you can get any tape on Mom. Go to the big game. Spend the whole game chatting up his mother. After the game, when he asks how he played, shake your head and say "Can't say. I'm more of soccer guy."

 - Set their house on fire. (Note: This technique will stress out anyone, not only teens.)

 - Pose as their school's guidance counselor. Meet with students individually and ask about their masturbation habits. At first, they will be reluctant to discuss masturbation, but you will soon win their trust, thanks to your scholarly beard and tweed jacket. (Note: Grow beard and don jacket before attempting ruse.) Once they've confided their masturbation habits and frequency, cross your arms, stroke your beard, peer over your glasses and say, "That's all fine, but are you doing it correctly?" Immediately leave the room.

 - Find a victim of cyber-bullying, put your arm around him or her and whisper, "It's okay. These are the easiest days of your life. It gets much, much worse."

 - Hand them a two page block of text without pictures or graphics. Tell them you will give them $10,000 if they can read to the end without sweating or crying.

 - When you see a small group leaving a movie on a Friday night, laughing and joking and quoting their favorite lines, run them down with your car.

 - While wearing dark glasses and using a cane to walk, as a blind person would do, approach a boy in the video game section of Best Buy and him that you are him from the future and you've traveled back in time to undo a life of horrible decisions. Mumble "If only we had know the truth about Facebook."

 - When the cashier at Burger King asks what kind of drink you'd like, say "Whichever one will melt a corpse the quickest."

 - Make eye contact, speak slowly and ask them questions about their day.

I could go on. There are 73 ways to stress out a teen, but you asked for ten. Ten is what you get.

Q: What type of things were drawn on cave walls?

A: That's an excellent question, Tommy, and that's exactly why we took this field trip, to see some cave drawings with our own eyes and experience what it would have been like to live thousands of years ago, before TV, before movies, before man could even read or write. I can't wait to see what we find. Let's take a look.

Here we have a drawing of a family around the fire, looking up with awe at a man in elaborate dress, perhaps a soothsayer or wise man. And here we see a warrior saving his bride from a mammoth, slaying the beast with   a spear.

It's like stepping into a time machine and traveling back to visit our ancestors. We can see how they ate, how they lived, how they danced and, if you look over here, how they ... oh dear ... how they made love.

Let's move on. Here we have a still life, of some sort of gourd, or maybe a banana, next to a pair of oranges -  okay let's keep moving. Come on everyone! Eyes down! Eyes down!

Stop taking pictures, Tommy!

Hurry along, hurry along.

Okay, this is more like it. A herd of animals. Look at the details, the arc of the horns, the grace of their movement. These drawings are the work of a true artist. We can see the animals, running through the plains, leaping over a stream, running right into the spear of a waiting warrior. I think that's his spear. I hope that's his spear.

Oh, dear.

Move along, class, move along. Kelly, don't look at that!

Run, children, run! Over here, over here!

Oh, here's a nice one. This is magnificent. Look at the scope. Thousands of tribes coming together, walking through the canyon to worship a space ship. A space ship. What the fuck?

I quit. Field trip's over. Bus leaves in five minutes.

Tommy, please stop taking pictures.

Q: Does a research paper have a conclusion?

A:  In general, a research paper does have a conclusion, otherwise it's merely a list of regurgitated facts. Specifically, however, my research paper does not have a conclusion.

I really wanted it to. When I started the paper I intended to have a conclusion, a good one, too, not one of those lame ones like "Those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it," but a real good, thoughtful conclusion, one that would make readers marvel at my cognitive abilities, earn a high grade and give me the minimum credits needed for graduation.

Then I got to drinking - you know how life college life can be - and the conclusion slipped my mind. As did the paper itself. But I was able to jot a few things down on this pizza box last night. I spilled some hot sauce on it, but you can still make out a few words. This one looks like "agrarian." And I'm pretty sure that says "counter-intuitive." This would have been a hell of a paper.

When you grade my research paper, I ask you to take into account not only the finished product, but also my intentions.

You should also take into account the quality of these photographs I took of you banging your teaching assistant on her patio last Thursday. It wasn't easy to pull focus from that far away, that late at night, in so short a time, as drunk as I was, but I did it. You have to admit they're pretty good. Out of consideration for your wife, I had them enlarged and labeled. I know she has poor eyesight. Nice lady. Big fan of your's.

I'm sure you'll make the right decision.

Q: Do you have to be in school to be able to act?

A: Anyone can act! Even you!

You need the discipline to hone your craft, the passion to pursue your dream, the ability to project your emotions and the courage to be vulnerable.

Above all else, you need to believe in yourself.

Of course, you also need to be attractive. That one's pretty obvious. People - complete strangers with awful, back-breaking jobs and loveless marriages and terrible, bitter lives filled with compromise and regret and heartbreak - will look at you, for hours on end, watching your lips move and your eyes dance and your face break into a smile. The last thing they want to see is someone who looks like them.

What I'm trying to say is that we're going in a different direction for the role of Romeo. We're looking for someone the ladies in the audience want to sleep with, not press charges against.

I'm sure we can find something for you. Every play needs trees.

Q: What good colleges can you get into?

A: I can get into NYU, because I made a series of award-winning snuff films. They all made the papers. At least after my acquittal.

Or I could get into Vanderbilt, study hotel management, because of my high GPA, my solid ACT score and my years of distinguished service at Motel 6.

I could get into Arizona State, because I filled out the application.

But I'll probably go to Yale, because of the school President's fondness for underage boys. And my talents as a photographer.

Q; How to summarize the short story apples from the desert?

A: Start with the apples. Describe their color, their texture, how they taste. Now, the desert. Make them feel the heat, the sand, the dryness. Talk about the girl in the story - every story has a girl, all the good ones.

Remember to talk slowly, really space out your words. If said properly, the phrase "The blistering sun," could take up a a good twelve seconds of your presentation. Don't be afraid of silence. It's the most important tool of every great storyteller. And what is a book report, really, but a story about a story?

If you speak slowly enough, take enough pauses, describe the apples and the desert in enough detail, stopping every now and then for a drink of water, you should be able to kill enough time to be saved by the bell, giving you an extra night to actually read the story.

Or, you could read it right now, on the bus. But then you wouldn't have time to sniff this rag soaked in paint thinner. When you're on your death bed, when you look back on your years in middle school, are you really going to wish that you spent more time studying, or more time huffing?

Q: Who creates the standard style guide for a research paper?

A: Usually the teacher. Occasionally the dean. Sometimes a charismatic student.

In our case Billy. Billy sets all the standards.You don't know Billy? That's right, you're new.  He's the boy over there, on the monkey bars.

DON'T MAKE EYE CONTACT!

Think pure thoughts. Think pure thoughts.

That was close.

Billy is what we call ... gifted. He's a very special boy. A wonderful, special, little boy. About a month ago, he discovered he has the most amazing powers. He can control matter. He can control life. Anything he can think of, he can do. He's a wonderful little boy.We're lucky to have him.

He's looking at us. Smile. Smile.

A couple weeks ago, we had a priest come by to talk to Billy, to see if he maybe had any ... visitors ... in his soul. Billy struck the man blind. Then he gave him back his sight. Then he laughed and laughed and laughed. Since then, we've let Billy make all the decisions. We feel that's for the best. If he wants recess to last for six hours, then recess lasts for six hours. If he wants all research papers to be written in Sanskrit on used toilet paper, then we'll start teaching Sanskrit and stop flushing. If he wants to have the teachers battle each other in gladiator style combat, to the death, each day at lunch, who are we to argue? He knows best.

Yes, life under Billy's rule has been wonderful, just wonderful. You'll like it here. I've worked at a lot of schools, but this one - His back is turned. We can overwhelm him and regain control. It's our only hope. You go first. I'll create a distraction. Go. Go. Go. Go.

LOOK OUT, BILLY! THE NEW SCIENCE TEACHER IS COMING TO KILL YOU!

Q: How many seats does Ed Stelmach hold?

A: Right now, he has seven. Wait, eight.

Nine. He has nine chairs. He's holding nine chairs.

He has no idea how to play musical chairs. He's ruining the game for everyone.

I'm reluctant to stop him. His father donated a new scoreboard for the football field, but he's holding onto all the multiples of 7 until Ed graduates.

I had a choice: Either let Ed make a mockery of musical chairs, or ban extra points.

I chose to let Ed have his way.

Q: Why sound can not travel without air?

A: Because, in space no one can hear you scream.  That's what I learned in science class. That's the only thing I know about space. And the only thing I know about science.

You should know that my science teacher had tenure and had given up on teaching by the time I reached high school. Instead of textbooks, he gave us old movie posters. Instead of conducting experiments, he had us play flag football in the hallways. Instead of writing reports, he had us write, produce and direct a series of erotic short films about a middle-aged high school science teacher sent back in time to save humanity by fathering the man who would one day lead us to victory in our war against the robots. For some reason, the mother had to be a high school student. 

I may not have learned much about science, but I learned a whole lot about life. And age of consent laws. 

Q: Does having a longer jump rope affect the way you jump?

A: If I had a shorter jump rope, say, one made for toddlers, I wouldn't be able to swing down from the roof, crash through the second floor window, surprise the terrorists and save the elementary school. With a rope that short, I'd only be able to dangle over the edge, my feet weakly kicking at the glass, doing nothing but drawing the attention of the terrorists to the window, giving them ample time to aim, fire and shoot me dead, leaving the elementary school unsaved.

Thankfully, I found this larger rope. Those terrorists won't know what hit them. The next time they think about invading an elementary school, holding the students hostage and demanding an exorbitant ransom, they'll think twice. I bet it never occurred to them that the Federal government has spent the past seven years training little people to pose as children in the event of such a terrorist attack. Congress laughed at the plan, as did the Press, as did every citizen who heard about it. Who's laughing now?

If you could, please give my beanie a spin. I think it will look cool if me beanie spins when I crash through the window. I'll need every advantage I can get. Congress slashed the funding for the Tiny AntiTerror Initiative this past year. Aside from the element of surprise, I have no actual weapons.

Wish me luck!

Q: Why are classification systems not based on physical appearance?

A: Due to massive protests and years of costly litigations.

It seems that parents are much more comfortable with the current education model, where the lives of their children are determined based on a series of arbitrary "grades" determined by random tests administered by complete strangers, than a more realistic model, where the students deemed most sexually desirable by their peers get the most opportunities to advance.

Thank God we still have the entertainment industry.

Q: How do you put dialogue into a book report?

A: With quotation marks, followed by a page number. For longer quotations, display the selection as a block quote.

In the future, please make sure that the passages quoted are directly from the book, and not from some outside source.

For instance, dialogue quoted from the film Glengarry Glen Ross has no place in a report on the book The Phantom Tollbooth.

Furthermore, dialogue passages that are clearly transcriptions of secretly recorded conversations between your mother and father have no place in a formal book report.

And certainly not when they are love scenes.

Do I even have to explain why the drawings are inappropriate?