By the fifteenth year, it was evident that the library had reached a plateau. In conventional terms, it had been successful. In materials and programs available, we could have challenged, with some reason, any school in the country. True, use of resources in the humanities was on a person-to-person basis, and some teachers used more than others. We were fairly well endowed, however, with Gifted Grinders, so the library had gone about as far as it could go, given the limitations of the Compact. Conditions for success had been optimal: budgets had been generous, and class sizes, for example, were significantly lower than the schools I had known in Alberta and British Columbia: slightly over 25 in academic classes, and not much over 15 in the General. The English teachers had 20% released time for marking and a full-time librarian to prepare reading lists and ensure the success of any assignments they chose to give. Most of the large comprehensive schools appeared to have made comparable gains, and, if a significant dent in the problem of functional illiteracy could not be made under the ideal conditions of the last twenty years, what hope is there now for significant successes as budgets tighten, academic backgrounds become thinner, and a flood of social pressures press down on even the most dedicated and clear-headed?

If the source of the failure to arrest the decline in the capacity of convey information could not be conceded within the system, it would have to be attributed to factors external to schools, either in the home or in the social milieu. I have argued, so far, that we have no excuse for our own failure to identify the problem and contribute substantially to a solution, and, in the absence of any real attempt to face the problem, the profession has indeed found many ways of passing the buck.

True, the university had let us know, to no effect, that not all of our graduates were properly literate. We were hardly alone in that respect, but the ranks had closed: the communication had been ignored as whining from an ivory tower. Despite the obvious implications for the library, I could express little sympathy with the university without alienating colleagues. In practice I had to resign myself to the occasional jab from mediocrities or individuals on the school board at the alleged lack of library use, and the occasional meaningless survey of student attitudes, a show of busywork which never got to the structural caps on the use of school libraries because it was intended to identify only those responses open to the librarian.

Elsewhere, there had been some outstanding successes and some failures. The involvement with General English had taken me almost as far as I could go in becoming a resource person, and we had so closely shared a common philosophy that we could adapt to each other's routines as our purposes required. Science, on the other hand, had been a non-starter for the library's book collection, aside from a basic core of text and general interest books, and excellent cooperation in building the AV resource, the science people had resisted further library involvement, maintaining that any available spare time had to go into subject labs. My suggestion that an environmental unit using library resources might be fitted into Grade Ten, was, therefore, not taken up. Ten years later a new core science curriculum was introduced from the Department of Education which established my proposal exactly. It was implemented with the thoroughness and competence typical of math/science people when they decide to undertake something, and with a degree of library consultation which easily matched what I had traditionally been able to achieve in the humanities. Few drew the obvious moral: why is there such a penchant for faulting the librarian in the absence of such a program when change, for good or ill, always turns on direction from the top? The obvious answer is that rationalizing the status quo requires limiting the number of scapegoats, and the position of librarian has a clear utility here.

Establishing working connections with various departments had had some successes and failures as well. The library had managed to establish the principle of maintaining a central record of all available school resources, an essential practice where the individual department heads had budgets sometimes put to use independently of the library's resources. By getting the department heads to agree at least to allowing me to do the actual ordering, cataloguing, and distribution of technical periodicals and books to school departments, I sought to stay in touch with teacher objectives and needs while still living with their penchant for spending some of their own money on print resources. Technical and math/science people typically wanted to order only highly specialized items on their own, so our arrangement worked fairly well.

Audiovisual and reference materials (such as auto repair and machine shop manuals) usually had to be kept where they were being used, and arrangements were necessary to keep this from allowing the library and school departments to drift apart over a period of time. Textbooks are particularly dangerous, since what begins as a teacher's personal supplementary reference can soon evolve into a resource seducing a teacher to plan his assignments around an expanded textbook rather than wider and more varied materials in the library. Later, our humanities corps was to do just that with their supplementary materials, a tendency which has already been noted.

I had seen libraries in Vancouver with an interesting twist on recycling supplementary textbooks as a reference resource: they had persuaded well-meaning librarians to stock as many as thirty duplicate copies of a classroom title, the better to encourage a library visit. Somebody clearly had not got right the difference between libraries and textbook storage rooms, but felt with exquisite naivete that such a misuse of library funds would encourage greater use of the library. Hence the wall of Mastering Effective English noted earlier. Some teachers never have understood the difference between using a library and neutering it.

By maintaining a central library record and assigning such supplementary texts to the departments, I was better able to maintain technical teacher awareness of the additional library materials which might interest a more enthusiastic automotive student, for example. A related problem in AV materials was largely solved in the same way, although programs for the technical subjects were stored in the library between periods of use in the classrooms.

The library's connection with the Art program was a good example of how the practice of allowing school departments to acquire materials parallel to those normally provided by a library can sour attempts at cooperative arrangements. The Art teacher had not wished, quite properly, to rely on a single text, but had proposed to use the Art budget to build what became in effect a satellite library. I had elected, with some private misgivings, to go along with his preference, and even transferred a fair representation of library books to the Art Department to help him get started. My hope was that a number of areas could still be found where the library could serve as a complementary enrichment resource, and for some years this seemed to be the case. In the fullness of time, however, the art teacher retired, and his successor expanded the practice of using the budget to acquire print materials. Unfortunately, she did so without regard to the old practice of having those books first catalogued in the library but stored and used in the Art Department. Unlike her predecessor, she took the view that the books she purchased were her books, not mine.

I made one of my last attempts to head off the growing isolation of the library by making a representation to the Mafia (with the knowledge of the new Art teacher) in defense of maintaining a central library record of materials in the school, and in the process of making my case I remarked by the way that this was part of a wise policy of limiting the number of independent book budgets around the school, which had a tendency to grow independently of the library's materials budget, and eventually to compete with it. This alone might have been enough to raise the Art teacher's hackles, but I had also remarked that books in satellite collections sometimes tended to have a short shelf life, meaning that the disappearance rate had tended to be very high. This was meant to hold for collections lacking a publicly accessible record, but was read by the Art teacher an allegation that she might decide to steal the Art books she was buying, for her own private use. (Disgruntled teachers had indeed left the school's employment and taken significant resources with them). She went ballistic and I had to back off. The result was effectively the end of any real association of the library with the Art department, to the extent that it eventually made no sense to acquire additional art books and AV for a demand which had dried up. I suppose that it might have been easier to accept the fact that a separate art library had come into existence had not the situation so paralleled growing independent print resources in English and History.

Thus, even at an early stage, a real problem was evolving with print materials in the humanities. AV had not been a problem since most of the library's acquisition and local production had been for English and Social studies anyway, and the limited grinder needs had largely been met without raising the possibility of a turf war over AV control. Acquisition of materials, maintenance of equipment, and the training of staff in AV equipment use were still recognized library operations. The bottom had not fallen out of print because there were still enough Gifted Grinders around, although many of them were already within a few years of retirement. The driftwood of the old print culture, which I represented, would not be brushed aside until a new Magic bland, a new wave greater even than the one on which I had ridden into my career, swept into the system: the Information Revolution of the computer. The fad element which it inspired would soon dwarf anything known in the early years of old television revolution.

I'm not certain whether a single point can be identified where the library went from being the future to being the past. I can only sketch some of the events along the way in my own case, noting that I was far from being alone among librarians. I was to cease being a full-time librarian by my fourteenth year in the new school, but the change of status preceded by only a few years signs of a general decline in the credibility of librarians, evidenced, as already noted, in the position of librarian being among the first to be downgraded when finances become tight.

There is no question in my mind that educational politics, coincident with educational restructuring during a crisis in public finance, has been influenced negatively by at least the first wave of the computer revolution. School libraries are now commonly touted as being on their way out sooner or later, as books join ancient manuscripts. This has, in turn, has served to obscure, if not actually justify by implication, neglect in the teaching of the written communication associated with books, at least in the minds of growing numbers of teachers who are preoccupied with teaching literature, even if they are not jock expatriates.

Too many administrators have told me that "writing is not so important in schools now" to be ignored as just a few straws in the wind. Encyclopedias on CD-ROM are regarded with awe by many jock Mafiosi, as if writing is writing is writing, and snippets will the lingua franca (paradigm) of information in the 21st century. I have a problem with those who see books as a medieval afterthought, since_, as a heavy user of a computer myself, I cannot imagine people staring indefinitely at a computer terminal to the complete exclusion of books as sources of general information.

This is by no means to deny that computer technology will profoundly influence the future. I would shrink in loathing from the very idea of preparing and revising the present text without the benefit of a word processor. Research assignments in the high school, for example, would benefit immeasurably from computer access to magazine articles and abstracts, as opposed to the tedious process of consulting a periodical index and contacting the local public library in order have a copy eventually located and faxed.

I am prepared to accept, therefore, that libraries will undergo important changes, but_, having seen grinders in school undress the television revolution, I am not worried that books will cease to be a significant component of a literate person's life. I am worried, however, that the hangover from the computer binge may provide a magic wand to bury the systematic teaching of communication in the public school system, so long overdue, indefinitely. Literacy could yet be the first roadkill on the Information Superhighway.

The Beginning of the end?

It was in 1978 that one of the great administrators of my career left the school. As a Department Head, the librarian had enjoyed at least some status, even if I had never quite made it into the Office Mafia. To do that would have required the capacity to influence priorities in the school, and that was something neither I nor any of the other department heads had. But we were respected and listened to, even if we often failed to get our way, and whatever success we managed turned on the support of the principal, who is remembered with affection by all of us years later.

The department heads had served as a link between the Mafia and the classroom, even if they had only softened the Compact's barriers. What the department heads had failed to see was that the validity of the concept of department heads rested ultimately on their accepting some responsibility for what went on behind classroom doors; on a willingness, specifically, to insist not merely on general minimal standards, but also on monitoring the use of a minimal core of established techniques and exercises. To the extent that they would or could not guarantee improved productive performances by their teaching subordinates, the department heads would not be able to prevent a gradual erosion of financial and administrative support. They had to choose whether they were middle-management or administrative errand-boys. Unless the Compact was modified, it would sooner or later render the department heads superfluous for anything but housekeeping. The departure of the one principal who had unequivocally supported the role of department heads was to contribute to a crisis which both justified the institution of department heads and ensured their demise. It was also one of the fatal turning points for the original comprehensive school vision of the central importance of the school library.

The new principal was certainly prepared to accept responsibility for what went on in the classroom, but chiefly in one narrow aspect: he clearly felt that the old-fashioned values of Bible Belt Alberta had a place in our school. He soon made it clear that the library collection ought not to include anything which affronted decent religious values and was even known to visit classes to lead prayer sessions. He had not long been in his position before he raised difficulties about two novels then in the English program: The Grapes of Wrath in academic Grade Twelve, and Rosemary's Baby, in General Grade Eleven.

There had been only one serious censorship attempt in the history of the school, and staff reaction to this new feeler was instantaneous and negative. Our new man backed off, but soon made it obvious that the matter had been moved no further than the back burner, for I presently began to hear of complaints about library books which had begun to surface in the new principal's office. I had never before been confronted with such complaints, although I certainly had a good representation of titles which had been banned somewhere sometime. However, I had long had a board-approved policy requiring written censorship complaints from individuals who had actually read any library books they wanted to complain about, a policy which had not yet been tested, since the sole previous stab at censorship had involved only classroom titles. Now my new boss soon let me know that he regularly received one or two complaints a week, but had been kind enough to cover for me and somehow turn the complaints aside. No indication of the source of the complaints was given, and apparently they were not in writing. Since I was aware by this time of his fundamentalist agenda, the veiled threat was not missed.

The prospect for the library of eventual censorship trouble was enough to lead me to sound out the English department head, who responded with an observation that censorship was not the only form of interference the principal was conducting. We decided to poll the other department heads to determine if our concerns were shared. So it came to pass at an exam week luncheon that concerns about the principal were found to be shared by all the department heads.

Censorship was not in fact the majority complaint. What emerged at the luncheon was the feeling that the principal had been making a variety of expenditures on his own, and freely billing them to the budgets of assorted departments without advising the department head whose budget had been tapped. The physical education head complained, for example, that a substantial quantity of equipment that neither he nor the department teachers had wanted or asked for had been purchased without consultation on the principal's own whim. All felt that, while it was the principal's prerogative to make a final decision on how much each department budget was allowed, once the decision had been made it was the right of the department head to determine in contact with his teachers just how the money was to be spent. The actions of the principal had the effect of undermining the department heads by unilaterally redrawing the school's administrative turfs.

The upshot was a decision to make a firm protest to the principal at the next department head meeting, with an indication that if a satisfactory accommodation could not be found the matter would have to be referred to the Director of Education. The protest was duly made and received in stony silence, with no indication of what action would be taken.

The complaint had been made in accordance with ethical professional practice. We had identified our concerns among ourselves, but presented them to the person concerned without delay and without any attempt to operate behind his back. The complaint had been made around the semester end, as I recall, and a response had yet to be made when the new school year began in September.

I became increasingly concerned as the weeks went by with no answer from the principal, and was successful in organizing another luncheon meeting on the matter just after the summer holidays. There I urged that silence meant trouble, and that we should now involve the Director of Education. I was outvoted by the other heads: we had made our concerns known, and we owed the principal a chance to act on them. I did not think that the danger of a censorship challenge would go away so easily, but censorship was not of immediate concern to the others, and so I had to agree to wait.

As it happened, the involvement of the Director was arranged for us. We were to pick up the local newspaper just after Christmas and read of a sudden sensational demand from the rural board chairman for an immediate investigation into dissention within the school, and a challenge to the authority of the principal. There was only one way the rural board chairman could have known of our meeting with the principal six months earlier, so we had our response at last: there was to be a purge.

We were each summoned to a separate interview with the Director, where our earlier concerns were repeated. None of us could understand why the principal could not have dealt with us within the privacy of the school, since an accommodation could have been easily reached. A confrontation now could only mean that the principal was not prepared to deal with department heads on any terms, and that meant a basic shift toward centralization in Mafia philosophy, and a rejection of the more democratic assumptions which had influenced, if only incompletely, the comprehensive school approach.

We were soon to learn that there was more at issue than turf. At the next department head meeting the principal announced that no one who questioned his exclusive authority in any aspect of school budgeting or policy was welcome in the room. As one, we all rose and left, although I was later to hear that I was thought to be the revolt's ringleader since I was said to be the first to leave my seat. (Others, however, insist that they were the first to rise and be accused of ringleader status. Some day we shall have to get together at a reunion and settle the matter).

The matter seemed now to be developing its own momentum. A few days later the confrontation ceased to be a purely local concern when the principal visited each of us to announce that he had filed charges of professional misconduct with the provincial Teacher's Federation. To this day none of us will hazard a guess as to how the principal imagined that he had a slightest basis for such a challenge, or the slightest need for it. This brought another round of interviews with the Executive Director of the Teacher's Federation, whose interview with the school's vice-principal did us no damage. In my own case, the Director rose after only a few minutes, making it obvious that he didn't need to hear any more.

Within a week the Executive Director returned to the school, met with us, and announced that he had found no basis to the charge of professional misconduct, and would so advise the local school board. Paradoxically, at the very moment that we were meeting the Executive Director of our Federation, and being given a clear bill of health, the principal and a number of his fellow pious creeps were meeting the local radio media in another room in the school, preparing to launch a public barrage against the school "bureaucrats^" who were attempting, "behind closed doors", to destroy the career of a good Christian man. How these good Christian educators could view the public radio barrage against the department heads, which erupted the next day, as professionally responsible, is a mystery rivaling virgin birth. I never did find out if the their door was closed when they went public.

By now our controversy was attracting attention across the province. The principal's response to our concerns had been extraordinary, not merely transforming our attempt at a meeting of minds into a administrative crisis, but also ignoring the central importance to the Compact of mutual respect for classroom and Mafia turf, which cannot be unilaterally and abruptly redefined. The principal had no intention of respecting the existing administrative structure in his new school, seeing it either as an unacceptable limitation on his authority, or (and here I can only speculate) he saw the department heads in general and the librarian in particular as obstacles to his religious mission. Urban/rural tensions on the regional school board may have provided him with an ally, and he had apparently opted for a headlong assault on the department head system rather than working deviously and secretly to discredit the department heads over time. The obvious solution, dealing with our concerns, seems not to have been considered.

A general meeting of department heads with the school board had been called after the various Director's reports were tabled, and the department heads, and some of their allies in the Mafia, were in a panic. Of particular concern was the apparent animus of the rural board chairman against the librarian in particular, and the fear was that if I attended the meeting the tenor of the confrontation could be determined by a personality conflict between me and the rural board chairman at the expense of real issues, not to mention several careers. I agreed not to accompany my fellow department heads to the meeting.

All of them trooped into my house after a tense meeting with the school board, and, seated around my large kitchen table, speculated on how they had been received. They were relieved that I had not been there, a strategy which had defanged the rural board chairman. They were inclined to be pessimistic_, but, now they were alarmed at another involvement of mine which seemed certain to threaten their careers.

I had published two articles in the leading provincial teacher's journal criticizing a movement current at the time to insinuate Creationism into the science curriculum. I had been interviewed, as a result, by a radio station in Regina, but since few local people listened to that station there had been no repercussions. But I had also been agreed to be interviewed on CBC Radio, which would be aired locally and this raised, in my colleagues minds, a serious complication. It seems that the crux of the principal's charge against us was that the "plot" against him was religious persecution by staff members who resented his Baptist fundamentalist background and were attempting to drive him from the school. All that was needed to confirm this surprising new allegation, in the majority opinion, was to have one of the department heads emerge on local radio as a critic of passing religion off as science in the public high schools.

By the merest of coincidences the scheduled radio interview and the crucial board meeting which would decide winners and losers, and possibly careers, fell within a few days of each other. The former and respected principal, now the Deputy Director, was especially emphatic in advising me against going through with the radio interview, and in the end I had to yield. Some CBC producers never forgave me for declining at the last moment to appear, and it was in vain that I tried to explain.

The crucial meeting came, and the decision was made to buy out the principal's contract and replace him. We had, in a sense, won, but it proved to be a Pyrrhic victory. The victory had left us too exhausted to resist what followed, which was to provide the final nail in the coffin of the comprehensive school concept.

A jock is almost anyone in education whose intellectual horizon is bounded by a narrow specialty, and much of the grief in public education can be traced to jocks who graduate into Mafias, a natural tendency since a facility in public relations is easier to come by than scholarly expertise in subject teaching, and more utilitarian, given the institutional need to avoid Blame and pursue survival. Jocks are typically physical education specialists, and as such the butt of a good many jokes. Small wonder they aspire to positions in the Mafia hierarchy which will intimidate critics.

Jocks, of course, could be taught to teach the humanities better, but they dare not openly admit to deficiencies, not merely because of professional vanity, but because a confession of weakness will enhance their exposure to a measure accountability for the shortcomings of students which, given the performance of the putative subject specialists, jocks rightly regard as unfair. Since jocks are especially liable to be sensitive and insecure about academic credentials, they absorb the essence of the Compact as second nature, instinctively respecting the autonomy of classroom teachers whose disciplines are opaque to jock understanding. In return, however, Mafia jocks take for granted the acquiescence of classroom specialists to Mafia autonomy, so a superficially amiable authoritarianism becomes the essence of the Office Mafia, betraying a nasty, oppressive dimension only when the strictures of the Compact are violated.

Our new Director was a mathematician. He knew numbers. He knew budgets. He was a good bottom-line man. But a mathematician who knows only this, and lacks a feel for the arts and humanities, can be as limited as any sports jock when it comes to dealing with functional illiteracy and grinder History. Should our Director fit the mould, he could qualify, therefore, as a Number Jock, and join the Test Tube Jocks, Hair or Car Jocks, Lumberjocks (Industrial Arts) and even Compujocks, ( geeks, or people who know little but computers), to name just a few. Initial indications from the Director were not encouraging. It was important to him to have a hand in almost everything going on in the district, and while he was known to accept some advice from others in the various Office Mafias, his degree of involvement soon persuaded some that the new Director was convinced that he knew what was best for everyone else in the system: parents, school board, the Mafias, the teachers, the students, the caretaker , and the caretaker's dog.

However fair or unfair the assessments, it is not to be supposed that decisions made by Mafia jocks, whatever the degree of arbitrariness, are necessarily inept, still less mistaken. Our new Director clearly had to have remarkable management skills in order to establish the degree of authority he enjoyed. The important point is that the long run tendency of Mafia decisions is to strengthen the Compact's rationale, and authoritarian proclivities, to the extent that they stifle change or unwelcome external influences, may actually increase the sense of security of many caught up in them. Organizations get the style of leadership they do for a reason.

The sudden shift to a more authoritarian bias in the system disturbed a number of people, but it was expressive of the natural tendency of the Compact, and all school districts are subject to such mood swings at one time or another. Various administrators and staffs soon learned that the displeasure of the new Director was to be avoided at all costs.

The arrival of computers had created a few teething problems in the school, and some teachers who had not got what they wanted were inclined to blame the arbitrariness of the Director for this. I had a distaste for the unfocused complaining prevalent in office politics, and when people complained that they should have an Imagewriter printer just as the library had, I suggested that they might talk to the Director rather than grouse behind his back. Until it was proven unwise, I felt that we had to assume that we should remain above-board in dealing with him.

I was presently called into the principal's office, to find there the English department head, who had had the concerns with the printer, the principal, and the Director. The Director began to speak, and within a few sentences I suddenly realized that I was having my knuckles rapped; he kept admonishing me to "stop fiddling with the Apple". I glanced at the Department Head, but she had her head down, either in embarrassment or shame (I never found out which), and I was left to read between the lines of the Director's tirade trying to piece together how the Department Head had got me involved and just what I was supposed to have said or done. I was not successful there either. The incident passed without further complication, but I had got a glimpse of what some teachers were concerned about.

The department heads soon picked up rumblings of discontent over the perceived arbitrary and impersonal nature of the new administration, but it is fair to say that we were too exhausted by the previous challenge to respond again so soon. The great showdown had left us in the position of being perceived as troublemakers by the old principal's petty cronies on staff and school board, a perception which could only be confirmed by another confrontation. Someone indeed made a protest or criticism of some sort to an acquaintance on the school board, which provoked the Director to a sensational impromptu reading of the Riot Act in the school's staff room. I entered the room minutes later, a Reach for the Top playoff having kept me out of school that day, and the stunned expressions and even tears of my colleagues spoke volumes.

The new Director had come through the public school system, which was administratively independent of the comprehensive high school which had its own combined rural/urban "regional" school board. There was always a suspicion around the staff that the Director could capitalize on some resentment of the high school teachers on the part of teachers in the middle grades of the public urban and rural systems. Our superior resources and more highly qualified and paid staffs had long earned for us a local "fat cat" label. The controversy with the former principal, and the lingering memory of a strike fifteen years earlier, not to mention an instinct for turf, may have encouraged a perception among some trustees that the high school staff needed a strong hand to keep it in its proper place.

Whatever the Director 's motivation, I was soon to feel his presence, for he shortly appeared in my office and notified me that the librarian would no longer enjoy department head status. Since there were rumors, shortly to be confirmed, that all the department heads would be scrapped (in favour of academic and technical chairmen, as it turned out), I was not especially disturbed, and even shook hands with him at the end of the interview. The previous regime had not produced any particular benefit for the library, and so there was little to defend. I might have been less cordial if I possessed clairvoyant powers, but I have never appreciated staff-room bitching, and felt that the new man had a right to a chance to show where he would be taking the school and the library, even if the opening rounds had been less than promising, As my career was winding down, I may have had a faint hope for a wise and benevolent dictator, the way some hope for visitors from outer space who will save humanity from its follies. Still, it was difficult to avoid the conclusion that somewhere there were Mafiosi who felt either that they had to get even for the earlier battle, or that we were a possible obstacle to their own expanded turf.

After fifteen years of fighting a rearguard action to salvage something of the original perception of the library in a comprehensive school philosophy, I was resigned to some reverses. Even as a department head, I had been less and less successful in resisting a tendency of younger teachers to drift away from the library. But I could hardly have anticipated the run of reverses which was about to develop, and which began with my reclassification as a part-time librarian a few months after the Director was appointed. For a time, indeed, it appeared that something of value might survive, since the new principal was making a genuine attempt to preserve the General English course after the originator's death, and no threat to the course had emerged from the Director's office: class sizes were easily the most sensitive indicator, and the Director seemed to be accepting some advice in this area, although someone more cynical than I might wonder if this was only because of the proven track record of General English in keeping slower students quiet.

The crisis in school financing, retirements of veteran specialists who had been hired so many years before to realize the comprehensive philosophy, and finally the computer revolution all arrived within a few years, and the significance, for the old comprehensive revolution and the library, was to be fundamental.

My first contact with the new regime occurred when I discovered that a library technician had been hired. True, there was a vacancy, but it had been standard practice to allow the librarian to do the search and interview, since he would have to work with whoever was hired. It had then been up to the principal to approve the recommendation. The Director now elected to fill the position himself, and indeed took a hand in the hiring of all personnel in the school district. His choice of library assistant had in fact been a good one, but then she was a former employee who was returning after starting a family. The choices made in replacing veteran teachers were more problematic.

In the old days, the school had avoided to some extent the bad habit of hiring jocks and multipurpose teachers who had to fill out their teaching assignments in the humanities. The search for new teachers had sometimes been the task of a committee which included the librarian, and we had even assigned the English department head to visit the university and spend a few days seeking out and recruiting teachers for specific assignments. This was a successful practice except when a principal insisted on his own turf and screwed things up by ignoring our advice. Mistakes are more likely as the hiring authority moves further from the classroom.

Efficiency and teaching history and communication requires specialized training and some life experience outside the classroom. It would be hard enough to find this kind of teacher even if the university background is exemplary, without having to contend with the public relations function, which favours high school sports and the creation of desired student and public attitudes. Winning teams are not built with English specialists coaching as a sideline. Unfortunately, Mafias have been known to make things worse by stretching the term "specialist^" to include any jock who speaks English and has survived a couple of senior year English courses. Such haphazard practices, while they may be compatible with the progressive emphasis on personal development_, choice, and having fun, do nothing to cure the real problem as the public senses it.

The centralizing instincts of the new Director were certainly not compatible with what we had been doing. After all, the librarian himself had been recruited from the University of British Columbia to build the new comprehensive library. We were now moving back toward the more conventional hiring philosophy we had hoped to avoid, and this certainly contributed something to the situation which had developed in Grade Ten.

The breaking point for the library came with the computer revolution.

The prospect substantial government funding to get computers off and running in the province's education systems had led the Director to schedule a general meeting of administrators and computer activists from urban and rural schools throughout our district. As at least the nominal head of our school's computer user's group, I had to be invited.

By that time I was well into developing teaching history through video, a project which would have been impossible without a computer, but which I was now able to develop as fast as I could pull together my materials and type notes. The basic course, which would formerly have required several years of development, was ready in little more than two semesters because of this marvelous tool. I knew the value of the technology in education better than most, but I also knew that, for the foreseeable future, computers in English and History classrooms would not get even as far as the television monitor had until they could be incorporated into a shared body of techniques built around a careful definition of what schools should be doing.

Since I had been invited to the meeting_, I decided that I should have some specific classroom computer application to suggest, even if it got only lip service and token inclusion in any fund proposal. I asked myself what I might reasonably attempt in an English communications class for starters, and it was easy enough to marry the computer to my committee marking system. Pairs of students might spend a class brainstorming expository paragraphs together, with a teacher moving from terminal to terminal offering assistance. It might eventually be feasible to have contributions shared and corrected or developed by the whole class, as technology and funding would allow. Just how practical all this might be would only emerge through experience, but, before all else, a consensus would be needed on the methodology of teaching written communication. I could not have escaped the drudgery of gifted grinding without a computer, and perhaps the computer could be used to breathe new life into yet another traditional objective by finally penetrating those durable four walls.

I decided against a detailed proposal, since I didn't expect to get an extensive hearing. It was just as well, for I was cut off before I could finish my first sentence. The meeting had not been in session very long before the high school was asked for what it saw as possible classroom computer applications, and I began to say that I could see at least one way in which the library, the classroom computer, and a writing program for the school could come together. I was rudely interrupted shortly after the word "library" was uttered, and treated to a harangue in which it was made clear that it was high time that I realized that the computer had made libraries obsolete, and that within a few years only a few fiction books would survive as a relic of the old print world, all other information sources having converted to the incoming CD-ROM format. I had of course, mentioned only writing, not books, so the Director's association of the two was significant. There were other comments to the general effect that bookworms like me had no place in the future of education, but, ten years later, it is quite impossible to remember their precise nature.

The outburst was not merely rude; it was condescending and belittling, not to say unprofessional, and it finally confirmed the Director's authentic Number Jock status. It meant that he saw me exclusively as a Keeper of the Books, not as a resource person with a solid reputation for fifteen years in technology applications. It meant that, although he was fully aware of the favorable things parents and students had been saying about my initiatives in teaching History, all this mattered not at all in his redefinition of the librarian's role. Or perhaps he simply sensed that I was a possible competitor for some part of the inviting new turf now up for grabs.

I bore all this in as quiet a dignity as I could manage, determined that if somebody had to lose it and appear to be rude and intolerant, it would be the Director alone. It was to be the last forum of any kind regarding computers in schools that I attended, for I was shortly to be cut off even from the library's automation program. The original comprehensive vision was clearly dead, and the new crowd could hardly wait for people like me to get out of their way.

A flood of converts had burst from the starting gate, predicting a dire fate for those who did not join the stampede into the new technology. The provincial government established a Development Fund, and our school made its bid for a grant, seeking credibility (old myths die hard) by portraying the projected computer facility as an extension of the library concept, which, in a sense, it was. It was to be housed in the old library classroom, which was at least physically adjacent to the library, but had come upon hard times as a storage room once the television revolution fizzled out.

The school's grant proposal was prepared by a "user's group", and the librarian was a natural choice as its chair. It turned out to be an honorary appointment. Whenever I ventured a suggestion, I was reminded by the two most active enthusiasts that a meeting of the user's group would have to be convened before any action could be considered, and that I had better not act on my own. When the money arrived it transpired that the two enthusiasts were the group, and that they didn't need to call in anyone else (certainly not the librarian!) in order to design and introduce the facility.

I saw the turf scramble coming and decided to let it work itself out. I knew very well that the instant revolution in school routines that everyone anticipated would run afoul of the grinders soon enough, and that it would be just as well if the librarian were not too closely involved_, lest he provide a convenient scapegoat when the staff and students failed to overrun the new facility. Besides, non-librarians were always ready to offer advice on how to run the library, and now they had their own revolution to promote.

The room was renovated, posters ordered, announcements and invitations made, hardware and software secured. Only one more thing had to be done to ensure its success. People would surely be turned off if the software bore discouraging Dewey numbers, or if prospective users had to go through the bureaucratic maze of charging out software and being hounded to return it on time.

A library fine would be the kiss of death (which ignored the fact that the library had never collected overdue fines for books). Promoting the computer facility clearly would require excluding the librarian.

It was decided to store the software in a large drawer in the library's business office, where staff could come and go as they wished, picking up whatever programs they fancied, and returning them whenever they chose, with no need for nettlesome records. The computer revolution would burst forth from an unstructured cocoon.

I could grit my teeth and ignore the growing junk drawer of discs, manuals, and full and empty containers, but the storing of twenty or so Appleworks programs on the office floor got to be a bit much after a few weeks, and one day I began to pick them up and store them on an adjacent counter just as 50 percent of the user's group walked in.

"Have you had permission to move the programs?"

"You can call a meeting about it if you don't like it."

The programs stayed, and it was not thought necessary to call the meeting.

I was expected only to look through the door of the facility now and then in order to ensure that everything was going smoothly, but admonished not at any cost to discourage young minds by roughshod discipline. There was no need for concern, as the computers would have had to be bouncing off the walls before I would impose order. No one would be able to blame the librarian when the facility withered away after the novelty wore off.

It was several months later before I was finally asked to record_, classify and catalogue the software collection. The reason for the change of mind was obvious enough: the junk drawer had gone from being unstructured to unusable chaos. When I was finally done piecing things together and matching them with purchase orders, I discovered that over $600 of software had disappeared, entirely amongst staff.

Within three years the classroom housing the computer facility had reverted to a storage room. A few surviving Apple IIe computers had been moved to the library (I was gone by that time) and the computer program was centered around the MS-DOS machines housed in the classrooms of computer teachers. Computer applications, like television applications before it, had become just another subject matter. Most teachers and students had remained indifferent to the revolution, as I anticipated, and those who had picked up the new technology had employed it mainly to facilitate what they had always been doing. The user^'s group had walked away quietly from the stillborn initiative, and there was no hunt this time to place the blame for the fiasco on an unfriendly or unwelcoming attitude, as there might have been had I been foolish enough to enter the competition for turf in the New World. The logic of the institution works in sundry and devious ways.

A final irony is worth mentioning. when the enthusiasm for the new facility was at its height, the 50 percent of the user's group previously mentioned sat himself down before my desk one day and announced that we might well discuss how best to promote the library, He meant well, and in fact was one of the better library users in the school, but he was clearly trying to create a sub-Mafia with me as a subordinate, solely on the basis of his association with the "library-connected" computer facility. Perhaps I shouldn't have lost my temper, but I could not see accepting advice from someone who was clearly ignorant of the library's situation, and whose idea of promoting computer applications had not extended beyond making sure that the library that he now felt qualified to promote was excluded.

The Director was not quite finished yet. I had heard that the district's school libraries were to be automated, although I had not been brought into any discussions. The principal had sent me to a seminar on the subject, but shortly after my return I heard that decisions on the computer (Apple IIe) and the automation program (Mandarin) had already been made, and that everything (surprise!) would be handled through the central office.

Some odd comments were filtering through. There was to be a network of some kind linking all the school libraries in the district, but we were the only high school and it was unclear how anyone could imagine that a collection that had been crafted for nearly twenty years for grades Ten to Twelve in a comprehensive high school could possibly be of much use to the junior grades. Junior high school teachers did seem to imagine at times that the high school was jealously guarding a hoard of materials which they should be able to use, but they could hardly have seen my history program, for example, and imagine that what I was using I was deviously keeping from them. Our experience with General English had shown, however, that the middle grade teachers would insist on doing what they wanted regardless, and perhaps even in spite of, what was being done in the high school, and there had never been a tradition of coordination between the two. We usually had to discover belatedly that a selection which had formerly been taught in the high school had been unilaterally taken over by a public school teacher, sometimes in spite of the curriculum guide. There was no obvious indication that things were about to change for the better.

The prevalent coolness between teachers in the system may not have been entirely the fault of the junior high schools, and was probably complicated by rural/urban tensions, so I was not surprised that the Director had designated a junior high school administrator and teacher-librarian to supervise automation throughout the system and in the high school library.

The librarian began her visits, but seemed so ill at ease that she spoke only to the secretary and technician, and never to me. After several weeks I ventured a hello, which she acknowledged without comment. In due course seminars in the Mandarin program were organized, and the only the technician and secretary were invited, so it was clear that I was expected to stay on the sidelines. I soon discovered, however, that the exclusion was even more sweeping.

From time to time I would check in on what my staff was learning and doing, thinking that, even if I was not a participant in what was going on, it would be well to have at least some knowledge of the mechanics of the automation program, lest it affect access to the collection or my own cataloging practice. I had some reason to wonder about this. It appeared that the automation program used only Library of Congress subject headings, judging from the CO-ROMs I saw lying about, and that was a curious development in a library collection where there was a much greater reliance on Sears subject headings. There seemed to be no cross-references, so that a user would have to get the subject heading right the first time, or the advantages of computer terminals over the old card catalogues would be largely cancelled out. I eventually ventured to ask the visiting expert about this, but she either did not understand what I was concerned with, or did not wish to pursue the subject.

Just how the land lay was presently revealed. I had been practicing catalogue entries in the program Just how the while my staff was on coffee break, enough so that I would not be totally out of touch as to what they were doing. In the course of this I encountered a problem which puzzled them, too, on their return. I called my public school colleague and chatted about the matter for awhile, before returning to my own work.

I was called into the principal's office the next day to be informed that an instruction had been received from the school board office that the library's automation program was "none of my business" and that it was not thought necessary for the librarian to know any more about the program than any student or teacher would need in accessing (!) desired titles. The principal was plainly discomfited about the whole thing, and I suggested that I might talk to the Assistant Director.

Since the Director and his staff had insisted on taking over my library's automation project as their own, there was no point in arguing over turf. I telephoned to ask what the instruction meant, since it had taken me by surprise to learn that the librarian was not only expected to remain out of any decision-making and implementation, but had even to remain deliberately ignorant of how library automation functions.

The Assistant Director actually accused me of trying to sabotage the automation project! It was not explained just how I was doing this, but it was plain that his aide had been very upset by my inquiries, and that, short of a fight, I could only walk away from the whole matter. So be it. Years earlier the incident would have sparked a confrontation with such people; my coming retirement made this pointless: any controversy with anyone would be used as evidence that there was no pleasing an unfriendly librarian. The outrageous proposition that a librarian has no business understanding library automation was the product of the same bald-faced turf aggression which had marred the introduction of television twenty-five years earlier, which had also, as we have seen, worked to the library's detriment.

In fact I was becoming a lame duck, and my part-time status was cementing this reality every day. I was struck at how administrators and teachers, even long term friends, had gradually begun to seek out the library clerical staff, in my absence, on a whole range of library matters. For example, I might find out after the fact that just local purchase orders could be issued after certain date, the principal, in my absence, having spoken only to the secretary, who had not thought to mention anything to me. Teachers, arranging class visits to the library, were also falling into the habit of notifying only the clerical staff.

In most instances it could be claimed that the clerical staff was dealing with nuts and bolts, routine matters which did not require bothering the professional librarian. Class visits, after all, were much the same from year to year, so why bother the librarian when it was sufficient to notify the paraprofessionals of the teacher's intention, and the librarian was often not in the library anyway?

Thus the library's users had, given the part-time status of the librarian, begun to slip back into the old habit of finding ways to use the library without using the librarian. If I had something new to offer it would have to be slipped in after the class had arrived, assuming the teacher had the time to pay attention. Even then it was likely to be something to be put off until a future visit, when the teacher might or might not remember it.

The academic vice-chairman, a respected colleague and fellow historian and co-coach of the Reach for the Top team, had also fallen into the pattern of unconsciously going around the librarian. I discovered that he had begun to confer with teachers directly over the acquisition of audio--visual items, without talking to me or becoming familiar in detail with what the library already had. He was oblivious to the necessity of direct contact with staff if the librarian is to promote effective use of a range of materials and build a functional collection. Unconsciously, he was beginning to limit me to a cataloguer of materials to be placed on the shelves by the clerical staff, and "accessed" by amateurs with the aid of a computer.

I began to suspect that something more was going on the first time my academic vice-chairman friend brought a class to the library. It was 1967 revisited. This time there was an electronic computer rather than a card catalogue, but rather than use a cart of materials on topics selected in advance, he insisted that his students ask the technician to punch in their requests. I stood there for twenty minutes watching everyone grasping vaguely for information I could have walked to in seconds, but the crowning indignity came when the technician was reduced to sorting through Sears list of subject headings trying to figure out what heading to put into the computer. My friend had failed to turn around and ask the one person in the room who knew the answer, and the reason was blindingly obvious: he was trying to make a technician plus computer do the work of a librarian--the school did not intend to replace me when I retired. I left long enough for various of his students to give up tumbling around on their own, and reappeared about the time they were finally ready to ask the librarian.

The instincts of the Compact were reasserting themselves. No one was deliberately snubbing me, but it had clearly become easier for professional staff to talk to someone lower in the pecking order than to invite give-and-take through interaction with other professionals, particularly if they are outside one's department, as the librarian was now, more than ever. This is coherent with the natural defensiveness which underlines the Compact, for insecure teachers will not risk letting colleagues know of possible weaknesses in preparation for lessons or library visits. Such a danger will not arise if contact with the library and the librarian can be limited to notifying clerical and paraprofessional staff of what the teacher has independently elected to do. My part-time status, therefore, was slowly and quietly distancing me from direct involvement with the classroom. Compromising on the librarian's position is like trying to be a little bit pregnant: once started one might as well go all the way because the damage has already been done.

The serviceability of the Keeper of the Books stereotype lies in how the stereotype limits the librarian's turf while expanding that of others. There is no need to suppose that it is something which is shared only by sycophants, mediocrities, or teachers lacking professionalism. Professional colleagues and friends will do nicely. Associating librarians with books and with an outdated print mindset is a favored ploy which immediately stereotypes the librarian as yesterday's man, and handicaps him in the rush to identify new turf. Mafias can downgrade the role of the librarian and so simplify budgeting and staffing, especially when deep cuts have to be made and one person, rather than several, can be sacrificed. Thus the stereotyping removes another impediment to setting administrative priorities and electing new Mafiosi, who will get to mark out turfs for everyone else. The stereotype serves so naturally and smoothly in keeping librarians from compromising Mafia and classroom autonomy that it is quite impervious to contradictory evidence.

I am reminded of an excellent example of how the mindset of the librarian as Keeper of the Books can make communication impossible. A new General English teacher was being broken in and a set of manuals had been returned to the school for his use. Knowing that the earlier teacher was a vastly superior teacher than filer, and knowing that the manuals would be sadly out of date, I removed them from the office to the library in order to amend them. The library had relieved active General English teachers of the need to maintain the bulky and extensive manuals for many years: it was part of a working librarian/teacher partnership that had long been a pattern in General English. When the principal and the academic vice-chair discovered that I had done so, I was ordered to return the manuals to the office immediately, and not to interfere with office procedures in the future. This was from friends, mind; people I had gone fishing with yet. The irony was that they had just emerged from a teacher in-service on the topic--wait for it--of Professional Cooperation in the High School.

It would be some months before I could re-establish the practice of the library helping maintain department files and sources. That was one of many ways that the library had tried to be relevant to the General as well as the academic program. In the event, the rupture was temporary, and I spent the last nine years of my career after Wood's death recording and editing the unfinished fiction catalogue in General English. There was simply no one else with the technical capacity to do the job. I was thus able to terminate positively an association with a program I had spent a career helping to establish, but it was sobering to realize that the requirements of classroom autonomy and the Compact meant that my contact with the program could end at any time with the stroke of a pen, no matter how diplomatic I managed to be. I once tried in vain to sketch out the library's point of view on its association with General English to my sometime friend, now principal. He gave me a startled look and exclaimed, "You're talking about a resource person!" Stunned, I could only mumble that that is what I thought I was. The gulf between the Mafia and the library had become so pronounced that we were no longer speaking the same language.

With the librarian reduced to part-time status, the clerical staff can also fall into the professional's pattern. They will be flattered, after all, by increased attention from the professional staff. Their jobs may seem more meaningful if they are asked for assistance, and how can the librarian demean them by jealously retaining a monopoly on those functions (helping visitors) that they can often do almost as well? By implication, the only thing that a librarian does that the non-librarian cannot do, even if it takes a little longer, is the classifying and cataloguing of materials, and that is exactly what Keepers of the Books do.

Library users ask for what they think they want, but knowing what they need requires knowledge of the subject, the purposes of the teacher, the collection, the student's background and ability, and so on. Amateurs trying to do reference work simply can't harmonize all these things, but that is seldom an obstacle to their thinking that they can function adequately, particularly while the librarian is on his teaching assignment, and especially if they have the aid of a computer.

The librarian's staff will, like her fellow teachers, honestly believe that they are more than willing to advise the librarian when it is necessary. When will it be necessary? When they can't find something. When do they know that? For all practical purposes, when they can't find anything. As long as they can find something, they will feel that they have helped the user, regardless of what is overlooked in the process. In this way technicians and clerks subtly insinuate themselves into the library reference work, and feelings can be instantly and deeply hurt if the librarian is so insensitive as to take them up short. They may turn away students who ask for material on Martin Luther because the books on Martin Luther have been loaned out, not knowing that most of the information is found under the heading "Reformation", and, since they don't know this, it won't occur to them to check with the librarian. And, if they don't check, there will be no occasion for them to realize that they can't do what they are doing. There will be few paraprofessionals who have a sure instinct for knowing when they should not trust their own judgment.

Given the reborn grinder climate, it is inevitable that initiatives such as my History/AV experiment and Wood's general English will each, in their own way, become isolated islands. Their general appeal will be limited because neither offer a discrete magic wand readily adaptable to grinder routines. In one sense they both can offer, in fact, a genuine prospect of survival, but that offer would require too many to find the courage to abandon the cocoon of anonymity offered by the Compact in favour of a verifiable standard of performance. Ideally, beginners could be trained in either program, but it would have to be a condition of employment that the newcomers work under the supervision of a senior teacher, so that the first two years on the job might be considered an extension of their in-service training. Only later could they assume greater autonomy, and even then significant departures, especially in General English, would have to have the approval of other teachers who are more or less permanently, if not exclusively, attached to the program.

It was the failure to accept some such supervisory function which doomed the department head system in our school. Worse yet, it meant that any change which would integrate teacher practices with the skills and resources available from the librarian would have to originate from the librarian as an outsider. It was a foregone conclusion that any initiative on the part of the librarian, no matter how circumspect, would sooner or later be regarded as interference and resented.

Such an arrangement would mean reconciling individual initiative with a co-operative general approach, and nowhere is this easily done. While we had been fortunate in having adequate teachers follow Wood, the Compact will remain a threat: sooner or later the logic of security will encourage the Mafia to replace tired veterans with raw beginners who will insist on their autonomy. The great insight of General English will disappear because people will eventually give up recruiting top talent and insisting on the necessary apprenticeship period. The school will revert to the common practice of treating English for slower students as a hand-me-down academic program inflicted on green teachers, and wonder why parents will object so strenuously to the stigma of having their children in it. Then the demand will be on for mainstreaming, and the treatment of all children equally, (read: the same) regardless of race, creed, color, religion, ability, background, sex, disability or height. It will be so easy to forget that, in an Information Age, the inability to move information is the mother of all handicaps.

The despised alternative would see effective and coordinated in-school apprenticeship programs to teach academic teachers and create a classroom regime where effective communications instruction would occupy less than half a teacher's time, and which would not have an impact at all on the teaching of literature. There is no tactical reason why flexible procedures could not be developed, employing a compulsory basic minimum of core techniques, but allowing individuals to adapt them to their own situations. All this would be consonant with any reasonable conception of academic freedom. The fundamental barrier is not that such a goal is physically beyond reach, but that the very rationale of educational organization is built on survival and the deflecting of Blame, not on finding practical solutions to clearly definable problems. By now it should be clear that the system has been evolved to meet the needs of people who so often lack the Platonic criterion of wisdom: knowing what it is that one doesn't know.

Teachers are forever quoting studies which purport to show that their students are equal or superior to certain others, usually from the same culture and country, in order to assert that there is no real problem. Given the fact of functional illiteracy (which is tacitly redefined to identify, conveniently, only basket cases) one might ask whether what the studies really show is merely that our students are the best of a so-so lot. Pretending that the emperor is really dressed, if one but looks at him aright, got my generation through to retirement. The coming generation of teachers, who are coming through increasingly manipulative and scholastically barren school systems themselves and so lack the reserves of the old Gifted Grinders, will hard-pressed to be as successful. With the phantoms of educational vouchers, alternative and charter schools, and the inflexible demands of the marketplace, buying off the public by substituting personal fulfillment for scholarship will not help jock grinders to reach retirement before the public school system effectively collapses.

Why, then, has there been such a pervasive tendency to sink into oneself and muddle through? Perhaps simply resignation to the inevitability of substituting magic wands for real change. The irony is that the appeal of superficial manipulation can turn aside the demand of the unwashed for concrete measurable results. Whatever there is of value in modernist manipulation will never mature in a milieu where survival is king: there fads rule. The public relations jocks have simply exacerbated the urge to survival, hastening a decline built into public school systems. Public schools can meet the society's expectations if only some way can be found to cut through the logjam and replace ego, ambition, insecurity, and resignation, with a sense of direction. We have somehow to develop the will to define problems and implement practical solutions to functional illiteracy without vainly trying to bribe the troops into change by tacitly ensuring that change will never occur.

It seems that most of my career was a delaying action against decline masquerading as change. It is paradoxical that the reasons for failure in public education can be so clear and the solution so remote. Worse yet, I had not been in the system so very long before I seemed doomed to holding that I was one of a minority in step. In fact there may be many who will privately admit the truth of much that I have written, but who have long since given up, praying for small mercies and successes as they hold on until retirement.

As much as anything else, it is this sense of resignation in veteran teachers that is so discouraging. After thirty years we still grind through History, or what is left of it. We teach bastardized composition, in what is left of English classes. In library use we have gone from making a fetish of the card catalogue by confusing searching with researching to making a fetish of the electronic card catalogue by confusing searching with researching, without tapping the full potential of either video or the computer. The computer will alter our lives profoundly, but it will scarcely ruffle most teachers at all: it will simply make it easier to do what they have always done: grind through subject matters.

I was not tired when the time for retirement came, but I could hardly have worked another semester without reverting to the rebellious mood which marked the early years. I began as a resource person in an era when libraries, books, and writing, at least in theory, had finally come within reach as the heart of a liberal education, yet thirty years later it seemed that my life's work was little more than the death rattle of the old print world, now a pathetic anachronism in the brave new world of the computer. Paradoxically, the triumph of the new order was so complete that the death rattle of the old was barely audible, and then mainly to the few surviving old hands whose memories went back those thirty years. The new people, and even some of the old hands, were blissfully unaware of how much the character of the school had changed, or how meaningless the traditional conception of literacy had become.

Clinging stubbornly to my books and my ancient Apple IIe, (since replaced!) I had been left behind in the ditch of the Information Highway, a road leading to a world where literacy and rational thought--if they survive in recognizable form--will lean on electronic crutches, and people will marvel at a cantankerous old relic who gets by without a spelling checker (well, most of the time) and who can add a tip to his restaurant bill in his head without needing a hand-held computer, skills now sharing the fate of the medieval troubadour's memory.

I am reminded of what my grandfather used to say when, as a child, I had to make a fourth at Bridge: "You are either a genius or an idiot!" I would have liked to stay on long enough in teaching to find the answer.