JUST IN TIME FOR THE NEW SEMESTER. Halfway through the Fifty Book Challenge! I offer Patrick Allitt's I'm the Teacher, You're the Student, which is essentially a diary of Professor Allitt's Reconstruction to Today survey of U.S. History, with a few vignettes from a non-credit course he offers to retirees, and an occasional reference to advising. As one of the Amazon.com reviewers noted, "it does not provide much insight regarding the struggles of balancing multiple classes, teaching, and service requirements."

There is, however, much to like in the book. An appendix provides the course outline and regulations, while managing not to balloon into the Syllabum Omnium (from the little Latin I know, that translates as "Unabridged Abstract," but I digress.) No eating, turn off cell phones and pagers, remove hats.

The baseball caps have always been an affliction. It was bad enough when they were worn with the bill facing forward. Students had an artful way of slumping down in their chairs so that their eyes gradually disappeared from view. Were the eyes open? I would suddenly ask someone a difficult question, singling him out by name. Usually this had the effect of causing a sudden flurry of alarm and a great deal of muttering. Sometimes the student requested that I repeat the question; occasionally his silence confirmed that sleep had descended. Then came the trend, starting around 1994, to wear the hats backward, with the bill sticking out behind and the adjustable plastic tabs defining a semicircle of forehead. The reversed student hat makes a statement about its wearer, something like, "I am dull."

Priceless. Just read the book. One sidenote. Paul Fussell noted the backward prole cap (his language, not mine) in Class, in the early 1980s, with a particularly lurid passage about showing off the at-the-time pathbreaking "adjusto-strap," which Fussell characterized as "One Size Fits All [Proles]." Chronology notwithstanding, Professor Allitt pronounces anathema on the use of "like" as a filler. "Resist it. It's the verbal equivalent of the reversed baseball cap." Amen. Apparently Emory undergraduates, keeping pace with the rest of the country, are not terribly polished speakers or writers, nor are they assiduous researchers. Ah well, we persevere.

They're also prone to rely on rote memorization and regurgitation, despite twelve years give or take of exposure to schooling from teachers full of the latest wisdom from the Colleges of Deaducation about the ineffectiveness of rote learning ...

What else is there to commend? For one, Professor Allitt is a train enthusiast. Quick quiz: which year is the most important year in American history?

a. 1492
b. 1620
c. 1776
d. 1861
e. 1869
f. 1929
g. 1945
h. 2001

If you know why the answer is "e. 1869" congratulations.

There's also evidence to give pause to those who contend that university tuitions are too high.

Now let me escort you to the student parking area, where we encounter a magnificent fleet of the best vehicles currently on sale anywhere in the world: haughty Mercedes Benzes by the dozen, stately Lexuses, fleet little BMWs, zesty sports cars from Italy and Japan, and monstrous SUVs with zip codes of their own. I always found the experience of seeing slim American college women driving these giants something half-erotic, half spiritual.

By all means read the whole thing, and consider Professor Allitt's approach to classroom presentation, which is itself distinctive (no textbooks and a lot of audience participation, for openers) as well as his advocacy of greater social distance between students and faculty.