Intro, I suppose, is an outgrowth of the olden-days requirements (still found in some states) that universities and colleges teach some sort of civics course, and thus the materials out there for teaching it fit that template. I’m not at all sure, though, that it’s all that important a course in the grand scheme of things. It certainly shoehorns poorly into the Millsaps curriculum; as a social scientist (first and foremost), I can’t think of any course that fulfills our social and behavioral sciences requirement more poorly than American government does, and shudder to think what impression of the social sciences is given by our choice to make Intro an exemplar of them (I suppose it gets better when we mosey into the more behavioral material, but the first month feels more like teaching a bad history class).

I guess the key question is: how do I fix it? This is the fourth time I’ve taught the class, and I don’t know specifically what to do, beyond adopting Yet Another Textbook (Fiorina, Peterson and Voss, 2nd ed.) and seeing if that one works better. Maybe I should pull in stuff from the magical mystery tour (I assure Mungowitz it’s only coincidence that his syllabus is the first Google hit I found for “classics in american politics”—I was actually looking for this). Damned if I know.

The hairdresser asked me whether I wanted her to use shears or clippers. Silly me answered “whatever’s easier,” which led to my hair being attacked by an electric clipper that apparently had dull blades or something, since it felt like it was trying to yank the hair out of my head by the roots.

Then she said that she thought my hair would look nicer if I added some highlights on top; the benefits of this, she claimed, would be that I would “look younger” (great, so now I’ll look even more like one of my students) and it would “fill in” my hair up top (apparently I’m going bald and I don’t even know it, go figure). Since I momentarily forgot that my current goal in life is to actually look older—let’s say 35ish, on the condition I get to stay looking 35ish for about 15 years—I said, “sure,” and promptly she put some plastic thing over my head and started (apparently) poking holes in it and apparently my skull too. My scalp didn’t exactly enjoy this either. Then she put some purple goop all over my head, put another plastic thing over it, and then put me under that mind-programming device from In Like Flint, the primary side-effect of which seemed to be to superheat my ears for what seemed like half an hour.

Needless to say, I was sorely (pun intended) tempted to complain about all this. But then a funny thing happened—while I was having my mind reprogrammed, my hairdresser sat down in another hairdresser’s chair and the latter hairdresser started fiddling around with something that looked like a small white fondue pot (I didn’t have my glasses on, so this was all very fuzzy, even though it was no more than 10 feet away). Then I heard this really loud yelp of pain, and I finally figured it out—she was having her eyebrows waxed.

I guess the moral of this story is two-fold: one, I’d have looked like a complete goober if I’d complained about the relatively minor discomfort I experienced, and two, I’m apparently a complete wimp.

Now I just hope I’m not half-blond for the rest of my life.