...to facilitate the learning process

Then it was quiet again. My classmates had taken their backpacks off and were pouring coffee on their chests, to facilitate the learning process. "What the hell are you talking about?" they muttered, staring up at the board with their eyes closed and covered with wraparound Spanish eyeglasses. "Never mind," I said. "It's your turn to derive." I hit the books and aimed the G.B. Shark toward the shoulder of the classroom. No point mentioning those Agrs, I thought. The poor bastards will see them soon enough.

It was almost noon, and we still had more than a hundred pages to go. They would be tough pages. Very soon, I knew, we would all be completely twisted. But there was no going back, and no time to rest. We would have to ride it out. Graduate Registration for the fabulous Fall 2005 was already underway, and we had to get there by the 29th to claim our sound-proof suite. A fashionable academic journal in Austin had taken care of our admission, along with this huge red Minimalist convertible we'd just rented off a lot on the Drag...and I was, after all, a professional student; so I had an obligation to cover the class, for good or ill.