He went back to his office to resume his normal work. He had to evaluate Vanessa Hunter after lunch, and he was not looking forward to sitting through her class from what he had seen just walking by her classes for the past week. He pulled out her lesson plans, again noting that there were more weeks of these missing and tried to get a feel for what the class he would observe was about. It was an introduction to computers class and today was the cohort’s first day. He wondered how Ms. Hunter would approach an introductory lesson to computer processing and had no idea, as she had not handed in the required lesson plans.

As he was poring through last year’s lesson plans for Ms. Hunter, trying to see what she was likely to cover based on what she had covered on the first day of the same class the previous year, he heard a knock on his door. “It’s not locked, come in,” he said, not seeing who was outside as he was sitting at Katie’s desk with a thick lesson plan folder on top of the Compaq transportable computer on the desk. Marvin entered.

“Well,” he said, closing the door behind him and pulling a chair from across Dan’s desk to sit closer to him, “that certainly went well. I hope you’re happy.”

“I sure am, Marvin. Now let’s hope the State Ed filing goes through.”

“It’s sitting at Taisha’s desk waiting for the FedEx guy to pick it up. I’m overnighting it. The sooner we get it approved, the better. The Melameds know these things take time—many months usually, from the date of filing even if there are no major snags along the way that call for clarification or, worse, re-filing. But they’ll start pestering me in a couple of weeks if I know them.”

I’m glad Upinder did not put any roadblocks as to the lab.” Dan said.

“About that, you should know that the little weasel made it seem like he negotiated the software deal, and that there was a great deal of haggling to get the vendor to agree to the swap. He also told them he pushed hard to make the deal today because it was just too good to pass up and that he had told the vendor that we had several other vendors coming in with competitive bids.”

Dan smiled and shook his head, “I honestly don’t care, Marvin. Who knows, maybe he’s trying to keep his job or is bucking for a promotion. He helped by not getting in the way and approving the swap. He could have torpedoed it or at least made it harder to achieve, so I’m happy with that. If he wants to take more credit than he is due, that’s fine.”

“Well, I do. I’ll set the record straight with Benjamin when I call him later today.”

“Just let it go, Marvin. I don’t want to make an enemy of someone whose support we may need in the future. Nor do I want to cost the guy his job. He may have expanded on the truth a bit, but who knows, maybe it was his way of trying to seal the deal with Mr. Melamed, providing a sense of urgency to accept a great deal. This was never about earning brownie points for me. I’m just happy as hell that we’re getting the lab. Sharing credit, even if not earned, is not a problem. My only agenda here is doing what I can to make things better. Upinder helped today, as far as I’m concerned, and if he gets a gold star on his record or a step closer to a raise, or whatever else he may be after, that’s perfectly fine. I’m grateful for his support.”

Marvin had no reply. He just stared at Dan for what seemed a long while, prompting Dan to ask, “What?”

“Nothing,” Marvin replied, his usual pleasant smile returning. “I’m just trying to figure you out.”

“What you see is what you get—warts and all.”

After Marvin left, Bob called. “Hey, Dan. It’s nearly Noon. Do you want to go out to lunch?”

“I have a one o’clock observation to do. I can go but have to be back before one, or I can go at two, if you like.”

“Let’s do two then. I don’t want to rush back and I’m dying to know how it went today. Marvin chatted with me for a while, but I’d like your take on the day.”

“Sure—that would be perfect. I’ll come by your office as soon. As I evaluate Ms. Hunter’s class.”

“Oh, God. I suggest you shake her awake before the class starts and give her a double espresso, and then maybe she won’t fall asleep before the hour is up.” Bob chortled, adding “See you soon” before hanging up. Dan sighed as he put the phone back in its cradle. “This is going to be fun,” he thought, then sighed again.

An hour later, after reviewing Vanessa Hunter’s file and those of the other three instructors he would be evaluating this week, he headed to her class and sat in the back of the room with a legal pad for talking notes. Some students were in the class before him and eyed him curiously. He stood out in his dark blue, pinstriped suit. At 1:00 p.m., almost everyone in the class was seated, but still no Ms. Hunter. She walked in five minutes late carrying a magazine and nothing else. She immediately sat down on the desk in front and told the students whom she was meeting for the first time, “Hello. I’m Ms. Hunter and this is Introduction to Computers and Data Processing. Dean Amor is sitting in the back today—he’s here to observe you, so make sure you make a good impression. You all got your books today, so read Chapter One and do the exercises at the back of the book. I’ll be up here if you have any questions.” With that, she plopped her people Magazine on her desk and began to read.

“Holy frigging feces of male bovine,” Dan thought to himself--or something to that effect. “This woman has got to be frigging kidding me.” He began to write on his notepad. Late to class. Poor attitude. No effort to engage her class. No introduction to the subject of any kind. No notes. No effort whatsoever to teach. “No wonder she did not submit any lesson plans for two weeks—she has no plan to teach any lessons,” he thought.

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About ten minutes into the lecture, Dan looked around the room which was full—40 students by his count. About two thirds of the students were actually reading, or pretending to read, from their textbooks. The other third were either chatting with each other or clearly reading, doodling or doing anything but their assignment—he did not blame them. He was seething, but there was little he could do other than leave, which he would not do if for no other reason than to document the full extent of this instructor’s incompetence. She seldom so much as looked up from her magazine. Was it utter contempt on her part or simply galloping stupidity, he wondered?

A student raised her hand which the instructor of course did not see. The student apparently did not want to call out to her for whatever reason, so Dan said “Ms. Hunter, one of your students has a question.”

At this she looked up at Dan then at the student pleasantly enough and said “Yes?”

“Ms. Hunter, I’m reading about D-O-S and I’m not really sure what it is or why we need to know about it. Can you please explain what D-O-S is and what it’s used for?”

“M-S-D-O-S,” Ms. Hunter repeated, pronouncing each letter, “Is the disk operating system that is used to boot an IBM PC and get it to do work. That’s basically it.” Ms. Hunter said, then went back to reading her magazine. The student looked puzzled but did not raise her hand again. At this point, Dan could not stand it anymore, embarrassed not only for the instructor, but for himself and for the school as well. He called out to the instructor again, in as calm a voice as he could muster and said, “Ms. Hunter, can you please give us a bit more information about what DOS,” he pronounced it dohs, as it was normally pronounced, “is used for and why we need to know about it in order to use an IBM PC or compatible computer?”

Ms. Hunter again looked up and simply said, “I already said what its used for—you need it in order to run other programs. That’s basically all you need to know about it.”

“Nobody could possibly be that stupid that teaches this course,” Dan thought to himself, but said out loud “Would you mind if I took over the class for the rest of the period to at least expand on what DOS is and some of its basic functions?”

“Not at all, Dean Amor. Please. I’d love to hear it.” There was no sarcasm in her voice, nor any malice. She simply seemed clueless as to what she should be doing. He did not mean to embarrass her, though he was angry. He hoped he could at least perhaps show her by example what she was supposed to be doing, rather than reading a magazine and having her students teach difficult concepts to themselves from a textbook not intended for self-guided learning and which she herself clearly had not mastered or perhaps even read. He got up and moved up to the blackboard, thinking an off-the-cuff lecture would be better than nothing at this point.

“Hello class,” he said facing the students and scanning the room, making eye contact with each of them as he spoke. “My name is Dan Amor, and I’m the Academic Dean at PEMTI, not an instructor. This is a subject I know pretty well, though, so if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to give you a bit of background on MS-DOS and PC-DOS. D-O-S is pronounced “dohs” for short and stands for disk operating system.” He moved to the board and began making notes and noticed that almost every student took out a notebook or loose-leaf and began writing—and that every student was looking at him as he lectured. The only real difference between MS and PC DOS is that one is produced by Microsoft Corporation and the other by IBM. For our purpose, they are identical.”

“As Ms. Hunter mentioned,” he continued. “You need either MS-DOS or PC-DOS in order to make any IBM personal computer or any PC-compatible computer made by others—I’ll just call them PCs from now on—work. A computer by itself can’t do anything. It needs software to work. Software is a set of instructions that tell a computer what to do. There are two basic types of software: system software and applications software. Applications software you will learn about later in the course—these are the programs that allow computers to do wonderfully useful things, like writing letters, reports and books, calculating your taxes, keeping track of large amounts of information and being able to retrieve it very quickly, or even playing games.”

“System software, on the other hand, is made up of instructions that tell the computer how to communicate and interact with all of its individual parts. Think of system software as a set of programs that wake the computer up from sleep and allow it to do useful things. A computer needs DOS to be able to communicate with all of its parts—to accept input from a keyboard, to send information to a printer, or to show you information on a monitor, for example.”

“DOS also gives you some important functions that allow you to prepare disks for use the first time—called formatting—and to copy and delete files, create directories and sub-directories, set the date and time on your computer so that files created with application software accurately reflects the date and time it was created, and do many other useful things. Without its operating system like DOS, a computer is just an expensive paperweight that sits there and does nothing.” “Kind of like your teacher,” he thought but did not say out loud.

Dan then went on to explain the process of booting DOS, and how data is stored and retrieved on floppy and hard disks, drawing illustrations of how a floppy disk and hard disk differ from a record or CD in the way that it stores information. He also illustrated how DOS allows a disk to be used like a virtual filing cabinet and the commands to create directories that are like drawers on a physical filing cabinet in which one can save and organize files.

As he lectured, Dan tried to make unfamiliar concepts accessible to students by giving a lot of examples and relating the new knowledge whenever possible to things they were already familiar with. He also stopped from time to time and asked students if they were following along and if they had questions. And he tried to involve students in the discussion and encourage them to ask questions. Along the way he was peppered with questions and he answered each in turn as fully as he could. Before he knew it, the bell rang, and he finished with “I’m sorry I’m out of time, but it was really good to have a chance to spend this time with you. And I want to welcome you to PEMTI. I hope you are successful and will enjoy your time with us.”

As students filed out on their way to their next classes, more than a half dozen students stayed behind to ask questions about computers or just to say thanks for a good class. When they had all left and before the next class filed in, he turned to Ms. Hunter and asked, “What did you get from my lecture?”

“That you should teach for me more often,” she replied with a smile, which is not what Dan was hoping to hear. He asked her to stop by his office at 4:00 p.m. when he knew she had a free period. And she said she would, returning to her magazine.

Dan grabbed his legal pad and walked out, shaking his head, heading for Bob’s office very much looking forward to a glass of wine.