(Indiana Jones to Marion Ravenwood in the climactic scene of Raiders)

Shadows dance on the rough walls, revealed by a break in the sulfurous, roiling mist. A flickering torch illuminates looming, grotesque figures. Their empty eye sockets drip with blood. Shriveled, leathery flesh hangs loosely on cheekbones. Gnarled fingers protrude from their hunched, shrouded forms.

These are my minions. When remarks so egregious that I cannot bear them emerge from a student’s lips, I call upon these specters to visit her in the night. They slip from their grim lair, enter their prey’s stylish suburban home, and swirl around her bed leaving an evanescent trail in the gloom.

“Susannnnnnah,” they moan in unison. She starts upright covering her eyes.

“We hear you whined in your lesson today,” they accuse. “We hear you said you were frustrated, that you said that you couldn’t get it, that you’d never get it. Did you say those things?”

Cowering, Susannah is without words. The lesson was a blur. She couldn’t have been that negative, she thinks. “If my children acted like that at soccer or baseball, I’d sit them down and remind them about patience and sticking with the job, and seeing it through because that’s how good people act. These creatures must have heard wrong!”

But my minions had heard correctly, and they wait in the shadows with their demonic tools and loathsome aspect to bring redress when a student crosses the line from introspection into unproductive self abasement.

[Other instructors who wish to outsource their punitive corrective measures are invited to contact Bill. His ghouls are sometimes available for short term contract work as their schedules permit.]