less than a week before the 2002 school year was scheduled to start, an advanced placement biology teacher quit. she was only one of two. at the time, california suffered fromg an apocalyptic teacher shortage, so the administerial scambling to avoid the ire of berkeley's affluent and motivated parents was legendary.

enter: robo-delp.

"robo-delp" was never an official moniker. it was the students' name for the scheme concocted by the school administration, a scheme that was pretty ridiculous, but not so ridiculous that the students couldn't make it more ridiculous by calling it something stupid. the idea was simple: the other ap bio teacher, mr. delp, would simply record all of his lectures on vhs tape to be replayed the following day to the classes now lacking flesh-and-blood instruction. (or something like this; i must disclose that i only heard about robo-delp's robo-instruction second-hand. i just find this story so amusing.)

how did robo-delp stack up? well, he wasn't a professorial guide of self-directed learning at the apex of berkeley high instruction, but neither did he dispense creepy racism or dangerously irresponsible sexual and legal advice. so, i dunno, a solid c? but not sustainable for long. the school needed a real teacher.

enter: the guy living my friend's basement. a few months earlier, my friend's family had entered into an au pair-like agreement with a man named joe sapp - "au pair" in that he got room and board in exchange for child care, and "-like" in that he was not an exotic foreigner on a romantic journey of emotional exploration (or a horrible ordeal of trafficking). he was just some guy. (i once knew this arrangement's genesis, but have since forgotten it.)

joe was decent. he was primarily there to care for my friend's younger siblings, but he'd also drive us teenagers around sometimes, and being twenty-something himself he found our teenage sensibilities slightly less alien than our parents did. the only concrete memory i have was of navigating the car by applause-o-meter ("should we turn left? right? STRAIGHT??"), but consider it representative.

and one day, at the height of robo-delp's reign, someone said: "hey joe, don't you have a biology degree?"

remember that teacher shortage? california was passing out emergency credentials like candy, and bachelor of science joe sapp did want a real job. a couple of weeks later, he was standing in front of high schoolers who were comparing him to videotapes of the teacher in the next classroom over. i guess he did well enough that the school kept him around, although he's apparently since departed.

the following year, my friends had him as a teacher, and they gave him no end of (good-natured) grief. for example, to demonstrate their understanding of human color-blindness, they made him a poster: a sea of green dots surrounding a collection of red ones that spelled out "JOE SUX." joe was color-blind, you see, and had to trust their explanation of their own cleverness, because he couldn't see it himself.

one of those friends recently sent me a slide from a lecture he was preparing for new medical residents, which is about as great of an endorsement of a high school biology class as i can imagine. that's berkeley high: we find our teachers in basements, and they're good.