 You have stated that during each of your American history courses, you are running an intellectual boot camp. What do you mean by this? Well, of course you know that's a joke, because I'm not very militaristic, and I don't want to be an authority figure, and I don't want them to think in lockstep. My job isn't to make them conformist thinkers, which boot camp implies. Everybody gets a short hair pack now, put on the same uniform, and march around the parade ground. In fact, I'm trying to achieve the opposite. I guess all I mean by intellectual boot camp is to let the students know that learning is a difficult process. It can be really fun, really exciting, but to get anything out of it takes a lot of work, a lot of hard thinking, it takes a lot of confusion, and a lot of discipline. I mean that's just the way learning is. And there's no reward without hard work, and I guess that's what I mean by an intellectual boot camp. But at the same time, when I say intellectual boot camp, I don't mean that these are just wall recruits, you know, blank slates with no thoughts of their own, and that I'm somehow going to fill them up like a drill sergeant with a military code or something. I mean these are thinking aware, smart people. They wouldn't be a westerner if they weren't. And they demonstrate to me all the time in the classroom that they're up to the challenge. And they already come into the room with all kinds of individual intelligence, wisdom, experience, even at 18 years of age. They bring a lot to the table in the classroom, and collectively at 125 altogether, the amount of collective knowledge and wisdom that we all have in that room is incredible. But then college is about refining that wisdom and that intelligence to be disciplined in your approach about knowledge and learning. How do we know what we know? And so in that sense, that's what I mean by an intellectual boot camp. How to become critical thinkers, disciplined thinkers, and in history that's especially important. I think history is the hardest subject in the world. Chemistry, physics, peace of mind, although I can't do it. I'm not inclined that way. But history is very difficult because it's so much of a philosophy. It's not a science. And recreating the past or understanding the past, going back to the past and knowing it for what it was is not an easy task. It's a complicated place. The past is a complicated place. It's a noisy place. Because just like today, in our society, the present is a complicated place. How do we know what we know about the present? How do we define what it is? Everybody has a perspective on it. The past is no different. There's multiple voices. There's no such thing as one past, one truth of what the past meant. So we have to put together all those noisy voices and understand it. And that takes interpretation. That takes critical thinking to make sense out of it. So when I say intellectual boot camp, that's just fooling around. I'm just joking. But there's a kernel of truth to it.