No Quarter Needed

Snapshot of the English office over the past week; English teachers (mainly male English teachers) glued to the two computer monitors, intensely concentrating, pecking at the arrow keys . . . some folks (including yours truly) poking at a rakishly angled keyboard, slanted diagonally off the desk, others-- more spatially gifted-- slanting their brain instead . . . and if you haven't guessed, we were playing a free version of Q*Bert, but don't get all up in arms about your tax money, this was pedagogically condoned, we weren't shirking our jobs as educators, in fact, we were being productive, as several teachers were using a recent Grantland article about marathon video game playing called "The Kings of Q*Bert" in class, so this was "research" for the lesson (and during this research, I briefly held the department high score -- which was written on the white board in the office -- but then Kevin overtook me by an unattainably wide margin and so I wisely chose to stop playing . . . unlike the lunatics in the Grantland article).