The best teacher I ever had was my eighth grade science teacher, and he taught something much more important than science. “I’m going to lie to you,” he told us at the beginning of term. “I’m going to lead you down the garden path. It’s going to be your job to figure out when I’m not telling the truth.”

Okay….

So I remember this one experiment he had us do. We were going to measure the speed of electricity. Stay with me, here. He had a battery on one side of the room, and a wire ran from the positive terminal, through an old fashioned knife switch, all the way around the perimeter of the room to a light on the other side, and then back around to the negative terminal on the battery. He divided us into teams. Each team had one person to measure the distance the electricity had to travel to light up the bulb, another person to measure the time lapse, and a third to perform the calculation, distance over time divided by the square root of how dumb are you. It was all very scientific, or at least as scientific as you could get in the eighth grade, careful measuring, timing and calculating. I don’t remember how he did it, but he added a phony time lapse in there somewhere, and then he stood back want waited to see how long it took for the light to go on.

So to speak. It was awesome, watching the mouths drop open as we figured out, one at a time, that we were being scammed.

I wish I could remember the guy’s name. What he actually taught us, though, was that we needed to wake up. We needed to get into the habit of thinking critically, of applying the rules of common sense to the nonsense coming our way, or else we would fall victim to every baloney peddler we met.

That teacher repeated the lesson several times during the course of the school year, and I have to say that it made his classes much more enjoyable and engaging than all the other ones I sat through. It was, and is, an important lesson to learn. And we are all capable of lapses, here and there. Time shares, anyone? Flat-earth society memberships on sale, act now before they’re gone! Hillary Clinton and Rudi Giuliani are using flu shots to implant mind control chips in your arm!

Baloney salesmen abound.

Wake up.