The unknown strength of language lab
by Dan Maigler

Perhaps I should have known when I was presented with the immense list of rules and regulations that the new language lab was going to be a very different place. In Italian class I signed this document that said something to the effect of: If any damage should come to any equipment in this or any other language lab, anywhere, you will be held personally responsible. Furthermore, payment for any damages to said equipment will be taken out of your person in the form of barbarous whippings and forced viewings of German comedies. This, however, was just a taste of what was in store.
As I walked into the operating-room-clean language lab, I was stunned. Gone were the familiar, if archaic, microphones and gray painted peg board stations. Instead I saw, to my amazement, helicopter pilot type headsets, complete with attached mini microphone. These were set behind stations shielded by what I can only assume to be bulletproof glass (should Hillary Clinton decide to return and work on her Spanish, no doubt) and a spacious table-like counter top. On the upper left hand corner of these counters a small computer-like device could be seen. It was so far away that at first I wasn't sure it was actually there, but after forming a small search team we made the trek along the grey expanse of Station 26 to find what I now believe to be a small nuclear device. While it was extremely complex in nature, after a few moments I was able to ascertain that it had a tape deck, a call button, an attendance button, volume control and a variety of other buttons encoded in some Chinese-Arabic mixture script, which I dared not press for fear some unimaginable horror might overtake me.
After a few moments all students were seated in their proper positions, with their notebooks on the desk, pencils in hand, book bags located safely on the floor and the mysterious tapes purchased during book sales ready. Despite Mrs. Conway's direct and explicit warning one student placed some prehistoric music tape in the slot and started pounding the buttons with his greasy paw. Something akin to the emergency broadcast whistle was then heard in the room which must have been amplified to at least 90 decibels under his headset. His head swelled up like a balloon. When the room finally went silent his head shrunk to about the size of an apple. With a slight flick of her wrist Mrs. Conway tossed his limp body in a before unseen storage closet. While we had always known she was not a woman to be trifled with, no one could have envisioned the immense power she could have with this advanced technology. Needless to say, she had our undivided attention and used it to explain how we were to proceed with our lesson. Sra. Weber and Mrs. Conway would be playing the part of Big Brother, listening in to our conversations without our knowledge.
We fumbled through our dialogues connected to some unseen person across the room. Without warning, the voice of an adolescent Italian girl piped into my brain. I got to experience schizophrenia first hand with the added bonus of a foreign tongue. After several minutes of this we were stopped and forced to listen to taped examples of people's misfortunes. Joe Rodino was embarrassed to hear his own voice say in front of the entire class, "I feel like a big goof. I have nothing to say."
While the rest of the class chuckled in amusement, I realized the true goal of the language lab. The intention was to embarrass people with the sound of their own hillbilly Italian (or whatever language) so that they would speak correctly at all times or suffer pangs of anxiety. "What a brilliant idea," I thought to myself, they must have read A Clockwork Orange or something. Through technology they would destroy our freewill to speak incorrectly and neutralize our inadequacies with fear."
All in all, we've come a long way, and I love the new language lab. Where else can you go and sing along with "The Little Mermaid" in Italian and then have it used against you for subliminal programming? The new language lab: absolute learning and a cavalcade of fun.