Chaos in a classroom. Brian "The Mack" Krakow attempts to read in spite of the spitballs flying around him. The guidance counsellor (oh, all right: Her name is Ms. Kryzanowski, and she's played by Winnie Holzman, who produced this series and continues to produce Once & Again) stomps in and tries, ineffectually, to restore order; we learn that their teacher is supposed to be Miss Mayhew (Nada Despotovich from the first episode), but that she deserted them, and Mr. Renaldi -- a Spanish teacher -- has been teaching the class, even though it's English. Jordan and one of his doofus friends poke their heads in the doorway, and after Ms. Kryzanowski is informed that the last time Mr. Renaldi appeared, he showed them the movie Alive, one of the students notices Jordan and calls out his name, whereupon Jordan reluctantly joins his class. Ms. Kryzanowski declares, "I'm going to pair you off, and you are going to write three sentences on the movie Alive, and you are going to trade papers and diagram those sentences. And I'm going to sit here and watch because my life is so empty." Heh. First of all, I think it's funny when guidance counsellors admit that they hate their jobs. Second, when I was in grade nine, I loved diagramming sentences. No kidding. Loved it. To me, it brought my favourite attribute of Math -- the fact that there could be only one correct answer -- and merged it with English, my favourite subject. We had these workbooks called The English Workshop and we'd answer the questions right there in the book, and I always made a point of doing it in pen, and as the semesters would wear on and we'd start moving on to assignments other than learning the parts of speech and so on, I would still continue marking up every sentence in the book. I was a major grammar nerd back then; now, of course, I'm much dumber and can barely remember not to use split infinitives.