Here’s a good sign you’ve been teaching bored high school kids too long. My son’s history homework assignment last night was to devise answers to a “Dictator Dating Game.” (His dictator was Tojo.) An Internet version of this quiz suggests students provide a “very brief and funny summary of the leader” based on questions like these.

1. What is your ideal date?

2. Where would you go and why?

3. What are your pet peeves?

4. What kind of books do you like?

5. What are your hobbies?

6. What do you do in your spare time?

7. What are your favorite methods for controlling the masses?

8. What is your favorite cartoon character?

9. If you could be any animal, what would it be and why?

Instead of merely getting the students to provide two or three paragraphs on Tojo’s life, he had to instead try to make up sad jokes about his hobbies (POW torture, perhaps?) Imagine the same jocularity about Hitler and Stalin, which other students were assigned. I tried to do what the teacher should do: convey the utter inhumanity of totalitarianism. I read my son some Tojo-related pages from Paul Johnson’s “Modern Times.” Let today’s pampered, Nintendo-besotted kids (like mine!) understand how lucky they are.