I don't know if Twain would have been comfortable teaching *about* his own works. (And who would?) After all, the preface to Huck Finn says, "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." However, I think that he was quite adept at finding good ways to teach and remember facts. For example, his story "How to Make History Dates Stick," available at http://www.twainquotes.com/HistoryDates/HistoryDates.html discusses some techniques that he used to help himself remember the sections of his speeches, using a few sentences, which he had a hard time remembering, and later changed to be a few drawings, which helped him remember effortlessly. He said, of the drawings, "That was a quarter of a century ago; the lecture vanished out of my head more than twenty years ago, but I would rewrite it from the pictures--for they remain." This is similar to the techniques used by many modern "memory experts" to build a series of images in their mind that would help them remember more easily. The rest of the article talks about how he helped his daughters learn the dates of the reigns of British monarchs. He laid out a series of signs along his road at "the farm" (Quarry?). The length of each stretch showed the length of the reign of each monarch, with one foot indicating a year, with drawings and colors on each sign to represent the monarch. I'm reminded of psychologist A. R. Luria's fascinating book, "The Mind of a Mnemonist," in which he describes a memory expert with the rare condition of "synaesthesia", for whom a word or sound would not only trigger an auditory response, but due to some interesting wiring in the brain, would tend to trigger repeatable smells, and sights, and feels, and shapes. The patient used this ability, and worked at other memory techniques, to build a "story" around things he was trying to remember and developed a prodigious ability to remember series of words or numbers even many years after being presented them for the first time. Twain would probably be an interesting and inventive teacher. Alan Eliasen