Walter and Winston live in a world they think boring, though Walter is unaware that his father is a champion Snarker from way back. Genghis Khan High School is so dreadful an educational environment little learning takes place there. As Walter says, "Besides, at Genghis Khan, being half asleep helps kill the pain of spending a whole day with nothing worthwhile to do!" The best education the school has to offer is cheating, because "but it's more challenging to cheat. At least this way, we're actually learning some skills." Genghis Khan High School shares many traits with schools in Pinkwater's other books, most particularly the same biology teacher, who seems to haunt the author's scholastic memory: "I assume that somewhere there's a school in which the biology class doesn't consist of a bunch of miserable kids locked in a room with a poor old lunatic every day, but...