aside from all the required college classes with desiccated old instructors doling out daily chapter assignments , a certain amount of required outside reading and the re-interpretation of tax law changes that each student must digest and regurgitate , some of it going back to the nineteenth century , college for me had one saving grace : in my junior year i took a course in criminal syndicates of the southwest , taught by an overweight and edgy former trial lawyer who had been in a car collision years before that had left him a paraplegic .