Expect a highly disturbing inside look at public education, one that carries an R–rating (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian) for its mature treatment of school violence, high stakes testing, academic freedom, and prayer in school.

It's Friday and there are just thirteen days of school to go before summer vacation at Odyssey Middle School. But just making it to the weekend will be hard enough. There will be more parent conferences, team meetings, class disruptions, violent acts, obscenities and epiphanies before lunch than the mythical children left behind would experience in a lifetime. Then it's on to fifth period. What happens after the all–important testing is over? School doesn't wind down at the end of the year; it winds up.

Is it your worst nightmare? You're in a room with thirty–six eighth graders in a public school and somebody expects you to teach them. If you survive the next fifty minutes, you may make it through the day, if you're lucky.

THE VOTIVE PIT comes from the front lines of the conflict within the human heart that threatens to blow us up. Here is the American dream of public education turned nightmare. School has become a votive pit, a trench we have dug and into which we now pour the blood of our kids, so that the spirits of the dead can speak truths to us. Are we going to listen or not?