It was one of those days I...

It was one of those days I knew I never should have become a history teacher. I should have gone into the hard sciences. Physics, for instance. Then I wouldn’t have felt so strange standing in front of my class and thinking of vacuums and black holes in space.

I was talking about the Aztecs--trying to describe them as something more than the empire Cortez conquered with a few horses and a little gunpowder. I wanted to give my freshmen an alternative view. Not as radical a project as challenging their John Wayne view of the American West, but I’d work up to that.

I told them they could learn about the Aztecs’ daily life at a free slide show and lecture by archeologist Patricia Anawalt at 8 p.m. Thursday in the Lenart Auditorium at UCLA’s Fowler Museum of Cultural History. Information: (310) 206-8934.

Anawalt’s four-volume “Codex Mendoza,” I quoted from the press release, “provides a rare glimpse into the Aztecs’ pre-Hispanic world. . . . A new baby is ritually bathed, willful children are properly reared, youths dutifully submit to arduous training, brave warriors rise through illustrious ranks, litigants appeal in courts of law. . . . Exemplary behavior is consistently reinforced.”

The kids looked blank.

The point is, I said, these were people like you and me, only different. And I gave them a fact to chew on: When Cortez arrived in the central valley of Mexico, about 15 million Indians lived there. Within a century, they had dwindled to 1 million. Disease and despair killed most of them, I said, not gunpowder.

Another blank. Don’t kids like numbers? I asked myself. They loved Jaime Escalante’s numbers. How did he do it?

But it turned out there was one thing my students did know about the Aztecs. One single, solitary idea. It had expanded like a pinch of gas in a vacuum, maybe one molecule per cubic mile, to take up all the space in their minds.

And, because it was such a juicy, sensational idea, it was all they wanted to know about the Aztecs. Like a black hole, it sucked everything into itself and gave off no light.

Rachel? I asked.

“They sacrificed people on altars to the Sun God.”

Jamaal?

“And cut out their hearts.”

Phuong?

“With obsidian knives.”

Jose?

(My honor student, my star, whose father owns Azteca Semiconductor, no less!)

“And ate ‘em, man.”

What can I do? The Aztecs are gone, Quetzalcoatl bless them, and who cares that their bloodthirsty image has been used to justify their demise? I can’t blame the kids. But how can I warn them that they, too, might be squeezed down into a nub of a cliche or diluted into abstract next-to-nothingness in somebody else’s mind? As weapons go, swords and harquebuses are gentle compared to that.