Surely, This Life Was Good. And Educational.

The man responsible for a large number of educational earworms, Bob Dorough, passed away Monday at the age of 94. Dorough wrote many of the songs used in the Schoolhouse Rock! project of short cartoons which aimed to teach kids some basic facts about things like math, the parts of speech and history. These would air during the sessions of cartoon and sugary-cereal bingeing that constituted a kid's Saturday morning during the 1970s and 80s.

Dorough wrote the music and lyrics for all 11 multiplication videos and sang all but two of them, "I Got Six" and "Figure Eight." One of them, which I'd forgotten, actually introduced the concept of the duodecimal or base 12 counting system. Given our ten fingers and toes we adapted a base-10 system, but we do use 12s in keeping time and in some measurements.

After that first set of videos was finished, Dorough was joined by other writers but did contribute some more during the new series. He sang less often as well.

The series ended in the early 1980s but returned in 1994 with Money Rock, a set of videos designed to teach basic economics like budgeting, interest and loans and even the national debt. Unfortunately these are not required viewing in order to be sworn in as a public official. Dorough wrote only "The Check's in the Mail" in this series but sang on "Dollars and Sense," "Tyrannosaurus Debt" and "This for That" as well.

A special series was commissioned for the Bicentennial, covering some aspects of U.S history and the operation of the government. Dorough wrote and sang on two of the original nine episodes, "The Shot Heard 'Round the World" and "Mother Necessity," and helped write "Sufferin' Till Suffrage." He also was involved in two of the three additional America Rock tunes. One was 1979's "Three Ring Government," which involves separation of powers and which should probably be played on heavy rotation in Capitol & White House elevators for the next billion years. "I'm Gonna Send Your Vote to College" explains the workings of the Electoral College in the election of the U.S. president and could have been useful to the 2016 Clinton campaign.

Dorough also contributed to one song in the Science Rock series and a couple in the Earth Rock ecology-based series. The latter never aired on television but was released on a DVD. He continued to work well into his later years, releasing albums up through 2015, but would almost always be called on to do one of his Schoolhouse songs at a concert.

Sesame Street has a lot to recommend it in a lot of ways, but when my mind reaches back to try to grab hold of how to use a part of speech or understand one of the functions of government, more often than not it's bebopping along to the words and tunes of good ol' Mr. Schoolhouse, Bob Dorough. Rest in peace, Teach.