Stormfuhrer (5 page)

When he walked into Mr. Hayes’ classroom, the middle-aged instructor was at the opposite end of the room near his desk, cleaning out the contents of several filing cabinets, tossing out stacks of manilla folders bulging with copies of assignments.  Large refrigerator boxes, monoliths of unequal heights, stood in rows like a memorial he had once seen in Europe.   Hayes saw him, smiled, kept working.  “How goes it my Indian friend and fellow educator?  Ready for a new year?”

“It goes well, thanks for asking, Richard.  Just cleaning out a few things.  I see you’ve been busy.”

“
I got the computer grant.”

“
Exceptional!  Where are the computers?”

“
In the boxes.”

“
They’re very big.”

“
The computers are embedded in their own desks.”

Hayes explained, as he would to others, that full implementation of the Aris MindMage software required total concentration on the part of the student.  The more focused the student, the higher the StatSat scores would be.  The boxes weren’t hermetically sealed, so there was no safety hazard.  In fact, each one had a curtain of black felt that hung just inside the mouse hole-shaped entrance.  The student would approach the box from the left side and easily sit before the “7”-shaped mail-drop module with room to spare on either side. 

Still standing at the classroom door on the side of the room opposite Hayes, Farash was intrigued with the setup, so intrigued that he did not catch the part about students actually working inside the boxes.  Rather, he simply thought the boxes were the containers in which the computers and desks arrived.  He thought their sizes a bit large to justify their probable contents, but this wasn’t the first time he was confronted with the over-packaging of American products, always boxed to make the contents look like more than what they actually were.

It was a month into the school year before Farash made his first visit to Hayes’ classroom for a round of occupational therapy.  It was mid-morning and some students had been sleeping through one of his lectures.  He'd had enough.  He looked through Hayes’ narrow window and saw . . . nothing.  There was no light on in the room.  Perhaps Hayes was absent.  No, Farash had seen him earlier in the day, coming back from the faculty restroom on the upper floor, swinging his large, stained coffee mug.

Farash tapped on the window and waited. 

No response. 

He tried the handle. 

Locked.

Farash went back to his room, pretending that all was normal.  At the bell, Farash rushed into the hall to see if Hayes would appear at his door.  Hayes was at his open door and students were filing out.  The fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling above the classroom were fully lit.  He and his students had been there the whole time.

“Mr. Hayes if I could speak with you for a moment.”

“
Sure.”

“
These students have no respect for authority.  Why do they sleep so much?  Do they not sleep at home?  Aren't they given curfews?”

“
Hm.”  Hayes stood at his door, non-committal.  He smiled as the next group of students shuffled past him, some smiling back, others ignoring him completely.

Farash related more of the situation to Richard.  Hayes, despite his best intentions, broke out into a grin, staring at the floor and shaking with suppressed laughter.

Farash now smiled broadly and sadly, showing bone-white teeth and dark gums above his bleached-white button-up long-sleeved shirt.  “It is funny, do you not think so, sir?  I have barely had them a month and they sleep in my class like zombies.”  Hayes shook his head in condolement but said nothing.  He was distracted by an idea and, in reality, barely heard the man.  Farash sighed and walked back into his room, shutting the door with some force; it was now his conference period.  Hayes felt a twinge of guilt, but experience had taught him that whatever advice he chose to give Farash, the man would never implement any changes in his teaching style.  In the few years he had known Farash, giving both encouragement and detailed critiques were equally pointless.

Later that day, Farash returned.  The room was dark again.  This time, the room was unlocked.  There was the barely audible sound of typing coming from some boxes, silence from others, as he entered.  Muffled as it was, the typing sounded almost inaudible, like distant rain tapping on a flat pane of glass.  Only specks of stars pierced the window that had apparently been painted over from the inside. Outside there was full daylight.

Hayes was sitting at his desk near the window on the far side of the room.  He had a reading light attached to a hardcover book and seemed engrossed, not noticing the entry of the instructor.

“Where are your students?”  Farash asked from the middle of the room.  He had thought that Hayes was alone in the room.  Hayes looked up.  Perhaps Farash was upset about earlier this morning--Richard’s laughter and perhaps the fact that he hadn’t answered his frantic knock the period before that. 

“
In those boxes.” Hayes said and glanced back at the novel.

Farhat Farash’s eyes were starting to acclimate to the dim room.  Some tiny hints of light peered from the base of some of the boxes in intervals, probably from the LEDs embedded in small, black boxes from which wires also trailed and snaked throughout the room along the sides of the walkways, leading ultimately to about a dozen newly-placed sockets along the walls.  Some light from the students’ monitors might also be seen escaping from the other side of the boxes but not from this side of the room.  From this side it was like being in a dark warehouse.

Farash turned to look at the boxes, sitting down on the desk next to Hayes, looking at him with the most apparent question mark that he could muster.  Hayes said nothing.  They sat quietly, both listening to the drone of the aircon and light tapping, which Farash could now hear. 

After some moments, a cry could be heard.  It was as if a student in one of the closer boxes was laughing or crying or perhaps both at the same time.  The sound stopped and typing continued.  Then another laugh—or cry.

Hayes left his desk and motioned for Farash to join him beside the box from whence the curious sound had come.  He pushed the black felt to the side, exposing a female wearing a headset, completely immersed in what was happening on the screen though nothing really seemed to be happening.  Actually, it was difficult to tell from this angle what the screen held.  It wasn’t the Aris MindMage program.  That was certain.

As Farash tried to figure out what the student was looking at, the student turned with a brief glance at Farash, a sort of sightless stare, making the teacher jump.  Her gaze returned back to the screen as if she hadn’t seen the man.  The student’s fingers were busily moving in the gloves, suspended in air at the sides of the monitor.  The black gloves had no fingertips, allowing the student to type when necessary.  The gloves were covered with tiny metal studs, apparently sensors of some kind that could be identified in their three-dimensional space by an unseen receiver.  Occasionally, the girl would lift one hand or the other, waving fingers as if putting the screen into a trance, and then resume typing with both hands or manipulating the mouse ball.

“This is indeed a unique teaching method you have implemented Mr. Hayes,”  Farash said encouragingly, as Hayes led him to the door of the room.  Hayes knew the man would seek a further opinion from the campus principal regarding this “new teaching method.”  Farash would indeed need to hear the principal’s opinion on such an odd  practice before he could truly form one of his own. 

Hayes shut the door behind Mr. Farash and smiled, flipping a pen through his fingers.  With the many contradictory teaching theories and philosophies floating around, he could spin his ideas into any form he desired if faced with difficulties.  He could argue traditional drill-and-kill and get just as many proponents on his side as a project-based or quasi-synaptic method.  Point was, though, he knew this idea had serious potential and was unlike any of them, except perhaps the online simulations, but those were few and weak in their current state. The Game was the exception.

A moment later a bell rang, the lights came on, and students slowly and reluctantly began to emerge from their cardboard caves, taking up their backpacks from along the back wall and, saying nothing to Mr. Hayes, filed out of the room, some exchanging excited whispers.  Others walked in morbid silence.

Currently, Richard was using the software the grant required during about 40% to 50% of the instruction time.  When a student had completed a sub-unit, s/he would then open up Hayes’ seemingly textless browser--his own invention--which could be had with the press of alt+del+v, the browser that took the student to the Valkyrie’s reality, encapsulated in an historical, fact-based virtual world of the 1930’s and ‘40s, a reality that was somehow tailor-made for each student’s psycho-social and emotional needs, it seemed.   After all, not a single student complained about his or her role in the game.  Each avatar was different, each character was somehow tailored to a student’s own personality, at least as far as Hayes could gather from the questions he would occasionally ask them.  Complex synaptic readers, ones he had read about in Computer Science Monthly, must be the cause.  Algorithms gathered data from the gloves--data involving pulse, respiration, and movement.  These things could predict much about one’s mental state, especially over time.   He had no idea how the game placed students in their appropriate avatars so quickly at the onset, some only a few minutes after first opening the browser.  Clearly, the program knew from information acquired through the gloves who was playing at any given moment.  There was thus no need for logins and none were required.  No student was ever mistaken for another student.  Richard silently gave homage to the Valkyrie builders responsible, whoever they actually were.

Hayes still incorporated the Aris MindMage into his curriculum.  He had to; it was part of the grant.  He would have to submit reports, eventually.  This meant that students would need to finish a certain number of sub-units each semester, according to the software literature.  It had been Mr. Hayes' particular requirement, therefore, that a student must finish a sub-unit of the MindMage each period before joining the Game. 

But it wasn't long before the 40-50% of class time devoted to the Aris MindMage soon dropped to 30%, then 25%, though he hadn’t decreased the workload.  Students were scurrying through the Aris MindMage to get to the Game before losing valuable class time.    Their scores on the MindMage, however, hadn't dropped, only the time it took them to finish lessons, which meant overall performance was improving.  Some students were even coming before and after school to get sub-units completed beforehand so that all their class time could be devoted to what actually mattered to them, the Game.  One student even completed MindMage sub-units in a mind-blowing ten minutes, on a regular basis, in order to use the remaining “tutoring” time for the Game.

A few weeks had passed before Farash would approach Hayes’ classroom door again.  Farash had again left his students in a huff, followed as he went, by giggles.  This time, Farash knocked rather solidly on the oak-veneered door, left arm akimbo with a fist resting on his white chinos.  It wasn’t long before Hayes opened it and Farash squeezed in gratefully, as if now shielded from what had followed him through the hall.  Hayes’ classroom was fully lit up this time.

“Can I observe?”  He smiled, pitifully.

“
Sure. What for?”  Hayes knew what for.  Farash needed to hide.  Passing the boxes, Hayes invited Farash to sit next to him on his desk, as usual.  Farash sat, smiling in relief, as if no students were currently populating the forsaken classroom next door.  The aircon blew hard into the room, masking any possible sound coming from the columns of monolithic boxes.  Occasionally, one box would stir, bumped from within by a gloved hand or elbow perhaps raised too high.

“
How’s . . . “ Hayes struggled to remember the name of his colleague’s wife “Amala?”  He wasn't good at small talk, but the silence was becoming awkward.

Farash stared straight ahead, not at the boxes, but at some nebulous thing on the wall that both classrooms shared. “Good . . . good . . .” He began.  Then, he put a hand to his forehead and shook his head.  He was silent.

Hayes, arms crossed, didn’t pursue it and decided to take a stroll around the room while Farash collected his emotions.  He moved between the boxes, checking the cables and plugs that ran along the edges.  At a few of the boxes he stopped and listened.  Soon, he was back at the wide desk, sitting beside his mentee.  Today, the classroom window was open to let out some of the aircon that had been blowing especially cold during the last few days though it was already October.  Both glanced outside through the open window on Hayes’ right and saw drops of rain sparkle through the sunshine.  Darker clouds were forming in the distance. 

“
She thinks I’m an an idiot.”  This wasn’t something Hayes had expected.

“
I tell her about my day, like a little girl, a samanyameye.  She used to rub my head and caress my woes with her fingernails.  Now, she just watches television while I talk, pretending to listen.  I know she thinks of me as a coward.”

“
Maybe” Hayes began and then hesitated.  “Maybe teaching isn’t your thing.”  He didn’t want to add injury to injury.  Amala had probably said as much as well.  Naturally, Farash wouldn’t hear of it.