Charles Sheffield: Higher Education

To the long-suffering teachers of America

At sixteen, Rick Luban’s life was about to end. He didn’t know it yet. He thought he was all set for a good time. The first period had gone no differently from usual. Mr. Hamel had been teaching high school for thirty years—forever, in Rick’s eyes. Hamel looked like an old turtle, and like a turtle he had developed his own survival techniques. Nothing got to him; not talking in class, or eating, or farting or sleeping. Gross and direct rudeness or violence, too much even for him to ignore, he passed up the line at once to the principal’s office.

Hamel’s rule: No fuss, no muss. And if that meant no work and no learning, too, he would settle for it. He usually reached that understanding with a class before the end of its first week.

“Test today.” Hamel took no notice of the half-hearted groans. Failing an Act of God, biology tests in his class came every Tuesday and everyone knew it. “Read the questions, mark the answers. You have forty minutes.”

More out of boredom than anything else, Rick put on the earphones attached to the desk and slipped the written sheet of questions into the reader.

“Question one,” said the voice in his ear. “Five point credit. One of the animals on your screen belongs to a different class from the others. Indicate which one. For assistance on the biological definition of class, or for name identification of any of the animals shown, touch the empty box.”

The TV screen in front of Rick was divided into six rectangles. The first was empty. The second through sixth showed an ant, a butterfly, a mosquito, a spider, and a caterpillar. They were all in color, and all moved in natural settings.

Rick saw Dim Willy Puntin, Puntin the Pumpkin, reaching out to poke the icon of the caterpillar. It certainly looked grossly different from the other four. Rick snorted to himself. That was just like Hamel, trying a trick question. Rick had hardly been listening to the lesson about larval insect forms, but even a five-year-old knew that caterpillars turned into butterflies; and insects all had six legs.

Rick reached forward to touch the icon of the spider, at the same moment as Juanita Cesaro, two seats in front of him, removed her headset. She raised her hand and then stood up.

Hamel left the raised podium and moved over to her at once. Rick eased the earphones away from his head. Juanita was dim, but she was hot stuff. Half the boys in her year—including Rick—had been through Juanita; but you’d never know it from seeing her in class. She always sat demure and quiet, doing so poorly in every subject that her teachers all had trouble passing her. She never caused trouble.

“These.” Juanita waved her hand vaguely at the headset, television, and reader. “Not working.”

Hamel came around the desk and leaned over to examine the television picture. He was very careful not to touch Juanita, and careful to stand so that this fact would be apparent on the classroom videocamera recording.

Wily old turtle. No sexual harassment charges for you. Rick could see the empty box and the five icons on Juanita’s screen, just like on his own. Another clapped-out reader, it had to be. The readers were junk, breaking down all the time. Even when they worked they would only handle one size of page. School was too cheap to buy decent stuff. Not like the school the phone company ran. That place had great equipment, but it was just for kids whose mothers or fathers worked there. His mother had got herself fired for drugs six weeks after she started with them, so Rick had only been to company school for a little while. That was back in first grade, but he still remembered it well.

Hamel had apparently made up his mind about the reader. He was glancing thoughtfully around the class, finally gesturing to a girl at the back. “Belinda. For this period I want you to change seats with Juanita.”

Rick had expected that action, well ahead of the teacher’s taking it. Belinda Jacob was one of three people in the class who could read well enough to handle the test from the printed sheet, without using a reader at all. So see what reading does for you, Rick thought, as the two girls changed places. Not a damn thing. Belinda was Hamel’s star student. She had probably been halfway through her own test before she had to move—and now she was forced to start over, while Juanita would get the benefit of her right answers.

Rick grinned to himself as he settled back to listen to the rest of the questions. Unless Hamel went to the trouble of noting the point where the two had changed over, which wasn’t at all likely, Juanita for the first time in her life was going to score—on a test.

The broken reader was all that the first period could offer to relieve the boredom. That was predictable with Mr. Hamel. Dullness was the rule. What Rick and his friends had been looking forward to for a week was second period. They were supposed to get a new civics teacher then, right out of training.

“Willis Preebane, his name is. An’ if I can’t have some fun with him, I’m losing my touch.”

Screw Savage was speaking. Any one of the three might have offered the same statement, but Screw had special credibility. He was a school legend. Two years before, by a mixture of near-inaudible insult and off-videocamera dumb insolence, he had made a new teacher take a swing at him on her very first day. She had been fired on the spot. Screw was provided with a groveling apology from Principal Rigden. His parents had sued school and county anyway, and been paid a hefty out-of-court settlement. Now Screw tended to get high grades without ever doing homework or handing in tests.

“But we’d all like to have first go at him,” Screw went on, “so we do it fair, an’ draw lots.”

Rick and the other two were walking between classes, heading for Room 33 with Screw Savage leading the way. The corridors were their usual confusion with backed-up lines in front of the metal and plastique detectors. Hoss Carlin, walking next to Rick, took a step to his left and reached out to brush his fingers over the breasts of a girl walking the other way. She slapped his hand away, but she turned to give him a big smile and said, “See you tonight.”

“Watch it, Hoss,” Rick warned. “You’re in deep shit if they have that on camera.”

“Nah.” Hoss jerked his head upward. “Checked already.”

The ceiling videocamera for the corridor was ruined, lens broken and body a shattered hulk. It was like this all over the school. Every time a corridor camera was repaired, within a day or two it would be smashed.

“Anyway,” Hoss went on. “Jackie’d be on my side if they did see me. She’d tell ’em I was swattin’ a wasp off her tit or somethin’. ”

The three youths were almost at Room 33. Most of the class was already there, standing waiting outside the locked door.

“Mebbe Preebane’s not as dumb as you think, Screw,” Hoss said. “He knows at least that much. Lockin’ the door stops us givin’ him a welcome.”

“So one of us has to get real inventive once we’re inside.” Savage turned around, three toothpicks sticking up from between the knuckles of his closed right fist. “Short one has first go at Papa Willis. Who wants first pick?”

“Me,” Hoss said, and grimaced with annoyance when the toothpick he pulled was fall length. “Lucky with women, unlucky in the draw. Go on, Rick. You got one out of two chance now.”

Rick plucked the toothpick from between Savage’s first and second finger, and grinned when he saw it was a fragment only an inch and a half long.