My preparation for teaching my course, a course titled "Engineering-Systems Applications" is an interview with Dean Eng. Dean Eng asks me my teaching experience and the only thing I can think of is tutoring. I tell her I tutored a Martian settler and she asks me if I could possibly get him to enroll in my class here. He could audit for free.
I use the terminal in her office to send Alexi Dormov a telex.
Her major piece of advice is to wait until to class has started and then walk in without looking at the class, walk straight to the blackboard and write my name. Then announce my name, the class name and call numbers and say that anyone who needs to add the class to their schedule should see me afterwards.
I assume this is some method of intimidating students with professorial manner.
"Not at all," she explains, smiling in a kind of motherly way, "it's a method of reducing stage fright. This way, when you turn around and look at all those faces you'll have something to say."
She is absolutely correct. There are fifteen people officially registered for my course, but when I turn around after writing 'Zhang Zhong Shan' on the board there are easily thirty people in the classroom. I've never talked in front of so many people in my life and the minute I start with my lecture they're going to know that I'm a fraud. I make my announcement about which class this is and nobody moves. Thirty faces, almost half of them ABC, all looking at me, most of them Invierno's age. My knees are shaking. I stand behind the desk.
I glance back at the board behind me. The class before mine is a required politics class, someone has diagrammed the classic Marxist historical progression on the board: Primitive Society to Feudalism, Feudalism to Industrial Revolution to Capitalism to Proletariat Revolution to Socialism to Communism. All sorts of irrelevant things run through my mind. My first year in China, my roommate, Xiao Chen, was a Scientific History major. I can remember helping him study for exams. I can still remember the three major advancements in pure science in the twentieth century: Relativity, Quantum Physics and Chaos Studies.
"I know you are all going to be disappointed," I say, "but this is an Engineering course, not a politics course."
Some of them smile politely.
"There is a member of the class who is present but several minutes behind us," I say. "We will have a Martian auditing the class by monitor, so please speak up loudly so Alexi can hear your contributions to class." My voice sounds very shaky. They cannot possibly believe I am a teacher. But they all sit very expectantly. When I start to talk, they all start their transcribers, highlighters ready.
When I wrote it, my opening lecture seemed brilliant. I don't really want to teach anything today, I just wanted to get my feet wet and entertain them a little. Looking at my notes I realize I'm going to bore them all bonkers. I talk about how we think of using systems, and how we assume that we jack into the machine.
"Stimulation of your nervous system from an artificial system is illegal," I say. "Why?"
There is silence. Madre de Dios, what do I do if no one answers the question? Then one young man raises his hand and I call on him gratefully.
"Because it's addicting," he says.
"How many of you have ever been to see a kite race?" I ask. It sounds like one of those teacher-questions (I am amazed at how much I sound like a teacher.) Most of them raise their hands. "Well, a flier experiences the kite as a kind of second body," I say. "The flier feels the kites sail as if they were the flier's wing, and if the kite develops a structural problem then the flier feels it as an ache. Something has got to be stimulating the flier's nervous system," I say. They glaze over. Did you know you can see boredom? I have other examples, the medical stuff in China, for one, but I decide to just finish up on fliers and forget other examples. I tell them about the system at Wuxi, where people didn't jack in. Some of them look interested but nobody uses their highlighters. "In the future we might all be cyborgs linked into systems. In that future, we would all be organic engineers." This sounds like a teacher lecture. Amazing how you don't have to have any training to sound like every dull teacher you ever had in middle school.
I explain about organic engineers. I expected the lecture to take an hour, but I find it's only taken twenty-five minutes. I tack on a little about the relationship of science to society, about how social thought always lags behind scientific change. Mostly because of thinking about Xiao Chen. Then I realize I need an example.
What's an example of how social thought lags behind scientific change? I mean, it's a cliche, but other than talking even more about how everyone is afraid of feedback but how it is the way things will go in the future, I really can't think of anything. Religion. But everybody knows about religion, and it's not relevant to them.
"Take for example the diagram behind me on the board. Does anyone recognize it?"
They all look at me, blank. Of course they all recognize it. But it's politics. Nobody in their right mind is going to volunteer anything about politics. Keep your head down, don't get into trouble. Nervousness makes me a tyrant, I point at one young woman. "Tell me what it means."
She looks around, hoping for escape. Normally I'd feel sympathy for her but now I am only concerned with how to fill another fifteen minutes.
"Ah, it's Marx's analysis-"
Her voice is so soft I can barely hear her. "Sweetheart," I say, trying to put her at ease, "you've got to talk loud enough to be heard on Mars."
Louder she says, "It's a Marxist diagram of historical progression."
"Right. Now, what the diagram says is that primitive society eventually organizes into feudal society. Usually as a result of farming. That society eventually allows a few landlords-whether you call them lords or landholders or whatever-to accrue enough capital to invest in something other than farming. That capital forms the base for an industrial revolution, which paves the way for capitalist society. Capitalism exploits workers the way Feudalism exploits serfs. But capitalism is an unstable system, with it's boom and bust cycles, it's violent corrections, and eventually there is a proletariat revolution and a socialist system is established. So far so good?"
I expect them to be bored out of their minds, they've been chanting this relationship since junior middle school, but they are rigid with attention, the glaze of boredom is gone. Apparently there is some novelty in having an engineering teacher lecture them on politics.
"Okay," I say, "when did China move from primitive to feudal?"
"The Emperor Qin," someone says dutifully.
"From feudal to capitalist?"
There is a moment of silence. Finally an ABC raises his hand.
"Laoshi," he says formally, 'Teacher,' "Mao Zedong changed the diagram. The revolution in China was a peasant revolution, not a proletariat revolution."
"Wrong," I say. The young man's eyes get large. "Lenin changed the diagram. Other than that you are perfectly correct." I sound like Comrade Wei, my calculus teacher in middle school. Marx and Lenin I hated that man.
There is a nervous laugh. I find it very exciting to have their attention. "Can you name me an example of a country that did have a proletariat revolution?"
A young woman pops out without raising her hand, "We did."
"Right. In the early twentieth century the national debt and the trade deficit of the old United States precipitated the second depression. In effect, the country went bankrupt, and as a result, so did the economy of every first world nation at the time except for Japan, which managed to keep from total bankruptcy but lost most of it's markets, and for Canada and Australia, which created the Canadian-Australian alliance, a holding measure to preserve their own systems which survives until this day. The Soviet Union also went into bankruptcy because it was deeply invested in the U.S. bond market, whatever that was," they all laugh, we've all been taught that the U.S.S.R. was deeply hurt in the economic collapse because of their involvement in the U.S. bond market, but I'll be damned if I ever met anyone who really knew what that meant. "And what did China do?"