While pouring coffee from his single cup brewer, he thought about how controversial and cutting edge school had seemed then. The DT monitored and measured their progress every step of the way, providing instant feedback. No waiting for papers to be graded. No weeks of not “getting” the material until some the teacher noticed (if she or he did at all) the problem. No moving through the curriculum at the “average” student’s pace while the slower ones fell farther and farther behind and the quicker ones grew bored. The teacher, through the DT, recognized their strengths and played to them; identified their weaknesses and helped them address them. It had encouraged William to do group projects with Leslie. Their learning styles complimented each other well, and they’d pushed each other to co-valedictorian status.
Through the DT, education had become again that visionary ideaclass="underline" one teacher to one student. Grades were replaced by competencies. When they demonstrated they knew the material they moved on. He remembered when students were “graded,” and the whole idea seemed ludicrous now. He and Leslie had joked about it. Leslie had said, “Any grade other than an ‘A’ indicates that learning isn’t done yet.” William agreed then. He still agreed, but he couldn’t muster any passion for the thought. He put his coffee down. It tasted dull and flat this morning.
Although William had never physically met Leslie—she lived in Vancouver while the farthest north he’d gotten was Wyoming—they’d kept in close contact since graduation through their DeskTops. Over the years, gray streaks gradually marked her auburn hair, but she laughed the same way and often. Every once in a while, he’d see a glimpse of the pose in the photograph. His fingers ached to type her code to tell her “Hi,” to find out how she would face the day, but she’d told him that her DT would be locked away for months while she real-toured Europe. “I’m going to touch the Arc de Triomph,” she’d said crustily to him last week. “And I don’t want some voice in my ear telling me anything that I can’t learn by being there.”
Six hundred students, he thought, and Leslie’s not here to lighten me up.
He tapped the blinking reminder, calling up the two problem messages the v-Bill couldn’t handle.
Fourteen-year-old Kimo Yu’s mother died yesterday, the first message said, and she wouldn’t be able to make today’s field trip to the canyons of Canyon Lands National Park. William scrolled through her history: generally a type four, agressive/abstract learner, she’d made good progress in spatial visualizations and practical math. Her current area of interest, geology, didn’t fit her vocational potential profile well, but the DT had planned a course of study that would funnel her back into her strengths by the time she was sixteen. The DT highlighted a closeness to her mother and recommended a two week suspension of instruction, followed by a gradual reintegration into the program with an emphasis on spiritual and grief relieving literature. William noticed Guenther’s Death Be Not Proud on the reading list and deleted it. “Too grim,” he muttered.
He studied her image for a moment: thick glasses—glasses were in again as a fashion accessory—covering non-oriental looking eyes, then he recorded a personal condolence and sent it. He couldn’t recall ever meeting her, and the DT confirmed that in her six years of study under his guidance, they’d never crossed paths.
The second message came from Jonas Wynn’s father. Jonas, the note said, had dropped his student DT out the window of the Tampa to Denver transrail at better than one hundred and forty miles an hour. Not only did Dad have to explain to transrail officials how his son could get what was supposed to be an unopenable window open, he also had to replace the DT before today’s field trip.
William tapped for Jonas’s picture and profile. A hard-eyed boy stared back at him angrily. Twelve years old. Type six, passive/defiant. Something about the boy’s face seemed familiar, and William searched his personal attention records for the last six months, finding that five weeks ago he’d spent a few minutes trying to come up with an appropriate response to an awful short story the boy had written that involved, among other things, a legless cow cattle drive. Two months before that, William saw, he had tweaked the DT’s recommendation for medical treatment for what the boy’s doctor had called “willful attention deficit disorder.” Neither Biomeds or Chemmeds helped, and even the new attention/retention hormone enhancements made no difference. William thought, in the old days, before DT education, Jonas would have been labeled “learning disabled.” Now educators recognized that everyone was learning disabled in some form or another, and more than half the population received meds as part of the curriculum.
For Jonas, the meds were dropped and the DT had been reduced to situational learning prompts since the boy was ten, offering information whenever Jonas appeared interested in anything. As a result, the DT reported, Jonas showed interest less often and responded to the prompts less appropriately as time progressed.
William frowned. The boy should have been flagged months ago. Why not? He ran a quick diagnostic and found that the DT had labeled the boy as fitting the type six profile perfectly, and that his behavior was not outside of that learning style’s norm. Since Jonas’s Individual Education Plan, or I.E.P., corresponded to his progress, attitude and actions, there’d been no flag.
“Of course,” murmured William. “If the damned computer says he’s not learning anything, and he actually doesn’t learn anything, prediction matched the outcome and nothing must be wrong.” William arranged for a replacement DT to be ready for Jonas at the park entrance.
He called up the day’s progress monitor which showed him responding to each of his six-hundred students’ I.E.P.s. The DT, through six hundred v-Bills, simultaneously lectured, directed reading, contributed to a network panel discussion, asked questions, offered advice, emotionally counseled, annotated literature, praised achievement and motivated the underachievers.
Messages flicked by so fast, he couldn’t keep track of them.
The DT cleared; his earphone sounded an attention ping, then reminded him that the shuttle to the canyon and his awaiting field trip would be leaving in fifteen minutes. While he dressed, the phone continued to tell him facts about the geology lesson and to fill him in on the fifteen students he would be leading in this real-lesson. The only student who sounded even vaguely interesting was Jonas. “And he dropped his DT out the window,” said William to the empty room. “I’ve got to get out of teaching.”
On the hour long shuttle trip to the park, an elderly man sitting next to William drew him into a conversation, discovered he was a teacher, and before long, with the gentle whoosh of tires on the road as a backdrop, the man was rhapsodizing about school when he was a child. Filling the rest of the seats, other travelers swayed with the shuttle’s motion. Some stared blankly out the windows; some leaned over their DTs, keying in information or studying their displays. Gray privacy shields hid the occupants of some seats.
“Loved my school,” the old man said with a tremulous voice. “Solid brick building. We used to wait outside until the bell rang. That’s when school began, with a bell. No bells nowadays. Not nearly.”
William nodded, watching cactus and patches of brown desert grass slip by. “School doesn’t really begin or end anymore,” said William. “Learning happens when the opportunity arises. Individualization is the key, so there’s no need for a structure to meet in.” He thought idly about querying the DT on the subject. He could call up pictures of old schools and the history of building based education if wanted.