“My god….” She was close to fainting.
The president came up to her and said, “Your students may not agree with you. You only know them in ordinary times, but not in extreme situations. In times of crisis, people, children included, can become superhuman.”
The president turned to address the children, who had not yet entirely grasped the situation. “Yes, children. You’re going to lead this country.”
3
THE GREAT LEARNING
THE WORLD CLASSROOM
On the day the Great Learning started, Zheng Chen left the school to check in on her students. Out of her class of forty-three, eight had qualified in the valley for the central government; the remainder, distributed throughout the city, were now embarking on the toughest curriculum in history under their parents’ tutelage.
Yao Rui was the first student Zheng Chen thought of. Out of her thirty-five remaining students, he had the toughest course of study. She took a quick subway trip to the thermal power station, shut down on environmental grounds prior to the supernova but now saved from dismantling and returned to operation as a classroom.
She saw her student outside the gate. He was with his father, the station’s chief engineer. Chief Yao greeted her, and she replied out of a jumble of feelings, “It’s like you’re me teaching my first class six years ago.”
Chief Yao smiled and nodded. “Ms. Zheng, I’m probably even less confident than you were.”
“Back in parent-teacher conferences, you never were pleased with my teaching methods. Today we’re going to see how you go about it.”
They went through the gate alongside a host of other groups of parents and children.
“What a tall, thick smokestack!” Yao Rui shouted, pointing excitedly ahead of them.
“Silly boy. I’ve told you before, that’s not a smokestack. It’s a cooling tower. Over there, behind the plant, is a smokestack.”
Chief Yao led his son and Zheng Chen up into the cooling tower, where water rained down into a circular pool. Pointing at it, Chief Yao said, “That’s the cooled water that circulates in the generator. It’s pretty warm. When I first came to the plant fifteen years ago, I used to swim in it.” He sighed at the memory of his youth.
Then they came to several small mountains of black coal. “This is the coal yard. A thermal power plant produces electricity by burning coal. At full capacity, our plant will consume twelve thousand tons per day. I bet you have no idea how much that is. See that coal train with forty railcars? You’d need about six of those trains full of coal.”
Yao Rui stuck out his tongue. He said, “That’s scary, Ms. Zheng. I never used to think that Dad’s job could be so awesome.”
Chief Yao let out a long sigh. “Kiddo, this is all a dream for your dad, too.”
They followed the long coal belt for a while until they reached a huge machine dominated by a large, rotating drum whose thunderous rumble set Yao Rui’s and Zheng Chen’s skin crawling. Chief Yao shouted, close beside their ears, “That’s the pulverizer. The belt brings coal here where it’s milled to a powder as fine as flour.”
Then they came to the base of another tall steel building. There were four of them, all visible from a distance, just like the cooling towers and smokestacks. Chief Yao said, “This is the furnace. The coal dust milled by the pulverizer is sprayed by four nozzles into its belly where it burns in a fireball. The coal gets almost completely burned up; only a tiny amount is left behind. Look, here’s what’s left.” He extended a palm and showed his son a smattering of objects that looked like translucent glass beads, which he had scooped up from a square pond along their path. Then they came to a small window through which they could see the blazing furnace fire. “The wall of this giant boiler is lined with an enormous number of long pipes. Water flowing through the pipes absorbs the fire’s heat and turns to high-pressure steam.”
Then they entered a cavernous building holding four huge machines, half cylinders lying on the ground. “These are the turbine generator assemblies. Steam from the boiler is piped here to turn the turbines, which drive the generators to produce electricity.”
Finally they reached the main control room. It was clean and well-lit, with signal lights twinkling like stars on a tall instrument panel and a row of computer screens displaying complex images. In addition to the duty operator, a number of other parent-child pairs were in the room. Chief Yao said to his son, “We had only a drive-by look just now. A power plant is actually a highly sophisticated system that involves a host of separate disciplines, and requires the work of lots of people to operate. Dad’s field is electrics. Electrics is divided into high and low voltage; I work in high voltage.” He paused and looked quietly at his son for several seconds. “It’s a dangerous field, involving currents that can fry a person in a tenth of a second. To keep that from happening, you’ve got to fully understand the structure and principles of the entire system. That begins now.”
Chief Yao took out a roll of charts and peeled off one. “Let’s start with the main wiring diagram. It’s fairly simple.”
“I don’t think it’s simple at all,” Yao Rui said, staring in obvious disbelief at all of the lines and symbols crisscrossing on the chart.
“Those are generators,” his father said, pointing at a diagram made up of four circles. “Do you know the principles of an electric generator?” Yao Rui shook his head. “Well, this is the bus bar. The generated electricity is sent out here. It’s three-phase, you see. Do you know what three-phase is?” Yao Rui shook his head again, and his father pointed to four pairs of concentric circles. “Okay. These are the four MTs.”
“MTs?” Yao Rui asked.
“Er, the main transformers. And these two are the auxes.”
“Auxes?”
“Auxiliary transformers…. You know the principles of transformers?”
Yao Rui shook his head.
“What about the basics? The principle of electromagnetic induction?”
Another head shake.
“You’ve got to know Ohm’s law, at least?”
Another head shake. Chief Yao let the charts drop. “Then what the hell do you know? Did you eat your lessons?”
His son started to cry. “I’ve never studied any of this.”
Chief Yao turned to Zheng Chen. “Then what have you been teaching him for six years?”
“Your son’s just out of middle school, remember. He’s not going to learn anything with teaching methods like yours!”
“I’ve got ten months to take this kid through a complete course of study in electrics, and to hand over my own twenty years’ work experience.” He sighed and tossed the charts aside. “It seems like an impossible task, Ms. Zheng.”
“But you’ve got to do it, Chief Yao.”
He stared at her for a long while, and at last sighed, picked up the charts, and turned to his son. “Okay, okay. So you know about electric current and electric potential, right?” Yao Rui nodded. “Then what are the units for current?”
“It’s a certain number of volts.”
“Oh for the love of—”
“No! Right, that’s the unit for potential. For current, it’s… it’s…”
“Amps! Very well, we’ll start from there, my boy.”
Just then Zheng Chen’s mobile rang. It was the mother of another student, Lin Sha. The two families were neighbors, so she knew them quite well. Lin Sha’s mother told her that she was having trouble teaching her daughter, and asked Zheng Chen to give her a hand. And so after bidding a hasty farewell to Yao Rui and his father, she hurried back into the city.