David woke up at 7h30 that morning



MAS 713 – Prof. David Cavallo and Arnan Sipitakiat (TA)

Paulo Blikstein – October, 2001

David, take one.

David woke up at 7h30 that morning. It was neither an alarm clock nor his own will that made him up by that early and sleepy time. It was the 15-minute warning that he always got before his class started. He rushed to the bathroom, took a quick shower and dressed up. At 7h44 sharp his teacher appeared in the front wall of his bedroom.

“Good morning, Dave. Have you slept well?”

“Yes, Mrs., I had a great night of sleep.”

“So no bad dreams anymore?”

“No, Mrs., the pills are working great for me. They are excellent indeed.”

“Very well done, Dave. But we have no time to lose. Did you do your assignments? Don’t tell me that you forgot them again…”

“Er… yes, Mrs., I have them all, absolutely, except from that Math’s thing…”

“Dave, you know that’s not all right…”

“Well, Mrs., I fact I did it in my friend’s house but then his connection time expired for the day and I couldn’t…”

“Wait… Wait… Dave, we both know that’s not true. I just checked all of your friends’ databases and you did not initiate any session from their houses yesterday. You were in Brian’s house for 76 minutes yesterday, but you only played FIFA Soccer 2021.”

“Well, yes, but I was actually trying to think about it…”

“And you lost all the matches. Not even the fact of picking up the invincible Brazilian team of Aiury Fonseca was enough for you. I will post a message also to your sports teacher… Well, may I check your homework? Can you grant me access?”

“Yes, OK. There it is.”

“Well… let’s see. You know, I must congratulate you. You did well in the Math quiz. But I can’t say the same about the Science one… So… let’s see… Well, today you will work with a very nice person from a country quite far from us… He is eleven years old, just like you, and he lives in Mexico. Say Hello to Kemsi Jr.!”

“Hello, Kemsi Jr.”

“Hola, David!”

“So today not only you make a new friend, but you will work together in this Science quiz. Kemsi is also a student of WorldLearn, and had approximately the same score that you had in the Science quiz. He also likes soccer, blonde girls and Totalgames. I think you’ll be good friends. So you will be well working together. I’ll be here at all times, just say ‘teacher’, OK?”

“OK, Mrs.”

“Would you like to listen to some music? Or a bag of fat-free, super-tasty UltraPop Popcorn?”

“Popcorn will be nice. How much is that?”

“Two hundred dollars, Dave.”

“OK, so I’ll offer one for Kemsi also.”

“Four hundred dollars are being debited from your account. Do you confirm?”

“Yes.”

After 45 minutes working with Kemsi Jr., David was done with his Science quiz. In fact he and Kemsi got the answers for that problem set using an illegal peer-to-peer search engine, and spent the rest of the time playing a new and exciting game that he just downloaded from this same network: 3D Solitaire. So he said goodbye to Kemsi, knowing that would rarely get together again, but he was very much used to that situation – friends from school come and go, but his “real” friend were not from the school, but from the condo. They got together everyday to play Totalgames, some “real” soccer and stay by the swimming pool.

The place he lived was quite nice, so his parents said to him, because he hardly knew any other place. It was too dangerous for a young boy like him to go outside, and his parents were always short on timeto take him out, or so they said to him.

So he took the 10-minute interval to bike around the condo and came back for the English class – hoping that the teacher missed the class.

However… there he was, Mr. English Teacher, as always. A friend of his told him that teachers missed around 3% of the classes, because that is a kind of motivation, and that was the result of some important research conducted in a very important university.

“Hello, Dave. I’m very happy to be here again. We have exciting things to cover today.”

“Yes, I guess so.”

“Dave, can you please touch the bodysensor?”

“Yes.”

“Dave, your heart beat is too fast… That’s not convenient for our class. Well… I have some video here… I can see you biking around. Wait… This is the fourth time this month. Your parents will get a message right now; you oblige me to disrupt their work with bad news. Dave, everything has a suitable time. When you study, you don’t bike, when you bike, you don’t think. Do you know that your scores could be reduced in as much as 20%, especially regarding you rational-motor intelligence skills?”

“Oh, that’s too bad sir. I apologize. I’m so sorry. I feel really bad. I know that if I go on like this I won’t have good scores and won’t go to the next study cycle.”

“All of that will be analyzed when you apply for university. Would you like them to know that you have poor emotional intelligence and bad disciplinary skills? If you go on like this, you will and up in some horrible place like Harvard or Caltech.”

“No, not those, please. I will behave, sir, I assure you”.

David was a smart kid. He and his friends have scrutinized all the underground documents on those teachers. He knew the right words to make them happy.

“OK Dave, so let’s start by an oral quiz. Do you remember the name of the most important writer in English Language of the 16th century?”

“Yes, I do.”

The dialogue went on for another forty-five minutes. David like it this way – he didn’t need to leave his bedroom and he could earn some credits for the Totalgames. Well, once a week he got together with a flesh and blood teacher and five other students, to review his studies for the previous week and plan ahead for the next one. That was nice, especially because there were always at least three girls in the group. Last year he thought they were just all boring, but strangely enough this year he started to notice that one of them has a nice, charming smile… She is different from the others. She talks to him. But his father told him to take care:

“You’d better know someone in a respectable chat room.”

David, take two.

David woke up at 8h00 that morning. It was nor the alarm clock or his mother. He was so anxious for that day that he hardly slept. He rushed to the bathroom, had a shower and dressed up. While he was having breakfast with his parents, they heard the horn of the school bus outside. He kissed them goodbye and jumped on the bus.

Well, on that day the bus was not going to the school. For this past month David was involved in a moviemaking project. They were shooting it in a neighborhood near his house. After many weeks writing the script, rehearsing, fund-raising and preparing everything, they were ready to shoot. The four of them got there around 9 AM, but the actors were not there.

“Actors are always late”, David said to Roger, a fourteen years old friend who have been involved in three moviemaking projects already.

“Yes, they hang out with the girls while we work”, replied Roger.

“I heard you, Roger”, said Jacqueline, one of the actresses, who had just arrived. “I’m not late at all. It’s 9:00 sharp”.

“OK, I’m sorry. Let’s get to work!”

Three hours later, they were packing up to leave. That was such an exhausting morning.

So they went back to school for an important task: cook lunch. Three times a week, they cooked together. Normally the girls were not so interested in it: “Cooking is for guys!” they said, but as everyone had to contribute somehow, so they normally did the dishes.

David was not very good at it, but he observed carefully his friends choosing the ingredients, measuring them, putting them together. And there were the “Analogies of the week”. They were supposed to think of some theme during the cooking thing and talk to each other about that. Last week, the analogies were about society, so they created a lot of analogies between mixing ingredients and how people organize. This week the theme was alchemy, so they talked about chemical reactions, alchemists... There was a small lab in the kitchen where they could measure and compute, among other things, the pH and concentration of some ingredients – they were also working in a year long project, the so-called General Theory of Cooking, which was supposed to explain in terms of chemical reactions everything about cooking: recipes, habits, tastes and superstitions. During lunch, they had a tough discussion on the Student Union. You know, elections were coming and everyone had a different idea about the dates and organization of them.

After lunch, David had some other things to do, quite different from the ones he did during the morning and lunch… but he started to realize some time ago that very different things have strange similarities…

So he met his friends together with Daniel. They started talking about plans for the rest of the day and for the week.

“The publisher called again”, said Daniel. “We are two weeks late for our book.”

“Yes, that’s bad”, David said. “How can we finally finish it?”

“Well, I think that the hardest part is to conclude the experimental data – but our buddys in Senegal have to finish their part also. ”, affirmed Ben, who was more aware of the general status of the project. “Once we have that, we can do it in a week”.

“OK, so let’s take two hours today to do that, because after that you all have to work far from here…”, Daniel concluded.

The book they were talking about was “The General Theory of Why and How Things Move”, that they were writing together with a group of teenagers from Senegal. They used to have a weekly video meeting, but it was cancelled on that week because of the holidays. Daniel, 28 years old, a trained physicists and performing actor, was helping them. The publisher was particularly anxious because there was a lot of anticipation, all due to the famous experiment that they did a year ago in the school, proving some law of Physics useless.

They worked on the project for two hours and went into the bus again, for a half-hour ride to the fisherman village not far from town. There they were helping a group of elderly people to learn how to read and write, as well as publish and share their texts. David was very interested in observing how people learned how to read. He even published a paper in the schools’ newspaper, arguing that it seemed that people learned better when their first words and phrases were related to their reality and environment. Well, later he found out that some guy in the beginning of the 20th century also had this idea… But that was OK. He sent a letter to his family and they where quite happy about the article, and even invited him to come along for Carnival.

David was tired. But the day was not over. He wanted to swim a little bit. So he went to the club, not only for swimming, but also because he knew that many of his friends could be there, as well as those girls… Last year he thought they were just all boring, but strangely enough this year he started to notice that one of them has a nice, charming smile… She is different from the others. She talks to him. But his father told him to take care:

“You’d better never trust the blondes”.

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