Dawn on Jefferson (scifi story): Chapter Eighteen - The Lessons Learned Before Maven

img src: Kevin Sinnott.

Chapter One: Getting Up
Chapter Two: Where I Live
Chapter Three: The Walk
Chapter Four: School
Chapter Five: Introducing my Friends, the Merry Pranksters!
Chapter Six: Walking to Mom's
Chapter Seven: Mom’s House
Chapter Eight: It Began on Constitution Hill
Chapter Nine: Attack of the Awknerds!
Chapter Ten: No Awknerds Were Harmed
Chapter Eleven: The Breaking Shadstorm
Chapter Twelve: Where I Envy Grilled Cheese
Chapter Thirteen: Doom! Doom! Doom! Where I Want to go to School! The End Must be Nigh!
Chapter Fourteen: The Game is a Foot
Chapter Fifteen: Uncomfortable Revelations!
Chapter Sixteen: WAITAMINUTE!
Chapter Seventeen: The Healing Power of Popcorn

Chapter Eighteen: The Lessons Learned Before Maven

The bell rang at that point and we all ran off to our respective classrooms. We knew we would have to continue the discussion as to what we were going to do and how when lunch came. That was the next time all five of we, the Merry Pranksters, would be together. The thought of having the face Maven was not going to be fun. It made me feel like I wanted to throw up. Queasy didn't cover it. Woman up, as they say.

Maven.

Maven the Raven from whom there was no haven.

Classrooms had Shadwell School were not exactly what was in the past. It wasn't even what they had on Earth. While what classes we took adhered to what the Department of Education in Washington, DC required back on Earth, how we did them was probably more than a little different. Or perhaps not. I've never been to a school in Earther America.

When we got to our classrooms, we checked in our boosters with the teacher and handed out a limited, crippled one to each of the students. This allowed us to link to the lessons and school computers, but did not allow any of the students - why are you looking at me?! innocent look - to hack our way through the lesson plans. Somehow that just seemed unfair. If you have the ability...why not? But, no. We were randomly given cripples to prevent us from preloading software for ourselves (and hacking) and they were wiped and reloaded each night. This forced us to actually LEARN.

OH! THE TRAVESTY!

Oh, ok. That was OOOOOVERLY dramatic! For the sake of drama's sake. Or Shakespeare in the park sake or...

Actually, I do like learning and we even move at a pace of our own choosing, so long as you met minimum requirements. If you could absorb information very fast, then you could unpack all sorts of backstory, side stories and extra information without slowing down others, boring them or dragging people who were not as fast along with you like they were on a wild sleigh ride.

The experience was mostly virtual. Today, after we said the pledge of allegiance, was history. American history. The last four hundred, almost five hundred years of the US of A were being covered in the class. From the attempts by England to settle Roanoke to the present day while Earth's greatest nations settled the stars, we learned. Some eras were more important than others and covered in more detail: walk the battlefields of the American Revolution, get narration, explanation and more, but if you wanted to WATCH the Battle of Yorktown, you needed to take a quiz immediately and get 8/10 right. If you wanted to PARTICIPATE, as a Redcoat or a French soldier or as an American, you better get 10/10. Revolutionary War, Manifest Destiny, Slavery, Civil War, Industrial Revolution, World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, Great Recession, the Rise of China, the Long War, Global Warming, Robopocalypse, the Race to the Stars and Escheria. Each could be viewed, participated in and grasped not just as dry statistics and boring desiccated words, but as events with people in them, places and how they shaped our country and later my world.

Every day, at the end, we'd get a test. It would cover all that we learned and participated in. Three hours of history could be fun. It could be exhausting. It could be devastatingly depressing: slavery did that to me and I got the light version for tweens, not the full blown one for seniors in high school. I saw Natasha Ricardo come out of that day green as a Terran plant and lose her lunch in the waste basket. Fortunately, that was six grades away.

And I was in the Great Recession. It WAS rather depressing: how could all those people get away with doing so many illegal things! Didn't they have auditbots? They could have easily seen the data was corrupt and caught the criminals! But, no, no auditbots yet. This was before the robopocalypse and actually one of the seeds that spawned it.

Ever seen a car that could NEVER self-drive?! That's just odd! And how dirty things were in San Francisco. I am surprised they didn't all die of disease. Let's not get into the fashion sense! Yikes! And I'm no fashion girl! And...there was more, but I won't bore you. Earth is a strange place. So easy to live in, yet so disrespected by those that live there.

Three hours later, after I had rocked out at a concern (yes, I had answered 10/10) and virtually walked across the Golden Gate Bridge, I did well enough on my test for the day to pass. It was lunch time.

Lunch time.

My stomach flip flopped.

That much closer to having to meet Maven.

I was pretty sure we would do so after school.

We needed time to plot and decide how we wanted to try to work with Maven.

But then...there would still be Maven.

Maven the Raven from whom there is no Haven.