Before the first reorganization, when classes compositions and seating assignments had been revised, John Calder and Grace Ling shared a Behavioural Science class, which later became generalized into a Social Sciences class. After the shuffle, the loving couple were in separate classes.
“Dr. Elliot”, Grace said, speaking to her teacher between classes, “I am worried about what Clarity asked. Am I really becoming less compatible with John? Are we really learning each other’s mistakes?”
“Just tendencies to make mistakes, Grace. I think your error-covariance is rising – you should know that term by now. When John is wrong about something, you are likely to be wrong about it in the same way he is.”
“But, but, that would mean we are becoming less compatible. I don’t want to lose John, I love him.”
“Well, Grace, there is a way to make you grow closer again, I think. We need to get you working on a project together, adding a few more people. Not many, just a few. At least one.”
“How would that help?”
“Actually working on some project together would give you a different kind of relationship, and a opportunity to make different kinds of mistakes. Any other person we add to the project should be suitable to work with you and function as social glue.”
“Glue?”
“Compatible with you, compatible with him, but not compatible enough with either of you to interfere with your relationship.”
“OK, what project, and whom should we get to work with with us?”
“Let’s try and get the social tech software to answer that.”
“It can suggest projects?”
“Well, not exactly. It is not intelligent, not an AI, but it can give us some ideas.”
Dr. Elliot got the two kids together and had them engage in a dialogue with the machine.
“First, I am going to ask it a question. The natural language interface is limited, so what we will see on the screen is a series of sentence fragments. We click on them to piece together a query. That makes it easier for the machine to understand what we want than if we just typed in a query we made up. Here goes”. Dr. Elliot brought up a menu of basic noun phrases and clicked on “A project for” then “a few students, including”.
“Now we type in your names. Go ahead. It will use auto-completion, so you will only have to type in a few letters.”
Grace went first, then John. Moments later the assembled text read, “A project for a few students, including John Calder and Grace Ling … “
“Now, we could just say pick ‘using their skills to the best’, but let’s try that, adding ‘and’ then ‘to improve their mutual compatibility’. There. Done.”
With no hesitation, the program came back with ‘Use John’s; computer skills; to produce; a visualization of; some dataset; created by; Grace; based on her interest in; history; and; geography – each phrase written on a different line of the screen and clickable.
Dr. Elliot explained. “Run it all together, you have a suggestion. Click on any phrase to have it present alternatives. Click on the button at the bottom of the screen when the statement says what you want it to say. It will then elaborate.”
The two looked at each other. They were still sufficiently compatible with one another for each to grasp what the other person was thinking without any words being exchanged. Catching just the slighted nod from Grace, John clicked the “Accept” button.
The online program then responded with a list entitled “Computer Projects in History and Geography, Suitable for John Calder and Grace Ling”.
Number 2 on the list was “A visualization of; American; historical; settlements; by date; and; location; using; maps.
Again, each phrase was a clickable item alone on one line. Taken together they described a project, but individual items could be clicked on to provide alternatives.
Grace clicked “American”. The program presented “United States”, North American”, “European”, “European and New World”, “World”.
“What do you think, John?”
“I’d say ‘European and New World’, Gracie, what do you think, Dr. Elliot?”
“Sounds like a wonderful project to me.”
Grace clicked “Accept”. The program responded with “Suggested Readings”, “Project Personnel”, and “Finished”,
John clicked the first buttons, one getting a printout of suggested books and papers. Asked about Project Personnel, the program asked for group size: “Just Two People, as Specified”, “Lower Limit”, “Upper Limit”, “Odd Number”, “Even Number”, “Best Guess for Stated Purpose”.
John typed in a lower limit of 3, an upper limit of 5, then at the machine’s prompting, asked for the best guess.
“Suggested number: 3; E-mail query anonymously to suggested person? (Yes or No); Modify Group Size?”
Dr. Elliot advised accepting the suggestion and asking the program to e-mail the suggestion.
Moments later, a geography student named Abby James got an e-mail message about a project to use computer visualization techniques to show the historical development of Europe and the New World. Abby was taking a computer graphics course, and found the project interesting. She replied that she would be willing to talk to the other people on the project.
The Social Tech High’s software quickly arranged a meeting between the three seniors. They recognized each other, since it was a small school and Grace had been in the same geography class Abby was before the big student shuffle. Abby had so often seen John and Grace in each others grasp that she knew them both.
John and Grace tried to explain the project to Abby, with a visit to Dr. Elliot to get his input as well. The girl understood perfectly.
“As a first cut”, she suggested, “let’s just find a database that lists the dates when various cities were founded.” That seemed like a good idea, so the three of them worked together to extract this data from a larger collection of information. The school kept some blocks of time for informal work such as projects. It was not free time, however, just time not assigned to a particular subject. Students did not have to stay in ordinary classrooms, if they were going to work on projects, but they were not completely unscheduled.
Though there had been some talk of it earlier, the idea had been first been enunciated by John Calder, when the Grade 12 students numbered 35, just over half the desired number.
“Dr. Aston, we have had a lot of informal time, more or less scheduled but not really organized. It’s been great. I’d hate to see it disappear.”
“What did you have in mind, John?”
“How about one hour a day, or one afternoon a week?”
“The others in Tech Fantasies have worried a bit about losing the informal time. Right now we do have some, partly because we don’t have enough students yet. I’ll try to keep some of it, if you’ll help me organize it.”
“I had hoped it wouldn’t be very organized.”
“It won’t be, John. Not exactly. What I had in mind was just putting a teacher or two in a room with some students, with some suggested topics written down, but nothing more. A talk session with no books. Everyone different.”
“Could we try it that way now?”
“If we can find a way to ask the software to give us the right arrangements.”
The number of teachers reached that planned for the first version of the school, 32, months before the number of students reached the desired 256. Until that time many teachers, especially in the lower grades, were teaching even smaller classes than intended, perhaps classes of five. The idea of sometimes putting two teachers in a room had seemed worth considering, but that could have caused conflict.
Now the idea of a special informal hour had come up. The software would be able to choose the best division of people into classes, regardless of whether they were teachers or students.
Not sure if she should mention the idea to a teacher or not, John’s girlfriend spoke of it to him after they had both recovered from a hot sexual encounter. The couple were usually able to complete their strenuous and often noisy exercises in a spare room in the basement of John’s house, finishing well before either of his parents came home from work.
“John, baby, about school. Uh, you know, about those special hours you got Dr. Aston to plan. Should we just divide up our grade, or divide up the whole school, regardless of grade. I mean, the computer is going to say where everyone goes. Why not give it more choices?”
“Ouch, that makes everything harder to program, you know. I am glad I don’t have to do it. Dr. Aston and her friends are real interested in the whole idea. They might go for it. How ’bout you come and talk to Sally with me?”
Grace was shy, but followed John into Sally Aston’s office. He explained Grace’s idea to his teacher, then offered to help even more than he had.
It was difficult to add this functionality to the Social Tech High software package, even with several people working on it, because it was an outrageous matching problem. Each person’s role in the resulting classes had to be estimated in the context of other people whose presence in the class might not have been established yet.
Still, it was done. In the third week of September, the whole school was divided into classes of nine, with no regard whatsoever for age range or topic. There was usually one teacher, but sometimes a senior sat at the teachers desk and worked with some mixture of younger students. Each person in the class had a list of the all the others, plus the courses they were taking and favourite topics of conversation, if known.
Nobody knew if it was going to work or not, but it did.
John Calder ended up as the only senior in a class of kids from grades 9 through 11. From the printouts, all showed an interest in computer programming. “So. Computer programming, everyone seems to like that. I guess that’s going to be the topic. Any ideas about what we are going to talk about?
“Programming languages”, said one boy. John looked at the list and saw what classes the boy was taking, but not at what level. What grade was this kid in, anyway?
John had worked on setting up these special classes, but somehow assumed they’d know what grades the kids were in. “I guess it’s better not to know”, he thought, “no hierarchy in these classes.”
“Okay, programming languages. Any other ideas? No?”
“Python” said the girl sitting beside the boy who had made the suggestion. Probably his girlfriend.
“C”, said another student.
“Java.”
“Visual Basic.”
The others had to be polled, but added no new languages to the list.
Then began the complaints.
“Object-oriented programming in C is possible, but ridiculous. C++ is too hard. It has to be Java. Maybe Visual Basic, but who wants to be a prisoner of Microsoft?”
“Java is sooo much harder than Python. Python.”
Around and around it went. New languages did emerge for consideration. Ruby. Scheme.
At the end of the hour, John emerged, shaken, having enjoyed that class enormously. The flow of ideas had been unusually heavy, even for this school, but they had fun, too.
Walking the halls during this hour, Sally Aston had heard the pleasant sounds of a small string orchestra in one room, something never before assembled in the school. There were music classes, but nothing like that.
Hesitantly the same kind of arrangement was tried two days later, with more warning and with the use of information from the first time.
Of course these classes discussed themselves. A wave of interest in scheduling passed through the classes, eventually turning into a specific suggestion. The classes should be held every day right after lunch, when students might otherwise be feeling a bit sleepy. Always exciting, these special hours would keep everyone awake.
Later, John, Grace and Abby voluntarily forsook the daily special classes to work on their own project, but by then the classes had been extended to occupy Friday afternoons, when it took something unusually interesting to catch the attention of the students. The three would leave aside their project for that one afternoon, to enjoy that full afternoon of intellectual fun, at least two hours of it, sometimes stretching into three as the more eager kids hated to leave in the middle of some heated discussion.
When the winter holidays finally arrived, John, Grace and many of the 254 other students in the school felt something unusual, a desire to stay in school when they didn’t have to.
The day the school finally did close for the summer, a shocking idea occurred to Grace Ling. “John, John, school is going to end in June. What are we going to do?”
“We are going to go to college, of course, you little idiot.”
“But, but. That will be so, so ordinary.”
John relayed this conversation to his teacher. “Trust me, John, you will go to college, at a real university, a good one, and a good university is never ordinary.”
“I think you have spoiled Grace and me. It is so much fun here, and we are learning so much. We all have compatible friends and teachers, something we won’t have at university.”
“Take some of your friends with you then. You, Grace, Clarity, some others, all of you go to the same place. You’ll have lots of choices.”
John knew she was right. He started to make plans right away, collecting information about possible colleges and universities to attend. Soon this became a topic to be discussed in the special classes. There would be life after Social Tech High.