Where do your children go to school, Mr. Green?”, Sally Aston asked the eldest of the three men who had arrived in the room after Ann and Sally had told the other two women about the proposed new school.
Ken told her he always insisted on being called just that, Ken, the only name he would answer to. Sarah teased him about that. It seemed it seemed that he had no objection to his surname above the door of some large college buildings.
“Beth and Arthur are among the ones who have private tutors, Ms. Aston, though some of mine go to our private school.”
“What private school is that?”
“That would be the Green Private School”, answered Sarah, proudly. Hers had been the guiding hand behind its creation, as Ken told them, with equal pride in his voice. Sarah was not his wife, nor the only love in his life, but she was perhaps his favourite.
“Sarah”, accused Sally, “you have been holding out on us. We have been talking about starting a school. You two have a school, which you started.”
“Well, I did not want to let my experiences influence yours. And I did it all wrong anyway, as Beth often reminds me. Both kids do. Beth complains because we did not take advantage of our small class sizes to do more class compatibility optimization, which she has taught me to to believe in, if not to understand. Arthur complains because it is a constant drain on Ken’s funds. The boy is too obsessed with money and profit, Ken says, though he himself has more money that God.”
“Not true. I merely have more money that the Archangel Gabriel. It is Bill Gates who has more money than God.”
Ann suddenly realized that they needed additional input. “We need to talk to those children of yours, Sarah. Where are they?”
“When last I looked, Beth was in Don’s computer lab, trying to see how all the music software and hardware interact”, Drake Phillips said. He had dropped in to see what she was doing, being a computer science person himself. His friends Ann and Sally were good programmers, but they were primarily mathematicians.
“Ken and I checked on your son, Sarah”, Don added. “He is trying out some software I wrote to manage all the boring stuff which a good business manager should be doing. I never wanted to deal with any such person.”
Don was primarily a writer, but had written software, too. Some of it kept straight an author’s characters and plot lines, computerizing the typical author’s notebook. This he had sold to other writers, or aspiring writers. For his own use, to free him from the need to have business manager, Don had written some software aimed at managing the very peculiar kind of business a professional writer runs.
It might seem that everyone wrote software, but that was not so. Sarah and her son Arthur were very business oriented. Sarah had never written a line of code. Twelve year old Arthur would not do so until he went to university in a couple of years.
When the adults went in search of the teenaged Beth and her somewhat younger brother, they found both of them in Don’s office, where Beth was typing away like mad. Arthur was standing, looking over her shoulder, pointing at the screen and speaking quietly to her.
“Oh, Daddy! Look! I’ve got a whole new version of Mr. Walker’s business software ready to go. Arthur told me what to do. It’s in PreCode, Mr. Walker, my own language, but I can compile it into C or something else for you.
Stunned, Don could only nod. His wife, Helen, much the polymath, was not only a brilliant musician but a good computer programmer, finishing an interdisciplinary degree which included psychology, sociology and mathematics — she took over and asked Beth to compile what she had into C now, so she could look over it. “I’d like a peek at your PreCode code, too, Beth, if I may.”
“Sure, it’s a language-abstraction layer over existing languages, intended to be compiled into them, but without any built in biases that I could track down. I started to write it for that purpose, for stitching together code written in a variety of different languages, then began to see that it allowed a more transparent programming style than any of them. I wrote it in C, but then used it to compile itself into itself, then cleaned up the machine-generated code – an ongoing project, actually.
Ken and Sarah gave the others knowing smiles. “And you are how old?”, Drake asked.
“I am almost 14.”
“Still young enough to be rounding up instead of rounding down”, Ken said with a sigh. “She is only a few days past the half-way mark, actually.”
Ann returned to the previous topic, at last, “Beth, Arthur, we are planning to start a school. A new school based on compatibility amongst students and teachers.
Your mother says you have been telling her that what she did was all wrong. I hope you pointed that out very politely, but you need not spare our feelings. If we tell you our plans, will you tell us what we are doing wrong?”
“Okay, what are your plans”, the two asked at once, in almost those words.
“Well, we thought we’d renovate a building and start hiring teachers, being extra-careful to hire compatible ones. Then we’d put together support material, get the teachers working on lesson plans and such, while we carefully sought out compatible children to fill the small classrooms we planned. Similar to the ones in the school your mother designed, I expect.”
“Wrong. Sorry, but wrong”, Beth said after only a pause to consider her response. Arthur just asked a question, “Subsidized, or as a profit-making venture.”
“Uh, subsidized?”, Sally muttered, realizing that was not the answer Arthur wanted to hear.
“Accept start-up donations, but run at a profit. Otherwise it will be the only school of its type. You don’t want just one, do you?”
Ann and Sally looked at each other. Drake shook his head and said no.
Ann looked at the others, in turn, then at Arthur again.
“Good plan, accept donations, run at a profit, try to duplicate it. Thank you, Arthur.”
“Get investors as well as donors, probably have donations build a school, investors pay to run it, then make a profit for them, a return for their investment. Over and over, in big cities, so a large enough pool of possible students will be available. When you are ready for investors, I’ll give you half a million, Canadian, I bet Mom will give you 2, and Dad, probably 20 – as investments, that is. He’s probably donate 20 as start-up money at least for the first one.”
“OK, Arthur, you and Beth seem to have us running for cover here”, Don joked. “What would be their first step. Our first step; let us help, please!”
“Step one. Hire two teachers and two students.”, Beth said. “They need a lot of interpersonal compatibility, so don’t reduce the solution space with too many constraints, just make them compatible – doesn’t matter what subject they teach and learn.”
“Step two”, Arthur continued, “get those four people working together to do anything consistent with what you hired them to do. Meanwhile, renovate your building. Buy existing educational materials, including prepared lesson plans, make them available, but don’t interfere with what your people are doing.”
“Step three”, Beth continued without any pause, “acquire new teachers and students, one at a time, making compatibility with your existing staff a high priority. But inevitably you must constrain the solution space a bit to satisfy the requirement to support the teaching of different subjects.”
It did not stop there. The others were able to insert a few ideas of their own, then they backed up and went over all the ideas one at a time. The adults stood around, excited, while the kids sat fidgeting, as if they were trying to listen to a boring sermon in church. They had figured it all out within seconds of being asked the question.