A, Like, Rez Peke at Tommorows’ Clasrom
O n the one hand, organizations such as Consumers Union complain about how commercialism is creeping into America’s classrooms. On the other, parents, educators and policy-makers want to bring state-of-the-art information technologies into schools. A student essay from, say, the next decade offers a glimpse of how tomorrow’s students will learn their ABCs.
This school is great, really rez! It’s like Sega, MTV and DisneyWurld all mixed up together. There are ractive games, VR-PCs, really big flat tv sets and we’re all real real careful not to break anything because the teachers sware if we do they will give us books because they are made of paper and don’t break so easy. The teachers here are really res too. They don’t make us learn anything. They just help us with the TVs, jack us into the Nets and give us these really rez learningames.
My favorite game is Burger Venture because I’m good in math. In BurgerVenture, Ronald McDonald gives you McMoney--sometimes hundreds of McDollars!!--and asks you to go to McDonalds and buy all kinds of hamburgers, apple pies, french fries and happy meals for different numbers of peeple. Like, if you have $76.43 McDollars, how many BigMacs, Cokes, Shakes and ExtraLarge fries can you buy for 12 people if you can only buy 4 shakes and have to bring back $1.93 in change? That’s tough!
What makes it so rez is that you have to bring back all the food through all kinds of obstacles like the Hamburglar and the Apple Pie-thon by paying them money. You have to have enough to get back with the right change. If you don’t, you lose. If you do, the Net prints out coupons good for real hamburgers and fries and shakes for when you go to a real McDonalds. Isn’t that great?!
I like McDonalds french fries a lot so I am now very good at adding, subtracting, multiplication and division. When I win, I share them with my droogs so i’m pretty popular. But be careful when you play Burger Venture because they try to trick you with the national sales tax. I am getting real good at figuring out %. Math is fun.
My teacher says that if I keep winning at BurgerVenture, I get to play a new Sega EduNetGame called SmartBombs! that will let me shoot rockets and stuff to blow up cities and planets while learning about angles, signs, cosigns and tanjents. He says this will help me learn phisiks as well as more math. But he says he doesn’t know what kind of coupons I will get if I get good at SmartBombs! That bothers me.
U.S. History with Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy is also arez--hi-rez. It’s fun to learn about the declaration of independence when Mickey is Thomas Jefferson and writes with a goose point pen. But it was wierd because teacher says that next week the DisneyNets are being replaced by Bugs Bunny, Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner because time and Warner wants to sponsor our school much more than Disney does.
He says that Bugs Bunny is a lot smarter and funnier than Mickey Mouse and that we will really like Loony Tunes History but I don’t know. I already see Loony Tunes every Saterday on my PC. I also really like Disney Wurld and since we no longer get Mickey History the teacher says I won’t get the free Disney Wurld tickets if I ace the class. That bothers me.
The highest-rez class has got to be media arts and technology. Morphing Mozart into VR Madonna while re-syncing the synthesizers is just so hot. Doing gospel rap is also rez altho its harder to sync. What’s so great about this class is that we can smear the bits any way we want so we do. This class is so great that nobody even thinks of crashing the Net while we’re in it.
Sony sponsors this class since Apple went out of business and they give all kinds of coupons for camcorders, CDs, interactive CDs and personal digital assistants if we come up with vidz and coustix they like. Teacher says it’s much better than the deal Universal/Seagrams has with Matsushita. All the kids like this class best because it’s so much easier to shoot and edit vidz than it is to sit and type words or do math.
I learn the most in this class because I am actually making something. Words are for speaking not writing but the teachers all say that writing is a very key skill for us to learn. I think they think that only because that’s how they learned when they were growing up. We’re different. For us, it makes more sense to just disc a vid and do a rez voice-over if there is something to say. They don’t understand that.
But since we have to write stuff to pass, this is what I am writing. But don’t you think it would be more fun to see one of my vidz or one of my games? They are how I really like to communicate with people. The great thing about growing up will be not having to write anymore. Anyway, I hope you like my story.
P.S. I am sorry for all the spelling mistakes but my teacher said that we will get a sponsor for spellcheck software next term. That bothers me.
