Fast Fiction 06.11.05
MARKS
575 words by Stanley Lieber
The teacher's fingers are squeezing the cartilage between his eye sockets. In front of him his screen wavers momentarily, as the next student's assignment gradually comes into focus. He bumps his coffee reaching for the keyboard, and his mug waddles over to a different part of the desktop, moving out of his way. Someone in the back snickers and he looks up over his glasses, seeming to peer not at a noisy student, but at a spot four hundred meters beyond the back wall. Nevertheless they quiet down, temporarily.
It's another fifteen seconds waiting for the promotional message to end before he can even begin reading. Coincidentally, it is the snickering child's paper which has been brought up before him. The volume starts to peak again and I shoot a severe look toward my classmates.
I start to tell them to keep it down, but after opening my mouth to speak I close it tightly again, recalling how these interactions usually conclude. When Rick (I am allowed to call him Rick) started this job, many, many semesters ago, now, he did not have student speakers in his classroom. Then, also, the intervals between testing periods were not marked by commercial simulcasts. When I consider the changes veteran educators have been made to endure, even over the last decade, I am awash with sympathy for the aged, and their continuous struggle to cope with the pluralistic overchoice that laps up against all of our ankles.
Today, each time a student submits a payment through the school credit net, an advertising clip from whichever merchant and/or manufacturer those credits were aimed at will be queued up behind the student's homework for the day. And commerce most assuredly does roll on, so, as we wait quietly in class, Rick is racking up message upon message he must sit through before our individual grades may be submitted. I believe some students have actually entered into arrangements with sellers in which they receive compensation for stacking the clips into a certain sequence. This subsidizes (somewhat) their future purchases from those same merchants.
These bumper ads make it impossible for Rick to sail through grading our papers by merely clicking the appropriate button over and over again and not really looking at the screen. Once a message starts up it won't bring itself to an end until a certain discreet pattern of movement is detected in his retinas -- supposedly denoting a successful commandeering of his attention. If this pattern is not detected, the commercial content will continue to stream out of Rick's screen. (At one point this arrangement had become quite controversial, with the teacher's unions bringing suit against merchants and school systems alike, but at some length the higher courts determined that a student's homework is protected speech. I feel that decision has been quite taken advantage of by my fellow students.)
I've never submitted an advertisement with my own homework. My parents have always been able to afford my tuition without my having to. But today, with me, it is not a question of tuition. Today, there is something I want to buy.
I see Rick rub his eyes and I feel badly, as if I am a horrible student, but I push the button which links an ad to my paper anyway. Again and again, piling them on, for what I want to purchase is quite expensive.
I hope this does not mean we will be kept here too much longer.
creative.commons.attribution-noncommercial-noderivs.2.5
* license