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kleptoquarkI fiddle with my tie while the students file into the lecture hall. I feel ridiculous wearing a three-piece suit, but it's no more anachronistic than the chalkboard, whiteboard, and projector screen lined up behind me. (They each read "PLEASE FIND A SEAT QUIETLY", with QUIETLY underlined several times.)
The students mostly find their seats, some preferring to sit or stand in the aisles. Some are dressed in a vaguely passable imitation of 19th-through-21st-century clothing (usually all at once), but most are wearing robes. As usual, about a quarter of them are playing with the little desks that fold out of the armrests.
Eventually, they've mostly settled down.
"Hi everyone! Shut up." That mostly works; a few people keep chatting. Three raise their hands, and a couple students start asking questions simultaneously, too quietly for me to hear. I ignore them.
"My name is Living Fossil, but in my time I was known as Jacob Davis, or Professor Davis." I write 'Professor Jacob Davis' on the chalkboard, then label each part: 'job title', 'personal name', 'family name'. I begin to write the same thing on the whiteboard, in several colors. The projector shows an animated version.
"PROFESSOR DAVIS! What time are you from?"
The student is standing up for some reason, and pointing at me dramatically.
"You've watched too many old movies," I shoot back, eliciting a few laughs from the crowd. "It would actually be fairly unusual for a student to shout out a question like that in the middle of a lecture. For the most part, academic lectures were very quiet, with only the professor speaking." My interlocutor looks a bit disappointed. "Also, there was a specific procedure for asking questions." He looks a bit happier; ancient rituals are what they're all here for. "A student who wanted to ask a question would raise their hand. The professor would point at the student, inviting them to ask their question -- which was usually done while sitting -- and then answer."
Several hands have gone up. I take a moment to finish writing my name on the whiteboard, then pick one.
"Why?"
"Good question. With so many people in a room, communicating only through speech, it was the only way to keep things organized. Also, it was a way of showing respect for the professor." I turn back toward the student who'd interrupted.
"To answer your original question, I was born in 1978. My parents chose the name 'Jacob', the 'Davis' part I inherited from my father, and the 'Professor' part I didn't get until 2015, when I started giving lectures like this one. Well, not quite like this one." More laughs.
"I was diagnosed with brain cancer -- don't laugh, a lot of people died from it back then -- in 2035, frozen soon after, and thawed out just a couple years ago. Pretty soon after that, the Library set up these lectures so that you kids could learn about the past."
Most of the class is getting fidgety by this point. Someone forgets to raise their hand and shouts out, "If the professor is just talking for most of it, what do the students do?"
Sit quietly and pay attention, I think, but that didn't get a good response when I tried it. I gesture at some of the Library helpers, who walk around handing out paper notebooks, pens, slates, and chalk.
"The students would spend most of the lecture writing down some of the professor's words, together with their own comments and tags." Note-taking is surprisingly hard to explain to someone who hasn't tried it. "The white powdery rock goes with the flat black rock, and the metal stick writes on the paper." The projector switches to an illustrated vocabulary slide: 'chalk', 'slate', 'pen', 'notebook'. Many of them know these words, but not everyone pays attention when they're learning history -- that hasn't changed. They're amused by the notion of using paper as a display surface instead of as packaging. Someone tries to write on the slate with the pen; a Librarian intervenes.
"The chalk-and-slate method is the oldest, and was no longer used by the time I was born -- but large versions," I point at the blackboard, "were still being used for display purposes."
The next slide shows a photograph of some Plymouth Rock reenactors in a reconstructed colonial schoolhouse. The irony is lost on my pupils.
The students mostly find their seats, some preferring to sit or stand in the aisles. Some are dressed in a vaguely passable imitation of 19th-through-21st-century clothing (usually all at once), but most are wearing robes. As usual, about a quarter of them are playing with the little desks that fold out of the armrests.
Eventually, they've mostly settled down.
"Hi everyone! Shut up." That mostly works; a few people keep chatting. Three raise their hands, and a couple students start asking questions simultaneously, too quietly for me to hear. I ignore them.
"My name is Living Fossil, but in my time I was known as Jacob Davis, or Professor Davis." I write 'Professor Jacob Davis' on the chalkboard, then label each part: 'job title', 'personal name', 'family name'. I begin to write the same thing on the whiteboard, in several colors. The projector shows an animated version.
"PROFESSOR DAVIS! What time are you from?"
The student is standing up for some reason, and pointing at me dramatically.
"You've watched too many old movies," I shoot back, eliciting a few laughs from the crowd. "It would actually be fairly unusual for a student to shout out a question like that in the middle of a lecture. For the most part, academic lectures were very quiet, with only the professor speaking." My interlocutor looks a bit disappointed. "Also, there was a specific procedure for asking questions." He looks a bit happier; ancient rituals are what they're all here for. "A student who wanted to ask a question would raise their hand. The professor would point at the student, inviting them to ask their question -- which was usually done while sitting -- and then answer."
Several hands have gone up. I take a moment to finish writing my name on the whiteboard, then pick one.
"Why?"
"Good question. With so many people in a room, communicating only through speech, it was the only way to keep things organized. Also, it was a way of showing respect for the professor." I turn back toward the student who'd interrupted.
"To answer your original question, I was born in 1978. My parents chose the name 'Jacob', the 'Davis' part I inherited from my father, and the 'Professor' part I didn't get until 2015, when I started giving lectures like this one. Well, not quite like this one." More laughs.
"I was diagnosed with brain cancer -- don't laugh, a lot of people died from it back then -- in 2035, frozen soon after, and thawed out just a couple years ago. Pretty soon after that, the Library set up these lectures so that you kids could learn about the past."
Most of the class is getting fidgety by this point. Someone forgets to raise their hand and shouts out, "If the professor is just talking for most of it, what do the students do?"
Sit quietly and pay attention, I think, but that didn't get a good response when I tried it. I gesture at some of the Library helpers, who walk around handing out paper notebooks, pens, slates, and chalk.
"The students would spend most of the lecture writing down some of the professor's words, together with their own comments and tags." Note-taking is surprisingly hard to explain to someone who hasn't tried it. "The white powdery rock goes with the flat black rock, and the metal stick writes on the paper." The projector switches to an illustrated vocabulary slide: 'chalk', 'slate', 'pen', 'notebook'. Many of them know these words, but not everyone pays attention when they're learning history -- that hasn't changed. They're amused by the notion of using paper as a display surface instead of as packaging. Someone tries to write on the slate with the pen; a Librarian intervenes.
"The chalk-and-slate method is the oldest, and was no longer used by the time I was born -- but large versions," I point at the blackboard, "were still being used for display purposes."
The next slide shows a photograph of some Plymouth Rock reenactors in a reconstructed colonial schoolhouse. The irony is lost on my pupils.
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The future setting is deliberately vague and probably doesn't make any internal sense.
Partially inspired by a childhood visit to Plymouth Rock.
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The students were probably thinking "wait, you had three names and didn't get to pick ANY of them?"
I think maybe he was a biologist before he got frozen. Teaching about the past is a common "occupation" for defrosted ancients, but not so common that he wouldn't have had other choices. I'm not sure if jobs still work the way they do now -- I replaced "Library employee" with "Library helper" / "Librarian" to keep that ambiguous. Similarly, I'm not sure if cryonics took off on a large scale in the 30's or if Living Fossil was just really wealthy.
At any rate, giving kids an Authentic Historical Experience is what he likes to do with his time. His professorial tone is part of the Experience. (Not in terms of vocabulary and grammar -- English has been pretty much frozen in place for a while -- but except for his opening "shut up", he's being *very* formal.)
Day to day, he sounds much more like a Tumblr post than a professor, now that he's assimilated.
I like to think that his employer(?), the Library, is a descendant of the Internet Archive or something.
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Do you think you will write more for this future?
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