The videos of some students are going crazy on the web these days explaining, with the calm competence of geeks, which subterfuges to implement to escape the feared remote interrogations. The students are back to school, yes, but mostly at fifty percent which means either half a class listens from the bedroom while the other half tries to blend in with the classroom wall, or that one class goes every other week. And if there are teenagers who live this moment with discomfort, with a lame social life, friendships on standby, social relationships all migrated behind a screen (and it should not be denied, because they exist), others take advantage of uncertain times to sharpen your weapons.
At school there are those who copy. Always. Not all and not good, but there are. And we realize it. Originally it was the note, the leaflet stuck in the most unexpected places, the writings on the benches. My high school desk had engraved on the surface, with a very fine work of chisel, the solving formula of second degree equations: it wasn’t my doing, but I’ve never complained about it.
With remote lessons and the perennial excuse of not being better identified “connection problems” strategies have multiplied. Applications that distort the voice, which sparkle the image, providential files that open at the right time, voice searches that give answers in real time like even the classmate nerd. In short, an arsenal of solutions, displayed on video, which make the unpunished exhibitionists of virtual deception heroes, acclaimed as saviors by the desperate questioned by surprise.
In the eternal struggle between THEM (those who know nothing and try to break it down) and US (those who fail to do it on purpose, always ask the same questions) the battleground changes and moves between the meshes of the net.
Guys: since you upload the videos that explain the most effective deceptions by putting your face on it, since we play with our cards exposed, I wanted to tell you something. We realize it.
I know, I understand you are convinced that we have recently started to replace papyri with paper and we take notes by engraving wax tablets; you, from the freshness of your eighteen years, look at us and believe us old, because at eighteen you don’t know how to give the age to adults, a forty-year-old seems close to retirement and a fifty-year-old seems to you contemporary of Julius Caesar, indeed you would ask him politely how it is that people lived in ancient Rome so as to write it in the research.
But we were there. We who ruined our eyes with Tetris and Prince of Persia, were there when the PCs arrived. We fought against everyone Windows updates, he yes that it was implanted at the least opportune moment, not like your platforms today, which never crash when the teacher calls you. When you cried for baby colic, we installed Linux. When you went to kindergarten, we downloaded things better not to say, waiting hours, because downloading taught patience better than an oriental treatise, jumping from torrent to torrent like mountain ibex. When you started the hard struggle towards diaper independence, we without any online tutorial, we synchronized all our devices feeling that we are eternal fathers.
It is not a question of “but what do the two thousand know”. It is question that we know it. We realize it. Why we would have done it too. Indeed no, we would have croaked into the microphone and put some duct tape full of hairs on the camera to simulate a poor connection, after all we are people who rolled up cassette tapes with pencils. We would have done it. And they would have caught us. It’s like in the lion king, the circle of life.
So good, very good.
You are ingenious and daring.
You are nerd geeks, indomitable standard-bearers of the bailout and the rigor of the ninety-fourth.
You are entitled to the poetic laurel and to ninety-two minutes of applause.
But, guys, we know it.
–
