FanStory.com - What We See - Chapter 26by Jim Wile

Chapter 26

Two weeks later

It was the night of the Christmas dance. On the way over to Callie’s house, Tommy sat silently in the back seat. “Are you feeling a little nervous?” I asked.

“Yeah. I’ve never been out with a girl before. How do I know what to say?”

“She’ll probably have a pretty dress on. Just tell her she looks nice, and you’re looking forward to the dance. And if she doesn’t introduce you first, make sure you introduce yourself to her parents. If they go to shake your hand, don’t hesitate; just give her dad a good, firm handshake. Her mom, just slightly firm. Don’t want to hurt her hand.”

“I’m a little nervous about dancing. I’ve never danced before. Mom showed me a few things, but I looked like a spazz.”

“Just watch what the other kids are doing, and try to copy them. Everyone kind of looks like a spazz doing the fast dances. Did she show you how to hold a girl for the slow dances?”

“Yeah.”

“Hold her pretty close. It’s hard if you’re too far apart. You’ll be fine.”

We pulled into her driveway, and Tommy got out. “Remember to introduce yourself,” I called to him as he headed to the door.

A few minutes later, they came out together. Callie had a coat on over the top of her dress, so I couldn’t see the whole effect, but she looked pretty from what I could see. She wore glasses, but the frames were small and stylish. Her long, auburn hair was wavy and looked professionally coiffed, and she had on some subtle lipstick. She seemed a little surprised to see me at the wheel.

“Hi, Callie. Don’t you look pretty?”

“Hi, Mr. Phelps. Thanks. I didn’t expect to see you driving us.”

Tommy said, “My mom is a nurse and had to work a shift tonight, so Ala… I mean Mr. Phelps agreed to drive us. He’s my next-door neighbor.”

“Oh.”

We started up, and nothing was said for a while. I could sense the nervousness coming from the back seat. I thought I would help out. “I’m sure looking forward to having you both in my first programming class. Do you have a computer at your house, Callie?”

“Not yet, but we’re getting one for Christmas as a family gift.”

When nothing further was volunteered, I asked, “What made you decide to take my class?”

“I talked to my cousin, Abby, who lives in Pennsylvania and is a junior at Penn State. She’s a math and engineering major. I asked her if she had taken any programming classes, and she said she had. She said it’s fun, and I’d probably really like it.”

“She sounds like she’s really smart,” said Tommy.

“Yeah, she’s like a genius. My mom and her mom are sisters, and we’re going to go visit them over Christmas vacation.”

“D-do you have any brothers or sisters?” Tommy asked her.

“Yeah, I’ve got two little brothers. You probably heard them making wisecracks when we were leaving. They like to tease me, but they’re okay. How about you?”

“Nah. It’s just me and Mom. You met her the other night at the orientation meeting.”

“Yeah, she was nice.”

The ice was broken, and they were off and running, talking together the rest of the way to the school. The dance would be over at 10:00, and I told them I would be here to pick them up. They thanked me for the ride and went in together.

I returned home and began working on another used computer I had purchased, preparing it for the class. Just one more to buy, and I’d have the required four I planned to use. I also started creating the lesson plans for the first two classes and wrote and tested the program code I would use to illustrate the principles.

I had purchased a whiteboard for smaller examples to explain in class, but for most of the longer code samples, the kids would be able to load, view, and run them from their own machines during the class.

I left a little before 10:00 to pick the kids up from the dance. They were both smiling as they approached the car. Tommy even held the car door open for Callie.

“So how was the dance?” I asked them after they’d both buckled their seatbelts. I noticed they were sitting right next to each other now, versus apart when we first drove to the dance. They looked cute together back there.

“It was fun,” they said together. They both said, “Jinx,” and laughed.

Tommy said, “There was a live band of ninth graders, and they were pretty good. The music was really loud, though. It was kind of hard to talk.”

“What did you say?” asked Callie in a loud voice.

“I said, ‘Chickens like to squawk’,” he hollered back.

“Oh, I thought you said, ‘Children shouldn’t jaywalk’,” she continued loudly, and they were both laughing. This was apparently a continuation of a joke from inside. Nice to see how comfortable they were together.

When he walked her to the door, I saw it open, and her father appeared. Whether Tommy had intended to or not, this prevented any kind of goodnight kiss. They talked to him for a minute, then Callie went inside, and Tommy returned to the car.

After a few seconds of silence, I said, “Well?”

“It was great. We really had a good time together.”

“Seems like you got over your nerves.”

“Yeah. She’s really easy to talk to. She talks a lot, but she’s interesting. She’s really smart and funny too. I really like her.”

“Really?” I said, teasing him a little.

He grinned. “Yeah, really.”

It was nice to see him so happy.

Ginnie and I had been out together several times in the past few weeks, and she felt it was time for me to meet her friends from work. We went to their annual Christmas party, where she introduced me as her boyfriend. If anyone had known about my past, they never let on, and I was accepted into the group. I enjoyed meeting her co-workers, and we had a good time.

Tommy, Ginnie, and I spent Christmas day together. We exchanged presents in the morning, and she and I prepared a sumptuous meal of glazed ham with side dishes of macaroni and cheese and green beans with almonds. Apple pie a la mode for dessert. And, of course, eggnog. We were all stuffed after that and spent the rest of the day relaxing and dozing. We also watched It’s a Wonderful Life together on TV.

Two weeks later, I held the first of my programming classes. I had spent several days prior to the class replacing the customer counter top with a top that overhung on the customer side, allowing my four students to sit on stools with room for their legs underneath. On the counter top, I had placed the four computers side by side—another reason for limiting the class size to four; there simply wouldn’t have been room for more. I set the whiteboard on an easel I had purchased, which faced the students. My own computer was next to it.

“I’d like to welcome the four of you to ‘An Introduction to Basic Programming.’ As I mentioned during the orientation, I’m Mr. Phelps, and the class is eight weeks with two hours for each class. There won’t be any homework, but there will be several programs to write that we will work on in class, and anyone who wants to come in early or stay late on Saturdays is welcome to do so to work on them or any other program you care to work on. There will be no game-playing, though, unless it's a game you created yourself.

“We’ll be starting with the fundamentals of programming, and we will learn the BASIC computer language to write our programs in. BASIC is an acronym for Beginners All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code and is a good, fairly simple programming language to learn and use, although it’s very robust. Does anyone know what that means?”

Callie raised her hand, and I called on her. “I think it means it can do a lot.”

“Exactly. You can write all kinds of programs to handle some simple things and some very complex things. Now what exactly is a computer program?” I called on Leroy Beeman, who had his hand raised.

“It’s a set of instructions that tells the computer what to do.”

“That’s right. You’ll learn to use English words like Read and Print and For and Next and If to create instructions for the computer.” I picked up the mouse on my computer and said into it, “Computer, multiply these two numbers: 6,237 and 3,128 and print out the answer.” The kids laughed.

“Do you think the computer will understand what I just instructed it to do, like they do on Star Trek?”

“’Course not,” called out Artie. “You’re talking into a mouse!”

We all laughed at that. “Well, even if it was a microphone, the computer wouldn’t understand. In fact, it doesn’t even understand the few English words that are part of BASIC. All it understands are 1s and 0s. So, there is system software that will translate the statements in which you write your code into the 1s and 0s the computer will understand. It’s called a compiler. We should all be thankful for compilers; otherwise, we’d have to write our instructions in long strings of 1s and 0s, and nobody would want to do that.”

I continued on with a few more fundamentals, and then we began with our first set of computer instructions in BASIC, and we wrote our first short program together. The time flew by, and the four students were completely engaged in what they were doing. All of them seemed to enjoy the class, and they asked a variety of good questions throughout.

Man, that was fun to have four such eager students who wanted to be there. No fooling around, no talking back, no petty complaining—just four kids interested in learning. If only all teaching could be like that!