Chapter 2: Familiarity Breeds Lots of Things

I’d been assigned four classes to teach for the semester: two sections of Introduction to Computers and Programming (freshman level); a class in Geographic Information Systems that I’d created two years prior; and a senior-level course entitled Organization of Computer Systems, that got into the guts and design of both computers and operating software.

By the end of the first week, I had seen about eighty new faces in the introductory classes, and renewed acquaintances with another twenty in the advanced classes. I had also engaged one TA – teaching assistant – to help me with the practical course work in the introductory classes, an eager young male grad student on an assistantship getting $12.50 an hour.

By the end of the week, I realized I hadn’t seen Ash or Christy for a week. I wondered how they were doing with their first college experience. I also wondered how well their fellow classmen were accepting them. It turns out I needn’t have been concerned.

Just after four p.m. on Friday afternoon, the two girls knocked lightly on my open door. I greeted them and urged them to come in and sit.

Ashley said, “We just thought we’d come and see you. We are having so much fun. The classes are great, our classmates are better, and the professors are the best.” Christy nodded in strong agreement.

Christy said, “Except now we have a three-day weekend, what with Labor Day. We’re missing Monday classes, but we have a boat load of homework.”

I grinned, “And I need to give you even more for your elective class with me.”

They both smiled; “That’s why we’re here. Load us up.”

I had thought about their assignment. II turned to my keyboard and in a few seconds had two pages printing on the ink jet next to my desk. I reached over, took the pages, and handed one to each girl.

“Basically, what you’re going to do is start this AI class by defining the detailed contents of the artificial intelligence realm. So, by next Friday at this time, if this time works for you, you’ll have jointly emailed me a minimum of ten pages outlining in lurid detail what the landscape of this emerging field is. As an example on back of that page, I give you Natural Language Processing, but I want to know a lot more about what you think is involved in that, for instance, written, reading, spoken or speech recognition, syntax, semantics, tagging, parsing, stemming, word segmentation, and disambiguation, just to mention a few subcategories, plus how it all relates to AI. Keep digging deeper, as if you were outlining a text book.”

“How will we know if we’re on the right track?” Ashley asked. As she did she leaned forward and I couldn’t help but notice the gentle swell of her breasts inside her top. I kicked myself mentally for starting to perv out on a ripening fourteen-year-old girl.

I spoke, “Think of yourselves as putting together the contents for a senior or graduate-level CS course, which in fact is exactly what you are doing. I’ve got a start on one, and we can compare notes as we go along, and, if my idea works, you can help me teach this next semester as a special projects class.”

The girls looked at each other, and I could tell they liked that idea.

Christy, the shyer of the two, said, “Doesn’t it bother you to stand in front of a class with fifty students in it when you have to teach?”

I laughed, “No. I got over that a long time ago. Surely you’ve spoken in front of classes before?”

“Yes, but only for brief responses from my seat; never for a major part of the class or as the instructor.”

Ash stated to her friend, “That’s why we’re taking Public Speaking.”

“You’ll be asked to speak before groups more and more as you get older, particularly with the two of you being as smart as you are and being what I think are natural leaders. I’ll help you with that side of things too. Don’t get overwrought about it. Usually the students are more worried than the instructors.”

We chatted a few minutes more about the assignment, and then about their other classes and how they felt about each one. About five-thirty I suggested we head home. They each shrugged. Ash explained that her mother was at her job flirting and serving up beers to the blue-collar guys in the bar where she worked, and Christy’s parents were out of state visiting her aunt for the long weekend. The implication was that they didn’t have to rush off anywhere.

I thought for a moment and said, “How about we go to dinner – my treat? Do you like Greek food? The place I’m thinking of can make pizzas too, but they have other good stuff on the menu.”

Christy said, “Is it far? We have to walk. The last train to Westborough leaves at 9:10 p.m.”

I said, “I’ll drive us to the restaurant, and then make sure you make the train. Will you be safe on the other end when you get home?”

They assured me they were all right so long as they were on that train, so off we went to Demetrios. At the restaurant, I introduced them to saganaki opa, a cheese dish served flambé at the table with pita bread and a lot of fanfare. It made for great appetizer, and the girls loved the panache of the waiter when he served them the dish. As entrees, we all got a kebob dish, moussaka, and a gyro platter and each took samples of each dish. I could tell they loved the variety of the meal and the cuisine.

We had a lively chatter over dinner. They got me to open up about my own background: raised outside of New York, electrical engineering degree at age eighteen at the university, and then computer science in graduate school; worked for two years building special purpose security electronic systems while going to grad school, and then after getting my Ph.D., starting to teach at the university. I was the youngest full-time faculty member they’d ever hired. Five years later I became the youngest tenured professor at the college.

I allowed as how my parents had retired to Florida, and my sister had gone with her boyfriend to the west coast to study biochemistry.

Christy asked, “Are you married? Do you have kids?”

I’d studiously avoided that subject, hoping it would pass by unnoticed.

“Not married. Divorced over three years ago. No kids, not that I didn’t want some.”

Leave it to curious fourteen year olds to probe deeper where the open sores are. Ash asked, “Why’d you get divorced?” Christine looked interested in what I’d say.

I realized I could talk about the event now and not get a knot in my gut. A surprise. “We married a couple of years after I got my Ph.D. To tell the truth, I think we over emphasized the sex, and under rated the need for intimacy and understanding between us. The former got routine, and the latter was inadequate to sustain things. We lasted eight years, and figured that was all it was supposed to last. We parted friends, but she moved to the west coast and we haven’t talked for almost two years.”

There were other, deeper, reasons for our break up, but that statement about summed up my marital life from age twenty-two to thirty.

Christy probed on a more neutral subject, “Where do you live?”

I breathed easier since she’d dropped the line of questioning about my marriage, and I’m sure she picked up my vibe. “I live in Dillon. I took over my parent’s old home there, but the house was falling down from neglect. My father is not known for his handyman skills nor for his willingness to maintain things in a very old house. Ultimately, I tore it down. I rebuilt with a more modern structure. I moved in just about the time the divorce became final.”

Dinner continued with each of us making more revelations about ourselves. I found myself fascinated by each of the girls and how they thought about life. They opened up about how they saw a number of areas in their lives: relationships, religion and spirituality, careers, contributing to society, and more.

About eight-thirty, I settled up our dinner tab, and drove the girls to the University train station. The place was on the dark side, and there were three older teenage guys hanging out around the station playing around on skateboards. I made a decision, “I think I’ll wait with you until the train comes, and make sure you make the connection.”

The girls seemed to breathe easier with my protectionism, and we sat in the car until the train appeared down the tracks pulling into the station.

My Friday afternoons with Ash and Christy expanded in several directions. They started to come in earlier at my invitation and then they usually joined me for dinner somewhere nearby the campus. Further, they either would stop by some days around lunch hour or find me at the student union wolfing down a sandwich with one of the other CS faculty members. Neither girl was shy about introducing themselves and joining us even when I was with another faculty member, which I took as a hallmark of their adult nature. They would always ask whether it was all right to join our company.

The other members of the engineering faculty enjoyed their company, and encouraged them to always come and sit with us. I can’t attest to their motivations, but the girls were certainly cute and unique enough on campus that it represented a bit of a coup to be seen with them. Of course, I had the lion’s share of their time, much to everyone else’s frustration. Thank you Deb.

The girls had agreed to a joint grade on the artificial intelligence class I was working on with them. After seeing the high quality of their work I told them they’d have to really screw up to get anything less than an ‘A’. Further, I coaxed the two of them into also structuring a two-hour seminar on AI at the end of the semester to which we’d invite other faculty, grad students, juniors and seniors in CS. Ash was excited at the idea. Christy worried a little about her nervousness in such a setting and her public speaking skills. I assured both of a sympathetic and supportive audience.

I realized that neither girl fully appreciated how unusual they were, nor the deference that faculty and other students paid them. They were on a natural path and while intellectually they knew they were unique and could even talk about it, normally they didn’t see how others changed their behavior around them.

Not all of our meetings concerned their coursework. I learned more and more about each girl and how they thought about the various aspects of life.

Ash spent a couple of dinners talking about growing up with a virtually nonexistent family life. Except in the middle of the night when she was aware of her mother checking that she was home sleeping, she seldom saw her mom for conversation. I learned that Lisa, her mother, was basically man crazy and little else.

She groused that on more than one occasion her mother had brought home some ‘scuzzy’ guy and the pair had kept waking her up as they had sex all night long, even in her living room. Those motherly habits were on the increase, and hence one of the reasons that she liked to stay over at Christy’s house. She usually wasn’t even missed by her mother.

I probed for why she’d taken the tack that she did, meaning towards education and adulthood, instead of becoming a free-wheeling teen that loved to party and push the limits in every direction like her mother.

Christy sat silently and listened to her friend with a smile. I could tell they’d had this conversation.

Ash said, “Over and over again, I realized that every day I stood at a cross roads about my own life. Mom wasn’t around, and I could watch the others around me. I could see who was happy and who wasn’t; who was achieving things that were satisfying to them and who not; and I saw the wild mood swings that things like alcohol and drugs or senseless sex did to people. I didn’t like those negatives. I rejected them.

“When drugs started to show up around school, I had a choice and I decided not to go down that road. I tried some pot, but it didn’t do anything for me so I quit doing that. A couple of years ago, some of the girls in our class started to have sex with their boyfriends, only the boyfriends never lasted too long, so they were having sex with just about any guy that showed interest in them. In my class over half the fourteen-year-old girls sleep around. I could see that prompted a lot of anguish and regret because the relationships weren’t stable. I skipped that stuff.

“Lastly, I saw how the happiest people I knew had strong educational backgrounds – they had a trade or career. Those same people were in stable, long-lasting relationships, and didn’t seem to have too many bad vices that showed.”

Christy had been nodding as Ash talked. I turned to her with the same question.

She laughed. “I’m much easier. Besides encouraging parents, I met Ashley. We both were having the same realizations about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We turned getting an education into a game with each other, and then we realized that we were smart – really smart. We took the school on as a challenge to see how fast we could get through it – not just a course, but grade after grade. We discovered that we could test out of subjects that were easy for us, or that we knew a lot about. “We started to study and read key subjects other than what they were teaching in the classroom, and then we’d go and test out of something.”

Ash interjected, “We did it first with English Literature, and then high school science and biology. We were in the fifth grade. It was easy.”

Christy kept going, “Pretty soon we had much better than a high school education. Miss Grimes, our guidance counselor, realized that too and brought us to her friend Mrs. Summer. Of course, by then, we’d also studied up on the various courses of study we could pursue and came across your work. We’d already been interested in robotics, done a junior-college paper on the subject of AI, but then wanted to get into the intelligence that drove robotic behavior, so it was back to computer science and you.”

“Yes,” I said. “Why computer science and engineering? Why me?”

Christy nodded at Ash. “The people really changing the future of the world appear to come from the technology sector – STEM: science, technology, engineering, or math. We picked the middle two, and that led us to who in our geography was doing the most innovative work likely to change the face of the planet by the year 2050 – that’s you.”

I smirked, “I’m honored, however, I think you’ve WAY overestimated the impact I will have.”

Christy grinned, “Time will tell. Either way, we found a great guy to be our advisor and to lead us through this part of our lives.”

I was touched by her comment, and even more surprised when she got up from her chair, came around to my side of the table, and gave me a kiss on my cheek. I felt my cheeks flush as she went to sit down. Glancing around the restaurant, no one else seemed to be paying us any mind. As Christy sat down, Ashley got up on her side of the table and repeated the gesture, with similar results.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but those two kisses were turning points in our relationship. My rational engineering mind at the time chalked the gestures up to two grateful kids who’d found another adult to help them through a major part of their life.

I revisited the kisses on each cheek that night in bed. I touched one cheek and realized the kiss had felt like a branding iron searing into my romantic soul. I liked the girls, and did indeed have affectionate thoughts about them; but I’d pushed those inclinations deep and far away lest I be seen as a lecher, pervert, or predator. I resolved to maintain my professional façade, and even congratulated myself for not responding with anything other than a blush in response.

In no time at all, the end of October was fast approaching. Mid-term exams occupied the last week of the month, and then I had to grade them along with my TA. Fortunately, the teaching assistant felt ready to take on grading the exams from both freshmen classes. We agreed that I’d spot check his work, so out of about a hundred students, I only had to check about eight of those tests. I agreed with his grading in every case.