Week 1 of 17
Orientation
Fiction. No real student, family or grade appears.
First day. No syllabus. Just one question on the board, and the news that we were going to spend a semester answering it ourselves.
MR. MENDOZA
How do we know what we know about the body, disease, and death?
Logistics day. I was ready to be bored. Then he showed us the exact way to name a file, and said a name the computer can read is the difference between graded now and graded late.
Cornell notes and the 6 Rs. Record, Reduce, Review, Reflect, Recite, Revise. I had written everything down and still could not say any of it back.
Safety day. The contract needs my signature and yours before I am allowed to touch anything.
MR. MENDOZA
No signature, no lab. That is not a formality.
I want to be a doctor. I have wanted it since I sat in a hospital room for three days understanding nothing anyone said about my grandmother.
First real Monday. John Carroll was not here yet, so it was just us and him. Forensic labs have sent innocent people to prison on evidence everyone trusted.
CLASSMATE
A person loads the sample. A person labels it. The machine only answers the question a human asked.