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20. Musings on Midterms

20. Musings on Midterms

If you’ve ever wanted to leave a game halfway through because it was a done deal, you might understand why I was a bit over our little friendly game. Instead of giving up, I put the guys into defense mode to see if I could get some gains out of it.

My first observation from seeing Esther in the thick of it as a defense was that as much as she was an offense, I mean the girl was doing things that looked close at hacking mod just to keep up. The academies kids each had to have been playing this game since middle school, at least based on how good they were. Every time I thought we could find a chink in their armor, they closed it up and pressed the attack again.

Of course, this meant that once again, we were on the wrong side of the snowball.

I could see Stacey watching the game, stunned at how deftly their team was working our guys. We were an amateur team facing a team of at least a second tier.

Amir: Did he say thank you for playing with us yet?

Kelly: Apparently they always beat us, but it’s hard for them to travel and then need competitors.

Amir: Don’t tell me.

I cleaned my neck to see what Stacey was doing. She was ignoring the group chat.

Kelly: She is laying it on thick, with a capital double c.

Amir: Good for her. Let’s see if we can get a high score while she’s distracted. Let me tell you about Leigh...

We chatted. I floated behind the team. Every time one of us texted the chat, her phone would buzz. I was reasonably certain that she was laughing internally. She knew we were trying to get her attention. She just didn’t care.

I honestly wanted to keep doing it for a while, but I felt bad. My kids needed me.

So I went back to perform my duties as the emotional support professor, fully understanding that I had just arranged for them to have their asses kicked by some snot-nosed punks. It was a learning experience.

Following that, the rest of that evening, I let Stacy do her thing, and I worked with Rachel to see if we could work on our weaknesses one by one. It was time well spent and when I got home that evening, so was I.

---

Fridays were supposed to be a time for rest. There wasn’t much of that to be had. The group chat was positive. This match did not count towards the overall total and that was good because otherwise we would have been down a lot further than I wanted it to be.

But I had shit to do, so I picked up Mom and took her to the dialysis center and studied my craft. Next week was going to be midterms for my regular fall classes and I had to check that I wasn’t making stuff too difficult. I was, of course, also checking that things might move in the right direction, regarding what I needed to do.

By the time Monday rolled around, I had a plan. Gladys would not like it, but I had a plan.

A business plan.

“Is the dean in today?” I said, clearly read to go.

Gladys took a long second to open a literal calendar. She had the iron clad audacity of a woman who would not allow herself to be held to the standards of a shared email calendar. She had to be dragged into the information age kicking and screaming. Gladys is still mad that they made her have an email address.

“Professor Thomas,” she said. “Unfortunately, the dean is sick today.”

Behind her, the door to the Dean’s office was wide open. It was like she was his tempting fate. I could look, but chances were that she wasn’t messing with me.

“Oh no. Do you know when he will be back?” I said, leaning in to inspect her calendar. It was, of course, tropical themed, with a pineapple front and center.

“It sounded awful when he called, so probably at least Wednesday,” Gladys said.

I eyed the door suspiciously, but I had a class to go to in twenty minutes. The time only allowed for a PowerPoint presentation, nothing more. I was going to let this one go.

“Alright, well, tell him I’ve got something I need to run by him if he does come in,” I said.

“Of course, dearie. Whatever you say,” she said before turning back to her sudoku puzzle.

I was going to let this one slide. Gladys had unknown Eldritch powers that kept her in his office for so long, so I figured it would be best to poke the bear. It seems she deliberately opened the Dean’s office, possibly looking for an opportunity to use her technical prowess to pull someone into a deep abyss. I preferred to not get into her business or why she was pretending the dean wasn’t in. Who knows, it could have been to my benefit.

The dean could have been in a bad mood.

I wouldn’t put a past on her to mitigate this just so that she didn’t have to deal with the fallout. I wouldn’t want to deal with somebody with administrative powers on a bad day. Especially not my super boss.

Instead, I just worked on a reel for social media. First, I started off teasing that I would talk about the five unique attributes that people should work towards and then I dripped each of the five categories.

It wasn’t perfect, but it was passable. I was going to have to get better at video editing. If this is how I needed to get in touch with Ryan Reynolds, so he might buy my team.

Speaking of videos, I spent a lot of time looking at the Essex team. I expected them to be around an ability total of sixty. Aside from Esther getting close? There is no way that we were going to make it. But this is just off of my guess. I had nothing.

The patch had given me the ability to see live game stats, but it had not given me the ability to see previous stats or video stats. It still hadn’t given me the option to see what that meant, either.

I would have done terrible things for a historical analysis option. If you ever listen to an anything about baseball, they have so much historical data to draw upon. That is just so blindingly unique and that it has to result from weaponized autism throughout the years. I mean, they’re still comparing stats of players that were playing almost 100 years ago to players nowadays and it’s just the stuff that they find is just so incredible.

If I just had a database of these players we were playing against, rather than just their win loss rankings, then perhaps I had to figure out what to do with them. As it stood, they had two superb players, and I expected both of them to show up. The rest of their team was at least as going to the guys on my team.

The patch gave me the ability to see match ratings while we were playing, which was how I knew we were going to get crushed by the Bergen County academies guys.

Once I saw the match rating for these guys? Then I would know how screwed we were. Chances were that we might be in the top 50% of the league no matter what. It was just getting to the top two positions, or at least to number three, where we could attend the finals. Maybe if you won the finals, then the dean would take me seriously. It was hard for him to take me seriously or he was just being a dick. Chances were it was the second one, because I’d seen him deny somebody something before and the smile was... shall we say malicious?

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Now if only the patch. Let me see people without having to actually see them in person or in a game, then I’ll be happy. There was a third option now. If Essex team were actually playing in regular matches or social matches, then I might drop in and a match with them and check it out. But there was a big luck of the draw thing there and I would have to be online at the same time as them and all these ducks would have to line up in a row and quack properly.

My ducks never quacked properly. Despite being quack addicts, they never had their beaks clean.

The two top stars at Essex played as Newark’s finest and Newark’s best. They shortened their gamer tags to EWRFINE and EWRBEST. I was reasonably certain that they were related, or at least, if not brothers, then cousins. You would expect brothers playing to cough from each other or to play in the same lane more frequently. But these guys stuck to a top lane and a jungle or a bottom lane in a jungle.

I only saw them play bottom and support once.

They did that thing where they were relentless in their farming and expedient in the early game. This led to them snowballing a lot better. And yeah, let’s just say that there were dozens of videos of them. Snowballing on their YouTube channel. Oh yes, they had a YouTube channel they shared with each other. It was mostly videos of them playing, although there were some strategy breakdowns where they talked about stuff and a couple of book reviews about things that Esther might be into. All the kids are into Manga nowadays, so it wasn’t too weird.

There are several mangas adapted from DOTA and with one anime season already shipped about Freya the mouse, they had another two in production. I hadn’t seen it yet as it was not the top of my list, but I made a note to review it later. Perhaps when I was on a cruise ship in the middle of nowhere and Mom had conked out for the day.

The game was great, but eventually you had to shut it off and do something else. There was always match commentary when you got tired.

When I got into my first class of the week, I was already happy to see that even the kids that had decided not to show up for some classes had shown up for the midterm. I based my midterm on the actual work they did.

This meant that the questions focused on the problems they encountered when executing a business plan with others and how they would address them. That was about 30% of the grade. So if they didn’t show up, and they didn’t do it, I would know. It was easy for them to fake this when they were at home, but if they hadn’t done it and I asked them who they’re working with and all this other stuff about their project, then they might have a problem with that. They can soak it at 70%. If they started the material, but the other 30% would be a kind of obvious that they lay over or didn’t fall through.

It was hard for me to tell them they couldn’t go it alone, but the purpose of this class was not to make them independent entrepreneurs. The purpose of the class was for them to understand business processes, accounting systems and software and how to work with a team so that they didn’t show up to a company knowing nothing. They would show up and they would work well, but they would definitely work efficiently. Exam, I had no problem reminding them they should probably open the notes for their projects.

A couple of them probably crisp me out internally, but I had briefed them before on this. So for the first half hour, I let them do their thing. Well, I thought about how I would handle this next problem.

If I figured out how we could solve Essex, then we could get to the championship. My major problem was that I didn’t know whether I should train to respond to the brothers or do one-on-one. I was thinking about a full court press style where we just hit the attack the entire way through, regardless of farming. That might be good in the short term, but I wasn’t sure if it would produce any results for us or just deny the enemy some of their results. Because chances were that if they saw an opportunity, then they would come back in and they would farm more.

In order for me to make these guys not a factor, I would have to train my guys so that they the counteract the enemy. That meant that I don’t need to put more into defense this time.

I was going to have to spend some of my hard-earned points on defense cues. Or should I put them on attack.?

It wasn’t like I could check their stats before we played. Unless one of these guys decided they were going to live stream on Monday night? I couldn’t really predict it.

My best guess was that if they had an attack of twenty and I had a defensive twenty in the same lane, then those two would kind of cancel each other out and it would be more up to the mechanics. I could get one of my guys to attack or defense twenty to combat this. I guessed that they already had an attack of twenty, which meant that I was going to have to think about defense and or mechanics. What I didn’t think they had was good farming. That was the other. If I could prove that a better farming in and Elaine did better. Would that be a viable strategy? Like if the bottom lane had to be combined farming of thirty-six versus the opponents thirty, would they come out on top on farming? All the other things being equal.

I didn’t know, but I wanted to test that. I just couldn’t test it in live conditions in that game.. So this might be back to the first point. At most. I can raise somebody’s points by two or three in one area. That method I would have to choose on Tuesday. Went to raise my guy stats in so on Thursday their games would actually be productive. We could make this an actual competition rather than just getting nailed to the floor.

I was going to have to talk to Rachel.

There were times during our normal gameplay when they would advance. There were times during training when they would ban advance, but that was more regular.

Sometimes, using solo training, they would advance. So if I really had them work harder, I might get them to increase one of their stats of five points, assuming that he didn’t hit some sort of cap somewhere. If there was a cap on points in one area, then I was going to have some issues. This was definitely going to require me to sit down and actually do some math..

That was the worst kind of problem. One I think about something and then show you work? The exact problem that I was asking my guys to go through at that exact moment. Look at the train. Incredible thinking and it made them actually do the work and if they did great on the other tests, I would drop this one.

This was just going to be a wake up call for the guys that weren’t actually doing the group work, which was going to be a requirement for there to pass my class. I was much harsher with the marketing class. They actually had to run a marketing campaign. The business guys just had to get their idea off the ground. You know, to a page in a place that might actually make sense. With their power, time and effort, they could easily make this something usable. They just treated this like another business 101 class where they just showed up and got an easy A, then they would not do so well.

The glass handed back the assignments, and I dropped into my spiel about the next test being weighted more heavily than this one and how if they weren’t already working on their projects, then this was our wake up call.

This had to be the 4th or 5th year that I’d run the class this way. I had updated the class to be more about working as a team and making a viable product. Then business theory. There was a little of theory, but there was a lot more business practice. I wanted them to actually walk out of here, actually knowing something. The same way that I wanted to walk out of this training meeting with a better idea of the situation that I was going to be facing.

I stared at the group over there, who my test had deeply affected, and delivered my usual speech.

It’s just one test. Just one course. Proper business is way harder than business class. And that one, you actually something to somebody. And this one? You just had to make me believe you were doing the work.

The second class is more the same, although I feel like they were a bit more put together. And I almost felt like I was going to be free after the second class, but then I remembered my fall 2 class.

Of course, I had another class. Life is a working professor. Meant that I had to lecture. But by the time that was done, I saw the announcement on the EWR's best feed about how they were going to play a live match that night and stream it. And how would you finally get my chance to get better intel? It’s one thing going up against an immovable object. It’s quite another thing if you know the Google object’s mother and have it on good authority that she’s tired of her current husband and now is looking for a hot wife to replace it.

I could not track down his mom and befriend her and then twist her to be on my side in 2 days. That would be a terrible use of my time. I’ve got my own mom to worry about. If I had to turn into Misses Steal your mom, then I would. But until then, I was going to view this as an opportunity to learn more about these guys and then potentially get them on my side later. If I can get them both on some potential franchise team, then I would do really well. Those two plus Jalil plus… Esther? It just got me in the right mood to enjoy the rest of my afternoon.

I popped in the first episode of the manga about Freya and let that one roll while I got on my calculator. If I was going to be unproductive, I might as well be supremely unproductive. I had several hours until the guys were going to be streaming that evening and apparently it was a school night. What this meant was that Mr. Johnston had an early curfew and Stacy was going to have to work with within those confines to get her needs met.

Now we’re all adults here and we all understand that if you got to wake up early, you got to go to sleep early. Because of generations of puritanical thought and expression, this country has decided that teenagers should go to school starting at around seven or eight in the morning. This meant that the teachers that had to teach those schools had to be up at around the same time. It was good for the teachers and it was overall okay for society, but it was terrible for the teenagers whose internal clocks and wanted them to be up a little later and stay up a little later.

But who cares about the facts of the thing when you have puritanical feelings to guide you, right?

It wasn’t like we could make any even better system and do better. After all. What was the point of education, anyway? Was I just making kids so they could make money for society?