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Old November 29th, 2019 #1
Jerry Abbott
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Join Date: Nov 2007
Location: In the hills north of Hillsboro WV
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Default Divine Heritage (Brenda Lynn Jones series, book #1)

Divine Heritage

by David Sims (a.k.a. Jerry Abbott)

Chapter 1

Morningside Elementary School
Atlanta, Georgia
April 2044

You don't know me, but you will. My mom is Helen Hostetter, and through her I'm German and Swiss. My dad is Bren Jones, and his ancestry is mostly English and Scottish. I get my blonde hair from both sides. I'm a girl, but I was named for my dad.

It's my eleventh birthday, and I have to go to school. I live in Atlanta in the same general area as Druid Hills and the Atlanta Botanical Garden. My home and my school are in one of the nicer parts of Atlanta, though that isn't saying much. I'd really hate to live on the south side because it isn't safe there at all. When I asked Dad where he was sending me for middle school next year, he said "Parks," and I was horrified because Parks Middle School is infested with drug gangs. It's a place where the teachers rape the students, or the students rape the teachers, and there's always somebody shooting a gun at somebody else. It happens every day.

But he was only teasing me. I'm going to Inman Middle School next fall, which is bad enough, but not nearly as dangerous as Parks would be. Dad said that a sociologist at Emory University did a study and found out that some of Atlanta's high schools have higher mortality rates than graduation rates. It used to be that low test scores were the biggest concern.

I really wanted to attend Brookstone, but it's in Columbus over a hundred miles away, and my parents' apron strings aren't that long.

My school is about half a mile ahead. I glance around the bus as it changes lanes, and most of my classmates don't impress me much. These same boys and girls were reasonably normal people last year, but now they're all quite immature. I don't know what happened to them. Of course, some of them are less childish than others, but they all seem pettier and shallower than they should be, fighting over small differences of opinion, casting friendships to the winds over trifles. I've seen kittens play pounce games with more dignity.

Dad says that humanity needs a functionality upgrade. He's a computer technician and software engineer, and that's just how he talks. He's right, though. The next version of the human software is overdue. Maybe the hardware needs to be improved first.

The bus has turned into the school's parking lot, and that's a good thing because the four boys in the rearmost seats are growing rowdy, and it wouldn't have been long before they started picking a fight with somebody. Now we must gather up our gear and prepare to head into the education mines.

Parked. Begin mass disembarkation.

My name is Brenda Lynn Jones, and I'm heading into Morningside Elementary School on this 20th day of April, 2044, to begin my last month in the fifth grade.
 
Old November 29th, 2019 #2
Jerry Abbott
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Location: In the hills north of Hillsboro WV
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Divine Heritage, Chapter 1, section 2.

It took about three minutes to stow most of my books in my locker along the side of Third Hall, keeping only my notebook and my math textbook, since that's my first class, and scoot into my home room ahead of the first bell.

Then I sat at my desk and looked around. Mrs. Joiner, mistress of my home room and the school's biology teacher, is reading something. The juveniles around me are abuzz with pre-bell conversation.

We're approaching the end of elementary school and a long, friendly association, albeit an institutional one, and whereas there are exceptions to which the word "friendly" would not apply, some of the girls in my class are misty-eyed about it. Sentimental. We will soon go our separate ways.

Although I'll almost certainly see familiar faces at Inman next fall, most of my schoolmates there will be strangers. A lot of the girls will be attending private schools in more gentrified areas where they will be less likely to encounter violence. So this will certainly be the last month in which most of us will see each other.

But unlike the sentimental ones, I'm looking forward to getting out of here and going somewhere people act their age, instead of like retards.

"Brenda, please pass this to Cindy."

"Okay," I said, accepting the note and handing it to the girl in the next column of seats and one row behind me. I didn't read it. Besides being discourteous, I can't imagine what the point would be.

To be fair, though, some of my classmates might be worth mentioning.

The best of them is a boy named Brian Smith. He's the smartest of the boys, and good-looking too. And he's well-behaved, and modest (for a boy), and—I guess you can tell that I like him. Last year, his grades were higher than anybody else's, and I was making B's and C's. This year, I'm top of the class, and Brian is number two. The remaining straight-A students in Morningside's fifth grade are Peter Chu and Sarah Weisman. Brian and I are white kids. Peter is Chinese, and Sarah's Jewish. We four are the grade point average elite, though some of the other kids are pushing hard to join the club.

A lady shouldn't be condescending, my mom says. But I can't help it. I enjoy having the distinction of being first in my class, especially since my having it means that Sarah doesn't have it. The title of "smartest girl in school" automatically goes to the student who has first in class standing, if that student is a girl. Sarah is jealous. She wanted to claim that status for herself. Last year, she did and made the most of it. This year, she can't. If I have anything to say about it, she never will again.

Mrs. Joiner began reading a list of today's announcements from the school administration, which means Principal Tucker, or the superintendent, or the school board. Or the cops. But Morningside doesn't often need police intervention, and today's list of imperatives sounded rather run-of-the-mill.

"...and some of you, I'll mention no names," said Mrs. Joiner, "are still in arrears for your school insurance premiums. The Principal and I expect payments to be completed by the end of the semester."

There's a law in Georgia that collectivizes the life-and-disability insurance that students are required by law to buy. Or, rather, our parents are required by law to pay for it. Collectively. Which means as long as the insurance company makes a profit, it doesn't care whether some had to pay higher premiums so that others could have a free ride. If the insurance company doesn't get "a reasonable profit" as determined by the courts, the same law enables the company to sue the county to recoup to that extent, and then the taxpayers pay for it. Payouts in the event of a death or an injury are legally guaranteed, whether the affected students' parents have paid their premiums or not. As a result, some parents don't pay. Mine always pay on the first day of each school term.

Why do we need insurance at all? The insurance gives you a certain amount of money to pay for your medical costs if you break your leg while playing basketball or if someone blinds you by popping out your eyeballs. That happened to a boy last year, and there was a big ruckus about it. There were reporters here from Channel 11 News, and I thought that it would make the newscasts, but it didn't. The station's producer or their affiliated network must have killed the story.

Anyway, the only other purpose of homeroom, as far as I can see, is to sneak in the prayers that the school is technically not supposed to sponsor. The only reason nobody sues them is the fact that they are watered down to the point of vague well-wishing. Be well, my child, and have the blessings of whatever gods or goddesses you like best. But the prayers only happen on Fridays, and today is a Wednesday.

Ah, the bell. It's time for math class. I headed out the door with the rest of the students. Some of them turned left. Some turned right. And the rest of us, myself included, went straight across the hall to room 306, where Mrs. Johns will try to teach us arithmetic.

I can't imagine why I ever thought that math was hard. It makes such perfect sense. Mrs. Johns must be a better teacher than any I've had before. I wish that she wouldn't go so slowly though. She isn't even going to finish the textbook before the semester ends. I finished it weeks ago, including all of the book's end-of-chapter homework problems. I turned them in just to impress her. The tests are so ridiculously easy that they ought not give anyone in here a challenge. And yet a minority of my classmates keep failing the tests, over and over again. I don't know how they do it, but they do.

We were in our seats, with me in the second row and the third column. Mrs. Johns, who had been sitting behind her teacher's desk, stood, picked up a handful of sheets of paper, and...

"Students," said Mrs. Johns. "Here are your mid-term tests, all graded and, where needed, commented upon. I'm going to give you your tests back, and those of you who are high-scorers should try not to look smug."

A smattering of smothered laughs rolled through the room.

"A few of you still need to study more. This should not be difficult."

Mrs. Johns handed out the graded test sheets. Mine had "100" written at the top. I could tell that Brian and Sarah had been similarly accomplished, but Peter was upset. I knew that this meant he'd missed one question, probably through misreading it, and had gotten a score of 98. That would be very upsetting to him. Worse, when his mother heard about it. Several of the questions on the test had intentional conflicts between logic and conventional syntax, and we students were being trained to attend to the logic.

A year ago, I was nobody special as far as grades go. I worked hard and was mostly a B student. But at the beginning of this year, I sailed to the head of the class. I don't just pass tests. I blast them out of the sky. I'm always the first to finish an exam, and I haven't missed a question so far this year.

The three other students of the elite aren't far behind me in GPA, and if I weren't here Peter, Brian, and Sarah would be vying for first in class. Behind those three notable classmates of mine, there's the "herd," of which I was an undistinguished member throughout the fourth grade. And behind the herd, there's a mass of dark matter that emits no light and can only be detected by their effects (mostly bad) on their brighter peers. The teachers focus their efforts on this latter group most intensively, at the expense of everyone else, trying to make them catch up with the herd. But it doesn't work.

I've met Peter's mom, a hard-driving woman, demanding of her son. Brian is a self-starter who does as well as Peter without needing his mom to nag him. Sarah is... well, Sarah's a Jew. To her, schooling is a stepping stone to the power, status, and wealth that she regards as the birthright of the Chosen Ones. And me? I suppose that I do more than is strictly required of me because I want to be an engineer like my dad when I grow up.

The four of us are all taking math class together. It's fifth-grade arithmetic, where we drill with addition problems involving four- and five-digit integers and study such advanced concepts as fractions and percentages. The dark matter actually struggles with it. The herd has no particular difficulty. Sarah, Brian, and Peter are already pushing ahead into algebra and plane geometry, though they've yet to take a course on those subjects.

"Today, we are going to begin the study of coordinate systems," announced Mrs. Johns.

I wanted to raise my hand and ask "Rotating or inertial?" but even the usually imperturbable Mrs. Johns sometimes gets annoyed with smart alecs.

"A coordinate system is a set of number lines that meet at a single point, called the 'origin,' but run in different directions. They enable functions and relations to be mapped, or graphed, on paper. This helps with visualiz—"

Mrs. Johns was interrupted by a call from another teacher, who had left her own classroom and was standing beside our door. Mrs. Johns went to see what the other teacher wanted.

Apparently, there was a discipline problem, and it was to be handled in the hall. The school's rules require such things to be witnessed, and all of the teachers are obliged to volunteer when asked.

I might have said earlier that Morningside isn't one of the really bad schools in Atlanta. It's true enough. Since it's an elementary school, the fifth grade is the highest grade it teaches. And in Atlanta there's an unwritten rule that two grade retentions is the maximum. A student who has already failed grade promotion twice will have on his later report cards no grade lower than a D. So the oldest kid here is a thirteen-year-old thug named Tyrone Banks. But he's still only a little thug, not yet as dangerous as he might be a few years hence. Still, some of the bad kids have been known to carry knives, so the extra teacher is as much a backup as a witness.

Tyrone was the troublemaker on this occasion. I could hear him saying that he hadn't done anything wrong. Or, rather, that's what he would have said if his English were better.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the room, Sharon Malley took advantage of the teacher's absence to show off her new graphing calculator. It was the latest thing from Hewlett-Packard, and Sharon thinks that anyone who doesn't have the latest thing is nobody, socially. If she saw my Casio, she'd make out like her calculator is infinitely better than mine. She's parted her hair on the left today, trying to look stylish. And would you look at that handbag she has? It's one of those $1200 models from Newman-Marks downtown. What does she keep in there—her teddy bear collection?

I could hear Tyrone's voice from the hall. He was sassing both teachers now, loudly. They ain't gonna do nothin' to him 'cause if they do he'll get them fired and brought up on civil rights charges.

I wonder what he did that was so bad that it compelled that other teacher to take cognizance. They usually just pretend not to have seen or heard anything. The teachers out there were trying to keep their voices down, but I can still hear them. It's an awkward situation for them because Tyrone isn't making an idle threat.

Years ago, laws were passed that criminalized something called "disparate impact" in the administrative policies of public schools, most especially those regarding discipline. A rule that causes one group of students to be more often subjected to punishment, as compared with other groups, may not be enforced. Tyrone belongs to a group having a very high per capita misbehavior rate. It's getting near the end of the year, and Morningside has probably used up its allowance of corrective actions with respect to that group.

Tyrone is black.

My classmates nearest the door had begun laughing. I'd missed something. But the desk-to-desk whispernet quickly informed me that Tyrone's offense had been urinating, in front of his class, while standing on top of a table, into Mrs. Thomas' aquarium. Mrs. Thomas was the school's English and Glee Club teacher. She'd been out of the room at the time, having had to witness for yet another teacher who had been trying to straighten up yet another offender, the details of which I probably won't know until this afternoon.

Most of the teachers at Morningside are white, and they don't like to deal with racial issues. The reason for their taciturnity is that doing so carries political risks. Someone like that mouthy black boy out there might accuse the teacher of racial bias, or of using a racial slur. He'd be lying, but all the authorities would pretend to believe him, and the teacher could lose her job. By never speaking about race as if there were any social significance to it, the teachers avoid having to choose between lying to their students or else being punished for telling us the truth.

The teachers worry about being fired by the principal. The principal worries about being fired by the superintendent. The superintendent worries about being fired by the district board of education. The members of that board worry about being dismissed in recall elections. And all of them are afraid of civil rights lawsuits, to which any of them might become liable if he says anything that implies that the races aren't equals, or that he thinks that mixing the races isn't such a good idea.

A threat to the paycheck will make most people pretend to believe every lie they ever heard.

Mrs. Johns reentered the classroom, and we resumed our study of arithmetic. When we were duly introduced to orthogonal Cartesian coordinate systems, we reviewed long division.

Yes, ma'am. I know how to do long division. I can show you how to find square roots, too. No, I don't need to see the prime numbers up to one hundred because I've programmed my calculator to find them for me, and to show the prime factorizations of the composites. I'm bored. Not with math, but with the slow pace of this class. The hell with mixed fractions, greatest common denominators, and least common multiples. Teach me something new, Mrs. Johns. Before I throw your box of chalk out the window.

I thought again about the deed of Tyrone Banks. Peeing in a classroom isn't the worst thing that has happened in the Atlanta Public Schools, but it is certainly one of the oddest. I wondered whether Mrs. Thomas' fish would die.
 
Old November 29th, 2019 #3
Jerry Abbott
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Divine Heritage, Chapter 1, section 3.

After the bell ending the first period, I went to my locker, unlocked it with my school-issued key, put away my math book, and grabbed the textbook for my next class.

Elementary schools once taught something called "Social Studies," which was (so I'm told) a class devoted to following contemporary events of national and international importance, and upon these events students would strive to say something relevant and clever, after which the teacher would bestow grades according to how well she admired what each of the students had said. It was, of course, a consensus-building exercise, but during the school days of my parents it did, at least, allow some wiggle room for independent thinking and the freedom to express that independent thought, if a student were capable of it.

Social Science is different. It's a brainwashing class. Once taught in colleges, it filtered into high schools in the twenties, and now it's being pushed like a narcotic drug to fifth-graders like me.

Having sat through twelve weeks' worth of Mrs. Fergus' classes, I've the impression that Social Science is a hugely convoluted exercise in circular reasoning. The entire subject exists to justify ideas that sociologists believe must be accepted as true because they should be true. And you had better not inquire whether they really are true or not, unless you want a bunch of sociologists to run up and spit on you.

Dad told me that anthropology was like that, too, regarding the theory of racial equality.

A lot of what sociologists preach sounds like nonsense. But my teacher, Mrs. Fergus, is a true believer in the stuff, so I have to pretend to believe what she preaches, or I won't get a good grade.

"What you thinkin' 'bout?"

Sharon Malley. She sometimes talks that way because her boyfriend does, leaving out unnecessary words and syllables for the sake of mandibular efficiency.

"I was just thinking about how fortunate we are to learn such an important subject as this from an expert such as Mrs. Fergus," I answered. "Is that a new calculator you have there?"

"Yeah. It's an HP."

She showed it to me, angling it so that the overhead fluorescent light reflected into my eyes.

"Is it programmable?"

"Don't know. If it is I haven't figured out how to program it yet. I hear you have a new calculator too."

I showed her my Casio.

"Pretty nice," she conceded. "Mine's probably better, though. Do you think we'll need them in class?"

"In this class? No. In Physical Science, we will."

"Yeah. That class has a lot of equations. Why doesn't this one?"

Sharon Malley isn't completely stupid, then, if she can think well enough to ask a question like that. Still, it wasn't safe for me to answer her, so I didn't.

Mrs. Fergus droned on for an hour about the usual stuff. Poverty causes crime. Everybody is born equal and different life outcomes are the result of disparities of wealth and privilege. Give a monkey enough free bananas, I thought, mentally extending the argument, and he'll become civilized and earn his living thenceforth as a mechanical engineer. I'd have loved to debate Mrs. Fergus. I was pretty certain that I could make a fool out of her.

She'd point out that the races of mankind differed by only a fraction of a percent of their genes.

I'd reply that humans and chimpanzees differ by only two percent of their genes, and that most of the genes of both men and apes have nothing to do with the differences between them, but rather function to determine them both as animals rather than plants; as multicellular rather than single-celled; as chordates with a central nervous system; as vertebrates with a backbone; as warm-blooded mammals instead of fish or reptiles; as primates rather than felines, ursines, or ruminants; as hominids rather than monkeys. Doing all that uses up 98% of our genes.

If I were disputing the equality of humans and oak trees, a much larger fraction of the genes would be relevant to the debate. But if I'm disputing the quality of the several races of mankind, the only genes that deserve attention are those that cause human racial variation to occur. The similarity in all the rest of the genes is irrelevant and does not constitute a valid talking point for the egalitarian side. Anyone who thinks otherwise should be asked whether farm tractors and passenger cars are the same things because they both burn fossil fuels, require lubricant on their moving parts, and have wheels, transmissions, and internal combustion engines.

Yes, I could beat Mrs. Fergus in a debate, provided that neither of us had an unfair advantage. But Mrs. Fergus held just such an advantage. She had the power to choose what grade I would get from her class, whereas I had no reciprocal leverage against her. Were I to show her the errors in her ideology, she'd punish me by giving me a bad grade, and with that grade I would lose my class standing. So I'd just keep my mouth shut, at least until I graduated from elementary school.

You don't have to tell me what a hypocrite I am. I know it already.
 
Old November 29th, 2019 #4
Jerry Abbott
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Divine Heritage, Chapter 1, section 4.

Physical science does have equations, but they're all simple ones that you don't need a fancy graphing calculator for. Anything that will do the four basic arithmetic operations will get you by.

On the other hand, I've had a peek into Dad's college physics textbooks, so I've seen what's coming a ways down the road. The equations in that book are the kinds of stuff that you do need a graphing, symbolic algebra-and-calculus, programmable calculator for. Since I don't expect to wait until I'm in college to do work at that level, my calculator isn't just for flash and status. It's an investment that I'm glad my dad paid for because my allowance sure wasn't going to cover it. Not even if I volunteered to do the dishes every night.

Now I know what Sharon uses that oversized handbag for. She smuggles chewing gum into class in it, and passes it around to the more rebellious girls who dare defy Mr. Davis' gum interdict. For a boy, getting caught chewing gum would be worth an immediate trip to the Principal's office for a stern lecture, plus whatever else they do to boys in there. Rumors abound, but hard evidence is scant. But a girl can usually evade punishment by saying, "Oops, I forgot," and by looking very sincerely contrite. We girls are all experts at looking very sincerely contrite. It's a survival skill.

I won't bore you with the rest of my science class, except to mention that some white phosphorus got away from Mr. Davis after it ignited on one side and burned his fingers. He had been holding it in his hands, trying to wipe the oil off.

"Is that white phosphorus?" Brian had guessed what the stuff was.

"Yes it is," said Mr. Davis, squeezing the little blob.

"You're going to get burned if you keep that up."

"No, I'm not. I—"

Fffffft!

"Ow! Damn."

He dropped the phosphorus, and after it hit the floor the thrust from the burning side made the blob scoot under our desks. We all raised our feet to get them out of the way while it careened from wall to wall, and nearly every girl in class except me screamed. The phosphorus wedged into a crack between two masonry blocks, and Brian ran into the hall, grabbed a fire extinguisher, and ran back in to spray whatever was in it on the phosphorus, which was still oxidizing furiously.

With Mr. Davis, that's a normal class. Last week he blew up a beaker filled with water by throwing some metallic sodium into it. He looks like a mischievous Faust when he does stuff like that, which is one of the reasons I like science class so much.
 
Old November 29th, 2019 #5
Jerry Abbott
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Divine Heritage, Chapter 1, section 5.

Biology is my least favorite class. Mrs. Joiner is our biology teacher, so I was back in Room 305. We've gone over human anatomy in some detail during the earlier weeks of class, covering digestion and metabolism while we were studying the alimentary canal. And some of the ruder boys predictably made jokes at the end of that chapter of our textbooks. We'd wrapped up the chapter on the reproductive system yesterday, and today we were reviewing sex.

More jokes from the boys.

I'm not sure how I feel about sex. It sounds like a messy and unsanitary kind of activity. But I'm quite sure that I don't like childbirth. The film we saw certainly made that part of the business look painful. Having to stretch that far seems like it would kill somebody. Maybe the fact that most women survive having a baby is why older people call it a miracle.

"Yes, Devon?" Mrs. Joiner had paused her lecture to answer a question.

"Do women sometimes defecate while they are having a baby?"

Um.

"It has been known to happen," the teacher said, taking the question seriously. "Nurses are trained to wipe away any feces, to prevent them from infecting the mother or the baby."

That was yesterday. Today, the focus seems to be on the physiology of sexual arousal, intercourse, and orgasm. Some of the students wanted the teacher to describe how an orgasm felt.

"All right," said Mrs. Joiner, rising again to the challenge. "Do you know how it feels to need to sneeze, but the sneeze won't quite come?"

A student quickly pointed out the unintended pun. Mrs. Joiner revised her question.

"Your nose itches, and you need to sneeze to relieve that itch, but you can't. Not quite. Not for a while. But then the sun gets into your eyes, and all at once you sneeze hard, and it's such a relief not to need to sneeze any more. An orgasm feels something like that. Only better."

Quite a few of the boys expressed disappointment when Mrs. Joiner told us that there wouldn't be a film documentary to throw light upon the human sexual act. One of them pointed out that we had seen the childbirth film, and he suggested that it was just as reasonable to see how a pregnancy began as it was to see how it ended.

I couldn't fault his logic, though I suspect he had an ulterior motive for wanting a pornographic film imported to our biology class. He can find sex movies online, if he's really interested. But having one shown in the classroom would legitimize his watching them and give him something to say if his parents caught him browsing YouPorn videos at home.

But that's how the human biology class went through the chapter on sex and reproduction. The girls concealed both interest and embarrassment. The boys tried to discombobulate the teacher with prurient questions that were oh-so-technically phrased. But Mrs. Joiner was an older woman who did not easily become discombobulated, and she sometimes found ways to turn the tables on the boys.
 
Old November 29th, 2019 #6
Jerry Abbott
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Divine Heritage, Chapter 1, section 6.

I have a "study hall and independent study" period after biology class. My project has been measuring the electric charge capacity of several brands of rechargeable 18650 lithium-ion batteries, with a secondary purpose of sorting them according to their actual capacity and scoring their sellers on a truth-in-advertising basis.

Over the years, lithium-ion and lithium-polymer batteries have replaced alkalines for nearly everything, and it's easy to understand why. They work at low temperatures that make alkaline batteries sluggish. They hold twice as much charge as alkaline batteries do and have a nominal potential difference of 3.8 volts, instead of 1.5 volts, across the poles.

Alkaline batteries are still used in wall clocks, but that's about it. My calculator uses small lithium batteries. Cars and buses run on huge lithium batteries. The 18650 battery is the most popular choice for flashlights, and flashlights are the most convenient device to me for draining the batteries.

A fully charged 18650 battery has about 4.2 volts. As it is used to supply power to a device, that voltage falls. The reduction in voltage means that the battery isn't pushing electrons through the wire as strongly as it had been earlier, so a given amount of current—which is the number of electrons moving past a given point in a wire in a given amount of time—carries less energy than it did before. The beam from the flashlight's light-emitting diode grows dimmer, and, when the battery's voltage has fallen to about 2.8 volts, the light goes out completely.

The flashlight I've been using is one of my dad's. He collected LED flashlights when he was younger, and he let me borrow his Romisen T801. I upgraded the bulb from its original XML T6 LED to an XML Y5, which I bought online.

At the start of the period, I entered Coach Cukenheimer's sparsely pupiled classroom and measured the voltage of the battery that I was using at the moment with the school's voltmeter. I wrote the number in a log book in the column beside the date. I put the battery back into the flashlight and turned it on. As I switched on the flashlight, I started a chronometer. Then I pulled a book from a desk compartment and read it for an hour with my feet propped up on the seat of the next desk. When the bell ending the period was near, I put the book away, turned off the flashlight, and stopped the chronometer. I recorded the battery's new voltage and the elapsed time.

A battery will recover some voltage if it is given a rest, so the voltage that counts is the one measured at the beginning of each class session. I wrote down the voltage at the end of the period just to find out how large the recovery was.

The Romisen T801 is a bright, demanding flashlight. The bulb is efficient, but five hours of runtime uses up the charge in the batteries that I've been testing, most of which have between 2400 and 4200 milliamp hours of capacity. Whether or not the capacity advertised on the label matches the capacity that the battery actually has is one of the things I'd set out to discover.

I've found four brands of 18650 batteries that are consistently good. The others... not so much. I've pretty much concluded that any battery brand name ending in "-fire" is second-rate at best, with some having less than half of their advertised capacity. I suspected that many of those weak batteries were rebranded old cells with a new wrapper put on at some dirty factory in Zhangzhou. One of them fell apart in my hand, so I threw it away.

The twelve batteries that I've tested so far have been recharged and are in a basket on top of a filing cabinet that contains a photocopy of my data for each battery, as well as graphs of those data. A battery's chemistry determines the shape of the curve of the declining voltage over time. An alkaline battery will have an almost linear decline, but a lithium battery will drop a little at first, but then hold almost steady until right before the end, when it suddenly poops out.

I know this isn't much work, and the class is just an easy A on my report card. But that's public schools for you. The curriculum is much too easy for some, but it is much too difficult for others, and there's a distinct racial correlation involved that nobody seems willing to talk about.
 
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