The last book I had read was The Martian, by Andy Weir, and while I liked the movie very much, I loved the book even more. Andy Weir is not afraid to get nerdy and lay out some serious math and I’m here for it. While I started thinking about reading a book by another favorite author, Scott Turow, some of my friends urged me to read another Weir book, Project Hail Mary, and I am so glad I did. I was warned to avoid the spoilers in the movie trailer that is out now, and I’m relieved that I did so. Because Project Hail Mary unfolds like a flower. It begins with the Amnesiac Hero trope, but it serves the book well as the protagonist’s (no, I’m not even going to tell you his name) story is told in parallel, with a series of flashbacks filling in the gaps as his memory returns…slowly.
I honestly can’t tell you too much about this book without spoiling it. But I will say this: If you liked The Martian, you will love Project Hail Mary. I love the problem solving, the humanity of the protagonist, flawed though he may be, and a satisfying conclusion that didn’t feel rushed, a trait that is more and more common these days. Oh, and the audiobook reader, Ray Porter? He kills it. Great job.
Three days preparing for students to start school. Three days.
Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? It isn’t. I’m just glad I went in last week to get started because I’m still not done. On Monday, all one thousand or so of us teachers congregated in the auditorium at the high school and listened to the superintendent talk for two hours. Well, I assume someone listened to him. I didn’t. I tried to listen but he couldn’t figure out how to talk into the microphone he clipped on. He walked around, gesticulated a lot, and from his tone, I think he was excited. But I couldn’t make out much of what he said. Everyone who spoke into the microphone at the podium were crystal clear. Unfortunately, that portion of the program was only about 20 minutes.
After catching a ride with my principal back to my school ( I hitched a ride there with my friend and neighbor Amber) I ate my lunch and had a whole 30 minutes to continue to unpack and situate my room, before–aw, you guessed. A staff meeting.Two and a half hours of presentation and information overload. After 90 minutes, it was all just bouncing off. Fortunately they gave us all a digital copy of the presentation with links to the important documents. The hard wooden furniture in B128 used to be in the library. I recognized it right away. It did quite a number on my back after two and a half hours. The library, on the other hand, has some nice, comfortable chairs. Probably not enough to seat the entire staff, though. At the end of the meeting, I got to see one of my old students who is now an assistant principal. That doesnt’ seem quite possible, but there you go.
By the end of the meeting, I had about an hour to work in my classroom. I was beat.
On the second day, we began with–aw, come on, you’re too good at this game–a meeting. A training, really, in how to use our new textbooks. The school system hasn’t adopted a math text in, let me count here, 16 years. But now we are using RevealMath, which includes both consumables and digital content. They are allegedly aligned with Indiana standards, but my very first search proved that wrong. Prime factorization is kind of my thing. My entire Solution Squad book starts out with prime numbers, then moves on to prime factorization, then solving proportions with simplifying ratios, which is done with prime factorization. It’s incredibly useful. Well, in Indiana, it’s a 7th grade standard, but it was nowhere to be found in the textbook that we are being given. It’s part of the 6th grade course. And we were told that we were only allowed access to the coursework that we actually teach, so the 6th grade book is not available to me, as I teach 7th and 8th grade. Now, you might think that something like that would upset me, but it does not. That just means I get to use my Solution Squad materials! It’s actually cause for celebration. What did make me a little angry, though, is that the filter I applied for my search was by Indiana standard, and lo and behold, it’s the old standards, not the 2023 ones. For a big company like McGraw-Hill, that’s just lame. At least I got some time in my rom after lunch.
The third day began with–no, you really don’t have to guess–a meeting. We had a math department meeting to talk about scope and sequence, distribution of the new books (which hadn’t even arrived yet), and who was teaching what courses. It was necessary to have, but holy moley, so many meetings. I would love to say that I spent the rest of the day preparing, but the books came in around lunchtime, and after I devoured my steak burriito and Mexican Coke from Ricky’s Taqueria (the best little hole in the wall in all of Elkhart), I hauled 200 books in two loads on my cart up from the library. I got all four bulletin boards done, but there’s a pile of totes in my room that have nowhere to go.
I probably should mention that there is not one cubic inch of storage available in my classroom. The teacher who had my room last year passed away from cancer, toward the end of the year, and all of her stuff is still in the cabinets. They’re still trying to figure out what to do with all of it. In the meantime, I’ll just stack my totes in a corner.
I would normally have been done with everything by now, but with all the heavy physical stuff, my back was warning me to slow down and take breaks. Getting older sometimes isn’t that much fun.
The kids are coming today, and I can’t wait to meet them!
The rest of my life. It’s such an odd phrase. But having turned 60 years old, I have to really start considering that what time I have left is limited. My dad died at 65, my mom at 72; both had cancer. Three of my 4 grandparents had cancer. One died at 53 two at 69, and one at 85. Just looking at the math, I may not have a whole lot of time left. So how do I use it? Retirement didn’t stick. I was bored silly. I was so bored, that one month, I wrote a novel. 60,000 words in a month. And I was still bored. Every morning I would do all the puzzles that the New York Times had to offer then I would write all day. It still didn’t give me the mental stimulation that I needed.
Since going back to teaching full time I have found the stimulation that I was looking for. Last year, however, was not ideal. I was teaching students who had failed algebra up to five times. They were not exactly inspired to learn. My ego told me I could make a difference in their lives and for a very few I was successful. But it was frustrating beyond words to meet such resistance from students who didn’t feel they could improve their lives. When the opportunity came to return to teaching middle school I jumped at it. I am a middle school teacher. Have been given the chance to return to Pierre Moran Middle School, well that was just icing on the cake.
I never stopped learning new things. That’s one of the things I can be proud of in my life. In trying to develop a yearlong escape room, more or less. I’ve found tools that have helped me immensely in being productive: ChatGPT and Canva. If I had had these tools while I was working on Solution Squad, my life would have been so much easier. The ability to create learning materials based on my comic stories has been made incredibly easier. I can now produce posters worksheets buttons everything at the touch of a button using Canva. ChatGPT helps me to align my work with Indiana math standards which have changed in the past two years. Who knows why they keep changing things the way they do? But they do and I just have to play along.
One of the mistakes I made when working on Solution Squad was thinking that all math teachers had the same ability that I do to be able to find math in every single instance of any subject. It was such a niche project that the crossover between math teachers and comic book lovers was too small to make it financially viable. So, I’m not trying to do that anymore. The work that I’m doing now is purely for my benefit. People may admire my creativity but I’m not doing it for the masses or to make money. I’m doing it for me. I want to see if I can be the quality teacher that I was 10 years ago.
My wife often says that I have to have a project. I always have to have something long term that I’m working on to keep myself occupied. Now that I have the tools available to me that I wish I’d always had, I’m going to make the class the best I possibly can. I’m going to use graphic novels, comic books, and popular culture and I’m going to make a math class that kids will remember.
The big question is, how long can I keep this up? If I enjoy it? Indefinitely. In seven years, I can collect Social Security at my full retirement age I don’t feel like my health will stop me but possibly my hearing will be the issue. I already have trouble hearing people in conversation and have to read lips in addition to having hearing aids, so I guess I’ll let that determine when I’m done. But I would honestly enjoy teaching for the rest of my life if the kids match my creative energy like the middle school kids in my past did.
I’m returning after a 10-year absence to Pierre Moran Middle School in Elkhart Indiana. I’ll be teaching 7th grade and possibly an eighth grade class and I’m really looking forward to being back with 12, 13, and 14-year olds that’s really where I belong. I’ll be honest I really haven’t felt like much of a teacher in the 10 years since I was pulled from Pierre Moran mid-year to join the staff at Northside Middle School completely against my will. I had spent 18 1/2 years at Pierre Moran and I had already had the children of some of my children. I was part of the community. I was a leader. I had been on virtually every committee that the school had and chaired most of them at one time or another. The hows and whys of it don’t matter anymore; the important thing is that I’m back.
You wouldn’t think that at age 60 that I had anything to prove. But I do–to myself. When I left Pierre Moran 10 years ago I was at the top of my game. I was the best teacher I had ever been. Everything was rolling in the right direction and it’s never been the same since. I want to see if I can get back to that level of expertise and skill and I want to do more. I want to be the example that other people follow. With that in mind I came up with a crazy idea to create a fictional school within a school a superhero school if you will and the students in my classes will be superheroes in training. Using ChatGPT to provide graphics and Canva to provide the ability to present, I’m going to introduce my students a new way of immersing in a fictional world while learning math at the same time. I’m not sure it’s ever been done before but I’m going to do it. Here’s my first presentation.
I know, it’s incredibly controversial. My artist friends have been up in arms for a few years now over AI. It’s robbing them of their livelihoods, and they are right to worry so.
Confession: I stopped drawing two years ago because of it. I’m truly a frustrated artist. I knew a long time ago that I would never be as good as I wanted to be. I saw the writing on the wall that it would quickly surpass anything I could do. And I was right.
I’ve seen the arguments. It takes money out of the hands of artists. There’s no skill to it. If you use it, your ability to do the things that it does will erode. Well, that’s okay. What I’ve discovered so far puts the lie to that. A month of so back, my gaming buddies and I were chatting about its use. I was about to start running a new Star Trek Adventures game, we were starting all new characters. Just for fun, I thought, let’s see what 1966 Charlton Heston would look like in a Star Trek Uniform. I have to tell you, it didn’t do a bad job. Now, was this something I was likely to commission from an artist friend. No. No way ever.
Now, I quickly discovered that ChatGPT does not like to do the correct insignia on its Star Trek renderings, so I used my skills with Photoshop to Clone tool away the patch on his shirt and replace it with a photograph of the actual command insignia. Since I didn’t ask for a background I was free to place him wherever I wanted him.
I put him in front of a control console on my starship, the USS Nautilus, and interior set that I paid a whole lot for. Now, I don’t want to hang this photo up. I just needed it for NPC reference in a game. And if ChatGPT can give it to me and I can complete it in 15 minutes, then sign me up.
I used it to create backgrounds for my two Bill Krause-designed Challenger-class starships. This is also something I would never pay anyone to do. And I paid $400 for my two digital models, thank you very much.
USS Nautilus approaches a tropical planet
So, yeah, while I’m using it for art, I am still paying artists for their work, but where else am I going to find a thousand backgrounds to put my ships on to my specifications?
The real kicker though, came when I was in a professional development meeting on June 6. We were learning how to make our home pages in Canvas and I asked the tech person how to word wrap around my photo image in my introduction. She quickly said, “Canvas doesn’t do that. But we can have ChatGPT write the HTML code for doing it and use its HTML editor to make that happen. And we did just that. Everyone, I have no intention of learning how to code HTML. This was a great tool to use and it never even occurred to me to use it for anything but playing around with photos and Star Trek stuff.
Then when someone suggested writing test questions with it, I had to admit, I didn’t know it could do that. But oh, yes. Here’s what I gave it:
Write a multiple choice question using Indiana Academic Standard 7.RP.2 with a Star Trek Original Series theme.
ChatGPT said:
Sure! Here’s a multiple choice question aligned with Indiana Academic Standard 7.RP.2 (Recognize and represent proportional relationships between quantities), with a Star Trek: The Original Series theme:
Indiana Academic Standard 7.RP.2 – Multiple Choice Question Theme: Star Trek – The Original Series
While exploring a distant planet, Captain Kirk notes that the amount of dilithium crystals mined is proportional to the time spent mining. In one mission, 15 kilograms of dilithium were mined in 3 hours.
If the crew continues mining at the same rate, how many kilograms of dilithium can they expect to mine in 8 hours?
A) 35 kg B) 40 kg C) 45 kg D) 50 kg
Correct Answer: B) 40 kg (Explanation: 15 kg / 3 hr = 5 kg/hr. 5 kg/hr × 8 hr = 40 kg)
Now, I don’t know about you, but my day is made. BUT–Is Captain Kirk really the right one to note the speed at which dilithium crystals are being mined? No. That’s where my brain kicks in. No, it would be Scotty. So, I will make the adustment.
While exploring a distant planet, Chief Engineer Scott notes that the amount of dilithium crystals mined is proportional to the time spent mining. In one mission, 15 kilograms of dilithium were mined in 3 hours.
If the crew continues mining at the same rate, how many kilograms of dilithium can they expect to mine in 8 hours?
A) 35 kg B) 40 kg C) 45 kg D) 50 kg
Now I have a decent question, and it took a fraction of the time it would have taken me to come up with something similar.
So, will my art skills atrophe? I don’t honestly care. I’m not doing this for money anymore. I’m more interested in making my workflow more efficient. My other skills, like using Photoshop, are getting a real workout. Especially when I want to see what Alan Rickman would look like as a Vulcan doctor. I fixed the insignia, the eyebrows, and I placed him in another set that I paid to have designed.
I know, all of my artist friends are dead set against it. I don’t blame any of you. But how AI is going to help me is immeasurable. I don’t care about six-fingered hands. What I do care about are things like I did yesterday. “Write a diagnostic multiple choice quiz with four questions from each of the five domains of the 6th grade Indiana math standards.”
Done.
I looked it over and it was solid work. If there were any poorly worded questions or questions that didn’t measure what I wanted to know, I could tweak them, but I didn’t need to.
“Write the quiz in Spanish.”
Done.
Then ChatGPT asked me if I wanted a printable PDF or if I wanted it in digital format. I chose digital format. Then I asked to make it for Canvas. It not only put the quizzes into digital format, but also gave me step-by-step instructions on how to upload it directly into my Canvas course.
So, in less than ten minutes, I had quizzes in Engish and Spanish uploaded into Canvas and ready to be assigned. Care to guess how long all of that would have taken me to do manually? Especially the translation? Hours.
Now, the debate can begin. Is it fair to rely on AI to do our jobs? Of course not. But I am a trained professional wth 38 years of classroom experience. I know good questions from bad ones. I also know if something is built to tell me what I need to know or not. I don’t rely on AI to do everything. I am going to use it to do the grunt work that I could pay an assistant to do.
I used it recently to write Ebay descriptions for comics and action figures that I put up to sell. I had to be very descriptive in my prompts. And I am going to say this, and you can argue with me all day long. It is an art form (and maybe a science) to construct a prompt to make the AI do what you want it to do. I have had many false starts because I wasn’t precise enough in my language when creating prompts. I’ve gotten a lot better at it now that I understand what it does and does not do well.
Does anyone remember the episode of Star Trek The Next Generation where Geordi gets tired of Data beating all the Sherlock Holmes mysteries on the holodeck and instructs the computer to create a unique Sherlock Holmes mystery with an adversary who is capable of defeating Data? This is how we got the Moriarty villain. You have to choose your words carefully.
But that’s not the only time that we’ve seen how AI works in our popular culture. When Tony Stark interacts wtih Jarvis or Friday in all the Iron Man and Avengers movies, that’s exactly what he’s doing. I recently had that same experience.
I started working on Heroes of STEAM again recently and uploaded the rules into ChatGPT. It gave me feedback on the gamel and how it was appropriate for the audience. I had the AI create two characters using my ruleset, and then had it simulated a battle between the two characters. It gave me a readout of the mock battle, all the moves, the damage done and the damage mitigated, and told me who the winner was. It even asked me if I wanted it to give the characters names. They weren’t bad, to be fair. I did note that it wasn’t having the characters move on the map at all. They just stod next to each other and slugged it out. I then added the strategy of moving to a distance where the character’s best attack would work. That generated an entirely different result. Then I had it create five characters and did a free-for-all fight. Last one standing wins. I ran that simulation ten times and found that the character whose main trait was mobility, the ability to dodge and move, was winning nearly every time. I asked ChatGPT how I could modify the stat to even things out a bit, and it gave me a potential solution. I made that change and reran the simulation ten times again. It changed, but now favored a different attribute.
I did this back-and-forth for about three hours, running hundreds of simulated battles using my rules. And now Heroes of STEAM is a much better product. The time and effort that it would have required to playtest hundreds of games was reduced to about 1% of what it would have been.
People can argue against AI all day long, but I’m going to tell you this; I’m not going back. It’s a whole new world now. It’s scary, but there’s no way this tool is going back in the box.
I remember when the first computer gradebook was released and my mentor teacher urged me to use it. It took me far longer to input the grades than it took me to calculate them mentally from my hand-written gradebook. I told him then that when the technology saves me time, I will start using it.
Today, I saw yet another reference to the original Nightwing costume as “Disco Nightwing.”
Goodness. Here it is, drawn by George Perez, in all its original 1984 glory:
Now, for anyone even vaguely familiar with this character, one has to remember that Dick Grayson, formerly Robin the Boy Wonder, grew up and became Nightwing in Tales of the Teen Titans #44.
He is paying homage to his circus roots. That collar does not fold over like John Travolta’s. It sticks up like a circus performer’s costume, and not coincidentally, the other circus performer-turned superhero from DC Comics is Deadman.
As you can see, Deadman has a raised collar, and yet no one suggests that he’s “Disco.” This is just one of those things that drives me nuts.
A little over ten years ago, when I was turning 50, I was teaching a one-semester elective class called Math Problem Solving. I was basically free to do anything I wanted within teaching the Indiana Academic Standards for 7th grade. And the main standard that I focused on was a big one.
“7.C.6: Use proportional relationships to solve ratio and percent problems with multiple operations (e.g. simple interest, tax, markups, markdowns, gratuities, conversions within and across measurement systems, and percent increase and decrease).”
Considering there’s another math standard for simply adding integers, this one was simply immense and covered a wide variety of problems to solve. So, we did a little trip down memory lane. I wanted to explore what was then 50 years ago, the year 1964. With a little Google-Fu, I pulled up some fun and relatable items besides myself that made their first appearance that year: The Ford Mustang, GI Joe, Rankin/Bass’s Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, the James Bond movie, Goldfinger, and much more. We looked at McDonald’s price boards from that year and calculated the rate of inflation to present day. Then we compared it to prices of other things like gasoline, bread, ground beef, and milk. We looked at wages, home prices car prices, everything we could find data for. And we compared. Oh, did we compare. We talked about the differences in the rates of inflation for different items and we theorized the reasons behind them.
Then, for a final project on the unit, I posed to my students a question: If you could go back in time to 1964, with a large American Tourister Bob Hope suitcase full of clothes and $50,000 in 1964 cash, and could spend a week there, what would you do, and what would you bring back to the present with you if you were limited to what could be contained in your suitcase?
One of the first students to hear the directions blurted out, “I want to go to Disney World.” I said, “Sorry, you can’t.” When they asked why not, I knew I had them hooked. I told them they’d have to look it up. They quickly discovered that Disney World didn’t open until 1971! They went wild over this project. Many of them bought stocks and some bought rare comic books, baseball cards, and various other money-making items. This was to be expected. Many of them had seen Back to the Future II. But the ones who hit me right in the feelings were the ones who wanted to go see The Beatles in concert; I had them find where the Fab Four were playing the day they were leaving (exactly 50 years ago the day the received the assignment); it was the ones who wanted to visit the grandparents who died before they were born. I had them ask their parents where they lived at the time. And my goodness, some wanted to save Martin Luther King, Jr. I asked them to find out where he was speaking that day. This was one time that iPads and the Internet won the day.
The breadth of this writing project stunned me. I had never seen imagination sparked like this in a math class. Sure, I expected them to find things that would secure them financially for the future, but to read about their additional adventures seeking rare experiences just restored my faith in the power of children, even adolescents. It showed me their character. And it showed me just what could be done when a teacher isn’t bound by covering a specific standard on a particular page in a lock-stepped curriculum.
I’m in a semi-darkened theater in Battle Creek, Michigan on Christmas Eve, 1978. I’m with my brother, my sister, my mother, my stepfather, and his three kids. We’ve ridden in the bed of a pickup truck with a cap on it, huddled together in blankets to get us all to the movies. We have popcorn and drinks, and in my hands I have a movie program, the first I’ve ever seen. I’ve been reading about the new actor Warner Brothers has found to play Superman, and I’ve seen him in previews for the past two weeks. He looks like the real deal in the program. As I peruse the actors’ biographies, I’m up to Glen Ford, when the lights go down. I get goosebumps. After the bit with the kid reading a copy of Action Comics I hear the low rolling bass. Dum de da dum dum. Da da da da dum de da dum dum…then a burst of blue light fires the credits right at my eyes!
Two hours later, I walk out of the theater in a daze, past the ten-foot wide crystalline Superman The Movie logo sign. I have just seen the greatest movie in all of my fourteen years. Over the next several months, I see the movie four times. I see it with my dad, and with one of my best friends, Ken. We travel to Traverse City on a night when he has keyboard lessons, and after we see the movie, we spend the whole trip home in his mom’s Lincoln Continental, with our hands outstretched in front of us, imagining the flight along the road in pursuit of an XK 101 nuclear missile.
I had been on the road to weeding out my comic book collection by trading them in two for one at the local flea market, but all of that’s over with. I am buying everything I see with Superman in it. I find a new Superman series called DC Comics Presents, with art by Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, featuring Superman and the Flash in its first two issues. I’m reading Starlog Magazine at a basketball game with Superman on the cover. This obsession lasts through spring and into summer. I have Superman The Movie bubblegum cards. I have the Superman soundtrack by John Williams on vinyl. While I listen to it, I sort out the cards in story-sequential order and match the music to the scene. I painstakingly record the soundtrack on my cassette recorder so that I can play it while I’m riding my bike on my paper route. I carry the cassette recorder in my paper bag, hands outstretched in front of me as I ride. It’s an endless summer before high school begins and I have to put away childish things…
There have been many live-action iterations of the Man of Steel since 1978, and whenever the newest one emerges, someone asks me what I think of the new Superman. My answer is always the same:
“It’s not for me.”
Now, I don’t mean to come down on anyone else’s opinion, or disparage anyone’s favorite Superman, but I mean what I say literally. It’s not made for me. Superman The Movie ignited my imagination and came to me at a time when I needed it. Was it perfect? Oh, no. I didn’t like the icy version of Krypton or Marlon Brando as Jor-El. But I was well-read enough to have seen multiple versions of Superman’s origin, even then, and I knew that changes came over time. The character had been around for 40 years at that point, and if in this version, Ma Kent survives to see him become Superman without him ever becoming Superboy first, so be it. My dad was less forgiving. He ranted and raved about the effects not being good enough and that Christopher Reeve was too scrawny. But I knew where his complaints were coming from. It wasn’t for him. His Superman came in the form of George Reeves in “Adventures of Superman,” the TV series that began in 1951, when my father was eight years old. I realized then that nothing is ever going to be more perfect than the cultural icons of your youth, and by the time Christopher Reeve was playing Superman for the last time in 1987’s Superman IV The Quest for Peace, I was graduating from college, and I knew my adult years would alter my perception of what was clearly a character intended for a more youthful audience.
There have been dozens of versions of Superman in animation, television and movies since then, and none of them will ever match up for me. But that’s okay. I’m 60 years old now, and though Superman The Movie is 46 years old, I still enjoy my annual viewing. Every variation, every version seems to find its fans, and boy, they don’t hesitate to let you know that your choice is the wrong one if it differs with theirs. The good news is that I have my version, and no one can take it from me.
“I’m afraid, Ray, that you’re going to need a hip replacement.” The doctor pointed to the scan on the screen in the well-appointed office whose shiny white walls made it look like it belonged in a Star Trek episode, except for the natural light that poured in from the skylight. He sat in a high-backed Herman Miller chair. He gestured with a laser pointer mounted in the left index finger of his metal hand. “You have worn down the joint here, here, and here. Looks like osteoarthritis. Ordinarily we’d see this in someone who was carrying too much weight in their belly for too long, but well, you’ve been carrying another kind, haven’t you?”
Raymond Light looked at the screen and shook his head. “What kind of recovery time are we looking at, Doc?”
“With Argonian technology and ultraviolet healing rays, still at least six weeks.”
“Blast! I can’t afford to be out of action that long. Aren’t there any shortcuts we can take?”
“Oh, sure, there’s Zurn genetic therapy and cloning, but with the wild card effect, there’s a ten percent chance you could sprout a lizard tail.”
Ray stood up, painfully, and walked across to the doctor, trying to conceal his limp just out of habit. “All right, Doc, schedule it for as soon as possible. I need to get this done with as quickly as I can.”
“In the meantime,” the doctor warned, “try to take it easy, eh?”
“You know me, Doc.”
“Yes, that’s why I said it. Oh, and Ray? Happy birthday.”
Ray shook hands with Dr. Improbable and nodded toward the skylight above. The doctor pressed a stud on his Improbability Gauntlet, and the skylight slid open with a near-silent whir.
“I’ll see you soon.” Ray adjusted his leather jacket, fastening it over his white jumpsuit, lowered the aquamarine translucent goggles over his eyes, and launched himself into the sky in a blaze of swirling blue, green, and violet light, which all but vanished against the bright blue sky.
“If not sooner,” the doctor said to himself.
Raymond Light, better known as Borealis, hovered for a moment above the Chicago office, took in the beauty of the skyline, then started climbing while he plotted a course home, following the Lake Michigan shoreline. He transferred the navigation into his heads-up display and did a weather check. It was a nice, clear day all the way home to Traverse City Michigan. It was a bit chilly at seven thousand feet, an altitude that avoided most migrating birds, so he redirected some of his internal energies into life support, crafted a minor multicolored bullet-shaped force field to project in front of him, and put the rest of his considerable power into flight. He accelerated slowly as he hugged the shoreline, passing over Hammond Indiana, then Gary, then Michigan City, but once he crossed the Michigan border and passed Benton Harbor, he poured it on. His force field and ear caps protected him from the sonic boom as he accelerated north, past Mach 1. At this speed, he’d be home in about half an hour. There was no rush.
I shouldn’t need a hip replacement. I’m still young. I’m only—59? That can’t be right, Borealis thought, as he made a minor course adjustment over Holland. That would mean that I’ve been doing this for—41 years? How is that possible?
Ray’s thoughts turned back to the day when he, as a high school senior, first became imbued with power from mysterious charged particles during a particularly strong solar storm.
December 28, 1982
Young Ray Light was on his way back home from the State Theater in Traverse City on a date with his girlfriend, Karen. They had gone to see Tootsie. They were on Christmas break from school, and Ray was thinking about finding a place for them to park. The night sky was filled with the shimmering curtains of the Northern Lights. They held hands as they watched the rare spectacle. They’d been dating off and on for two years and were finally in a place where both felt comfortable. When an oncoming car drifted into their lane, Ray turned the wheel as slowly as he could to avoid it while maintaining control of the car.
The car just missed them, and Ray tried to navigate his way back to his lane, when he hit a patch of ice. The 1974 Chevy Nova with its 350cc engine, started sliding wildly. He overcorrected and caused it to fishtail once, twice, three times. On the third time, the car skidded sideways down into a ditch, sending a wall of snow flying over the windows, then coming to a sudden halt. Ray checked on his girlfriend to make sure she was all right. Karen was shaken up but nodded that she was okay. Ray opened the driver’s side door to get out. His shoe immediately filled with snow, as they were in pretty deep, about 100 feet from the road. He cleared the driver’s side of snow with the shovel he kept in the trunk and found that one tire had been taken off the rim, and the other one was completely flat. He had Karen get behind the wheel, while he pushed the car, and couldn’t get it to budge. They tried rocking it back and forth, but it was to no avail. He had no choice but to change the tire that was off the rim.
He retrieved the jack from the trunk and found the most stable spot he could. He got the car just high enough off the ground to get the back wheel off. As he replaced it with the spare tire, he tried to torque the lug nuts back on with the lug wrench. His hands were freezing. Just as he was pulling the last one on, the jack began to sink into the ground and the tire came down on his foot. He could feel his foot sinking into the hard-packed snow, but then it stopped, pinned against something hard: the frozen ground. The weight of the car continued to bear down on him. Only the air in the tire was preventing his foot from breaking. He realized that he was only moments from having his foot crushed, and in a colossal effort to free himself, he grabbed the car under the wheel well and lifted for all he was worth. It was no good.
Just then, Ray was bathed in shower of green, blue and violet light from the sky, and inexplicably, he hefted the entire rear end of the car into the air to the level of his chest. He could hear the metal of the frame straining. Karen screamed from the driver’s side door. Ray moved his foot to one side and slowly set the car down again. As he stepped back, he saw his reflection in the Nova’s rear window. He was glowing with the colors of the Aurora Borealis.
Karen was terrified. “Ray! Ray, what’s happened to you?” she screamed.
Ray looked confused. “I have no idea, Babe.” He examined his hands, which weren’t cold anymore. He could see light shimmering under the surface of his skin, like a veiled kaleidoscope. “But it doesn’t hurt!” Then an idea came to mind. “Put it in neutral. I want to see something.”
Karen shifted the car into neutral, as much out of fear as curiosity. Ray walked around to the back of the battered old Nova, curled his arms under the rear bumper and lifted. The back end of the car rose right out of the hole that the rear wheel had spun into the snow and dirt, and Ray moved it almost effortlessly, like a wheelbarrow. “Steer toward the side of the road!”
She guided the car toward where they had skidded off, and step by step, Ray’s entire body began to glow, and he nearly carried the car out of the field. And in just a few seconds, it came to rest on the shoulder. Ray tapped on the car’s roof twice. “I’ll be right back!”
Ray walked back to retrieve the tire he had replaced, and behind him, he heard the revving of the 350 engine and gravel crunching as Karen left him behind, running the Nova on a flat tire as fast as it would go. Ray ran back across the short distance to where the car had been and stood on the side of the road in disbelief. She’d left him there in sub-freezing temperatures without so much as a coat.
“AAAAHHhhh!” Ray roared in frustration, hurling the ruined tire like a giant discus. His arm glowed brightly again as he heard the rush of air passing over the surface of the speeding tire as it left his hand, far faster than any baseball he’d ever pitched. The tire sailed off into the darkness over a patch of 20-meter fir trees at the edge of the field. “Why? Why would you leave me here?” He couldn’t believe she had just abandoned him.
Extra-normal people had existed in the world since at least 1938, but Northern Michigan had not exactly been an epicenter for that population. In places like New York, Charm City, Crescent City, they had a presence. But Traverse City? Never. There would be an occasional incident and it would be front page news, but none of the heroes ever stuck around.
Ray started walking toward his hometown, which was about sixteen kilometers away. Though he didn’t have his coat, he wasn’t cold. The strange, colorful energy was still surging through him, coursing through his limbs and torso, but he didn’t feel any ill effects. Just the opposite, really. He felt strong, powerful. And most importantly right now, warm. He imagined that Karen was on her way to her house. If he made it there, he would take his car back. He’d have to figure out how to get another tire on it. The sidewall of the flat tire would be destroyed in just a few miles, the way she was driving.
As he walked, Ray thought, Well, clearly I have some kind of weird powers.I’m really strong and I can stay warm. Wonder what else I can do? I have nothing to lose by testing it out while I walk. It’s about a two-hour walk from here. Unless—what superpower does everyone fantasize about? Ray paused on the side of the road for a moment, held his arms out to his sides, and rose into the air. His entire body gave off a radiant glow as he rose higher and higher. He had felt this once before, as a child playing around with magnets. This was definitely like holding two magnets with the same pole next to one another. They repelled each other just as he was repelling against the magnetic field of the Earth itself.
At about seven meters, he decided he’d better experiment a bit first. He maneuvered over the piled snow on the side of the road in case the power failed. He leaned forward and began moving along the snowbank. The shimmering energy trailed behind him, cascading in undulating curtains of purple, green, blue, and pink. He felt no signs of weakening, so he tried changing directions, over the open field. It was child’s play! The only problem he was having was seeing through the colorful effect. He was flying along an unlit roadway, the Aurora providing most of the light in the night sky. The wind was doing a number on his vision as well, making his eyes water. How did the famous flying heroes deal with this? He had some snowmobile goggles at home. If he could make it back, he would try those out.
If I stick to the main road, he thought, I should be all right. There will be occasional lights I can use to navigate. And the reflective road signs should react to this glow. I wonder if I can make it even brighter.
Ray concentrated for a moment on making the aura brighter, brighter, and brighter still, and for just a moment, he glowed like a multicolored star. Then he dropped like a stone out of the sky, hitting the ground with a cloud of white powder. The snowbank broke his fall, but the impact still knocked the wind out of him. He’d felt like this before on the football field, so he knew not to panic, and to let the breath come back to him in its good time. Good thing I stayed over the snowbanks, he thought, as he remained aglow. He began to shiver in the snowbank. It was suddenly freezing. Ray concentrated on bringing the glow down, and as he did so, he began to rise into the air again, and he felt warm once more. So, I’m strong, I can levitate, produce light, and stay warm. That’s a good start! But it appears I can only do so much at once. Ray focused on two things, keeping warm and levitating, and took a couple of slow laps around the field. Success! He took off in the direction of Karen’s house. Crossing the Manistee River was just a little terrifying. Ray didn’t want to think about what would happen if he fell into the near-freezing waters, heat field or not. He approached the shore slowly and tried hovering over the water to see if it reacted differently to his electromagnetic push. It did not. He then surmised that he was pushing against the electromagnetic field of the planet itself, not just the ground. Ray wasn’t a physicist by any stretch of the imagination, but he understood basic science pretty well. He made his way over the river in safety, and accelerated. He could fly!
When I was in fourth grade in the fall of 1974, we lived just outside of Hastings, Michigan. It was the longest stretch of attending a single elementary school that I ever had. I had started second grade at Northeastern Elementary, and did all of third grade there, and had just started fourth grade in the same place, despite moving out of town, which would have placed me in a different school. This required me to do an unusual transfer of buses, but my mom wanted me to have that stability.
I have told the tale to my students many times of the time I was hit by a school bus. They often wonder at the hyperbole of it. It certainly sounds more devastating than it was. When I got off the school bus one rainy afternoon, I noticed that my boots (galoshes, really) were unbuckled, and if my stepfather saw them like that, I would get “the stick.” So, I bent over to buckle them up as the bus rounded the corner to make a left turn, the back end swung around and hit me squarely in the rear end, knocking me to ground, carrying on its merry way. I lay there for a minute, splayed flat on the ground, unhurt, and after a moment I realized what a tale I now had to tell. I’d been hit by a bus! I started laughing maniacally.
I started with a funny story to soften this one. It was around this same time that my brother accidentally shut my finger in the car door. Now, you have to realize that at this time, most American-made car doors weighed about the same as an entire compact car does now. When you closed those doors, they made a satisfying “clunk” sound. That sound was drowned out by my yelling when my brother, who was only four years old, caught my pinky finger in the door. We got it back open quickly, but my little finger was a mess. There was a big old blood blister under the nail, and it throbbed.
Over time, my fingernail got infected. My finger was swollen and discolored. By the next weekend, it was looking very ugly, and the nail had started to come away from the skin. My stepfather decided he knew what to do about it. So, on a Sunday evening, he took me over to the sink, held my hand under cold running water, and pulled my fingernail off with a pair of pliers. I probably don’t have to describe the incredible pain I suffered, but it wasn’t enough to make me pass out. I’ve never passed out from pain. I’ve come close once or twice, but I’ve never passed out. I did scream, though. I never screamed as loudly as I did that day in my life. It was the most painful thing I’d ever experienced to that point. As I held paper towels over my finger to staunch the bleeding, I noticed that the quicker picker-upper was filling with blood. Like a lot of blood. We were applying direct pressure like all the first aid directions told us to, but it wasn’t stopping. It was finally decided that Steve would take me to the emergency room before I passed out from blood loss; or worse. He was mad at me because he was trying to avoid taking me to the doctor in the first place and now he was going to have to pay for an emergency room visit. At least he had his priorities straight.
Sitting in the emergency room, I was fascinated to see that they had a color television set up so that people could be occupied while they waited. The television show, Apple’s Way was on. I liked that show, but hardly had a chance to watch it because Steve didn’t like it. It was by the creator of The Waltons, another show he didn’t like. When we were finally called back, the doctor was able to stop the bleeding, and chastised Steve for waiting so long to bring me in. At this time, he and my mother were not married, and he was not my legal guardian, at all. The doctor said that the infection was pretty bad, and that some drastic measures would have to be taken to get it all out. Twice a day, I had to soak my finger in hot water with Epsom salts and then cover the spot where the nail had been with a raw potato for an hour to draw out the pus. This had to be done for a week. As you might imagine, this hurt quite a bit, but by this time, I was no stranger to pain. I did this every morning before school, and when I came home in the afternoon.
The upside of this event was the science experiment that my friends and I got to participate in, as every day we got to watch the progress of my fingernail growing back. When I came to school each morning, I would peel back the bandaid and we’d all check to see how it was going. It took about four months for the whole thing to grow back. All I cared about is that it would be back in time for baseball season, because my left hand was my glove hand. Fortunately, it worked. It stung a little, but baseball took a lot of my pain away back then. It still does.
