Award winning writing: The School of The Future

Felix Hanzhang Liu
Grade 5, 5B
American International School, Elementary School
14 / 6 / 2017
Word Count : 899

It has been a few decades since Musk’s arrival at Mars. Now Mars has its new society. Earth has its own new trends while Mars has theirs. One similarity was that now hoverboards are popular on Earth and on Mars. Hoverboards are very popular nowadays. When I was small there was a trend. I still remember that trend, something called a fidget spinner I think. I used to love it. Now that I look back it was such a stupid trend. You can’t do anything with it except for spinning it. The H - ternet (The holographic version of the Internet) has now inspired us with new trends. Many things have changed recently. My school Johnson academy has been updated about thirty times since I left. I decided to go check out my school.
I found a school with the same name on street 55. I remembered when I was little, teachers used to tell me this whenever I got bored. “Humans have created a difficult and civilized society to prove that they are better than other animals. Schools help you to prepare to fit inside the society that mankind have made. Elementary school is made to prepare you for middle school. Middle school is made to prepare you for high school. High school is made mainly to prepare you for college. College is made to prepare for the world outside where you have to get a job and be independent. If you don’t study hard enough how do you even think that you could get a job and fit inside this society of this never ending improvement?!” I think that is what my teachers said. I don’t think this is what they really mean because everything they do was for money, not for the wealth of children they teach.
I looked at the front doors. They seemed more outstanding than I had remembered. Maybe because they change the color into a brighter shade of brown or something. I opened the door and stepped through the threshold. “Good morning!” a stick with short iron hooks attached to it exclaimed in a British American accent. “Can I please have your hat?” This machine was an automatic hat holder. I took of my brown bowler hat and hooked it onto the machine.
Once I was inside, memories started flooding into me like a tsunami. I recognized the bench where Wesley used to share food with me secretly (we weren’t allowed to share food because of allergies). We used to be very straight forwards. If you want to speak you had to raise up your hand. If you forgot to do your homework you had to copy it on a piece of lined paper. You had to copy everything down. Many rules got changed. I’m happy for them now. They had so much more than what I had when I was little. We used to play Pokemon and Minecraft and GTA. Now they had VR games like Monkey Kingdom where you press virtual reality buttons to create a kingdom full of monkeys.
I clicked floor 5.4 on the elevator. That took me straight to an underground room. The 5 was for Arts while the 4 meant the level of the person. My school changed their teaching format into subjects instead of grades. There was Math, English Literature (Writing), English Literature (Reading), etc. Everyone was put into the subject they liked the most. Then they were put into levels with different teachers. You were sorted into four to five different different groups, depending on how many levels the principal wanted to sort you into. Each student is rated like a book. If they are one starred, they would go into the one category at the end of the test. Same with two and three and four and five.
The underground room included bookshelves, painting of famous people, beanbags, brushes, pencils, pens, art supplies, bottles of colors meant for art experiments, windows that show a garden with carrots, cabbages, roses, and a lot more other plants. A hole shone from above the plants. I took of my breathing mask that covered my nose and mouth off and put it on a hook that was hanging on the wall. We all had to wear B - masks because of oxygen purposes. There weren’t enough oxygen on Mars for us to breathe and it gets extremely cold in the night. That’s why we invented the Underground Steam Oven, often known as U.S.O., and the B - masks. There was an oxygen producer at the back of the classroom. There were no formal desks.
Students had a list of activities that they had to do. There was a teacher sitting beside a student, she helped solve problems and taught the children how to not only be a problem solver but also a problem seeker. Smaller kids used tablets or ipads while bigger kids used a light computer. The students had a lot of fun. In every class there was something exciting to everyone. Sometimes it’s experiments, sometimes it’s trips to lots of other places, even other countries. The school really had improved. I could not resist but to feel jealous of them. They did not have to raise their hand to talk, they could just say “Ms.Sophie (for example)! I have a problem!” In a normal school when I was small you would get punished because of rudeness.
There are no classrooms, students just have to come to the teacher for the start of the class and the teacher will tell them what to do and then they could go wherever they want to go as long as it is in this school. Teachers had a lot of trust in the kids. They expect the kids to have fun and finish the list of activities on their own.
My school really improved. I walked out of the school happily, skipping as if I had been inside an amusement park.