Capeworld Comics

Dr. Liam PIaras, Principal

 

“Why do we even lock the doors? The Taylor boy is just going to open them. You know, I bet if we just keep them open we wouldn’t have a problem. “Look Tommy! Mops and disinfectant! Isn’t that interesting?””

 

“I’m not caffeinated enough for this.”

 

“Why are they on the roof? What’s up there they want to look at? The sky? They can look at that down here.”

 

“I’m too caffeinated for this.”

 

Dr. Liam Plaras is a celebrity of the education world. He’s a maverick, a trailblazer, a leader at the bleeding edge of education. When he gives speeches, he approaches the podium with the cool of a champion boxer entering a prizefight and speaks with the enthusiasm of a fire and brimstone speaker. He’s a striking person to meet face-to-face with red hair and black sunglasses he wears indoors. In a school whose dress code allows all sorts of outlandish costumes, he manages to stand out. His face, smiling as confident and knowing as the Buddha, adorns his best seller The Inclusion Principle now into its fifth printing.

 

That is Dr. Liam Plaras.

 

That is the Dr. Liam Plaras that people see outside his office.

 

But inside his office, there’s another Liam Plaras.

 

Liam is a wreck away from the cameras, often resting his bleary sleep-deprived eyes on his desk. He keeps himself going through the day through a mild coffee addiction and a quiet strength born of resignation. His inclusion initiative isn’t taking off and he has no idea what to do now that the experiment hasn’t gone in his favor.

 

Everyday he walks beneath the portraits of his predecessors and feels the weight of their legacies barring down on his shoulders.

 

He knows he’s going to be the first principal in Martin’s history to blow it. He knows it. As such, he’s extremely hands-off as an administrator. He keeps things on budget and gets people excited for Martin’s. Beyond that, he trusts vice principal Hwang and executive coordinator Jefferson to decide what needs to be done and get it done. When faculty have a problem, they go to them first.

 

So long as his faculty doesn’t burn the building down, he’s more than willing to let them try whatever lesson plans they want–and even if they do burn the building down he’s likely to take it in stride.

 

Some teachers appreciate Liam being hands-off, especially those that chafed under his inclusion initiative, but others wish that he would pull himself together and be the leader that he pretends to be for the cameras.

 

But as long as he compares himself to Martin’s past principals, Liam will never be more than a tired, old man that shrugs at questions and leaves coffee stains on his paperwork.

 

Susan Martin–she insisted on never being called Dr. Martin, as that to her was her husband’s name– was celebrated as the first principal of Martin’s School. Of course she would be, her name was in the title. She was Pryoman’s widow. She could have ran the school into the ground and people still would’ve looked positively on her tenure.

She retired in 1971 as a goddess of education. She was bigger than Maria Montessori and John Dewey combined. Her retirement party was like her apotheosis. Gold Star and the Intercessors showed up to thank her for her decades of work helping the superhuman community. Herbert Stapeldon, one of her students back in the fifties, now a student of the cosmic Form Masters, thanked Ms. Martin for being kind to him when he was a small child of flesh and blood. He gave her a thing that had no name. It had no name because it was the only one of its kind in existence. Herbert made it out of exotic matter gathered from the cores of black holes. It was something like a tree, if trees were made out of sparks of light and shards of colored glass, and it moved in a sort of eternal dance with parts of it drifting through the air like autumn leaves down a stream.

 

Susan Martin kept it in her living room next to a picture of her husband.

 

Everyone pitied the poor bastard that would have to take Susan Martin’s place.

 

But no one pitied Dr. Michael Ward after a year into his tenure.

 

They respected him.

 

Martin’s School set best practices under Susan Martin and continued to do so under Dr. Ward and his idea of the “limitless classroom.” The limitless classroom was a combination of outside contacts and simulations that made the world a classroom and every classroom a world.

 

Field trips to far-off counties and worlds were already a thing in Susan Martin’s time. As soon as the Weft Authority approved the Interway in the 1950’s, she was taking her kids on field trips to the thermosphere to see Sanderson Base and the subterranean Nepots Ocean to see the homelands of the Thule. But Dr. Ward expanded trips and visitations into points of contact. Martin’s School students weren’t just aware of Sanderson Base, they knew veteran researchers that donated their time to teaching them the details about the base and thermosphere monitoring. The students weren’t just aware of Thule states in the Nepots Ocean, they knew ambassadors that were willing to tell them all they wanted to know about Thule history and culture. Direct mentorship phased out textbooks and encouraged students to meet new people and new cultures. It also allowed students to get an inside look at prospective careers. This network of contacts resulted in the creation of Martin’s famed Contact Education program and a new office for Martin’s, the office of coordinators, whose duty was to coordinate students and contacts. The current executive coordinator is Tracey Jefferson, and she does a marvelous job ensuring that Martin’s contact network is full of knowledgeable, attentive mentors.

 

Dr. Ward’s limitless classroom not only made the world a classroom, but each classroom a world. CRS (Controlled Reality Simulation) technology was used in Susan Martin’s time, but only on a limited scale. There were only two floors that had CRS rooms in the 40’s and 50’s. This became five under Dr.Ward’s tenure and today eleven.

 

Originally, CRS were mostly used to provide environments where students could practice and explore their powers without holding back and for training students in emergency response. A combination of telepaths, photite holograms, and quantum controllers created environments where nearly any superpower could be used without fear.

 

Students learned how to respond to supercriminal attacks, extradimensional incursions, zombie plagues, and any other kind of emergency they might encounter in their lives. In the first few years of Martin’s School, combat against enemy soldiers was also covered under emergency response. This was controversial. One of the reasons Pyroman threw his support behind the plan that would become Martin’s School was that enrollment prevented students from being drafted, and yet they were being trained how to fight at his school. But Pyroman couldn’t deny that an attack on US soil was a possibility. The country was at war, and no one knew if it was going to last a month or a decade. Incursions on American soil had happened several times during the 40’s and could happen again. And many of the students, particularly the boys, wanted to learn how to fight. They wanted to learn how to protect their country.

 

After the war, Susan Martin ended training against soldiers and cut back on the martial aspects of emergency response training. She put focus on important elements of emergency response that went beyond subduing a supercriminal–the administration of first aid, the planning and implementation of rebuilding, the legal processing and rehabilitation of criminals, and so on. But the student population complained that they were limited in the amount of “action” they experienced in emergency response training. Perhaps it was because Susan Martin was a woman who saw each and every student at Martin’s as her child, or perhaps it was because the love of her life died in combat, but she never really understood that nearly half her student population was male, and males with superpowers typically want to learn how to fight with their powers to protect their community and develop confidence in themselves.

 

As part of the limitless classroom, Dr.Ward changed the curriculum to allow students to have as much action as they wanted. They could fight, or they could not. Everyone had some sort of role to play in an emergency and it was up to them to discover it.

 

Dr. Ward also expanded the uses of CRS teaching far beyond superpower testing emergency response training by recruiting the ARGO hyperempath known as Thespian in 1975. Thespian was able to interface directly with CRS technology to provide a verisimilitude to photite holograms that computers couldn’t. He acted whoever or whatever a CRS program needed. He was a debate between Aristotle and Lao Tsu for a philosophy class ,real-time historical events for a history class, and all sorts of supercriminals and civilians for an emergency response class. Thespian was the entire world inside a classroom, or as he liked to describe himself, the entire globe inside a classroom (he had a love of Shakespeare.)

 

Personal use of CRS rooms began under Dr. Ward owing to Thespian’s incredible mental multitasking and the remodeling of several floors into additional CRS. Thespian was the ultimate personalized tutor. He could teach everything to anyone as anything. For students that couldn’t understand what their teachers taught them, he was remediation. For students that understood more than their teachers would ever know, he was enrichment.

 

The limitless classroom was a huge success, and the secret to its success was student choice. Students were able to choose mentors through the Contact Education program. Students were able to choose what they studied during personal CRS time. Dr. Ward believed that education was ideally like a toy box. Teachers presented concepts and ideas, but it was ultimately up to students to take what appealed to them and incorporate it into their “play.” This belief is why his book written in his final year as principal is titled The Limitless Toy Box.

 

To Dr. Ward, learning was an adventure. He even insisted on calling Martin’s students adventurers. Some of the older faculty from his tenure still do as testament to the influence of his tenure.

 

For the success of the limitless classroom, Dr. Ward was praised. In a way, people came to hold him in higher regard than Susan Martin. She put herself in charge of something unprecedented. He didn’t. The challenge of filling a giant’s shoes was all his–as was the prestige that came from accomplishing it. But Dr. Ward was also praised for answering the difficult question of superpowered children in industry.

 

It’s an open secret that Susan Martin intended to answer the question during her final years as principal but was convinced by Dr. Ward to allow him to do it. If it blew up in their faces, it would be best if their first principal didn’t end up with the blame.

 

Dr. Ward worked closely with companies and organizations, particularly the Statesmen, to find employment for children that wanted it. It was, to say the least, controversial. Detractors called it the commercialization of childhood, but Dr. Ward was all about student choice, and some students wanted to ply their plowers. If a child could construct a building with the power of his mind, why shouldn’t he? And why shouldn’t he be paid for it? It also soothed the anxiety of children with difficult powers who were unsure if they would ever find a place for themselves in the world to find useful, profitable work that they could develop into a full career after their education ended.

 

Though the employment of children remains controversial, most today accept it for the good it produces both for the child and for the community.

 

After Dr. Ward retired in 1995, he turned the position over to his vice principal Dr. Johnny Turner. Dr.Turner didn’t turn out to be an education superstar like Dr. Ward or Susan Martin, but he still came into the position with a new big idea.

 

Dr. Turner’s new big idea was called “superpower sharing.” The science of secondary hyperstasis, of inducing superpowers in individuals in a controlled manner, had advanced in leaps and bounds since Martin’s opened in the 40’s. Superpowers that could only be granted by dangerous procedures like the terror formula of the Black Terror Soldiers were now safely and freely available to all. Dr. Turner’s superpower sharing introduced superpower trial classes. These classes temporarily gave students common, useful superpowers such as flight or telepathy, and they could choose to permanently gain these powers when they came of age or with their parents permission. Even if they chose to never develop these powers, Dr. Turner believed it was beneficial for students to learn how it felt to have these powers.

 

Particular powers, such as telepathy, had a stigma attached to them. Even to this day, some states forbid the presence of telepaths. Dr. Turner hoped that in presenting superpowers to children not as innate features but as tools that could be picked up and put down, that the next generation would fear superpowers just a little less. Given that there are fewer states banning telepathy nowadays than in his time, his hope was not in vain.

 

Susan Martin, Dr. Ward, and Dr. Turner each improved education.

 

And now it was 2020.

 

Now it was his turn.

 

Liam Plaras, up at bat.

 

He demanded, begged, and fought for the position while everyone else drew back from it like it was radioactive. He told them he had ideas, big ideas, ideas big enough to be Martin’s School ideas.

 

He had nothing.

 

It was so much easier back in university! He observed how teachers taught and it gave him ideas. He put those ideas in books, people read them, people liked them, and people asked for more ideas. So he wrote more books, and he got more praise. People said he was an education genius and that made him one–didn’t it?

 

They should have seen it coming. He should have seen it coming. Martin, Ward, and Turner were all something else in addition to being educators. Martin was a lawyer, Ward was a scientist, and Turner was a psychologist.  But he was all education. He was all dreams and untried theory.

 

And all his dreams and theories had hit reality like water drops on a frying pan.

 

His big new ideas was “inclusion teaching.” In inclusion teaching, students took part in the individualized curriculum of other students. Telepaths participated in classes for flyers by linking to their minds as a kind of ground control system to guide them through low-visibility situations. Flyers participated in classes for telepaths by imprinting their instinct for three-dimensional orientation onto other minds so that they could feel the sensation of flight without having to confront the fear of leaving the ground.

 

The goal of inclusion teaching was to get students to think creatively by having them use their powers in useful ways that might not seem obvious to them otherwise. Liam’s idea caught on in the education scene because it encouraged creativity…and because it appealed to educators’ favorite buzzword–equality.

 

Liam wasn’t sure why so many educators were fixated on equality. He thought it had to be a mental thing. It was some kind of complex like how some people couldn’t stop moving things around on their desks.

 

They just couldn’t stand differences. They especially couldn’t stand differences in demographics.

 

Studies on secondary hyperstasis showed that men preferred powers that were dangerous, very powerful, and martial while women preferred powers that were safer and weaker. And studies on primary hyperstasis, or wild talents, found that men wanted to increase their powers more often than women and women wanted to decrease their powers more often than men.

 

They hated this. They said it had to be the result of cultural programming telling women that they couldn’t be as strong as men and couldn’t take risks like men (though they rarely asked if cultural programming ever told men that they had to be strong and take risks).

 

There were also differences for racial differences. African-Americans preferred electricity powers, Whites preferred fire powers, and Asians prefered super-speed powers. Educators didn’t know why and it bothered them.

 

They championed Liam’s inclusion teaching because they hoped it would equalize these differences. They hoped that it would present different powers as equally useful across all kinds of  situations and that this would cause students to overcome any preferences they had.

 

But Liam didn’t want inclusion to work because of equality. He wanted it to work, period.

 

But it didn’t work, and no matter what he tried he couldn’t make it work. His faculty pushed back hard against inclusion. It was just too weird and too had to implement on any meaningful level. They knew how to teach specific classes, and now they had these kids coming in drawing their attention away to teach odd little sub-classes of dubious use. Did flyers really benefit from working with a telepathic ground control, or was it just make-work? The teachers weren’t interested in experimenting to find out. They were interested in teaching.

 

Liam couldn’t find a way to include inclusion. It was almost funny.

 

His failure exhausted him. It tired him out and he had to make an effort just to keep things running like Turner did. He was like Turner’s shadow. He had Turner’s shape, but none of his substance.

 

He kept things steady, he kept the budget balanced, but he couldn’t get things to progress. His friends told him that he shouldn’t be discouraged and that it was just a matter of settling into his role.

 

But he knew the truth.

 

He had nothing.

 

And he was going to be nothing.

 

He was going to be the first nothing in Martin’s School history.

 

Having resigned himself to an inevitable and inglorious plummet, Dr. Plaras has bifurcated. There is the Dr. Plaras the students and public see, and then there is the Dr. Plaras only the faculty see. When addressing students, he’s cool and collected. But when he’s in the teacher’s lounge he takes off his sunglasses and everyone can see the bags under his eyes weighed down by many a sleepless night. With his faculty, he’s meek, distracted, and so, so very tired.

 

He does his best to disguise his weakness. When met with a conflict beyond his meager ability to solve he tries to use humor to defuse the situation. This however can lead him to make what might be considered inappropriate, albeit humorous, comments about the students and faculty such as saying that Dr. Jugend’s classroom was only the secondest strictest program to come out of Germany. Someone recording one of his jokes and playing it out-of-context over the noosphere would be disastrous for Martin’s School, and his faculty urges Dr. Plaras to watch what he says. But Dr. Plaras can barely find the will to get out of bed in the morning let alone mind his mouth.

 

Tired, confused, and dejected, Dr. Plaras is the small-town sheriff looking for a mysterious gunfighter to ride in. He’s the police chief beleaguered by a crime wave trying to phone a heroic vigilante.

 

Dr. Plaras could use some help. Dr. Plaras could use a hero.

Or two.

Or an entire team.