Page 3 of SaaS & Class

I hung up and smiled. He and I were moving to the same city, and would probably be just as tight there. But an afternoon just hanging out seemed the perfect way to wind down our time in Valle Granja.

Chapter 2 - Brent

“Mister Andrews?” asked a whiny voice.

I didn’t need to look up from my screen—where I was grading the work of a different class—to know that it was one of my graduating seniors. He—and the rest of my high school students—were mentally clocked out for the year and ready for summer break.

That it was a Monday only added to their fatigue. And mine, if the reflection from my monitor was any indication. I’d let my brown hair grow out a bit more than usual, and my beard needed a trim.

Nothing out of the ordinary for a teacher in May.

“Yes, Isaac?” I asked.

“It’s not saving my colors. It just keeps giving me errors.”

I stood, rounded my desk, made my way down the center aisle between long desks that boasted only moderately outdated desktop computers interspersed with netbooks for the kids who were multitasking, and over to where he sat.

I leaned over and looked at Isaac’s screen. “Ok. Show me what you’re doing.”

“So I’m doing what you said, and using colors from the color wheel…”

“Ok…”

He clicked one of the colors, and a tiny ‘copied’ notification flashed. “I copied the color…” He switched back to the website backend of the content management system he’d chosen. “I pasted it. But it doesn’t do anything.”

He pasted in the color code, pressed save, and a vague error code popped up.

I immediately spotted the problem. “You need to strip out the number symbol.”

“What?”

I pointed at the number symbol on the screen. “See how the symbol is already there in front of the text field? The plugin is putting it in automatically, so the code gets confused when you put it in again. Remove it, and it should work.”

“The hashtag?”

I forced myself not to sigh. “Yes. Remove the hashtag.”

He did it, and the page saved without issue. “It worked!”

I let out a single chuckle. “Was there anything else?”

“No.”

“Ok. I’ll let you get back to work, then.”

He nodded as he leaned in to stare at the screen again.

I decided to tour the classroom while I was up. This was my advanced business software class, and the kids were working on design projects rather than listening to me lecture… for all of our sanity.

I checked in with the kids who were glaring at their screens, making sure they didn’t need help. I spotted one of my slackers had abandoned his project in favor of playing a game, but he’d tucked himself into a corner of the back row and wasn’t disturbing anybody else.

I’d emailed his parents several times—to no response—about his grades over the course of the year. But if they didn’t care that their kid failed, then I wasn’t going to waste energy fighting at the end. He wasn’t disturbing anybody else, which was enough.

I probably wouldn’t have let him into the advanced class, but he’d squeaked through the intermediate class with grades just good enough to meet the prerequisite.

For as little as his parents cared about his grades, they raised holy hell when somebody tried to deny their precious son. Trying to kick him from the class would have been a nightmare of his mom complaining to administration, then me having to take him anyway. It was easier for me to just tell him to keep quiet in the back corner if he was going to slack off.

I glanced at the clock and saw that the bell was about to ring.