Manipulation High

Chapter 9: a confusing coding class

George POV.

I sat around for the last two periods of the day. One was science, and I had this as one of my classes yesterday and it was fine. Currently they were talking about biology and human anatomy and I already knew a lot about that. So for most of the time I was just staring around the room at the different posters and looking at all of the kids who were my new classmates.

My other class was one I was more interested in, it was coding. Clay had walked there with me and when I was at the door he insisted on standing beside me while we were waiting for the teacher. When he turned up Clay still stood beside me when I introduced myself and then he told me to take a seat beside the blond.

The teacher was a short, stocky, man called Mr Richardson, and I quickly found out that he was extremely firm. He was similar to Mrs Rogers except a little more sane at least. One of the things he told me was that he would expect high quality work from me and if I miss one assignment he will make my grade drop drastically. Talk about no pressure.

Clay seemed more than happy about me sitting beside him, and the blond kept chatting away with me throughout most of the lesson. We were programming a website which the class was told would be used to display all work we completed here. All of the class had gotten to work, designing and personalising a website for themselves.

A lot of the girls were putting photos of animals or themselves and then writing inspirational quotes before sending the website link to their friends so they could all see it. Most of the boys were adding in pictures of cars and sports players and movie references that they asked their friends if they understood.

I however just quickly and quietly got to work designing my website. I made it look like the website was broken down, and up near the top of the webpage there was huge text saying ‘404, page not found’. I made it so the text and background occasionally glitched and changed to say and look like different things, then added on some links to games and other websites to display.

When I considered myself done I still had over half an hour left of class, and so I called the teacher over, showed him what I had done, and asked what I needed to do next. The teacher seemed more than pleased with what I had accomplished and let me do whatever I wanted.

As he walked off I noticed Clay looked over my shoulder at my screen, and when he realised I had noticed he gave a nod of approval. “It looks good.” He told me as he leaned back in his chair. “I think it is pretty cool.”

In response I told him ‘thanks, your’s looks cool too’. And it did. Clay’s website looked almost complete, and just like mine had pages which changed back and forth occasionally. His website also had games to play in case he got bored. He also set it up to show some work he had already done this year and some stuff from his previous years.

Clay didn’t bother telling the teacher he was done and instead went on his computer to start playing some games. However he did talk to me a lot during this, asking me questions about things like what video games I liked and stuff similar to that.

Everything he asked I answered and in return I asked him some questions back. The two of us seemed to have a lot of things in common. After talking for a while the bell rang and Clay and I had to cut our conversation short. We both logged off of the computers we were using and headed out of the classroom.

“So what class do you have next?” Clay asked me as he walked alongside me down the hallway while trying to avoid walking into students walking in the other direction.
I pulled my piece of paper out of my pocket and glanced over it. “I have Science.” I told him after looking at it for a moment before folding up my paper and putting it back.