Run by Michaelbrent Collings

the school had given up on him, and he took their poor expectations of him and did his best to live down to them.
    Not John, though.  He firmly believed that no kid was a lost cause.  He focused intensely on the boy from the first, pushing him to do better, to be more than he had been.  Surly in the beginning, Dallas had gradually begun to respond to John’s gentle prodding.  Soon he was smiling when he sat down at his desk, waiting for the next assignment to be handed out, the next challenge to overcome.
    John lay a hand on his student’s shoulder.
    "Good job, Dallas," he said, "pretty soon you’ll be able to outdesign me."
    Dallas didn’t so much as pause in his work, but he did snort lightly, as if to say, "I already can." 
    "That good, are you?"
    Dallas stopped typing for a moment, looking at John with playful teasing.  "The worlds I create in here are already better than the piss-poor one God did for us."
    He grinned widely, and John smiled back.  A few of the nearby kids in the class heard the comment and snickered.  One of them, a girl with a pair of rings in her nose, spoke up.  "Want to be God, eh?  You’re the wrong sex, little man."
    More laughter came with that comment, and John was pleased to see that Dallas could smile as well; that he was not taking himself so seriously anymore.
    "You bring up a good point, Patricia," he said to the girl, then raised his voice to address the whole class.  They grew silent instantly, all side-chatter ceasing as he spoke.  John appreciated the fact that they liked to listen to him, but also felt the pressure each time as he strove to find something to say that would both interest and inform his students. 
    "Remember, ladies and gentlemen," he said, "the world is fast moving into an age where the computer-illiterate won’t stand a chance.  Tomorrow’s world is going to be run by and through computers: a new age of machines merged with people, where they do the work we are either unwilling or unable to do for ourselves."
    He paused for a moment, trying to figure out where he was going with this particular strand of thought.  Very often when he taught, John found himself saying things that he had not thought about beforehand.  It was as though the words came from someone else at times, emerging so quickly that they left him breathless and wondering just what part of his brain had come up with that idea.
    Then he felt himself continue, saying, "So let’s say Mr. Howard here is right, and he is becoming a god of computers."  A few titters at that, and more than a few of the girls batted their eyes at Dallas, who was blushing a bit under the class’s scrutiny.  Blushing, but John noted with approval that he was not looking away from them.  He was becoming a very strong and self-assured teen, so very different from the attitudinal, beaten-down youth of only a few months before.
    John turned his attention from Dallas back to the class.  "So what does it mean to be a god?  How many of us have thought about the ethics of the computer age?"
    John looked around the room.  The kids all stared back at him, blank-faced.
    "I see.  Does anyone even know what I’m talking about?"
    "Porn," said one of the kids.  The rest of the class snickered.  John laughed a bit, too, though for a different reason.  It never ceased to amaze him that in all the changes in all the kids through all the years, one thing stayed constant: mention of anything sexual or any kind of bodily function was guaranteed to elicit a laugh.
    "Yes, that’s one thing we might have ethical concerns over, and certainly a subject we could spend a lot of time discussing.  But I’m afraid that if we talked about that, then I’d just find out how hopelessly old fashioned I am and you would all have me blushing inside five minutes."  More laughs.  John drew a deep breath, still not sure where he was going with this but determined to find out. 
    "But there are a lot of other things to consider,