On a gorgeous day in June, Roderick met Molly per usual at the corner of Elm and Fourteenth, and they walked together to Beauneville Latin. The end of the school year is near, but the students are motivated to learn, and the faculty are motivated to teach; there is none of the typical "let's kill time because we're almost out of here" attitude.
Or so it appears. In truth, the faculty and students of Beuneville Latin are smart. The faculty, for example, understand that the appearance of rigor means satisfied parents and state boards of education; and since statewide standards are patheticly low, even modest effort leads to blue ribbon prizes for excellence in education. And the students understand that happy and satisfied faculty make the classroom much more pleasant. And so, there is a social contract: students make a modest effort, faculty label modest effort excellence and everyone is happy; in the substantial amount of time remaining after basic standards are met, students and faculty alike pursue their special muse.
As one would expect at any school, the students of Beauneville Latin run the gamut from brilliant to not-so-sharp. Roderick, for example, is diligent and hard-working, but he is no genius. "You don't have to be brilliant to be smart" says Mr. Gibbon, the History teacher. "And you don't have to be a genius to succeed in life, especially if people like you". That characterizes Roderick perfectly: smart, but not brilliant; diligent and likeable, but not likely to figure out how to do cold fusion in a test tube.
Molly is rather focused in her talents: outside of the piano and nude modeling, she struggles a bit. Roderick helps her with math, but languages were too difficult, so she stopped taking them last year.
Beauneville Latin focuses on a central curriculum designed to prepare students for the Liberal Arts, but students have a great deal of choice about what they study. Courses seem to rise and fall in popularity in ways that are hard to predict. For example, Mr. Botticelli is quite puzzled by the recent surge in enrollment in Art class, especially among the boys. Demand is so great that Mr. Botticelli proposes to split next year's class into three sections: Human Figure, Landscape and Still Life; interest in the latter two, however, appears to be minimal.
