The Uber-Unicorn
by Sam Kean
part 1 of 3
I was doubly startled: not only had I found an uber-unicorn on the first try — something I’d been told was impossible — but the instant I had pegged him, he gathered up his water bottle and his notebook and made straight for me.
Only a few other students noticed him getting up: mostly the ones in his row who had to shift in their seat to make room for him passing down the aisle. They pulled back their foldable arm desks, let him pass, and without even sparing a second for a dirty look, resumed scribbling as soon as they could reach their essays again. Words, words, words. I’d given only three hours to finish the final; here it was, only one-hundred and twenty minutes in, and this kid was handing his in.
His classmates worked with such passion that it hurt me to look — later on, it would literally hurt me to look. I’d have to start grading their essays in just a few hours. Except passion isn’t the right word for how they approached it. They worked hard and they worked fast, but it wasn’t passion for literature that motivated them.
To be fair, I had approached teaching that semester in the same way — 25 classics of Western Civilization in 15 weeks, including most of the Bible, and now I was reaping what I had sown. During the test, I was too timid to discourage them, but I kept a tally of the number of words I would have to read in my head. Based on the number of missing bluebooks, it was approaching one million.
I had tried mind control, or telepathy, to get them to stop, as if the sheer force of my will could convince them to quit writing.
“Put down your pen.” I varied the spell any way I could think of. “Put your pen down.” “Your pen, put it down.”
The class was so large that controlling it all at once seemed overwhelming. I focused on individuals, especially the ones who throughout the semester tended to hand in papers that ran over the assigned number of pages.
“Two examples will suffice, June. There’s a law of diminishing returns. I’m not going to be impressed with three.”
“You don’t need a second blue-book, Lizabeth. No, just wrap it up! It’s not going to make a difference to your grade.”
“Jonathon, don’t make me do this to you. Please.”
They were too powerful. Perhaps I should have focused on the ones who didn’t write much in the first place.
I was discouraged and at the same time antsy, and there was no way to alleviate it. I just watched them pile up more and more work for me. You cannot read a book while you proctor, or else students immediately begin to cheat, almost by instinct. At least that’s what you have to believe, in order to stay vigilant. I began to think, though, that I could start writing answers on the board, and my students would never look up.
About an hour in, I started hunting for the unicorn. It’s a silly little game, a kid’s poem, but something childish like that was a relief. It starts like this: You look at the first student in the first row and recite the line, “I got your green alligators.” Then you switch to the next student and say, silently, “And long necked geese.” Then, “Some humpty-backed camels,” for the third. Like I said, it’s a kids’ song. There are eight lines altogether and various rats, cats and monkeys make an appearance.
The last line, the eighth, is “I just can’t see no Unicorn.” When you get to that student, and you sing that line —”I just can’t see no Unicorn” — he or she is eliminated.
The first one I cut was Keith, who had a cold and had been snuffling the whole period. It felt good to cut him out. Then you start the poem over with the next student; and after eight more, you cut another. You proceed up and down the rows this way, and at the end it wraps around to the beginning. Once you cut a student, he’s gone for good and you skip over him. You keep pruning and pruning, jumping back and forth, and the last student remaining is the unicorn.
I cannot take credit for inventing the game. I will cite my source: a guy I lived with in grad school and still sometimes talk to. He was a math PhD, and an amateur magician. He couldn’t believe I’d ever tried to get through a test without it.
“What do you do with yourself?” he asked. “Just stare at the cute girls?” I felt ashamed.
My old roommate had all sorts of proctoring games, and he let in on his treasure: he would pick out three students and guess who would finish first, second and third, like a horse-race trifecta. He tried to pick out who would die first and why, or who most resembled the spawn of two celebrities. The unicorn game, he said, kills times most effectively because it’s long and mechanical. And it prevents you from focusing on just one corner of the room.
He said he’s gotten to the point where he can find the unicorn in less than fifteen minutes in a full class, without a sheet of paper to keep track of things. Like I said, he’s a mathematician. I’m not, so I had to make a diagram. I had to keep glancing up and down, from the class to my paper, to remember who I had X-ed out. It was satisfying to strike them out. After a few mistakes — I skipped a row and had to count backwards and erase, I found the unicorn and had a moment of celebration, even though I barely recognized the kid.
Then, with nothing to do, I sighed and started over. This time I counted off in columns instead of rows. It really doesn’t matter how you count or where you start. You can go diagonally or in a spiral from the center, whatever. My old roommate said that, mathematically, he could prove that there must be a double or “uber-unicorn” somewhere, if you counted enough times in enough different ways. But he said that the odds of finding an uber-unicorn in just three hours were so small as to be negligible.
So much for math. On my first try, I’d gotten an uber-unicorn. That lent some satisfaction to game. Until I noticed that he was coming right after me.
I slowly crumpled up the sheet I had, wondering if he had seen me and was going to confront me about it. It was a large class and nearly filled to auditorium — I had agreed to teach two sections simultaneously that semester, since I was up for tenure review and hoping to impress the right people. But he still could have seen me doing something. It took the unicorn a long time to make his way down.
“All done?” I said, trying to sound out what was going on.
“I guess,” he said, and his eyebrows creased.
I almost gasped. I had just never seen it up close before, and I recognized him instantly when he did it. He always sat in the very middle of the lecture hall, and whenever I felt myself stretching a point about a book or poem a little too far — saying something that I didn’t quite believe and didn’t have much textual evidence for — his eyebrows creased just like that.
All the other students would be fixed on their papers, taking notes, and he alone would be watching. No matter where I tried to focus my attention in the room — the front row, the ceiling, the exit — I’d catch him looking like that out of the corner of my eye. It unnerved me, like an alarm going off. I was so used to seeing him frowning at me and then looking away that I didn’t recognize him otherwise.
He flipped through his blue book — just one of them — as if to read his entry just once more. I began to look at him for the first time. He was shorter than average, and a little fat, though it suited him. He had thick black hair that threatened to crawl down and overwhelm his forehead. He was no better groomed or shaved than any other student during finals week; yet he seemed somehow fresher than the rest of them. I checked my watch again: only 5:50. I thought, “He’ll be the only one of us to escape before the sun goes down.”
Suddenly I caught him smiling. If anything, this was more disturbing than the creased eyebrows, since there seemed no reason why he should smile. He gave up and handed it in, and he said goodbye for the semester.
No one looked up when the door banged shut behind him. I couldn’t help myself. I had to know what had happened, and I opened the book. My students were too absorbed in writing to care. We had read Tolstoy and Stendahl and Homer that semester and for the final I had asked an impossibly simple philosophical question: “What underlying characteristics unify every work we have examined?” Again, it was designed to impress the higher-ups: to demonstrate that I demanded critical thinking. I’d worry about whether they learned anything after tenure.
I glanced at the kid’s name: Doug Shaw. Here is what he wrote:
* * *
In his life, he had been considered first a genius, then a joke, and finally a sad joke.
There were a dozen Soviet scientists that had dared to escape to America, but Julian Petrovich was the coup. For a reign of eight years, no one had dared making a bold statement in particle physics without first sounding out, at least informally, what he would say about it. By the end of his life, his academic life, he had been reduced to accepting piddling government grants aimed at manipulating children’s reading scores on standardized tests.
Before he fled Russia, Julian barely had had time to read. Schools in the mother country were concerned with achievement, not well-rounded liberal-arts men. But trapped in California, he simply missed hearing Russian. It was insipid, but he needed the language around him, and so took up reading. The only books available in his tongue were the authors that even people like him knew by reputation.
His scientist colleagues tacitly gave him a grace period of one year to adjust to California, and no work of brilliance was expected during that time (though everyone secretly checked to see if it came anyway). Five years later, when it became clear that the grace period would have to be permanent — that at 31 he was washed up — his fellow physicists began disinviting him to conferences and striking his name from peer review committees. Uncaring graduate students, too young to be impressed any more, imitated his Russian accent behind his back, a cruel caricature of what he most needed.
Many years later late one Friday night, his mistress Maria Bellini screamed at him, “You are pig! A bear and a pig to treat a woman like this! I will wait here until the day of doom, you coward, and then kill you like a woman does a man!” At least that’s what the Italian sounded like to him. She pounded with both fists on his office door, demanding to be let back in.
Julian thought this unfair, but knew better than to respond. He glanced around to make sure she had not left any clothing behind. In a way, he hoped she had. He also hoped she had the sense to not smoke in the hallways, which had no windows and a non-disabled fire alarm, during her siege. That was doubtful.
“Maria Bellini,” he called out.
“Yes?”
“I am to love you always. Always, I am to love you.” He called himself names in Russian as a punishment for saying all this to her.
“But right now I am to work. All weekend to work. I have —”
She exploded. His weight was a favorite topic of hers to exploit, as was his silver hairiness. He had expected this, but it was no easier to take. He had not entirely lied when he said he loved her, but he should have admitted from the start that he could never give her all his affection. He was a physicist — in love first with truth and with the measurable world — and he had no choice but to ignore her now. There were data to examine from the experiment he had just run on Maria Bellini, and it was easy, too easy for him to bury himself in it.
Many years back, with no other source of Russian, Julian had began reading. Indeed, he had neglected his research (though not his teaching) to such an extent that in order to justify his salary, he applied for grants from the Department of Education that would demand no more than ten hours per week, much less than the dozens his colleagues put in.
Julian’s mind was used to quick brilliance, however, and he grew impatient slogging through 1,600 pages of Tolstoi. Even a native Russian couldn’t keep track of the characters from week to week. So to speed things up, he applied some of the results he’d discovered from studies of small “emerging readers.” At first his duty had been to determine the optimal font size and column width, to make reading easier and boost test scores artificially.
After zeroing in on the best parameters, Julian had an innovative idea. He gave up the printed page altogether. He propped children in front of screens that flashed words and fragments of words at them in quick succession. He attacked the subconscious, and comprehension and retention jumped dramatically. It caused seizures only in a negligible few, and the government was thrilled. The D.O.E. doubled his funding. Indeed, became a bone of contention with colleagues that while Julian had been reduced to quack studies of speed-reading, he always had ample grant money from the government.
Applying these techniques himself, Julian found he could finish any book he chose in less than a day. Yet, though aesthetically satisfying, it did not quench his scientific soul. He misappropriated some of his grant money and bribed a pirate publisher in his mother to get electronic copies of Russian-language texts.
As someone who believed the brain was nothing but a digital computer, Julian decided to overthrow the tyranny of the alphabet. He reduced the texts to a long series of flashing colors. A sequence of three red flashes, for instance, indicated the Russian equivalent for the letter M. Punctuation was green and emotional was coded in with a varying intensities of blue. By overlaying many pulses into a single signal — and then beaming it directly into the rods and cones of his eyes with special goggles — he found he could read a book by Dostoyevski in less than an hour.
Copyright © 2006 by Sam Kean
