Melchiza
In which accommodations are reached.
So, Clyburn’s family lives on Melchiza, and he’s not only counted a native but accorded a considerable amount of respect by the people responsible for keeping visitors in line. Isn’t that interesting?
Hafley’s crack about Theo being only good enough for Team Three because she’s not properly attentive doesn’t accord with any of what we’ve learned about how Learning Teams are actually allocated. A sign, perhaps, of how properly attentive Hafley was during her own schooling?
PA: what we’ve learned about how Learning Teams are actually allocated.
Except…after Kartor tells her that the “algorithm’s pretty solid,” Theo seems to hit upon an interesting observation. She thinks to herself: Where did you put the set of all things that didn’t match anything else? And then she says to Kartor: Maybe they just lumped all the misfits together.* So perhaps Hafley is not obtuse or misinformed?
*Chapter 12
I was thinking specifically of the way Hafley says that if Theo were better she’d be in Team One instead of Team Three; that implies the teams are ranked by quality, which is definitely not the case.
The indications we’re given are that teams are chosen by matching on personalities and aptitudes — qualities in the sense of characteristics, not quality in the sense of status. It’s explicitly not a case of “the people who are good at things all go in one team, and the people who are bad at it go in another” — we’re told that if a person is bad at something, they’re put in the same team as people who are good at it and they have a chance of learning from. (Unless, perhaps, the matching algorithm couldn’t fit them into a team with the right people while giving the greatest number of students the teammates they need, in which case they might end up in a misfit team — but that still wouldn’t be a direct consequence of anything the particular student did or didn’t do.)