September 101AG
School in the Fire Nation was quite different from what the Air Nation children had been accustomed. Instead of them all learning together in a tiny schoolhouse, they were split up by age and put into a large school.
Each day, the students sang the Fire Nation national anthem. They didn't even know if the Air Nation ever had a national anthem.
They also found that Fire Nation schools were more competitive. If you got the best test score in history, then you got a night of no homework as a reward. In math class, the children would play around the world. The kids would all sit in a circle and two of them would compete head to head. The winner moved on to the next student and if you beat all of the other students, you won.
Language arts was taught using games, the winner got candy.
Even recess was competitive; children could play kuai ball or wall ball, the winner becoming the "King of the playground."
"Do you ever just do things for fun?" one boy asked his Fire Nation counterpart.
"What do you mean?"
"Like play a game when there is no winner."
"Why would we do that?"
"Just for fun."
"But winning is fun."
The Fire Nation children in the Air Nation were just as baffled with their new school.
They all got different tests based on their abilities, so there were no winners. No batter how poorly you did, you could not fail. If your score was less than satisfactory, then you would do the lesson again and get a new test.
To test this out, one student wrote the number 5 for every question he got and his teacher sincerely thought he was confused, so he just picked a random number.
"They always encourage you, even if you put it no effort," the boy remarked. He asked a local why this was, and she said, "we all do our best, so if we do poorly, they just try harder to teach us."
"But how do you do your best with no competition?" He had been raised that competition was what made you stronger.
"We compete against ourselves."
The exchange students in each country would write about their experience abroad, describing the food, the people, the location and the school. The Air Nation children enjoyed the food. It was flavorful albeit a bit spicy. The weather was enjoyable as were the abundance of things to do, shopping, plays, and beaches, but they found the people to be a bit stiff and the school to be intimidating.
"School should be more fun," one girl commented. "Everything here is so competitive."
The Fire Nation students wrote, "the food is a bit bland, but the people are really nice. School is a lot of fun, and there is no pressure since they aren't competing for anything. The weather is chilly, but the sweaters they gave us are really fluffy." Instead of shopping or going to the beach, the children would go on hikes and play with the animals. It was a humbler life.
Sokka was reading the comment cards from the Air Nation children. "Why is school in the Fire Nation so competitive?" he asked his girlfriend.
She shrugged. "It's always been like that, I think. The sages would know more."
The Head Sage told him, "Schools used to be more collaborative and less competitive. Sozin changed it because he wanted students to fight their way to the top. He wanted the smartest and the strongest to support his conquest of the world and he used schools to figure out which kids would rise to the top and which would sink to the bottom. Schools started to focus on the best students instead of everyone."
Sokka didn't like that answer. "We should make schools for everyone again."
His ideas were not well received by the PTA.
"But my son is at the top of his class," one mother complained. "If you change it now, his hard work would be for nothing."
"School should be about learning all that you can, not being content that you learned more than the kid next to you. What if that kid is stupid? Then the benchmark is useless!"
That only made the parents more upset, and they started squabbling.
Azula was starting to get a headache. She understood Sokka's concern, but it would be hard to take a country indoctrinated in winning and tell them to hold hands and "let's just be friends."
"Perhaps we should try a pilot program," one parent suggested. His child was not doing very well in this competitive atmosphere, "and we could use volunteers, so parents who want their child to stay with the standard curriculum do not have to change."
"Who is going to teach it?" a teacher questioned. The teachers liked the competition because it kept the kids from acting up during class; disobedience took points away from them.
"I will," Sokka volunteered.
"What?" Azula questioned. Does he know what he's getting himself into?
"What does he know about teaching?"
"I taught the boys in my tribe how to fish and spear fight."
"This is absurd!"
"I'll teach them," the Head Sage volunteered.
"Surely he's qualified," Azula said. "Next time on the agenda!"
The new program would start in November, giving the Head Sage a little over a month to prepare a curriculum.
Sokka still wanted to get involved with the school. "I can't believe these kids don't know how to have fun."
Suddenly, an idea came to Azula. "I know something you can teach."
Sokka became the new gym teacher. The old one wanted to take some time off and care for his sick mother.
"What do I do?"
"Keep them moving so they don't get fat," Azula told him, "and make sure they stay hydrated. It gets hot outside."
When the students showed up on Monday, they were surprised to see that they wouldn't be playing kuai ball.
"But we were supposed to have a tournament!"
"We're going to try something new," Sokka told them. "We're going on a hike."
"A what?" The kids looked blankly.
Instead of competing for supremacy, they kids all got water bottles and started walking up a giant hill.
"How do you win?"
"You make it back without passing out," Sokka told him.
"Then everyone wins."
"Yes."
"There's no winner if everyone wins."
"Why is that?"
"The whole point of winning is that you aren't the loser."
"Why does there has to be a loser?"
"Now you're just talking nonsense."
"Am I? Your definition of winning is that you are better than those around you, but what if you defined winning based on your own achievement and not another's failure. If you are your own meter stick then there is no reason to have a loser at all."
"They must be devoid of oxygen in the tribe," one girl said snidely.
After two days, Sokka was already sick of some of his students.
"They're so nasty," he told Azula as they took their evening bath. "I mean some of them are nice and many of them say nothing, but one of them called me an Akata. I don't know what that is, but I'm sure it's an insult."
"It's a pejorative term meaning slave, particularly a slave who works in the fields."
"What do I do with kids like that?"
"Carry a switch?"
"A what?"
"A big stick. You hit them with it if they're bad."
Sokka was stunned. "You can't be serious."
"What? That's what they did when I was in school."
"Your teachers would hit you if you were bad."
"Well not me, I'm the princess, but other kids, yeah. You should ask Mai about the time she put epoxy on the teacher's chair so her butt got stuck to it. She got hit with a …"
"There has to be a better way. You can't teach students to be nice by beating them."
"Why not?" Azula asked honestly.
Sokka tried Mai and Ty Lee, but Mai said, "It's all they know. If she gets hit with a switch once, then she'll stop saying those things, at least within earshot of you."
"But if she is being raised in a racist home, I'll only reinforce it by hitting her."
"Oh you want to make her a better person. I just thought you wanted her to shut up."
"You should insult her father," Ty Lee told her. "Call him a Gong Fei. She'll start crying and then she'll learn not to insult people."
Mai turned to her and then said, "That's a better idea."
"Why don't you try talking to her about her feelings?" the Head Sage suggested. "When students lash out like that, there is usually trouble at home."
Finally a sane response, unfortunately, it didn't go so well. The next day, the girl called him "Blue gums." He asked her "if there was something going on in her house."
"What?"
"I've been nothing but nice to you, but you choose to act in a rude and hostile manner. Is something wrong at home?"
The other kids started teasing her. "Her daddy doesn't love her. He left her and her mama for another woman."
"Shut up! You don't know anything." The girl ran off crying.
"Oops!"
"You should have just hit her with a switch," Azula said. "I'd rather be hit than have that happen during class."
Sokka groaned. "What do I even do with these crazy children?"
"Promise them ice cream if they stopped being mean to each other," Azula offered. "I think that was the only time I was ever nice in my youth."
Sokka promised them ice cream on Friday if they could make it the whole week without being mean to each other.
"Yay!"
He shook his head. "They are some crazy kids."
The new Air Nation government voted to start growing more food, so they would be less dependent on Earth Kingdom exports.
"If we plant some fruit trees now, they should be ready in 2-3 years."
The children did the planting. They put down apple trees, moon peach trees, and lychee nut trees.
It counted as a biology field trip.
"But field trips usually mean we're going somewhere new," one of the Fire Nation children told their teacher.
"Oh, I thought it meant you were going to the field."
Sokka still couldn't get the girl in his class to open up. He hoped that a surprise on Friday would cheer her up.
They put a table in the gym and had three kinds of ice cream, vanilla, spicy chocolate and mango sorbet.
"We have a special guest," Sokka told them.
The kids were all eyeing the ice cream and didn't notice Azula walk in. Instead, they were all arguing over who got to be first.
"Me!"
"Me!"
"Me!"
Azula decided to give them a challenge. "I want you to line up from youngest to oldest without speaking."
They turned and saw the Fire Lord.
Immediately, they started bowing and praising her.
She quickly directed them back to the game. "If you line up correctly within five minutes, I'll arrange for you to have a field trip."
Let the games begin. The students started flashing numbers with their fingers and moving in and out of line.
Four minutes and thirty seconds later, they waived that they were done.
"When is your date of birth?"
"November 17th 93AG."
The students were successful.
They quickly divided themselves based on who wanted what flavor.
It was easy for Azula to identify the girl Sokka was having trouble with. She sat at the far end of the table by herself.
"Why aren't you sitting with the others?"
"They make fun of me because my father left."
"My parents are divorced too," Azula told her. "They weren't happy together. It had nothing to do with me, and your parents' divorce has nothing to do with you."
The girl looked skeptical.
"My parents married for all the wrong reason. My father wanted strong benders and my mother didn't want to disobey my grandfather. It's likely that your parents married for political reasons too. I think it's much better if you find someone who makes you happy, no matter who he is."
"I think that went well," Sokka said as they came back to the palace. Mai and Ty Lee were there to greet them, mainly so Ty Lee could binge on the leftover ice cream.
"Do people get divorced a lot in your tribe?" It was considered scandalous in the Fire Nation, but it was becoming increasingly popular.
"We don't really have divorce. Then again, the men typically died a lot earlier than the women, so if a woman was unhappy in her marriage, she could just wait him out."
"Is that because of the war?"
"Not just this past war," Sokka told her. "Before the tribes unified, there were a lot of disputes over territory and resources. There was a war every ten years or so, so the men often died in their 40s-50s." The Water Tribes had a warring culture, historically much more so than the Fire Nation.
Everything was about the parents in the Fire Nation. If your father got a promotion, you became a cool kid in school. If your father got laid off, you were ostracized. Azula never thought much of it, as a princess she was always on top, but now with her father in jail and her mother out of her life, Azula wondered what it meant to rule a country where people judge you based on your family. What would it be for like for her kids?