And Mac? “One of the last things I got from him,” Doran said, “was a message about how he felt he had been changing that year, and how he had been improving. And I agreed—I thought he had, too. And then just about that time, he pulled this stupid move and got drunk while he was on a class trip and got kicked out of the school.” But the story didn’t end then. “Mac moved to British Columbia and is gainfully employed. In the boys’ cases, the measure of success is that they are not in jail. In 1990, probably ten boys were at risk of failing and dropping out of school. Two were at risk of ending up behind bars or dead.” Reflecting on past and present students at Park View, Doran noted the little triumphs which led to the big ones. The Net helped whet the children’s interest in school—to the point where, often, just about all the students in his first period showed up. It was a virtual miracle, given the sleep hunger of adolescents. Clearly the Net could be a truant officer’s best friend. “I use computers a lot,” one enthusiastic student e-mailed me from Bridgewater. “I come in on any free time that I have, I even give up my lunch hour to play with the computer, but I would really like to have more class time in the computer room.” She said that computers “hold so much wonder to a person. Like me. Writing on a computer does help out with reading and writing skills.” Another student, a tenth grader who lacked a computer at home, told how much he’d enjoyed corresponding with an aunt and uncle in Winnipeg. At the time he e-mailed me, his relatives had just had a son, and his e-mail was going into their baby book. Textbooks alone would never, never have encouraged him to look forward to school the way the Net did. I asked Doran if there were any test scores for the children to document the Internet’s benefits to the children at Park View. He said that scores by themselves would mislead since he had improved as a teacher in other ways. And yet he believed the Net had helped; since he couldn’t supervise the class constantly, he had learned to foster curiosity among the students as they explored the Net on their own. He and some other teachers in the experiment understood that they and the children would be learning from each other, that the old authority models were gone. The same trend was gradually happening in industry in Canada and the world at large. So if Doran wasn’t turning out Ph.D.s, he at least was creating better workers.