Flop.

She should probably make decisions about which schools she liked best but for now she's going to take a nap.

And then deal with questions about schools maybe.

She does have an email asking if she'd like to tour any more schools or pick one of those four! (Or not go to school! She doesn't have to because she's an alien.)

School's nice for talking to other people, though. She wants to go to one of these four, though.

She makes a list, and crosses off the theater school that didn't give her a buddy.

She liked all three of the others.

She starts putting together the things she liked about them.

Does the first school, with the blue friend, have dance classes?

It has dance classes in winter, and dance clubs, but not year round dance.

Hm. Dance clubs are maybe close enough...

What about art classes in blue friend school and grey friend school?

Blue friend school actually seems to do all the arts seasonally in terms of classes - dance in the winter, music in the autumn, and assorted visual arts in the spring and summer.

Hm. They have art clubs, though, right?

They do! Anyone who wants to paint year round can be in the painting club.

She thinks she likes lots of different art options more... (These get noted with little symbols.)

What's art like at purple friend school, with the big playground?

They have art class, which rotates through a bunch of different stuff and has everybody in a year doing the same thing at the same time.

Rotating art class seems to be the same type of art class as gray friend school...

She needs to also think about whether it's important she learns stuff like math, or if it'll be okay being confused a lot in those classes...

Her focus is on diplomacy for now. Can she find a normal Voan diplomacy blue child curriculum online?

Diplomacy track blues learn a lot of foreign languages, go on a lot of foreign field trips, learn boatloads of history focusing on warfare and peacemaking and treaties and trade deals, and play games designed to improve their social skills and reflexive access to etiquette they'll need.

She knows all the languages, but stuff with field trips might be good, though she can probably just request those, being an alien.

She looks at the three schools' history curriculums.

They're a little difficult to compare straight across - disability specialty school lists nearly twice as many topics covered as the others, but most of them seem to be subsets of things the others do list. Clubs school has three different history clubs currently in operation (history of war, ancient history, and Voan history) plus two more if you count art history and history of theology (history of theology is only for three and four year olds). Playground school seems to lean slightly more on war stuff and recent history than the other two.

Playground school and club school get little symbols indicating 'history - class' and 'history - club' (which are two symbols smooshed together).

History of theology will probably be important someday but being Amentan three is soooo far awaaaaay.

She's kind of stuck, now, all the three schools she likes are still all the three schools she likes.

She emails Ude to say she's narrowed it down to three but she's not sure which is best because she doesn't really know enough about what she'll need to know or which school will help most, and her mom doesn't know either. She thinks disability school is going to be better at explaining stuff to her, but the playground school and clubs school seem to cover maybe more relevant stuff? Though clubs school mostly does that through clubs, which are good for social but trade off against Bright having time for other stuff. But also she could probably just do school for social stuff and have help outside of school to do relevant other stuff?

Ude says they'll be happy to hire her tutors for anything that isn't covered inside school. If she wants Ude's advice, Ude'd go with the disability school for her - they have ways for their students to sit in on classes at a rainbow gifted magnet Bright filtered out earlier in the process, since lots of disabled kids have uneven abilities, and the gifted magnet has better blue-content specialty classes than any of the three.

Oooooh! Thanks!

She looks at the gifted magnet's blue specialty classes.

They have lots of foreign languages, a bunch of history classes with the words "in depth" in the title, an Etiquette and Conduct class, some intimidating-looking civics stuff including a course on international law, and a sequence of classes titled "Abroad" with a footnote that kids outside of certain tracks (any blue, teacher track orange, civil service or business track yellow, military track grey, or business track purple) must have special permission from the tracking counselor to take it.

That looks good!

She decides to sleep on the decision, then picks the disabilities school and emails Ude about this.

Ude says they can get her fully enrolled to start next week! In the meantime there's a testing center actually in the school (most schools use third-party tests, the disability school just runs a testing service of its own for in-house use as well as anyone who qualifies for testing accommodations elsewhere) where she can take her placement tests.

She is hopefully ready for the placement test!

Then they will schedule that for her. Anything she'd like to do before she's spending so much time in school? (Her videographers suggest More Videos.)

Yeah! She wants to do a video on human and shoggoth education, since she's starting school! And she gets her mom's help for videos about Basic Earth Facts and recent human history and shoggoth art forms and theology-for-children: aliens edition (this is where she can emphasize the shoggoth idea of Being Kind To People You Dislike, Especially If You Think They Aren't People, plus the many human religions about 'stop being jerks to each other no really')...

These all sound like fun topics! What does she want to put in them?

Education:

Shoggoths mostly do one-on-one education! The family is responsible for your education until you have your family history memorized. You also learn life basics then. Once you know those - generally between two and three - you find stuff you want to learn from other people. This kind of works like apprenticeships! Mostly you follow people around and ask questions. Shoggoths are really fond of an approach to learning based in conversations.

Humans do a lot of types of education! Western humans, who are mostly descended from this one continent that's the north-western part of what people on that continent used to think was the only big landmass, do a model really based strongly in 'the teacher lectures, the students listen, the students learn how to sit quietly and be seen not heard'. When you get to university level it does work a bit differently, though. Western humans have gendered biases in schooling, though there's a big push to get rid of those right now, because Western culture has been really strongly into equality for the last twenty-five or so Amentan years, and they've been expanding their definitions of who gets to be equal. Western education focuses really strongly on science, math, and literature as important. You're supposed to be schooled into a well-rounded citizen, ideally.

There's a few other less detailed examples from other human cultures, mostly relayed from Bright's mom, but a lot of humans around the world have adopted the Western model, largely for reasons of 'a few Western nations conquered a ton of the world between them starting about a century ago.'

Basic Earth Facts is mostly geography, climate, major sapient species on the planet and nearby, facts about the year length and all that. Broad strokes history, too. The Elder Things terraformed Earth from an empty rock, and used it as a biological experiment and then a base in some of their wars.

Recent human history goes back about an Amentan century and covers lots of wars and invasions and rebellions and societal changes. Slavery: outlawed pretty recently, there's still discrimination against ex-slaves and their descendants. Wars: mostly fairly small scale. Wars that take up more than a few nations haven't really happened yet, though some people think they might get more likely as population goes up and international relationships shift.

Shoggoth art: has a strong focus on shapeshifting-based art since Bright can do that, but also talks about theater and singing and sculpture and selective breeding as an art.

Alien theology: Lots of Earth theologies are really speculative! This is partially because of their world's history, and some definitely weird stuff happening in it but a lot of history being lost. Human religions all have different origin myths - they knew their world was created, but they had different guesses and stories about who did that! Human and shoggoth religions also often have speculation about what happens to a person's soul when they die. Shoggoth religion is pretty bleak on that and thinks the souls of the dead are trapped somewhere bad. Human religions are a mix in terms of afterlives. (Most Earth religions believe in souls as a thing; there's evidence some technologies can interact with these, but Bright's not familiar with those, and doesn't know if the Elder Things put souls in stuff on purpose. Here's an explanation of the different theories on what a soul even is!) Earth religions also have rules about how you should treat other people! Here's some examples of major human tenets, from all the ones Bright's familiar with, and the big Shoggoth ones. (This is where she emphasizes the kindness rules.)