As I walk down the hallway of KO I cannot help feeling that I have yet again entered some sort of factory. Not a factory to make some sort of new product, nothing you would see in commercials, no, something more standard. Some sort of person that, once they had been chewed up and spit out, was gonna be just like all the other items coming out of the mold, perfectly shaped. Even now, the students are starting to figure out their roles in the machine. There’s the girls, all leather boots and cardigans and fake smiles, each one just like the other. [4a] Then there’s the boys, at the other end of the hall, suits and ties and trying to be adults already even though you can tell all they wanna do is get outside, get away. It’s like I’m not even here, really. The machine doesn’t stop for me, just keeps churning, there’s too much to be done for such a minor figure to be a distraction. Quick smiles and questioning glances are all the acknowledgement I need, though. I’m stealthy. I’m an infiltrator. I know how all this works. It’s all the better if the students won’t talk to me; all I need to do is serve my time here and get back to the hospital.
I peer into one of the classrooms, where the students are learning some sort of writing style. Nothing they’ll ever use, unless they want to impress their friends with how intellectually advanced they are. As a teacher gives me a glance, I see a glimmer of what I always see in the Big Nurse’s eyes. She is rigid and unswaying, staring me down, willing me to tell her what I am doing here and why so she can force me to leave. I don’t tell her, just bow my head and melt into the side of the doorway. She scoffs and returns to teaching, and I can almost hear the clock ticking in the background. Of course she needs to follow her tight schedule, because if the students don’t get to the essay writing today then they will miss the new vocabulary tomorrow, and then they will never be able to escape this convent because their education will never be sufficient. The teacher needs to ensure that all her student projects are functioning bits of machinery, coded to perfection with every skill they need, or else the whole system will break down. They have to be educated, confident, intelligent, before they can even dream of leaving this little isolated combine and going out into the real world, where the boundaries of how they can live are even greater. [4] I can’t wait to leave this combine, and not just to get back to the hospital, but to get away.
You get the overall aspects of the Chief's view right, how he can get overall descriptive in a very depressing way sometimes. Also you do a good job of writing how the Chief sees through the facade's that people put up. As for KO, your description is mostly correct;although, people here try to seem more intellectual then others all the time not every once in a while. In addition, you get the combine aspect right to some degree, but this school is not as harsh of a combine as you describe it. The thing that you get most accurate is the fact that kids here do not seem to pay much, if any, attention to things that are outside our normal routine and set daily life.
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