ABSTRACT
The thin, meager light that managed to filter through the grimy win-
dows exposed the gouges and scratches on the faded old blackboard. The
room was entirely bare, with no hint of the name of the class, the work
of the students or the personality of the teacher. Broken desks sat empty
under the windows, still aligned in straight rows. Twenty students sat in
the four rows closer to the door, slightly to the right of the teacher’s
lectern. They looked to be typical teenagers: boys slouched down, with
long legs extended into the aisles, girls sitting slightly straighter. A mix-
ture of races and sizes-alert but not animated, they waited for their
teacher. On their desks were a few pages of notebook paper, but no
books. Visually, the scene could be a third-world school, a photo from a
Peace Corps brochure, a request for donations for school supplies and
equipment. Sam Beshara, huge and huffing, burst into the classroom, a
heavy engineering text tucked under his left arm, chalk in his right
hand, and a stack of papers clutched between the two. “Moment!” The
students registered surprise and amusement: what next? “We have to be
able to work with ‘moment.’ What is it? You can’t build, you can’t
understand materials, you can’t make anything work until you under-
stand ‘moment.’” He set down the book and the papers, picked up the
chalk, and jabbed the blackboard with numbers. The numbers grew into
equations. The teacher boomed, “Of course, we have no books, so you
are just going to have to pay attention up here.” He chalked in geometric
diagrams, sketches of structures. “Now, if we had a book or any materi-
als here, you could test this out. Instead, we are going to just have to get
this through the formulas. Now, who can tell me what we have here?
