Soon, all the students in Emily's class were seated around the circle of desks. Mme Gaudrau strolled to the front of the classroom and sat upon a desk, smiling radiantly at all of her students. "Good morning, class!" she acknowledged everyone animatedly waving her hand in greeting. The shining jewels on her necklace and earrings matched her glowing, white smile. She was wearing a fancy shirt, which was a vivid, bright shade of pink. That day, her outfit was a matching representation of her personality.
"Can anyone guess what we're doing today?" She questioned the class.
"Writing a story!" Emily called out
"Having a nap!" Dawn yawned
"Jumping off the Eiffel tower!" Jon shouted
"Wrong!" Mme Gaudrau exclaimed "Today we will be baking brownies!"
The class made various sounds of approval, except for Emily, who looked down at her desk, slightly disappointed that they weren't writing a story. Emily, unlike the other students, had a deep loathing for cooking. Then, Mme Gaudrau led everyone downstairs to the kitchen to begin making their snack. The students followed after her, chattering excitedly with one another. When they arrived at the kitchen, the baking supplies were already set out on the counter, except for the milk and the eggs, which were in the fridge.
The students took turns doing small tasks to complete the job. Jon turned on the oven, while Katie opened the brownie mix box and poured the powdery batter into a large, shiny, metal bowl. Emily read the instructions out loud while Eric carefully cracked the eggs into the bowl then threw out the pointy, dripping, eggshells. Dawn was given charge of thoroughly stirring the contents of the bowl together. Meanwhile, Emily greased the trays.
Emily didn't enjoy greasing the trays very much. It involved touching slimy cooking ingredients, with she found utterly unpleasant. She hated when her hands were sticky and gross, and had the desperate need to wash them right away. Nonetheless, she didn't complain. She comforted herself by thinking At least it's not ketchup, or vomit, or anything disgusting like that. After she was done, she accidentally half threw, half dropped the tray on the counter in a desperate attempt to speed up her arrival to the sink to wash her hands. It made a loud, clattering sound which echoed loudly through the room. Emily flinched.
Soon, the brownies were in the trays and ready to cook. Mme Gaudrau placed them gently inside the oven. There were still 40 minutes to wait until class was over, and it would be about 30 minutes until the brownies were done cooking. So all the students stood around the counter and stared at their smartphones.
Emily thought it was an outrage, the amount of time that people wasted scrolling through their smartphones. While people could be paying attention to things that happened in the real world, they were instead avoiding eye contact and real conversation, communicating only by texting each other and sending each other messages and videos. What could the benefit be in that? None of it was real interaction, in Emily's opinion. Also, Emily had read somewhere that people having their faces stuck in front of an electronic device could strongly increase anxiety in a person, because it caused people to pick up the bad habit of only paying attention to their phones most of the time.
Untitled Part 2
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