Lathem College for several years, an elective that would make students swap bodies with one of their classmates for the whole semester. It was intended to give students an insight into alternative perspectives, and thanks to many positive experiences the class numbers continued to grow year after year. On the rare occasion there was an odd number of students either the subject coordinator or one of the tutors would swap as well, becoming a student for the semester.
Over the years of acting as the subject coordinator Margret Farland, a 61-year-old senior lecturer, found herself fiddling with the parameters of the swap. A memory or two exchanged here, an inability to talk about the swap there. Her experiments slowly became known by her fellow teachers, each one suggesting new tests to run each semester and enjoying what they saw as a social experiment.
However, during one of their informal after-hours 'meetings' around how to run the next class a new idea was proposed. This group of underpaid and underappreciated lecturers and tutors wondered "What if we just didn't swap back?"
What started as a joke over one too many drinks slowly ate away at the group as each member of the now rather large group mulled it over. Before the new academic year the plan slowly came together, each teacher secretly discussing it with each other until finally the whole group was on board.
The Swap Class would be mandatory for students living on campus, becoming an essential element for keeping their place in residence.
Each class this semester would have an odd number of students due to an 'error' in class allocation, meaning that each teacher would be a part of the swap.
The teachers would be 'randomly' paired up with students from the residential overflow annex, a small building on the edge of the campus which housed students when there wasn't enough room in the larger dorms.
Margret's years of experimentation would be used, preventing the students in the teachers' aging bodies from talking about the swap. However, this would also make it hard for the teachers turned students to do the same as well as ingraining both parties with certain mannerisms and attributes from their new bodies.
Finally, with the help of the Computer Science lecturers the logs of the Swap Class would be updated remotely to claim that they had already swapped back and to further cover their tracks.
As the weeks before the new year of classes went by what had started as a joke became a serious plan. The teachers all had their own reasons for the swap but mostly it went back to one thing, their desire to re-experience their youth and to have the do-over they felt they deserved.
There was only one problem for the group, what if other teachers signed up to teach the class. After a great deal of discussion it was agreed that, even though they weren't a part of it all, any teacher to sign up would get the same treatment. The group decided that it was a gift for their unaware colleagues, and even if they didn't agree at first that time would make them see the kindness of it all. However, it was also unanimously agreed that the core conspirators would receive the cream of the crop, leaving the remaining students to their unwitting colleagues.
The week before the start of classes Margret and Simon, a recently divorced English Literature lecturer, went over the class lists as they made sure an annex student was in each class. Thanks to the small pool of students living in that small building they didn't have much of a chance to shop around for themselves and the other teachers, all they could hope was that their new lives would grow on them. As they planned the classes they noticed a few teachers from outside of their little group had signed up to help out with the Swap Class, grinning at each other as they placed the remaining annex students in those classes and laughing at the thought of having a dorm that was entirely for teachers turned students.
That night the group got together for drinks, celebrating their plan a little early while they still had the money to do so. Ordering expensive drinks well into the night Margret and Simon stayed tight-lipped about who was swapping with who, lying and always responding with "We did it by last name, it'll be a surprise. You'll just have to wait...though not for very long."
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