The girls actually got to sit at their desks and play a few ractives 
showing what it was like to live during this time: generally not very nice, 
even if you selected the option that turned off all the diseases. At this 
point, Mrs. Disher stepped in to say, if you thought that was scary, 
look at how poor people lived in the late twentieth century. Indeed, after 
ractives told them about the life of an inner-city Washington, D.C., child 
during the 1990s, most students had to agree they'd take a workhouse in 
pre-Victorian England over that any day.