Brilliance was Miss Matheson's department, though she mostly left it to 
her assistants, occasionally wheeling in and out of various classrooms in an 
old wood-and-wicker wheelchair. During the Aglaia period, the girls would get 
together in groups of half a dozen or so to answer questions or solve problems 
put to them by the teachers: For example, they counted how many species of 
plants and animals could be found in one square foot of the forest behind the 
school. They put on a scene from a play in Greek. They used a ractive 
simulation to model the domestic economy of a Lakota band before and after the 
introduction of horses. They designed simple machines with a nanopresence rig 
and tried to compile them in the M.C. and make them work. They wove
brocades and made porcelain as Chinese ladies used to do. And there was an 
ocean of history to be learned: first biblical, Greek, and Roman, and then the 
history of many other peoples around the world that essentially served as 
backdrop for History of the English-Speaking Peoples.