I love Grace's little eridian students but can you imagine the conversations that took place before that. Like I think most people agree that Grace, had he returned to earth, wouldn't have been able to pick up his job as a teacher again, simply because he's the saviour of humanity. Him becoming a teacher on erid is even more ridiculous!! It sounds like self indulgent fanfiction but someohow it's in the book!!!
Like can you imagine, you found out about the existence of stars a couple decades, maybe a century ago and pretty immediatly yours starts dimming. So you send your first ever space vessel to look for a cure. 80 years later the sole surviving crew member returns with an alien. You just found out other planets exist and now there's intelligent life on one of them, and also the only known member of their species is dying. Do you disclose this to the public? How do you even disclose this to the public? The alien is better now and somehow doesn't want to go home. It says it wants to teach! Well yeah this is great, you have so much advanced technology people would kill to know about! The xenobiologists and xenoantropolgists (fields which were established six months ago) are loosing their minds over the thought of a course taught by saviour Grace!! All of erids most prestigious universities are trying to be first to invite him -- I'm sorry, the alien wants to teach what? To who??
I want to know which poor government employee had to figure out how to get the alien a position as a school teacher. Did he have to go to school to get qualified for that? Which poor middle school admin had figure out how to set up a classroom for an alien teacher? How do they choose the students?? How do they get them to not loose their shits about this. Imagine being 12 and your school counselor shows up like "hey you know the alien that saved the planet a few years back? Yes, some of you might have seen it in its habitat. So anyway, it's gonna be your new science teacher." There were probably a few weeks where a class of very confused preteens thought their school was pulling a very elaborate prank on them.
