As Ichiban listened to the polite girl voice her question, the man was drawn somewhat into reflection on her answer. It was a very peculiar issue to come up, but it tended to appear in those that were particularly studious, very academically inclined. He grabbed the wooden back of his chair and slid it out to once more sit down, placing his tea neatly on a coaster he had pulled out for it. He knew the answer he wanted to give the girl, but sometimes it wasn't really about having the right information to convey, but instead figuring out what the best way might be to convey it.
In the span of his meditations on the topic, the restless child started speaking up, asking what was going on in the world. It was a clever little trick for a child who didn't know what he ought to be looking for; questions like that were fairly obvious ploys to try to better understand the way a person thinks, by figuring out just what it was they were focusing on, and how they might interpret it. A small smile curled up along the man's wrinkled cheeks, although, for the moment, the two children kind of impressed and disappointed him in equal parts. "Well," he began, trying to force himself not to recognize what the purpose of the boy's line of questioning was, so as not to cater the answers too heavily, "There's another story of one of the protests being broken up within the country, with rumors that a couple had been killed during the gathering, although not much else is known on this point." He snapped the crinkled paper into a firm rectangle, tilting his head up to scan the headlines as he looked down on it, mimicking the use of reading glasses he had forgotten at home, "A restaurant named "The Baited Gill" apparently broke the record for baking the largest pie ever baked in Lightning Country, and there appears to be a rise in fatal cases of drug overdoses appearing in some of the country's factories and fisheries."
The boy would then go off on a slight tangent, but it would build to a point. It was somewhat encouraging that the two children were at least trying to break through his explicit description of the exercise; that he wouldn't be helping them come up with an answer, but he didn't say that they would not be allowed to seek one out. It wasn't a very sophisticated strategy, but the exercise was by no means simple, he had to admit. He wanted to answer the boy's question, since it was freshly presented, but he didn't want the polite student's thoughts to fall too far into the backdrop, so he began with a general note to the assembly. "In answer to both of you, it's not quite time for you to present an answer, but I'll let it slide since you technically phrased those answers as questions. Young lady," He was looking at the girl now, and casually pointed a pencil at her as he spoke, "You gave a very succinct technical answer that almost sounds like it was memorized from a book. If I was checking to see if you had read something, I would have given you full marks here, but your description is flawed. In particular, you've simply shunted off the responsibility of description to some vague third party. You say that a country is a region identified as a distinct entity; identified by who? Whoever identified it must have some criteria for doing so, and that criteria must have some presence in actual reality, don't you think? Or are all countries simply figments of the world's imagination?"
He turned to the boy now, his pencil aimed at critically breaking this new assessment down too, but despite the boy's longer trail of thought, Ichiban's response, he found, would not require much differentiation between the two students. "And young man," He sighed, "You have a similar issue. You say that everything within a country relies on it's people. Not a bad answer, but you have created for yourself the challenging task, then, of defining it's people. Suppose, tomorrow, Sunagakure took a vote to dissolve Lightning Country's hidden village; should we give in to their democratic vote? Why or why not?" The man had told himself that he wasn't going to offer any help to the two students, and perhaps he was getting soft in his old age, but he could sympathize somewhat with how challenging the class must have seemed to their young minds, before, perhaps, they had experienced more of the world and had to contend with these challenging concepts.
Ichiban was wondering if he should have given the two a little bit more. He didn't want to deprive them of the opportunity of failing the class by simply handing over an obvious clue to accomplishing their goals here, but, well, he felt he still had some room to see what they were capable of. "Doesn't it seem now that I would've been able to come up with an answer to this second question on the board if I were a student in your places, given what you now know about my worldview?" He was speaking to both of them, "But you didn't know anything about my worldview when you came in, and yet you still attempted to answer the questions, when I alone hold the key to your passing the class, and for all you know, my view of the world could have and still can be absurd. I have to wonder here if either of you actually wants to pass this class." This would be enough, surely. Cryptic enough to give them some trouble, but not quite as unforgiving a circumstance as he had initially set the two off with.
"I'll take your answers to the questions now, if you feel comfortable enough to give them."
From the earliest moments that a person starts conceptualizing their future, they begin work on what most only ever actually understand and can put to words after they’ve grown old; this being their legacy. Perhaps this was caused by a belief that tends to persist through youth; that being that most people, given the option, will act selfishly. Quite the opposite was the case, in fact. Every meaningful decision a person makes is made with consideration for how it will affect others, or the broader world around them, and therein we find decisions about family, profession, love, and everything else. The old man had taken a break from his considerable workload to contemplate quite seriously on this topic, on the matter of a life’s work that will truly last for as many lifetimes as Kumo has left, and realized that he had found himself lacking.
