Jam

In which we see Ms. Bradstreet navigate her way through a curricular block

The Maria Chronicles, #7

"Damn! This traffic jam/How I hate to be late/Hurts my motor to go so slow . . . ."

Maria is stuck on the parkway. She thinks of the James Taylor song she loves because the radio is playing "You've Got a Friend," which she hates: too maudlin. She punches the radio off. It's 7:49. Under normal conditions she'd be at school in about 15 minutes. Still time before the first class at 8:30, but this will cut into her zone to set up, adjust, and generally decompress.

She thinks about other things that are irritating her. Her hair. The fact that she didn't stop at Dunkin' Donuts, which means she's marooned without coffee. The fact that she hasn't heard from her son Evan.

And then there's her ongoing inability to resolve her assessment problem in the colonial history unit in her survey class. It's a long stretch, about four weeks. At the end of it, Maria intends for the students to compare empires and/or colonies in the Americas. The problem is what comes in between. She needs time for them to get information, from her and from the readings. The question then becomes what to get them to do with it. Maria hates assigning busy work -- worksheets, mini-essays, and the like. The kids resent it, and it loads her up with grading when she's trying to juggle all her other courses. A quiz doesn't really make sense to her, either. The colonial era isn't like, say, the sequence of events leading up the American Revolution, where keeping facts straight matters. It's a big stretch of time, and the point is to sketch broad themes that will stick. Maria herself loves the period, but she also knows it's the most likely to seem remote to the students. Back at Derry High, there was a map assignment that was pretty good, but Maria is restless with it. Still, she may just have to go back to it.

Maria crawls past the exit for the convention center. It's now 7:52. She decides she will panic in eight minutes. Then, coming around a bend, she sees the problem. Accident up ahead in the left lane. Thank God. The end is in sight.

Hmmm. Convention center. Maybe she could do some kind of convention? A colonial meeting of some kind. Maria begins imagining a character. She'll call him Nicolo Pragmatica, a Jesuit priest. Father Pragmatica has distinctly ambiguous relations with the Vatican, as Jesuits so often do. Let's say it's 1650, right after the Treaty of Westphalia, which has finally brought stability to Europe. It's Fr. Pragmatica's idea -- his motives are murky -- to finally do something comparable for America. To that end, he's invited Spanish, French, Dutch, and English teams in an unofficial capacity (though these will be people hoping to have influence with their governments) to his estate in Tuscany. As a result of some intense back-room jockeying, representatives from the Huron and Iroquois have also been invited to the parley. Father Pragmatica will host an elegant dinner, with spaghetti and his best Chianti, and ask members of the teams just what their long-term goals in America are. The Spanish will no doubt talk about security for their southern possessions, the Dutch their trading interests in New Amsterdam, the Huron their friendship with the French and skepticism about the English, and so on.

The traffic is beginning to pick up momentum. CRV ditched by the side of the road. Police, two passengers milling around on cell phones.

Maria resumes her train of thought: This will kill a lot of birds with one stone. Simulations are fun. It will get the kids to do group work. Some light research -- she'll expect them to rely on the textbook and whatever they can pick up on Google as homework. They can IM if they can't get together. She'll tell them she's giving them group grades, and she will. But this will also allow her to identify class leaders, as well as who's passive. Depending on how it goes, she might prod a student or two, or purposely sow dissension in a particular delegation (maybe she can use her cap and gown from her master's degree to play Fr. Pragmatica). Be a tight squeeze; she can't make it more than a night's homework or give more than a class session to it, or maybe a class and a half, which might be a problem. But maybe she'll drop that draggy DVD on King Philip's War she used last year.

The scenario will need work, and Maria isn't certain she'll be able to fit it in. But it's worth a try. Maybe something to tinker with tonight. For now, though, there are more immediate issues -- here's her exit. She just hopes to God she can make the Smart Board work.

Codes

In which we see Ms. Bradstreet look for a break

The Maria Chronicles, #4

Damn it, Damn it, Damn it!

Maria would like to throw her new Macbook out the window. For the last half hour she’s been trying to paste The Federalist Papers, #35, into the course web page she’s been assigned for her upcoming classes. Having taken this new job, she’s determined to refresh her entire skill set, ranging from her curricular offerings to her use of technology, and to that end she eagerly accepted the invitation to put all her courses online. She spent an hour yesterday with the school’s tech guru, Ray Rozenholtz, the genial gabber who issued Maria the computer and reassured her that she’d find the software to be a breeze. And it kind of was – when she was sitting there in his office, that is. Now, though, alone in the cluster of desks that constitute the History Department office on a sweltering late August afternoon, she’s hopelessly stuck. When she copied and pasted the immortal Alexander Hamilton onto the page, he lost all his formatting. That wasn’t such a big deal, except that the whole thing is now a single slab of type, no line breaks, and no matter how many times she hits the return key the thing remains an unreadable blob.

Maria sighs deeply. "Now what?" she says, aggrieved, to herself.

"Technology trouble?" A voice behind her says. Maria almost leaps out of her chair in terror.

"Oh my God!" she says, swiveling to see the source of the voice. It's a blond-haired boy, pimply, with green eyes, clearly frightened by her fright

"Sorry!" His reply is loud, even forceful, with a tint of aggrievement. He's rattled by her being rattled.

"I'm sorry," Maria says, apologetically. "It's just that I didn't know anyone was here."

"I came to see Ms. Abruzzi," the boy explains.

"She's not here," Maria says, stating the obvious about the department chair and immediately regretting it.

"I know," he replies neutrally. "But we have an appointment. I'm a couple minutes early."

"Oh." Maria is recovering her equilibrium, part of which involves realizing that she has to take the lead here with this child in terms of the social niceties. "I'm Maria Bradstreet," she says, extending her hand.

"You're the new history teacher," he says with a smile. "For Mr. Haynes."

"Yes, that's right." Haynes apparently lasted a year. Following a teacher that left mid-year. Maria got hired because the school was desperate for a seasoned teacher in what is a young department. "And what's your name?"

"Me? I'm Kenny Lowe."

"Well, hello, Kenny."

"I think you might be my teacher this year?"

"Wonderful! In which course?"

"The regular history course. Whatever that's called."

"You mean the U.S. history survey."

"Yeah, the survey."

"Ah. Very good. Of course, at the rate things are going there isn't going to be much to do, because I'm having trouble with copying and pasting documents."

"Is that it there?" Kenny asks, squinting at the screen. "Why don't you just make a link rather than copy it in?"

Maria feels like an idiot. "Yeah, I guess I could have done that. I just thought it would be easier to cut and paste. But when I did, all the formatting disappeared and the whole thing is one long paragraph."

"Can I take a look?"

"Be my guest!" Maria pushes her swivel chair away to make room for him. Kenny looks intently at the computer, which gives her a chance to look more closely at him. His features are delicate, partially obscured by his acne and whiskers. She's struck by the intensity of his concentration -- it has an adult quality, even as his manner and appearance suggest an uneasy purchase on his adolescence.

"It's the line breaks," he says to her, still looking at the screen. All the coding is missing. She sees him make type the letter "b" and a slash within brackets, and then a series of CTRL/V where he thinks the breaks should go. He then hits the PUBLISH button on screen. Sure enough, the line breaks are there. "I think you'll be able to do italics and bold the usual way," he says. "For some reason, you need to put in the HTML language for the line breaks."

"Wow," Maria says, grateful and humbled. Are you a computer aficionado, Kenny?"

"Well I dunno. I guess," he says, which Maria surmises is a vast understatement. "I like to do animations."

"You mean like cartoons?"

"Yeah, sort of. Me and my friends have a website --"

"Ah, so I see you've met Kenny," Jen Abruzzi says, coming into the room. He's my advisee. "You've met Ms. Bradstreet?"

"Yes."

"Kenny got me out of a technology jam," Maria says.

"I'm not surprised," Jen says. "He's our resident computer geek." She flashes him an affectionate smile. "C'mon into my office, Kenny. We'll see if you we can straighten out the chem kink in your schedule."

The two of them disappear into Jen's adjacent office. Maria looks back at the screen. She feels a twinge of unease: She's in Kenny's debt and wonders if that will affect her sense of authority over him in the classroom. But having had the thought, her fear recedes. Maybe with a different kid she'd have more reason for concern. He seems like he'll be fine. Actually, she suspects this will actually help their relationship. She remembers an incident in Benjamin Franklin's autobiography when young Franklin courts favor with a rich and influential man not by trying to be of service, but asking to borrow a book Franklin knew the man owns. It's probably a good idea to seek their help from time to time to build good will and trust.

Later. Now she has to finish this syllabus. And establish herself here. Effective dependency requires strength. Maria has a ways to go, around here at least.

Orders of Magnitude

In which we see Ms. Bradstreet weigh the scales of time

The Maria Chronicles, #3

The last time Maria visited Hudson High School, all was quiet on a dusky evening in late spring. She had assumed the next time she came, all would be bustling on an early September morning. But of course she had forgotten that there would be meetings before classes started, that she’d be coming in to set up her desk, and that she’d want to explore the building before school year got officially underway. So the contrast as she pulls into the parking lot on this surprisingly cool August day is not as sharp as she’d imagined.

Still, lots of doors are open. There are a few kids walking by. And in the distance she can see the football and girls’ soccer teams practicing. It’s quiet, but not dead, as she gets out of her car with her new briefcase and slams the door. Nice that it won’t be that hot today for the faculty meeting this afternoon. Maybe she won’t have to dry clean all her clothes. After the $300 she put on her Amex card at Ann Taylor refurbishing her wardrobe, and the approach of her first rent and car payments, Maria needs to rack up some small economies. She’s brought along a container of yogurt, a granola bar, and a banana in her backpack.

There are some benches near the main entrance, and Maria pauses to put the backpack on one and looks carefully at the building. It is massive. A frieze in the middle with the words HUDSON HIGH SCHOOL chiseled in it. Faux Doric columns flank either side, set against red brick. A granite base with sculpted horizontal lines. Everything about it projects a sense of solidity. Ted Johnson, the principal who offered her the job, told Maria that the school was built in 1911, though he didn’t know much else about it. But Maria sees that everything about the building conveys a sense of Progressive confidence in the future. This school was made to stay.

Maria thinks of a picture she saw in a book on World War II she was flipping through recently in preparation for her new courses. It showed an aircraft carrier under construction in a shipyard in Los Angeles. The vessel itself and the surrounding machinery dwarfed the clumps of workers milling around like ants on the ground, vividly dramatizing the colossal scale of American industrial life. Power, in just about every sense of the term, was associated with a sense of scale. Bigger was better.

Today, Maria knows, modernity is defined in terms of smallness. The ever shrinking transistor, literally microscopic in size. The locus of cutting-edge science is molecular biology. It’s true even in consumer culture. She thinks of her first boyfriend’s stereo system and its massive speakers. His 400 LP record collection. Now it would all fit on an iPod. There’s a remarkable sense of tidiness about it. Still, she senses that maybe there’s a sense of loss, too.

She turns back to look at her new, ice-blue Toyota Prius. She loves the car, which she waited six weeks to get. Never having liked SUVs, they now seem like pathetic dinosaurs (she spies one at the far corner of the lot – probably a kid who drove to practice in Dad’s old car). But in her mind’s eye she also sees her brand new car as an antique, bearing witness to moment of transition, of hybrid cars caught between two worlds, neither fish nor fowl. One thing she knows for sure: she’s going to hang on to that car as long as she can, and will cheerfully drive it a decade from now no matter how old-fashioned it will become. Maria tends to find comfort in the past; that’s why she’s a history teacher. But – much to her surprise – she also increasingly finds hope in the future, and few things are more satisfying to her than yesterday and tomorrow mingling. Maria picks up her briefcase and heads toward the massive front doors. A new ritual is about to begin.

The load

In which we see Ms. Bradstreet weigh how much homework is enough

The Maria Chronicles, #2

Maria is conflicted. It's a Sunday night in mid-July, and she's sitting on the deck outside her frighteningly expensive, but at least unpacked, little apartment on Southside Avenue. She believes that what her landlord told her is true, that it will afford a view of the Hudson come winter when all the greenery is gone. For now she settles for occasional pedestrian traffic and the occasional sound of the Metro North train coming into the station a couple blocks away. She's been bent over her laptop for hours now, the container of lo mein she brought home from dinner last night long since forgotten, as is the half-empty bottle of Pinot Grigio. Standing up, she realizes that her back and neck are sore from her unnatural position. It hadn't been her intention to spend so much time on the syllabus for this new course, which she looked at after she came home from a jog in the park, but once she got started her immersion had been complete. Until a few minutes ago, anyway, when she got stuck. Now she stands, realizes it's getting dark, and moves her stuff inside to the kitchen. No more wine. She's tired. And about a week into her new life, a little lonely.

The problem is with her new "Advanced Topics" class. This is actually a plum assignment in a portfolio that includes the year-long survey and other staple courses. The school recently decided to drop its AP curriculum as too restrictive, a move she thoroughly endorses. This has opened up a space for an elective of her choosing, and Maria has decided she would like to try her hand at historiography in a class she's calling "Great Debates in U.S. History." She's using the latest edition of a nice course reader that she got as a desk copy last year, having then decided it was something she would like build a course around someday. That came to pass sooner than expected -- along with the end of her marriage, a new home, and a new job, which she hadn't expected at all.

The issue at hand is how much work she can or should try to get out of her still-imagined students. Maria knows she's going to ask them to write a couple short pieces on readings of their choice. She also knows she's going to ask them to do a final project on a movie with a historical theme, like Last of the Mohicans or Saving Private Ryan, that she'll want them to situate in terms of academic scholarship at the time of its release and/or today. What she can't quite decide is whether to require them to read and write a review of a major piece of historical writing from a list she'll give them, something that will include classics like Garry Wills's Lincoln at Gettysburg or Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's Good Wives. The books would have to be short. And she knows it will be tough for students who will no doubt also be taking similarly challenging courses in science and math, not to mention playing soccer, performing in the percussion ensemble, or whatever. But shouldn't they have a sustained encounter with a major piece of historical scholarship? Especially since they're taking this course because they want to be challenged? Or maybe she should be thinking, as education guru Ted Sizer says, that Less Is More. Maybe three short reaction pieces, the movie essay, and class participation is enough.

Maria knows that the issue isn't entirely intellectual or pedagogical. It's at least as much about the kind of tone and reputation she's going to establish, how she's going to be perceived. Will they see her as a hard-ass? Is that a bad thing? She knows from experience that setting the bar too high discourages kids, some of whom will drop out -- and a sharp melt early on will not be good for her image. On the other hand, setting the bar too low conveys a lack of seriousness, and paradoxically may mean she gets even less work out of them. It's more important than usual that she get this right.

The sudden burst of Los Lobos's version of "La Bamba" from her cell phone comes as a relief to Maria. She's glad to have the diversion and human contact, particularly when she sees that it's her daughter Felicia calling from Seattle, where she's now a few months into her job as a reporter for the History News Network website (thank God her boyfriend, a software designer, has a salary they can live on).

"Hello darling!"

"Hello Mama! How are you?"

"I'm great. Really great!"

"Oh no you're not. I can tell from your voice."

"Now honey, don't you start."

"What is it, Mama? You feeling all alone out there? How could you not? You know, the Labor Day weekend coming up, but I bet I could even -- "

"Nevermind about that. You tell me how you are."

There's a pause. Maria knows Felicia hears the edge in her mother's voice. The right answer is to answer. Good girl: Felicia does, with talk about the office, her boyfriend David, a recent visit to Vancouver. This goes on for a while. When Maria senses that Felicia wants to turn the conversation back to her, she shifts the ground again.

"And your brother? Have you heard from him?"

"Yeah, I talked with him yesterday," Felicia answers. "I didn't get the sense things were all honky dory with Doreen -- he sounded a little tired, maybe even down -- but I didn't press and he didn't say much on that. His work is going well, though. And what about your work? Are you preparing for classes?"

This is safe ground. "Indeed I am. Maria describes her curricular planning, including the work she'd done that afternoon. She also decides that Felicia is a good sounding board, and asks her opinion.

"Oh I would definitely assign the book," Felicia says. "Let 'em do some real history. You're talking as if you're going to inflict pain on them. It'll be fun!"

"Well, it would be fun for you. You were always the golden girl when it came to homework. I'm worried about it being perceived as too burdensome."

"Burdensome, schmerdensome! If you're really worried about it, have them read the book over spring break."

A good idea. But Maria shoots it down. "Can't. I was told when I was hired that they really try hard not to make the place too much of a grind. School policy is no homework over vacations."

"Well, that may be the policy, but you and I both know there will always be kids who do homework over vacations, whether they want to or not. So don't actually assign it for the break. Set it up so that anyone who wants to can read it at the airport while waiting six hours to board the plane to Orlando, but no one will actually have to read it, because the review won't be due for a week or so after that."

"Honey, you're brilliant."

"Of course I am. That's why I'm making a fortune here writing news digests for HNN. Have you asked my good-for-nothing brother what he thinks?" Maria knows Felicia really is fond of Evan, and really thinks of him as lazy.

"That good-for-nothing brother of yours is making about twice as much as you are. But no, I haven't asked him."

"Well don't. You know what he'll say."

Maria does. That's why she's tempted to call him. But she knows that he's going to a Coldplay concert tonight.

Maria gazes back out toward the deck. It's fully dark now, and she's fully tired. "You know, Mama, David has some frequent flyer miles. I could get out there to see you maybe even next weekend."

This is all too tempting an offer. "Nonsense. Maybe Labor Day. We'll see. Let me go, honey. I want to catch some re-runs of In Treatment on HBO."

"OK, Mama. You think about that visit. I can be there at a snap of your fingers."

"I know, sweetheart. Thank you. Love to David."

Maria has no intention of watching In Treatment. Instead, she puts her wineglass in the dishwasher, turns off her computer, and turns on a lamp in her bedroom, where a paperback copy of Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge awaits. She had already thought of what Felicia had said. But hearing her say it has emboldened her. It's going on the syllabus. She can change her mind later. Ted Sizer says less is more, she thinks as she takes off her shorts and crawls into bed with the T-shirt she put on after the shower that followed her run. But he also talks about patient expectation. Something like that. I'll aim high, at first, anyway. That's always been my way. Mark would say that's why he had the affair -- that my standards are too high, but . . . .

Maria is grateful for her exhaustion. She's barely opened the novel before she falls asleep.