A Function of Murder (20 page)

I stood and nearly got whacked again as Principal Richardson’s door opened and he
rushed out.

“’Scuse me,” he said, and hurried down the hall without meeting my eyes. I doubted
he knew whom he’d almost knocked over.

Two administrators, two near misses for injury.

I decided it would be safer in my classroom with the younger set.

At Zeeman, teachers were always happy to have guests drop in to their classrooms.
We were welcome, as long as
we walked around and interacted with the various groups of students and their projects.

I still had a half hour before my students would gather, so I stopped by Dan Sachs’s
class. Dan, a passionate third-year teacher, had applied for and won a grant to outfit
several rooms as technology-centric classrooms, which meant a laptop for every student,
large interactive screens, and enough educational software to support a space mission.

Today, Dan’s students were working on a special curriculum he’d developed for teaching
Shakespeare to sixth, seventh, and eighth graders. Fifteen small heads were bent over
laptops, some of them lifting their eyes and moving their hands away from the keyboard
long enough to say, “Hey, Dr. Knowles.” One of the groups was building Facebook pages
for each of the characters in
As You Like It
; another was creating a song list from the Internet that expressed the emotions of
the lovelorn Silvius; a third was writing code geared to constructing a concordance
of Shakespeare’s comedies.

I wandered around among the groups, but participating more as a student than a teacher.
I hadn’t written code since the clunky days of the mid-nineties. It was a pleasure
to see how far programming had come and how accessible it was to these students.

At the back of the room, Digital Dan, as we called him, was helping a group troubleshoot
a faulty cable connection. Was this an English class? A vocational technology class?
I’d heard Dan’s pitch often enough, and knew how he would answer—that there was no
need for arbitrarily defined “subjects” and that technological devices were appropriate
to whatever they were studying.

“They let students learn at their own pace, teach skills needed in a modern economy,
and hold the attention of a generation weaned on gadgets,” he’d said, sounding like
a paragraph from his grant proposal.

I saw the merit of his position, but knew also that the
results were not yet in on the long-term effect of approaches like Dan’s.

There were similar questions about curricula at the college—always a back-and-forth
between those who wanted to keep the offerings purely academic and those who wanted
to introduce vocational programs into each department.

I felt that mathematics sat in a win-win position. We could accommodate the most abstract
topics, like number theory and the construction of proofs, as well as the most practical
topics, like math for machinists and computer scientists.

It seemed a bit ironic that my math classes at Zeeman were built on low or no technology,
almost a throwback compared to Dan’s English classes.

I teased Dan about it now as I reached the cable splicing group.

“Why don’t my math classes get a shot at all this technology?” I asked.

Dan cocked his shiny, bald-by-choice head and grinned. “Math is already so interesting,
you don’t need bling.”

How could I not agree?

The bright part of my day was at hand, matching the brightly painted walls that characterized
the school décor. I had no doubt that the students had participated in the decorating
project that encompassed Zeeman’s classrooms and hallways. I walked down a side hall,
the walls of which were covered with children’s renditions of the sun setting in the
hills, houses with lawns, and a clear, starry night. Long, curvy blue lines were reminiscent
of rivers, and tall rectangles with rows of smaller rectangles reminded one of a city
skyline that could have been Boston.

I thought of the framed print in my den. A drawing of a large ship on one section
of wall told me that Zeeman’s children had been on a field trip to the USS
Constitution
, “Old Ironsides,” the oldest commissioned warship afloat, from the late eighteenth
century. I was always amused to recall that one of its first captains was Isaac Hull.
With a name like that, what else could he have done but become a sailor? Like the
handyman I hired now and then for small
carpentry projects, Rick Rafter. Or like me, mathematician Sophie Saint Germain Knowles.

Just like that, a new puzzle idea came to me.

It was a good thing I liked class, or I would have skipped out and constructed a list
acrostic—people who chose occupations to go with their names—then and there.

I was always comfortable in a classroom, feeling at-home surrounded by student desks,
black-or whiteboards, chalk, pointers, or markers. The setup in the classroom I used
at Zeeman was primitive compared to Dan’s, however. Having just stepped out of his
futurist model, I felt like a Luddite. I was able to use my own laptop and the whiteboard
as a screen to display videos, but only three or four students could play an interactive
game at the same time. We used a lottery system, and the others (I tried not to call
them losers) were reduced to using actual physical manipulables and worksheets for
practice in converting decimals to percents, or adding and subtracting fractions,
both topics of the month.

Many of the games I’d found were disappointing. The math action seemed secondary to
scoring a point in a sport. Players spent more time “building a character,” that is,
adding qualities to an avatar, than doing the math. In some cases, for every correct
answer the player keyed in or selected, there were still several more steps to moving
an icon in place to hit a home run or make a goal, having nothing to do with math
skills.

At one table, I tried to encourage two fourth graders to click on a button with ten
problems on adding fractions, instead of only one arithmetic operation before the
football field kicked in.

“I have to give my guy some tats first,” clean-cut Bobby said, choosing to place a
swooping eagle on his avatar’s torso.

“Yeah, and look at the bad hair they gave my guy,” his partner said, though her avatar
was female. “And she needs some swag.”

I mentally threw up my hands.

The atmosphere in my classroom, especially compared to the up-to-date problems kids
were dealing with in Dan’s class, was almost enough to make me give up my hard-copy
puzzle avocation and create interactive games. Maybe it was time I became part of
the educational gaming world.

Either that or I’d join the opposition who questioned the need for teachers to be
entertainers in the first place.

“Drill, drill, drill,” they cried. Was it time to go back to that? It had worked for
my mother, as she often reminded me, and in part for me, though I’d also had a taste
of what was called “the new math.”

So many choices and opinions. And no really foolproof way to determine what results
to expect from each decision. I’d never appreciated college teaching for the piece
of cake that it was. Except since Elysse and her Facebook Friends muscled their way
in.

Vending machines were not my first choice for lunch food, but I decided to stay at
Zeeman through the lunch hour, hoping Principal Richardson would show up. I inserted
some coins, then pulled a container with a bagel and cream cheese from a revolving
slot. Vending machines now came with flashing lights and high-tech money management,
but the food was the same.

I took a seat at a table in the faculty lounge where Rina Flores and Dan Sachs were
just settling in. I sniffed in envy as each of them in turn microwaved something that
smelled delicious.

Except for my time in Dan’s class, with children present, I hadn’t seen either teacher
since before the terrible end to Saturday’s festivities on the Henley campus. Both
expressed their outrage at the mayor’s murder, and offered detached theories of the
crime.

“Politics, you know,” Dan said. “These days, there are a lot of people who think political
disagreements are best settled through physical confrontation. It’s all you see on
TV.”

Rina agreed, and added her thoughts. “A man in the public eye is very vulnerable,”
she said.

After a few more rounds of talk that included sympathy for the mayor’s family, I went
out on a limb.

“What time does Mr. Richardson usually come in for lunch?” I asked.

“You won’t see him in here very often,” Rina said.

I took a bite of the cold, hard, tasteless bagel with rubbery cream cheese. “I don’t
know why not. The food is delicious.”

They both laughed and offered to share their meals, but I waved away the idea. I wanted
something other than food from them.

“I wondered if Principal Richardson and the mayor were friends, and I wanted to ask
him how he’s holding up.” It was a pretty good line, if I did say so myself, and I
wished I’d thought of using it when Superintendent Collins plowed into me.

Rina, a dark beauty in her late thirties, I guessed, nearly choked on her chicken
and black bean casserole; Dan threw his head back; both rolled their eyes.

“Can you say ‘thorn’?” Rina asked. “That’s what the mayor was to our principal. A
thorn in his side. May he rest in peace, but he was always after our principal for
one thing or another. Especially when his boy, Cody, was here, but it hasn’t stopped.”

“You got that right,” Dan said. “Our principal gets special attention from high places.
Attention he doesn’t need.”

It was clear whose side the two dedicated teachers were
on, but I suspected both were too loyal to tell me outright whether their principal
was breaking the law. I had to be more direct. I braced myself.

“I’ve heard rumors on my campus, something about grades being reported”—what could
I say that wouldn’t be overly offensive?—“higher than they are.”

My attempt at subtlety didn’t work. Dan screwed up his mouth, his look unfriendly.

“What are you implying?”

“Just that I heard something about grades and test scores,” I stammered.