“Yes, ma’am.” Diane shut the door carefully behind her and sat. She studied Maggie’s dark expression. “So it’s bad, huh?”
Maggie nodded. She described her test-drive of the mathless MathPal. “I can’t believe I committed the kids to sixty hours on that thing.”
Diane raised an eyebrow. “Whoa. Sixty hours? I thought it was twenty minutes a day.”
“Twenty minutes a day for 180 days. That’s sixty hours of instruction time.”
Diane grinned. “Wow, look at the math skills on you. At least we know the MathPal doesn’t make people more stupid.”
Maggie shot back miserably, “I am stupid.”
“No, you’re not, honey,” cooed Diane.
“I am. I committed my kids to spending sixty hours on a glorified video game.”
“Oh, c’mon. It can’t be that bad. There’s gotta be something educational on there.”
Maggie fumed, “It’s about as educational as having someone shout the word ‘educational’ in your face. It’s . . . it’s bullshit.”
Diane winced. She’d never before heard Maggie curse on school grounds. Maggie usually acted like there was a G-rated force field around the place. Diane suggested, “Maybe they’re still building it.”
“Huh?”
Diane explained, “You said the MathPal was superdetailed at the start with the avatar and whatnot, but then it got real sloppy on the actual game. Maybe they just ran out of gas. It’s like when I was little, I’d tell my kid sister about the three bears. I’d fill in Goldilocks real well—her wandering ways, her reputation as a troublemaker, her burglar’s tools. I wore myself out talking. By the time I got to the bears finding her, I’d just say some bad shit went down.”
“And your point is?” asked Maggie.
“My point is, maybe Edutek’s still building this thing. Maybe they’ll beef up the math part this year while our kids are working on it. Would that be so terrible?”
Maggie shot back, “Yes. It would be. Our kids should not have to sit through sixty hours of schlock just because—maybe, someday—the schlock might achieve an acceptable level of mediocrity.”
Diane grinned. “Acceptable mediocrity—that sounds like the world’s worst tattoo.”
Maggie put her head in her hands. “I can’t believe I agreed to this.”
“You didn’t agree to anything. Arlene got us into this deal.”
“With me cheering from the sidelines.” Maggie held tight to her guilt—as if it were her handbag, and she was passing through a bad neighborhood.
“Fine. You’re a monster. Someday, they’ll make a grainy documentary about your sins. But let’s not forget there’s a damn good reason you did this. Those kids need STEAM teachers. Sixty hours sounds like a lot, but it’s worth it if it buys us science and PE and whatnot.”
“But this deal only buys us a year.”
“You don’t know that. If the MathPal’s a hit, that stock Edutek gave us could pay for years of goodies.”
“That’s not going to happen,” said Maggie. “Once the world gets hold of this dud program, Edutek’s stock price is going to tank.”
Diane frowned for a moment, mentally regrouping. “Well, if you’re right, we don’t have time to sit around feeling sorry for ourselves. Do we?”
Maggie took a deep breath, then blew it out slowly. “You’re right. When the MathPal tanks, we have to be ready to pay for STEAM by ourselves. We need to start raising cash right away.”
The two women looked at each other, and something passed between them—an agreement cemented by steely resolve. With the solemnity of an ensign asking whether she should launch the torpedoes, Diane asked, “Shall I bring out the worm?”
Maggie straightened in her chair and said, “Yes. It is time.”
11
THE WORM
Maggie didn’t choose a worm as her school mascot. No, that sin belonged to one of her predecessors.
Back in the 1980s, other local principals had embraced aquatic mascots in a nod to Carmel Valley’s almost-but-not-quite seaside status. Their students were the Dolphins, the Rays, the Marlins, and so on. One Jaws-loving principal went with the Great Whites, until he heard his students’ cheer: “Who’s the best? The Whites!” They became the Sharks after that.
But Maggie’s predecessor, Lynn Tarvey, had gone in a different direction. A fervent environmentalist, Mrs. Tarvey chose Willy Worm as Carmel Knolls’ mascot to raise public awareness about composting. She’d proposed a school logo showing a worm atop a pile of rotting food scraps, but parents had not let her go that far. Still, they let her paint worm murals on two school walls, put out a line of Willy Worm school T-shirts, and have a local sculptor build a giant, smiling worm statue in the courtyard.
Thanks to the statue’s brown color, Maggie thought it looked like the world’s largest, longest turd. She yearned to get rid of Willy Worm, but she couldn’t. Repainting the murals and redesigning the spirit wear would have cost too much money (these days, any money was “too much” money). What’s more, the kids had grown attached to the playground statue. They draped holiday-themed outfits on it as the year progressed, and they touched the worm’s side for good luck when they passed it. They got perverse pleasure out of chanting, “We’ve got worms!”
So every year, Maggie marked the beginning of the school’s pledge drive by hanging a huge Willy Worm banner on the school’s front gates. It showed a grinning, big-eyed cartoon worm with a word bubble shouting: “SUPPORT OUR STEAM TEACHERS!” Beside it, a thermometer showed the amount raised thus far relative to the district’s goal. The banner worm’s smile never faltered, but Diane—depending on how the fund-raising actually was going—periodically redrew the worm mock-up she kept tucked away in her desk. Thanks to last year’s meager haul, by June, Diane had redrawn her office worm as a bitter drunk, with an empty begging bowl in one anatomically incorrect hand and a bottle of tequila in the other.
This year, as Maggie and Diane hung the worm banner on the school’s front gate, Maggie prayed Diane’s office worm would smile all year long. She had no stomach for firing her popular, oh-so-necessary STEAM teachers. Every year, when it became apparent that she might have to lay off talented teachers, Maggie would feel nauseated. Diane called it “mourning sickness.”
Maggie had daymares about playing the heavy: the back-seat Mafia hit man who left the gun and took the cannoli, the Monty Burns with a trapdoor wired to a button on her desk, the TV host who pulled up the cloche to reveal which contestant would be chopped. She hated being the pawn of a stingy, reckless system.
But no, not this year. This year, Maggie would raise all the money she needed. She and Diane just had to come up with a plan.
As if reading Maggie’s thoughts, Diane mused, “Bake sales and galas won’t cut it.”
“But we’ll still do them,” said Maggie.
“Oh yeah. We’ll do ’em,” said Diane. “And we’ll make money off them. But it won’t be enough. It never is.”
Maggie sighed. “I don’t think we can up the direct appeals.” This was fund-raising-speak for abject begging.
Diane nodded. “Too true. I think we wore out the parents last year. It’s like those NPR pledge drives. If you give something in the first few days, you feel virtuous. Your halo lights up every time Terry Gross says how great it’d be if everybody else would be like you and give. And the everybody elses out there feel all guilty. Some of them cough up dough to make their consciences quit yapping, but others—and Ira Glass says there’s lotsa others out there—they start getting ornery. It’s like they missed the Cooperation Turnaround, so they head straight on to ‘Not Doing Shit for You’ Boulevard.”
Maggie whispered, “Language, please.”
Diane winced and looked around to make sure she hadn’t inadvertently corrupted any young minds. She hadn’t. “So anyways, we can’t just rely on begging and bake sales. We need to think big. Halloween’s more than a month away. That’s plenty of time to—”
Maggi
e cut in, “No. We’re not doing that.”
Diane balked. “You don’t know what I’m going to say.”
Maggie replied, “For the last time, we are not turning our campus into a Walking Dead theme park.”
“Hear me out,” Diane protested. Like most preppers, she was a Walking Dead fan.
“I did hear you out. Every year, it’s the same thing: ‘Let’s put the teachers in zombie makeup and have them chase the kids around the campus.’ It’s insane.”
“It’s a moneymaker. Do you have any idea how much teenagers pay to go to that Scream Zone out at the fairgrounds?”
“How much?” asked Maggie.
Diane blustered, “Well, I don’t know. But it must be something ’cause they bring in actors from LA, special effects, the works. They wouldn’t lay out that kinda money unless they’re getting a big-ass return.”
Maggie answered, “That’s for teenagers. Parents like it when you scare the bejeezus out of their teens. It’s the only thing that humbles them. Scaring elementary school kids is different. Half the kids at this school can’t make it through a Harry Potter movie without soiling themselves.”
Diane conceded. “Those Dementors are scary.”
“Not as scary as a blood-soaked zombie teacher cornering you against the jungle gym,” said Maggie.
Diane explained, “No, but I told you. The kids won’t be cornered. They’ll be empowered. We can give them paintball guns to shoot at—”
“Guns?!”
Diane flailed. “Okay, not guns. How about those retractable stage knives? They can stabby-stabby all they want with those things. It’ll be fun.”
Maggie put a hand to her temple. “Yes. I’m sure parents will be delighted at the specificity of their children’s nightmares.”
Diane persisted, “Okay, so we don’t have zombie teachers. I can see how that might be . . . fraught. How about we use animals? Dress them up as zombies? We can call it Zombie Zoo. I’m still in touch with Chaz’s buddies. They can hook us up with plenty of critters—goats, cows, sheep, dogs. It’ll be . . .”
Maggie shook her head. “Enough. I am not turning this school into Old MacDonald’s slaughterhouse.”
Diane sniffed. “Okay, we’ll stick a pin in that idea, come up with something else.”
Maggie nodded, mumbling, “Something else.” But what?
12
A WELL-OILED MACHINE
Maggie didn’t see Danny Z for the first few weeks of school. But she felt Edutek’s invisible hand jerking her this way and that. First, it forced her to knock her disgruntled teachers into line. Danny Z’s well-publicized digs against “outdated” teaching methods—their teaching methods—stung. It was like seeing your face painted on Cinderella’s ugly stepsister. And Danny Z’s “community meeting” only intensified the faculty’s disdain. They were not distracted by Danny Z’s charms or his blather about them as “dedicated educators.” Instead, they focused on the way he’d compared their “traditional” pedagogy—and them themselves!—to butter churns.
Their wounds still fresh, the teachers were galled when Maggie broke the news—at the first staff meeting of the year—that Edutek had upped its daily testing quota from ten to twenty minutes. Like Maggie, the teachers immediately recognized the magnitude of this time suck. California’s bloated battery of tests—coupled with its ever-shrinking education budget—had already required amputations of healthy educational tissue over the past decade. So Edutek’s new demands cut to the bone.
Jeannie Pacer would have to give up her fabulous first-grade poetry unit and its poetry-slam finale. Mrs. Brandl would say goodbye to her fifth-grade unit on the spice trade, a brilliant project that combined geography, history, and economic theory. And poor Ms. MacPhail would have to compress her colonial history unit, cutting the faux-colonial newspapers the kids always loved creating. There’d be no more “Hear Ye, Hear Ye!” gossip sections speculating on whether the old lady down the lane had used black “magicke” to retain her teeth all the way into her forties.
As the teachers processed their grief, all Maggie could do was listen. She listened to them rant as a group at faculty meetings and later in one-on-one bull sessions. She nodded and murmured apposite condolences through it all, and then—over and over—she drew her trump card: the children’s well-being. Yes, the cuts were painful. No, Maggie wasn’t sure whether Edutek’s software worked, but its money definitely did. And the school needed that money to keep its beloved STEAM specialist teachers for another year. And who knew, if the company’s stock rose, its stock grant to the district could cover those teachers for years to come, years without the MathPal.
After so many cutbacks, Maggie’s faculty could not bear to watch yet another talented colleague get shoved out of their professional lifeboat. They knew how much the kids adored charismatic Mr. Carlsen, with his grand experiments and his lab full of lizards, snakes, and mice. They knew how quickly their students learned to code under the tutelage of Ms. Seborne, the intense, Diet Coke–swigging technology teacher. Or how about Mrs. Maugham, the flamboyant music teacher who’d somehow managed to trick kids into singing—and actually enjoying!—opera? And it was galactically stupid to even consider firing Mr. Baran, the physical education teacher who’d used his loud, gravelly voice to teach kids flag football one week and the cha-cha the next.
The only expendable specialist on staff was the new art teacher, Miss Pearl. Maggie liked her. Miss Pearl was that rarest of birds: sporting a gorgeous plumage of academic credentials (Art Institute of Chicago), boundless enthusiasm, creative energy, and—dream within a dream—humility. She was exactly what the school needed: new blood. But her sheer newness made her vulnerable. Despite rave performance reviews, the poor girl had already been dismissed twice from other schools; her lack of seniority made her vulnerable to budget cuts. She’d burn out if she was forced to wander much longer.
While Maggie helped the faculty adapt to their increasingly stingy circumstances, Edutek moved into its “on-site” headquarters. The company took over the school’s only empty classroom, the classroom where—in another professional lifetime a decade earlier—Maggie used to teach Spanish as “Señora Marguerite.”
Edutek sent a pale, lanky computer whiz named Shawn to man its “HQ.” To Maggie’s eye, Shawn appeared egregiously young, as if he’d only recently started to get hair “down there.” She lectured him on the school’s dress code when he’d first arrived on campus in baggy blue jeans and a Doctor Who T-shirt, reminding him that he was now working at an elementary school, not Comic-Con, so khakis and button-down shirts, please. Shawn had nodded and given her a snappy Star Trek salute. “I shall make it so, Captain.” As Maggie watched him retreat, she felt a millisecond of remorse on behalf of principals everywhere for the many times Shawn must have been pantsed at recess.
But Maggie’s sympathy for the young man dissolved when she saw what Edutek had done to her once-modest classroom. After clearing out the school’s cheap furniture, Edutek kitted out the room with ultramodern, ergonomic office furniture, soft lighting, and a large stainless-steel refrigerator stocked with eleven-dollar-a-bottle pressed juices and other pretentious fare. A massive bookshelf in one corner held hundreds of new Edutek computer tablets, to be used by students solely for Edutek’s purposes. In another corner, Edutek had installed a freestanding, old-timey Pac-Man arcade game—consistent with the tech world’s faux playful image. Expensively framed, kitschy Deep Space Nine and Battlestar Galactica posters hung on the walls. And at the center of it all was Shawn’s workstation, featuring a keyboard and six huge wall-mounted monitors, as if he’d won some contest at Best Buy.
Maggie couldn’t decide what annoyed her more: the sheer opulence of the room’s contents or its studied “ain’t-we-cute” enfant terrible vibe. Both rankled in an underfunded school where teachers used their own money to buy many of their students’ school supplies and infrastructure dated back to the Soviet Union.
So Maggie had to work hard to hold on t
o her smile when she ran across Danny Z just outside the doors of the school’s noisy cafeteria. “Mr. Zelinsky, what a pleasant surprise.”
He smiled down at her. “Please, call me Danny.”
Maggie stiffened. “I’m sorry. I can’t do that. ‘Danny’ sounds like one of my fourth graders. Oh wait, Danny is one of my fourth graders.”
“Do you have any fourth graders named Maggie?” He pronounced the name “Maggie” in a singsong so as to accentuate its childishness.
Maggie countered, “Our situations are not comparable. You have no reason to tamper with your given name. Daniel is fine. Margaret sounds fat.”
He looked her over appraisingly—not quite a full-body scan, but close enough. With mock indignation, he said, “You are not fat.”
Maggie reddened. “I didn’t say I was fat. I said Margaret sounds fat, like Bertha or Mabel.”
Danny Z gasped. “Mabel was my mother’s name.”
Maggie sputtered, “I, uh, what I meant to say . . .”
“I’m just playing. My mom was a Wendy.”
Maggie frowned at him. “That wasn’t very nice, Mr. Zelinsky.”
“Sorry, at least call me Daniel.”
Maggie nodded. “All right, Daniel it is.” She smoothed the pleats of her skirt and wished she’d worn her heels. In her flats, she had to crane her neck back to look up into Danny’s eyes. The stance made her feel like a bird-watcher. “Um, so can we expect many visits from you this year?”
Danny said, “Yes. I would have been down here before, but I had to raise another round of financing for the launch.”
“Ah yes, the launch.” Maggie tried to sound like she knew what he was talking about. She pictured smoke billowing out from under a rocket. That couldn’t be right.
Danny simpered, “The MathPal is going to be big, like Titanic.”
“The Titanic sunk,” said Maggie.
He grinned, unperturbed. “I mean the movie Titanic, not the ship.”
“Ah,” said Maggie. Based on what she’d seen of the MathPal, she was pretty sure the market’s reaction to it would be iceberg-chilly.
The Very Principled Maggie Mayfield Page 7
