Story Time (34 page)

1. Dr. Austin and the other administrators at the Whittaker Magnet School are convinced that high scores on standardized tests and rote memorization of facts make an ideal education. Do you think success in these areas is truly a measure of intelligence? What else do you think is wrong with the Whittaker system?

2. One of Dr. Austin's many innovations was having teachers be known to students only by the subject and grade level they teach. What purpose did this serve?

3. At the beginning of the story, Kate and George have very different personalities and interests. Over the course of their time at the Whittaker Magnet School, they grow closer and seem to take on some of each other's personality traits. How are Kate and George at the end of the story different from the way they were at the beginning?

4. What are some of the experiences that Kate and George share that bring them closer together?

5. Kate and her mother, June, also grew closer over the course of Kate's attendance at Whittaker. How does Kate feel about June in the beginning of the story, and why do her feelings change?

6. How do the First Lady and her chief of staff, Rosetta Turner, react to the practices they observe taking place at Whittaker?

7. Cornelia Whittaker-Austin, Dr. Austin, and others try to make the Whittaker Magnet School a place that is very structured and organized, with students who behave almost mechanically—but the demons in the library always seem to return to knock their system out of control. What kinds of actions do the demons cause that are normally suppressed at Whittaker?

8. If you could open your ideal school, what would it be like? What kinds of classrooms, teachers, and lessons do you think would best promote learning? How would it be different from the Whittaker School? How would it be different from the school that you attend now?

My first two novels,
Tangerine
and
Crusader,
tried to deal with reality, as I saw it, in our public schools. For my third novel,
Story Time,
I was eager to do something different, or at least to approach reality from a different direction. The result is a novel that is part ghost story, with lots of supernatural action, and part satire about public schools.

Story Time
is set in the Whittaker Magnet School, a grades six through eight experimental school that boasts the highest standardized-testing scores in the United States. Within this school's sterile, Orwellian environment arises a curious poltergeist—at times funny, at times malevolent—who turns everything upside down. This unfriendly ghost provokes incidents that, should the public catch wind of them, would wreak havoc on real estate values in the highly desirable Whittaker Magnet School district.

I was fortunate to teach in the public school system (nearly twenty years ago) in what now seems to be a golden age, unencumbered by state standards and high-stakes tests. Seventh-graders could read aloud and talk about
The Odyssey, Flowers for Algernon,
and
Lord of the Flies.
They could put on a drama festival in which they wrote and acted in their own plays. They could write and illustrate poems to adorn the classroom walls.

I doubt that so many fanciful activities could occur with such frequency in seventh-grade classrooms in America today. The relentless pressure from above to succeed on standardized tests, pressure originating from the president of the United States himself, trickles down through descending levels of politicians until it pours onto the heads of local principals. These hapless former teachers now find their worlds turned upside down, their livelihoods tied to their students' performances on a specific test on a specific day.

"Test-Based Curriculum," the absurd pedagogy upon which
Story Time's
Whittaker Magnet School is founded, is already a reality in many American public schools. As a result, many children who learn to love reading today do so in spite of, not because of, what they experience in the classroom. In this topsy-turvy system, the politicians win and the educators and students lose. I believe that, in the Latin words displayed in the Whittaker Magnet School, "We will pay for it" with a less literate society. We risk producing a generation that could read for pleasure, but chooses not to.