It is Nancy Christensen's birthday. She opens a card the other teachers and student teachers put on her desk. The card shows a bunch of friendly wild animals. "One of these animals is like you," the card says. And, when opened: "The giraffe -- you don't hear him laughing, either! Happy birthday!"
Mrs. Christensen, a blond woman in her late thirties, smiles and shows the card to a visitor.
"Now to unpack," she says.
She takes a large stack of typed student papers out of the canvas bag she carries to work. "These are for the newspaper contest," she says. "I didn't put a mark on them. I gave the students feedback on their first drafts. Some of them did a lot better, but there are still verb mess-ups."
Mrs. Christensen teaches eleventh grade honors and regular English in Austin High School. This incarnation of Austin High -- there were several earlier ones -- is a rough concrete building completed in 1975, at the end of the "open classroom" vogue. Mrs. Christensen's classes meet in a huge room, with other classes on three sides separated from hers by bulletin boards, walkways, and, on the west end, hanging from the ceiling, six large American flags from different historical eras. In the class two east and one north of Mrs. Christensen's, the teacher has taped to the lectern Abraham Lincoln's maxim: "We cannot escape history. We will be remembered in spite of ourselves."
Mrs. Christensen's first period is free, so she meets with students and her student teacher, Sherry Holt, a senior at the University of Texas. Mrs. Christensen is preparing students for a statewide spelling contest, and she gives 15 "approved" words to a girl who missed the try-out:
anthrax
apropos
bodacious
chicken Kiev
despotical
equilibrium
gazpacho
gossamer
hawser
Ichabod
laudanum
marauder
nadir
oleander
spasmodic
"The words come from the UIL booklet," Mrs. Christensen says. "In the contest, they have to use current words from the newspapers as the tie-breakers.
"The last two years, my students have won District. My trick is just to choose kids who are geniuses."
Ms. Holt has been adapting sentences for a grammar test, and she asks Mrs. Christensen about one that perplexes her: "'In order to be a complete sentence, a group of words must contain a subject and a verb and must express a complete thought.'"
"It's parallel," Mrs. Christensen says. "Do you want it make it unparallel?"
Ms. Holt is concerned that they have too many correct sentences.
Mrs. Christensen frowns. She and Ms. Holt work out a revision: “In order to be a complete sentence, a group of words must contain a subject and a verb and a complete thought must be expressed by it.”
"That's awful," Mrs. Christensen says, "but it's wrong too."
A tall boy in a Doonesbury T-shirt comes to speak to Mrs. Christensen about his newspaper essay. "I think we better use the second one," she says. "The first one is better, but it's not quite on the topic. There are times when you'll be forced to write to a specific prompt. Too, what if it won? They'd publish it in the paper -- they even publish the honorable mentions. How would your father feel?"
The boy agrees to submit the second essay, though he doesn't like it so well.
Mrs. Christensen later explains that the first essay had talked about his father's racism.
She leads her visitor out of the open classroom, into the carpeted hall. There are signs in the classrooms and a large banner in the hall proclaiming "Everyone is someone at Austin High!" Still, when Mrs. Christensen notices the visitor noticing the knots of students sprawled in the carpet, she says, "Sitting in their cliques."
The hall smells of warm muffins. "Yes," Mrs. Christensen says. "More than a quarter of the students get free breakfasts here."
In the high school's office, Mrs. Christensen tears 12 large pieces of white paper from a contraption loaded with six rolls of poster paper of different colors. On the paper Mrs. Christensen will have her students, in groups of four, make lists comparing the parties in the first three chapters of the book they have begun reading, F. Scott Fitzgerald's
The Great Gatsby.At 9:55 she begins an honors American Studies class by describing the Advance Placement English test many of the students will take in the fall. "You'll be given a passage to analyze. You won't recognize the passage, but it wouldn't matter much if you did, because the assignment will say something like 'Analyze how the author's use of tone, diction, and syntax works to achieve the passage's effect.'"
She speaks about Fitzgerald's "West Egg" and "East Egg," and compares them to the actual Great Neck and Manhasset Neck. "That's the American imperative," she says, "to want to move up the ladder: from West Egg to East Egg."
She points out how the high-class Daisy and low-class Myrtle are alike in their shallow values. "Didn't take much to seduce Myrtle, did it?" she says. "Wait and see about Daisy."
Eugene, an African-American boy who read the book two years ago, announces that Daisy once had an affair with Gatsby.
The class groans.
"Eugene!" says Mrs. Christensen with amused exasperation.
She breaks the class up into groups of four to outline the similarities between Daisy's and Myrtle's and Gatsby's parties.
Mrs. Christensen and Ms. Holt circulate among the groups commenting on the students' work. Mrs. Christensen has asked Ms. Holt to prepare a class on the Black Sox Scandal and 1920s gangsterism alluded to in Gatsby. "You have to let student teachers do things their own way," Mrs. Christensen says, "and fall on their faces if they need to learn that. Sherry will do fine."
At 11:06, at the start of the next class, school announcements pour out of a loudspeaker. Rushed and muffled voices speak of upcoming "mandatory" and "emergency" meetings and "important" sports events. After this, a television hanging from the ceiling comes on, and an African-American boy gives the "Austin High headlines on Channel One." These include peer mediation for ongoing disputes and anchor tryouts for the TV service. An African-American girl and a white girl speak about Black History Month.
Following the Austin High broadcast, the day's Channel One transmission occurs. "Yesterday, the United Nations voted to set up a war crimes tribunal," says the young Hispanic woman announcer. Then there is a four-minute interview with a gray-haired man who is an expert on war crimes trials. He says that most of the precedents for trying people for war crimes come from the Nuremberg Trials after World War II.
Then there is a Reebok advertisement.
Then Channel One does a story on President Clinton's proposal that young people do national service. There is gray footage of Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps and slightly brighter footage of former soldiers attending college on the G.I. Bill.
Then there are ads for a candy bar and Pepsi.
Channel One closes by answering its question of the day. The average college graduate earns how much more than the average high school graduate? Ninety-six percent more.
Third period, Mrs. Christensen teaches
The Great Gatsby to another honors American Studies class. "There are similarities between West Egg and East Egg," she says. "You may see that Daisy and Myrtle are alike and see why Fitzgerald put the first chapters next to each other."
At lunch, several teachers speak to Mrs. Christensen's visitor about the difficulty of maintaining order in the "regular" and "remedial" classes. "Students don't care because their parents don't care," a math teacher says. "We're bringing up a generation that doesn't have good work habits and doesn't want them."
The State of Texas is going to do away with remedial classes next year and move remedial students into regular classes, the belief being that the remedial students will learn more and be better behaved if they are with regular students.
Mrs. Christensen is silent during this conversation because she teaches mainly honors classes, with highly motivated students. These classes have 40 students -- five more than usual classes -- but they have an extra teacher (Mrs. Christensen works with Rosemary Morrow, who teaches history), which means, in practice, that the class is usually split in two. "That gets it down to a size you can manage," Mrs. Christensen says.
Of Mrs. Christensen's 100 honors students, only two are African-American. "But the number of Hispanics is increasing," she says.
The push toward a multicultural curriculum is strongly felt. "The editor of the paper, one of my students, wrote an editorial about what he hadn't learned at Austin High," Mrs. Christensen says. "This was directed at me. I'm reading women's and minority literature as fast as I can. But who am I going to cut out? Hemingway? Faulkner? Fitzgerald? Steinbeck?"
Her honors classes read
The Grapes of Wrath, the whole thing. "And they just love it," she says.
As Mrs. Christensen leaves the lunchroom, she mentions to another teacher an upcoming drama club performance to establish a scholarship in the name of the former drama teacher, a young man dying of AIDS. "It's very hard on the kids," she says.
•
A week later, Mrs. Christensen's classes have gotten to the climatic chapters of
The Great Gatsby."Where does Gatsby meet Jordan Baker?" Mrs. Christensen says.
"In Louisville," several students say.
"Yes, she's in Daisy's car," Mrs. Christensen says.
"In --- What's she doing there?" a red-haired boy asks.
"Just sitting," Mrs. Christensen says. "You don't sit around in your car, David?"
"Hours on end," David mutters.
"Canute!" calls a boy down the row. "Tell her not in the front seat."
While drawing a moral about the lack of loyalty in Gatsby's world, Mrs. Christensen says, "Those of you who have finished the book know how many people come to Gatsby's funeral."
"You told us!" says a girl. "He dies!"
"That's in Chapter 8, Melissa," Mrs. Christensen says. "You were to read that for today."
Mrs. Christensen says that Fitzgerald, as he began Gatsby, wrote his editor that he wanted to write "something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned."
"What are some of the patterns in the book?" she asks.
Students mention the parties and violence. "Yes," says Mrs. Christensen, "we talked about those things, didn't we? What else?"
The students seem puzzled, so Mrs. Christensen says, "How about the colors in the book? Fitzgerald calls a lot of attention to them. Jana, name three things we know are green."
"The light on the end of Daisy's pier," Jana says.
"Yes, that Gatsby looks at so long and hard. Pretty important symbol for him. What else?"
Jana thinks for a moment. "I really like that light," she says.
A boy says the Gatsby's hydroplane is green.
"I don't remember that," Mrs. Christensen says. "Are you just making that up? Don't make it up."
Mrs. Christensen has her students write a paper on every book they read in class. She gives out the mimeographed Gatsby assignment, which will be due in a week: "Analyze one of Fitzgerald's patterns in
The Great Gatsby. You will find repetitions of certain scenes, symbols, relationship between characters, settings, images, and social groupings. Explain how one of the patterns reinforces a theme of the book."
"Any questions about the assignment?" says Mrs. Christensen. There are none.
"Now, let me read you something I saw on a plaque at the U.S. Pavilion at Epcot Center. How many of you have been to Epcot?"
Three hands go up.
Mrs. Christensen reads from a page of her notebook, which is marked "Gatsby -- the 1920s" on the spine. "'There are those I know who reply that the liberation of humanity -- the freedom of man and mind -- is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is the American dream.'"
Mrs. Christensen pauses for a moment. "Let me read that again," she says. She does. "That was written by the poet Archibald MacLeish, who knew Fitzgerald and was a close friend of Hemingway.
"Now, we've spoken about the American dream and
The Great Gatsby. The American dream is based on the freedom of the individual. Our country gives the individual more freedom than any other nation on earth. But great burdens come with this freedom -- or they should. Freedom shouldn't mean that we have the right to injure other people. Or buy automatic weapons anytime we like."
The news that day is full of David Koresh and his group of religious fanatics who are in an armed standoff with federal agents outside of Waco, 100 miles up the road. Two days earlier, Koresh's group killed four Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms agents.
"Fitzgerald's people are free, but what is he saying about them?" Mrs. Christensen asks. "They are careless, corrupt people. They show the danger of the American dream."
