MARY KETTL

Perspective

I bought a box of chalk this week - 32 slim sticks in shades of white, yellow, green, blue, and pink - and spent a half hour before school one morning drawing a timeline on the chalkboard in my classroom. This diagram, which stretched from the 1860s to the year 2000 before I ran out of board, was supposed to show 7th graders the historical contexts of some of the stories we have been reading lately. It was neither flashy nor animated, it made no sound, and it could not be downloaded. I loved it.

I had to buy my own chalk because, although my new school has every conceivable piece of computer software or multimedia gadgetry, including a thumbprint scanner that keeps track of which kids buy lunch and how many chocolate milks they take - and which, presumably, the lunch lady uses to solve crimes in her spare time - I couldn't find anything with which to write on my chalkboard. I was an analogue stranger in a digital land.

In the olden days, every classroom came with the same basic equipment - desks, chalkboard, Snoopy poster, American flag. Some of your jazzier rooms might have beanbag chairs, film strip projectors, or maybe a Nature Center displaying six fall leaves and an exciting collection of local sticks. For the most part, these furnishings were very user-friendly, and, if they failed, relatively easy to fix or replace: If the flag fell down, you put it back up; if the fish died, you got a new one. Even if a pulldown map got away from you and rolled itself back up with a snap like a shotgun blast, you could, once you had recovered your nerve, just reach up and pull it down again. No harm done.

Things are different now. Although public education still professes that Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic all begin with the letter R, in other ways it has advanced well into the digital age. My high school students are assigned laptop computers, the middle-schoolers have their own in-house e-mail, and young people who cannot write in cursive or operate a folding chair without injury can nonetheless text message each other at the rate of 90 words per minute, most of which are variations on the root word "S'up?"

Meanwhile, teachers take attendance, write on their calendars, and fill out report cards electronically, which means I spend a lot of time clicking from screen to screen, urgently seeking the right button that will allow me to undelete third quarter. It's not like I'm Amish - I know how to make two-sided copies and I hardly ever talk about the card catalog anymore - but as a new teacher who is also an older person and a liberal arts major, I've been so overwhelmed by programs, passwords, and technology goals that I suspect I may be that child they're always talking about leaving behind.

Kids love all this technology, of course. These are people who, for safety reasons, were not allowed to go outside and throw dirt clods at each other as previous generations had done, but instead spent their formative years learning to shoot machine guns via video game. They are baffled by conventional pencil sharpeners - "What do you mean, 'Turn the crank?'" - and they whimper every time you try to pull the tiny headphones out of their ears, but they know computers and are happy to shout advice at me whenever I mess something up.

Their greatest source of amusement this year is the Smartboard, a square movie-screen-like appliance that is mounted on the wall of the classroom and, when plugged into the teacher's computer, will project text, diagrams, or life-size pictures of Shetland ponies on the screen. The Smartboard is the first educational appliance I've had with its own proper name. Classroom equipment used to have quiet, generic titles, like "podium" and "filing cabinet" and "mason jar of ibuprofen," but the Smartboard is bigger and much more able to multi-task than, say, "loose leaf paper." It also has more memory than I do.

Standing next to the Smartboard, I can open and close programs just by touching the screen. Or I could, if I understood which of the two dozen icons I was supposed to touch. As it is, I just poke at the thing randomly, the way you tap frantically at the numbers on an unfamiliar microwave just before your popcorn bursts into flames. "Click on the box!" my children shout helpfully. "Not that one!" they chorus as the screen goes blank. "Let James do it!" they cry, and a silent blond boy punches a few keys in an attempt to salvage my teaching career.

And so I turned to the chalkboard last Tuesday and invited by students to gather around it for a quick look at American history in relation to the stories we read this quarter. They regarded the arrangement of lines and words silently, and, although the timeline was executed in six colors of chalk, I began to wish I'd drawn in a cartoon puppy or a dancing paperclip in the corner. "Is this it?" somebody asked.

"Yeah," I said. "Look, here's 1910," I said, pointing. They nodded.

"Let's go look at the pencil sharpener again," I said.

Mary Kettl is a junior high teacher in Newcastle.