Published: May 1, 2000

Moving Day

The big move had arrived. Our new school stood a mile north on Route 1, just waiting for the finishing touches. All that was left to be done before vacation was to pack up our belongings and close down what had been our home for many years, Memorial Elementary. In a corner of my classroom stood 19 empty rent-a-crates, one inside the other, rising above my head. I watched as day after day students marched assembly-line fashion past my windows to a trash-compacting truck parked under the basketball hoop, hauling boxes of the artifacts teachers had accumulated over the years. Our outdated textbooks would be sent to Africa by way of a local college professor. Students had volunteered to add their books to the lot, figuring they wouldn't need them with all the technological marvels of our new school.

"Is it true in the classrooms of the new school a kid can dial his mother and hand the teacher the telephone?" David asked me.

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