A Galaxy Of Strangers

by Lloyd Biggle Jr

  “I can handle it.”

  “Your class meets from ten-fifteen to eleven-fifteen, Monday through Friday.” “I’m not interested in part-time teaching,” she said. “This is a full-time assignment.” “Five hours a week?”

  “The position assumes forty hours of class preparation. You’ll probably need much more than that.” “I see,” she said. She never had felt more bewildered.

  “Classes begin next Monday. I’ll assign you to a studio and arrange an engineering conference for you immediately.” “A-studio?”

  “Studio.” There was a note of malicious satisfaction in his voice. “You will have approximately forty thousand students.”

  From a drawer he took two books, one a ponderous volume entitled Techniques and Procedures in TV Teaching, and the other, mecha-typed and bound with a plastic spiral, a course outline of tenth-grade English, Northeastern United States School District. “These should contain all the information you’ll need,” he said.

  Miss Boltz said falteringly, “TV teaching? Then—my students will attend class by television?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Then I’ll never see them.”

  “They will see you, Miss Boltz. That is quite sufficient.”

  “I suppose the examinations will be machine graded, but what about papers? I couldn’t get through one assignment in an entire semester.”

  He scowled at her. “There are no assignments. There are no examinations, either. I suppose the educational system on Mars still uses examinations and assignments to coerce its students into learning, but we have progressed beyond those dark ages of education. If you have some idea of bludgeoning your material into your students with examinations and papers and the like, forget it. Those things are symptomatic of bad teaching, and we would not permit them even if it were possible, which it isn’t.”

  “If there are no examinations or papers, and if I never see my students, how can I evaluate the results of my teaching?”

  “We have our own method for that. You receive a Trendex rating every two weeks. Is there anything else?”

  “Just one thing.” She smiled faintly. “Would you mind telling me why you so obviously resent my presence here?”

  “I wouldn’t mind,” he answered indifferently. “You have an obsolete contract that we have to honor, but we know that you will not last out the term. When you leave we will have the problem of finding a midyear replacement for you, and forty thousand students will have been subjected to several weeks of bad instruction. You can hardly blame us for taking the position that it would be better for you to retire now. If you change your mind before Monday, I’ll guarantee full retirement benefits for you. If not, remember this. The courts have upheld our right to retire a teacher for incompetence, regardless of tenure.”

  Mr. Wilbings’s secretary gave her a room number. “This will be your office,” she said. “Wait there, and I’ll send someone.”

  It was a small room with a desk, book shelves, a filing cabinet, a book-film cabinet, and a film reader. A narrow window looked out onto long rows of narrow windows. On the wall opposite the desk was a four-foot TV screen. It was the first office Miss Boltz had ever had, and she sat at her desk with the drab brown walls frowning down at her and felt lonely, and humble, and not a little frightened.

  The telephone rang. After a frantic search she located it under a panel in the desktop, but by then it had stopped ringing. She examined the desk further and found another panel that concealed the TV controls. There were four dials, each with numbers zero through nine. With a minimum of calculating she deduced the possible number of channels as 9,999. She tried various numbers and got a blank screen except for channel 0001, on which a printed announcement was displayed: Classes begin Monday, September 9. Registration is now in progress, you must be registered to receive graduation credits.

  A knock sounded on her door. It was a kindly looking, graying man of fifty plus, who introduced himself as Jim Pargrin, chief engineer. He seated himself on the edge of her desk and grinned down at her. “I was afraid you’d lost yourself. I telephoned, and no one answered.”

  “By the time I found the telephone, you’d hung up,” Miss Boltz said.

  He chuckled, and then he spoke seriously. “So you’re the Martian. Do you know what you’re getting into?”

  “Did they send you up here to frighten me?”

  “I don’t frighten anyone but the new engineers. I just wondered— but never mind. Come over to your studio, and I’ll explain the setup.”

  They turned a corner and quickly left the rows of offices behind them. Now each room they passed featured an enormous glass window facing on the corridor. Miss Boltz was reminded of the aquarium on Mars, where she sometimes took her students to show them the strange marine life of Earth.

  Pargrin unlocked a door and handed her the key. “Six-four-three-nine. A long way from your office, but at least it’s on the same floor.”

  A hideous black desk with stubby metal legs squatted in front of a narrow blackboard. The camera stared down from the opposite wall, and beside it was a pilot screen. Pargrin unlocked a control box, touched a switch, and abruptly the lights blinded her.

  “Because you’re an English teacher, they figure you don’t need any special equipment,” he said. “See these buttons on the desk? Number one gives you a shot of the desk and the blackboard and just about the space enclosed by those lines on the floor. Number two is a closeup of the desk. Number three is a closeup of the blackboard. Ready to try it out?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  He touched another switch. “There.”

  The pilot screen flickered to life. Miss Boltz faced it—faced the dumpy looking, middle-aged woman who stared back at her—and thought she looked cruelly old. The dress she had purchased with such care and for too much money the day before was a blur of repulsive colors. Her face was shockingly pale. She told herself sadly that she really should have spent more time on the sun deck, coming back from Mars.

  “Try number two,” Pargrin suggested.

  She seated herself at the desk and pressed button number two. The camera twitched, and she contemplated the closeup of herself and shuddered. Number three, with herself at the blackboard, was equally bad.

  Pargrin switched off the camera and closed the control box. “Here by the door is where you check in,” he said. “If you haven’t pressed this button by ten-fifteen, your class is automatically canceled. And you must leave immediately when your class is over at eleven-fifteen, so the next teacher can get ready for the eleven-thirty class. Except that it’s considered good manners to clean the blackboard and tidy things up. The stuff is in the desk. Everything clear?”

  “I suppose,” she said. “Unless you can tell me how I’m to teach written and spoken English without ever hearing my students speak or reading anything that they write.”

  He walked by her side in silence until they reached the door of her office. She opened it and turned to face him.

  “I know what you mean,” he said. “Things were different when we were kids. TV was something you watched when your folks let you, and you went to school with all the other kids. But it’s changed, now, and it seems to work well this way. At least, the big shots say it does. Anyway—the best of luck to you.”

  She returned to her desk and thoughtfully opened Techniques and Procedures in TV Teaching.

  At five minutes after ten o’clock on the following Monday morning, Miss Boltz reached her studio and pressed the button to check in. She was rewarded with a white light over the pilot screen. She seated herself at the desk, and after pressing button number two, she folded her hands and waited.

  At precisely ten-fifteen the white light changed to red, the camera lights blazed, and from the pilot screen her own image looked down on her disapprovingly. “Good morning,” she said. “This is tenth-grade English. I am Miss Boltz.”

  She had decided to devote that first class period to introducing herself. Although she couldn
’t become acquainted with her thousands of students, she felt that they should know something about her. She owed them that much.

  She talked about her years of teaching on Mars—how the students attended school together, how there were only twenty or twenty-five students in one room instead of forty thousand attending class by way of as many TV sets. She described the recess period, when the students who went outside the dome to play had to wear air masks in order to breathe. She told them about the field trips, when the class, or perhaps the entire school, went outside the dome to study Martian plant life or rocks and soil formations. She told them some of the questions her Martian students liked to ask about Earth.

  The minutes dragged tediously. She felt imprisoned under the unblinking eye of the camera, and her image on the pilot screen began to look haggard and frightened. The steady warmth of the lights soon had her perspiring. She had not realized that teaching could be such a strain.

  The end of the hour came as a death throes. She smiled weakly, and from the pilot screen a hideous caricature of a smile grimaced back at her. “I’ll be seeing you tomorrow,” she said. “Good morning.”

  The red light changed to white. Miss Boltz took a last, shuddering look at the camera and fled.

  She was seated at her desk, forlornly fighting to hold back her tears, when Jim Pargrin looked in on her.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  “Just wishing I’d stayed on Mars.”

  “Why would you be wishing that? You got off to a very good start.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “I did.” He smiled at her. “We took a sample Trendex on you this morning, during the last ten minutes. We sometimes do that with a new teacher. Most students will start off with their assigned classes, but if the teacher isn’t good they switch to something else in a hurry. So we check at the end of the first hour to see how a new teacher is doing. Wilbings asked for a Trendex on you, and he came down to watch us take it. I think he was disappointed.” He chuckled slyly. “It was just a fraction under one hundred, which is practically perfect.”

  He departed before she could thank him. She turned to her desk again, her gloom dispelled as if by magic. Cheerfully she plunged into the task of rewriting the outline of tenth-grade English.

  She had no objection to the basic plan, which was comprehensive and well constructed and at times almost logical. But the examples, the meager list of stories and novels and dramas supplied for study and supplemental reading—these were unbelievable. Just unbelievable.

  “Recommended drama,” the outline said. “You Can’t Marry an Elephant, by H. N. Varga. This delightful farce—”

  She crossed it out with firm strokes of her pen and wrote in the margin, “W. Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice.” She substituted Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities for Saddle Blankets and Six Guns, a thrilling novel of the Old West, by Percivale Oliver. She found no unit at all that concerned itself with poetry, so she created one. Her pen slashed its way relentlessly through the outline, and her conscience troubled her not at all. Didn’t the manual say that originality was encouraged in teachers?

  The next morning, when she started down the corridor toward her studio, she was no longer nervous.

  The vast unfriendliness of the building and the drab solitude of her office so depressed her that she decided to prepare her classes in her apartment. Not until the middle of the third week did she find her way to the tenth floor, where, according to her manual, there was a cafeteria. As she awaited her turn at the vending machines, the young teachers who silently surrounded her made her feel positively prehistoric.

  A hand waved at her when she turned toward the tables. Jim Pargrin bounded to his feet and took her tray. A younger man helped her with her chair. After so many hours of solitude, the sudden attention left her breathless.

  “My nephew,” Pargrin said. “Lyle Stewart. Miss Boltz. She’s the teacher from Mars. Lyle teaches physics.”

  He was a dark-complexioned, good-looking young man with a ready smile. She said she was pleased to meet him and meant it. “Why, you’re the first teacher I’ve spoken to!” she exclaimed.

  “Mostly we ignore each other,” Stewart agreed. “It’s strictly a survival-of-the-fittest occupation.”

  “But I’d think that some kind of co-operation—”

  Stewart shook his head. “Supposing you come up with something that clicks. You have a high Trendex, and the other teachers notice.

  So they watch your class, and if they can steal your stuff they will. Then you watch them, to see if they have something you can steal, and you see them using your technique. Naturally you don’t like it. We’ve had teachers involved in assault cases, and lawsuits, and varying degrees of malicious mischief. At best, we just don’t speak to each other.”

  “How do you like it here?” Pargrin asked her.

  “I miss the students,” Miss Boltz said. “It worries me, not being able to know them or check on their progress.”

  “Let’s not be dragging in abstractions like progress,” Stewart said bitterly. “The New Education looks at it this way: We expose the child to the proper subject matter. The exposure takes place in his own home, which is the most natural environment for him. He will absorb whatever his individual capacity permits, and more than that we have no right to expect.”

  “The child has no sense of accomplishment—no incentive to learn,” she protested.

  “More irrelevant abstractions. What the New Education strives for is the technique that has made advertising such an important factor in our economy. Hold the people’s attention, make them buy in spite of themselves. Or hold the student’s attention and make him learn whether he wants to or not.”

  “But the student learns no social values!”

  Stewart shrugged. “On the other hand, the school has no discipline problems. No extracurricular activities to supervise. No problem of transporting children to school and home again. You aren’t convinced?”

  “Certainly not!”

  “Keep it to yourself. And just between us, I’ll tell you the most potent factor in this philosophy of the New Education. It’s money. Instead of a fortune invested in buildings and real estate, with thousands of schools to maintain, we have one TV studio. We save another fortune in teachers’ salaries by having one teacher for a good many thousands of students instead of one for maybe twenty or thirty. The bright kids will learn no matter how badly they’re taught, and that’s all our civilization needs—a few bright people to build a lot of bright machines. And the school tax rate is the lowest it’s been in the last century and a half.” He pushed back his chair. “Nice to meet you, Miss Boltz. Maybe we can be friends. Since you’re an English teacher, and I teach physics, we aren’t likely to steal from each other. Now I have to go think up some new tricks. My Trendex is way down.”

  She watched thoughtfully as he walked away. “He looks as if he’s been working too hard,” she announced.

  “Most teachers don’t have contracts like yours,” Pargrin said. “They can be dismissed at any time. Lyle wants to go into industry after this year, and he’ll have a tough time finding a job if he’s fired.”

  “He’s leaving teaching? That’s a shame!”

  “There’s no future in it.”

  “There’s always a future for a good teacher.”

  Pargrin shook his head. “Look around you. The teachers are all young. They hang on as long as they can, because the pay is very good, but there comes a time when security means more than money. Anyway, in the not too distant future there won’t be any teachers. Central District is experimenting now with filmed classes. Take a good teacher, film a year of his work, and you don’t need the teacher any longer. You just run the films. No, there’s very little future in teaching. Did you get your copy of the Trendex ratings?”

  “Why, no. Should I have gotten one?”

  “They come out every two weeks. They were distributed yesterday.”

  “I didn’t get one
.”

  He swore under his breath, and then he looked at her apologetically. “Wilbings can be downright deceitful when he wants to. He probably thinks he’ll take you by surprise.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand these ratings.”

  “There’s nothing complicated about them. Over a two-week period we’ll take a thousand samples of a teacher’s students. If all of them are watching their assigned class, as they should be, the teacher’s Trendex is one hundred. If only half are watching, then the Trendex is fifty. A good teacher will have about a fifty Trendex. If a teacher’s Trendex falls below twenty, he’s dismissed. Incompetence.”

  “Then the children don’t have to watch their classes unless they want to?”

  “The parents have to provide the TV sets,” Pargrin said. “They have to see that their children are present during their assigned class hours—‘in attendance,’ it’s called—but they aren’t responsible for making them watch any particular class. They’d have to supervise them every minute if that were so, and the courts have held that this would be unreasonable. It also would be unreasonable to require sets that worked only on assigned channels, and even if that were done the students still could watch classes on the channels they’re supposed to use at another time. So the students are there, and their sets are on, but if they don’t like your class they can watch something else. So it’s extremely important for the teacher to make the classes interesting.”

  “I understand. What was my Trendex?”

  He looked away. “Zero.”

  “You mean—no one is watching me? I thought I was doing well.”

  “You must have done something that interested them that first day. Perhaps they just got tired of it. That happens. Have you watched any of the other teachers?”

  “Goodness, no! I’ve been so busy I just never thought of it.”

  “Lyle may have some ideas for you. I’ll ask him to meet us at your office for the two-o’clock class. And then—well, we’ll see.”

  Lyle Stewart spread some papers on the desk in front of her and bent over them. “These are the Trendex ratings,” he said. “You were supposed to get a copy.”