The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady - Elizabeth Stuckey-French [61]
It was similar to the mysterious tennis-shoe thing. One morning Marylou’d found a brand-new pair of men’s black Converse sneakers, size 10, on her front porch. She threw them away, but the next morning there was another pair, exactly the same kind and size, in the same place. It might’ve been the same pair.
Was there some message intended? What did a disappearing and reappearing rug and black tennis shoes mean? She couldn’t tell anyone about this stuff, because it sounded crazy. She had no idea who would do such things, but, in her moments of paranoia, Marylou suspected that it must be someone who saw beneath her nice old lady exterior and was trying, in the creepiest sort of way, to let her know that she wasn’t fooling everyone.
Alberto. What a wimp. And Vic had had such high hopes for him.
On June 8 he’d watched baby Alberto hatch in the western Caribbean, held his breath as the baby burst out of his red egg, causing a colorful disturbance on Vic’s computer screen as he crawled slowly northwest, fed by sweet winds. By June 10, toddling around Cuba, Alberto had blossomed into a tropical depression, and his predicted path was smack-dab into Florida’s Gulf Coast. When he read this forecast, Vic, down in his basement closet, silently raised his fist in celebration.
Vic’s boy wobbled in the Yucatán Channel—increased wind shear—but he hung tough. On June 11, a red-letter day, he intensified into Tropical Storm Alberto, and Floridians started paying him the attention he deserved. It was hard for Vic to discuss the lad with family and friends and not sound gleeful. And then, praise be, on June 12, the NHC predicted that Alberto would attain hurricane status before he made landfall—in the Big Bend, the armpit of Florida, near Tallahassee! Vic celebrated by having three beers after dinner. But, alas, on June 13, Alberto, weakened due to an infusion of dry air, came straggling ashore fifty miles southeast of Tallahassee, near St. Marks. He remained just a run-of-the mill storm—undernourished and undistinguished.
Yeah, sure, there was flooding, storm surge, downed trees, power outages, and Alberto fathered a few impotent tornadoes; but all in all, he turned out to be a disappointment, an underachiever, a failure. Utterly forgettable.
Meanwhile, there was the rest of his life, which at that time was the portfolio project. Vic’s other baby.
The portfolios included samples of each student’s work in the subjects they took—lab write-ups, essays, the solutions to story problems, the whole shebang. Scoring them was a bitch, and it was Vic’s job to try to figure out how to train people to do that scoring as fast and accurately as possible. Otherwise, students (and ultimately their teachers and their schools) would be assessed on the basis of nothing other than standardized tests.
Portfolios from ten pilot high schools were pouring into FTA offices. Vic and his staff had to read through some of the writing samples and, for each subject area, assemble the packets that they could use as examples to train their scorers with. Vic had persuaded his supervisor that Gigi, with her Ph.D. in English, would be an excellent person to train the language arts scorers. He finagled her a temporary raise. Since Vic was a language arts person himself, he would help Gigi.
Vic and Gigi spent hours alone in a conference room piled high with cardboard boxes labeled Language Arts with the name of the high school written underneath, reading through hundreds of writing samples to find examples of different ways a student could get a score of one, two, three, and so on, so that they could photocopy the samples for training packets. Sometimes they read the papers aloud to each other or asked the other one’s opinion on what score a certain paper should get, and in between reading and discussing student work they talked about themselves and their families and graduate