“But now Betty and the others had people who would write back and forth about their weekends, and their boyfriends, and their dates, and their sports, and their hobbies, and their cats, and so on. And I think it opened up a sensitivity to what was acceptable in print, and how your words can affect people, and the differences between people—especially over great distances, because a large number of the students that we were writing to in Vancouver were Asian. In fact they were fairly recent immigrants to Canada, so their English wasn’t that great. So actually Betty’s writing skills were better.” And that, in turn, helped her think better of herself.
Meanwhile Mac, too, was progressing. At the start Doran gave Mac and others a list of twenty words; they were then to look up the definitions and use the words in sentences. The time limit was four weeks. Mac needed the month. He couldn’t even cheat well; copying others’ work, he blundered because he did not know what he was cribbing. “The last thing that he could ever see himself doing,” Doran said, “would be sitting in front of a computer, you know, at a keyboard. With these beefy fingers of his, he was gonna tap away? I mean, that was out of the question.”
Doran, however, managed to stretch out Mac’s attention span to put up with the limits of the machines—to give them the detailed instructions they needed. In computerdom, people use the term “boot up” to mean turning on their machines or loading programs into them. And, Doran recalled, “There were times I half expected he was gonna literally boot this thing across the room.”
“Yes,” Mac snapped back at Doran, “I’ll boot the friggin’ thing up!”
“And yet,” Doran recalled, “within that one year he was writing messages to pals in other schools and to me as well.”
By then Betty wasn’t just sassing back the boys when they teased her. She was actually teaching them how to use the equipment. Her marks shot up to the 90s. Not content just to write a few short paragraphs, she was turning out well-organized letters several hundred words long in a professional-looking business format. That was unimpressive by the standards of academic students, but a true triumph for Betty; she even zapped off a paper letter to a suspense novelist she admired. The writing skills she developed on the Net had helped make this possible.
Simultaneously her opinion of herself rose to the point where she was one of the chattier participants in a video that Park View students helped make, and that was later shown on a Halifax television station. Students shot scenes to send across Canada to counterparts at a school in Vancouver, British Columbia. And Betty showed up again and again on camera. It would have been nice to write that she went on to college, but she did not. She ended up a waitress. Partly due to the Net, however, she surely was a better waitress—more at ease with her customers, and better material someday for management if that was what she wanted.
And Mac? “One of the last things I got from him,” Doran said, “was a message about how he felt he had been changing that year, and how he had been improving. And I agreed—I thought he had, too. And then just about that time, he pulled this stupid move and got drunk while he was on a class trip and got kicked out of the school.” But the story didn’t end then. “Mac moved to British Columbia and is gainfully employed. In the boys’ cases, the measure of success is that they are not in jail. In 1990, probably ten boys were at risk of failing and dropping out of school. Two were at risk of ending up behind bars or dead.”
Reflecting on past and present students at Park View, Doran noted the little triumphs which led to the big ones. The Net helped whet the children’s interest in school—to the point where, often, just about all the students in his first period showed up. It was a virtual miracle, given the sleep hunger of adolescents.
Clearly the Net could be a truant officer’s best friend. “I use computers a lot,” one enthusiastic student e-mailed me from Bridgewater. “I come in on any free time that I have, I even give up my lunch hour to play with the computer, but I would really like to have more class time in the computer room.” She said that computers “hold so much wonder to a person. Like me. Writing on a computer does help out with reading and writing skills.” Another student, a tenth grader who lacked a computer at home, told how much he’d enjoyed corresponding with an aunt and uncle in Winnipeg. At the time he e-mailed me, his relatives had just had a son, and his e-mail was going into their baby book. Textbooks alone would never, never have encouraged him to look forward to school the way the Net did.