ЕГЭ по английскому языку (аудирование №8: детальное понимание текста)

First year teacher

In the last semester of college, I married. I was poor and had no car; so I rode a bicycle and carried my wife on the handlebars. By the end of college, it was clear we were going to have a baby, so I needed to find a job soon and postpone my graduate program at the University for better times. I took a job in another state in a town I’d never seen or heard of, because it paid more than any other teaching position I could find.

It turned out to be a tiny village of 1300 that once was a lumber town with the largest sawmill in the world. Now there was not a tree in sight, the low wet lands had been drained, and the region produced soybeans and cotton. The school where I would teach had only sixteen teachers for grades one through twelve. That meant we had to teach many courses. My college degree was in history, but they already had a history teacher, so I taught geography, general math, algebra I, algebra II, trigonometry, and physics. That was a challenge! Thank Lord I’ve been keen on maths since junior high school and later had a chance of getting more training in this area while temporarily studying Electrical Engineering at the US Naval Academy.

Teachers were also expected to sponsor student activities, and I was asked to sponsor the junior class. That class earned money by staging a school play, and it also organized and decorated the gymnasium for a junior-senior prom. I had no experience with drama, but that didn’t seem to matter. My colleague, a new biology teacher was asked to coach the junior basketball team though he had never played basketball. I had, and, after watching his misery during the first practice, I volunteered to take his job too…without pay as well. Sometimes, riding on the back roads with the team on a cold and crowded school bus, I wondered if I’d lost my mind.

Basketball was this tiny school’s only sport, so the boys played twelve months a year and produced one of the finest teams in the state. For some reason, these rustic country athletes decided to take my course in trigonometry. It was a delight. I sent them out in teams to see who could be the first to measure the height of a tree or building, with only a protractor and measuring tape. They loved competition and in the process they learned trigonometry.

On the day my first child was born, I passed cigars around this class to smoke in celebration. Unexpectedly, the school principal came to the door to see what was going on. Thinking quickly, I offered him a cigar and saved my job.

The play the juniors put on that year under my direction was a surprise success. The class selected a mystery that was intended to be scary, but their acting was so poor it became a comedy. The audience left the building with tears in their eyes from so much laughing. The young woman who had helped me with the play went home with a nervous breakdown.

In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first spaceship to orbit the earth. The US Congress responded to Sputnik by financing the National Defense Education Act, intended to produce a corps of specialists who could help respond to what was thought to be a Soviet threat. Three of the first-year teachers in this tiny school received three-year grants for university graduate programs. I was one, and I’ve been grateful to the Soviet Union ever since for my graduate education.