14RUNNING HEAD Content Design Factors in E-learning

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RUNNING HEAD: Content Design Factors in E-learning
An investigation on the effect of content design factors on
learning outcomes in Basic Education in the US
HCIN 699-51- B-2021/Summer
Applied Project in Healthcare Infor
Professor Chaza Abdul and Professor Glenn Mitchell
Prepared by:
Name: Bolade Yusuf
Student ID: 273092
Harrisburg University
08/18/21
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION 4
1.1 Background to research problem 4

1.1.1 Content Design Factors 4
1.1.2 Learning outcomes 5
1.2 Problem Statement 5
1.4 Research Questions 6
1.5 Significance of the Research 6
LITERATURE REVIEW 7
2.1 Content design Factors 7
2.2 Learning outcomes 8
2.3 Research Framework 9
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 13
3.1 Research Philosophy 13
3.2 Research design 13
3.3 Study Population Sample 13
3.4 Sample Size and Sampling Procedure 14
3.5 Data Collection 14
3.6 Data Analysis 14
References 16
Appendix 1: Survey Questionnaire 17
Appendix 2: Paired T-Test Analysis 20
Appendix 3: Chi-Squared Test 28
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION 4
1.1 Background to research problem 4
1.1.1 Content Design Factors 4
1.1.2 Learning outcomes 5
1.2 Problem Statement 5
1.4 Research Questions 6
1.5 Significance of the Research 6
LITERATURE REVIEW 7
2.1 Content design Factors 7
2.2 Learning outcomes 8

2.3 Research Framework 9
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 13
3.1 Research Philosophy 13
3.2 Research design 13
3.3 Study Population Sample 13
3.4 Sample Size and Sampling Procedure 14
3.5 Data Collection 14
3.6 Data Analysis 14
References 16
Appendix 1: Survey Questionnaire 17
Appendix 2: Paired T-Test Analysis 20
Appendix 3: Chi-Squared Test 28
Comment by Author 2: Need to fix the first line start of
your pages. All pages should start at 1 inch all sides.
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1: Content Design 8
Figure 2: Factors Affecting Lesson Design 9
Figure 3: Guskey Evaluation Framework 10
INTRODUCTION1.1 Background to research problem
Education has a key role to play for sustainable development
both in developing and developed countries (Chimombo, 2005).
The progressively increasing pressure majorly on developing
countries to be at par with their developed partners has only
contributed towards the significance of education. This is aimed
at balancing the global competitiveness. According to
Chimombo, 2005, hindering circumstances in each developing

nation have tomust be improved and aligned regarding
compulsory and free education to foster general access to
education.
Internet connection is tremendously growing tremendo usly
globally each year. People across the globe are increasingly
integrated to what happens on in different parts of the world.
This has brought forward huge opportunities and success to
individuals. Just like the technology has changed the world, it is
now changing the learning and teaching environment. Learning
approaches embedded to the Information Communication
Technology (ICT) ICT (must define it in full term first before
using abbreviations) policy include Electronic learning (e-
learning), blended learning and distance learning. Students can
remotely attend classes through distance learning powered by
Information Communication Technology (ICT) ICT. 1.1.1
Content Design Factors
Basic content design factors are reviewed from three
perspectives: Environmental, educational, and architectural.
Selected developmentally appropriate characteristics of students
are reviewed and linked to affective, behavioral, and cognitive
learning categories. These characteristics are then matched with
learning goals, and activities. Given these foundations,
appropriate architectural/natural support systems are defined
and designs that match the learning goals are recommended.
Functional and structural design represents two primary
considerations for the built and natural/arc hitectural support
systems for schools. Natural areas and built structures are two
familiar examples of support systems for learning. Comment by
Author 2: You many want to connect this to healthcare
education by using an example in one way or another. This will
make your topic a bit more relative, especially giving what
happened during COVID in 2020 going into 2021. It is the best
to use that as most of our education for all students' levels took
place online. 1.1.2 Learning outcomes Comment by Author 2:
Is this part of your research objective or a definition? Make sure
to combine with the paragraph before if the intention is to

include a definition within your introduction or background.
No need to use a special sub-heading in this circumstance.
Learning outcomes in basic education seeks to; enable the child
to live a full life as a child and to realize his or her own
potential as a unique individual, enable the child develop as a
social being through living and cooperating with others and so
contribute to the good of society and toprepare the child for
further education and lifelong learning1.2 Problem Statement
According to Reeves (2008) in his article, Evaluating what
Rreally Mmatters in CcomputerB based Eeducation, several
reasons and lack of evaluation surround E -learning. First,
tTeachers, pupils and parent who are the consumers of this
technology ical assume that because these innovations
areadvertised as effective, they are effective, yet there is little
if any research to supportthis assumption . Second, evaluation
has often been statistically done where technology readiness is
measured in terms of; the investment done onhardware and
software, the ratio of users/pupils to technology devices’ use
and the amount of timestudents have access to technology
within a school day, week, month, or year. The transfer of
content from teacher to pupils and vice versa has always been
over lookedoverlooked. Content design factors for delivery of
the content largely contribute in determining the readiness,
acceptance and adoption levels. This research study proposes to
addresses the gaps and uncertainty around E-learning
preparedness and investigate how various content design factors
may impact on the outcome(s) of learning in basic education.
Comment by Author 2: Should explain a bit. Provide
evidence from literature if that is true. Comment by Author 2:
Also, maybe good to provide one or two examples. Comment by
Author 2: If in you analysis have more than one gap, then
change to plural. Otherwise, just be careful to revisit some of
the grammar once your analysis is complete and your results are
reported.

1.3 Objectives Purpose of the Study
i. Identify content design factors for learning outcomes in
schools.
ii. To investigate how content design factors impact learning
outcomes in schools.
1.4 Research Questions
The study intends to address the following questions;
i. What are the available content design factors for learning?
ii. What are the available content design factors for learners
over the age of 18 in Schools?
iii. What are the expected outcomes for learners’ in basic
Schools?
iv. How learning outcome is measured in basic Schools?1.5
Significance of the ResearchStudy
The information from this research will be crucial to education
stakeholders in understanding which elaborate measures to put
in place to improve learning outcomes. Academically, the
proposed study is expected to contribute to the existing
literature in the field of E-leaning in general and its impact on
quality education in particular. Besides, the study will be a
basis for further research.
Set all your pages margins to 1” all over. You need to reset it
and fix it.
LITERATURE REVIEW
In this second chapter, relevant literature information related
and consistent with the objectives of the study was reviewed.
Important issues and practical problems were brought out and
critically examined so as to determine the current situation.
This section was vital as it determined the information that
links this study with past studies and what future studies would

still need to be explored so as to improve knowledge. Studies on
content design factors in teaching and learning in schools
provide the rationale behind the model being presented. Being
an impact/investigative study, employing a theoretical
framework is important so as to offer guidance. In this study,
the research uses the Guskey’s Evaluation Framework (Figure
1) as the research framework.
2.1 Content design Factors
Content Designs are pedagogically informed learning activities
which make effective use of appropriate tools and resources.
Content design factors refer to how information is structured to
ensure ease in delivery, understanding and uptake. Some of the
main content design factors to be captured in this research
include; instructivism (teacher only active member) verses
constructivism (more learning for learners), teacher centered
verses student centered, multi – modal (a mix of audio, visual
and diagrams) verses single- modal, sequential (theory then
practice) verses non-sequential (theory and practices all in one),
access to extra learning materials and remedial work (repeat
lessons).
Figure 1: Content Design2.2 Learning outcomes
Learning outcomes are statements that describe significant and
essential learning that learners have achieved, andachieved and
can reliably demonstrate at the end of a course or program. In
other words, learning outcomes identify what the learner will
know and be able to do by the end of a course or program,
Spady, (1994). Spady, an educational researcher who
spearheaded the development of outcomes basedoutcomes-based
education suggests that the abilitydemonstrate learning is the
key point. The learning demonstration will include some kind of
performance to show learning significance. Though it is
essential to have significant content, this alone is not sufficient
as content knowledge must be manifested through a sort of
demonstration process.

Figure 2: Factors Affecting Lesson Design
The lesson’s learning objectives comes from the work scheme.
After defining the learning objectives, the intended learning
outcomes should be outlined. What will learning produce by the
end of learning or sequence of lessons to demonstrate that
learning took place – for instance ability to pronounce words, a
piece of writing, ability to solve a mathematical problem. It is
therefore necessary from the outset to define what a good-
quality product will look like to help clarify expectations with
learners.2.3 Research Framework
In this study, the researcher proposes use of Guske y’s
Evaluation Framework to investigate the effects of content
design factors in basic school learning. Effective professional
development evaluations require the collection and analysis of
the five critical levels of information (Guskey, 2000). With each
succeeding level, the process of gathering evaluation
information gets a bit more complex. And because each level
builds on those that come before, success at one level is usually
necessary for success at higher levels.
Figure 3: Guskey Evaluation Framework
Level 1: Participants' Reactions
This being the first of evaluation looks at learners’ reactions to
the professional development experience. This will help in
establishing how the learner perceives different content design
factors. This is the most common form of professional
development evaluations, and the easiest type of information to
gather and analyze. The researcher purposes to use
questionnaires to get information on learners’ reaction. These
questionnaires will include a combination of rating-scale items
and open-ended response questions to allow personal comments
from learners.

Level 2: Participants' Learning
After determining the measure of learners’ satisfaction of
various content designs, this framework aims as establishing
whether they learn something from it. ThereforeTherefore, this
level focuses on measuring the knowledge and skills that
participants gained. Depending on the lesson/learning
objectives, this might include on the goals of the program or
activity, this can involve anything from a simple assessment to
a simulation or full-scale skill demonstration.
Level 3: Organization Support and Change
Level 3 shifts focus from classroom to the organization.
Organizational support and change can sabotage any learning
efforts despite ensuring all other aspects of learning are in
place. The researcher will try to establish how the community
and school support learners in attaining the desired learning
outcomes. The school policies and practices make learning
highly competitive and will thwart the most valiant efforts to
have students cooperate and help one another learn (Guskey,
2000).
Level 4: Participants' Use of New Knowledge and Skills
Level 4 answers the question; did the new knowledge and skills
that pupils learned make a difference in their education process?
Relevant information will be gathered by clearly specifying
indicators of successful learning outcomes and the quality of
implementation. This information cannot be gathered at the end
of session but rather during learning sessions. The
implementation is often a gradual and uneven process, thus need
to measure progress at several time intervals.
Level 5: Student Learning Outcomes

Level 5 addresses “the bottom line”: How did the various
content designs affect the learners? Did it benefit them in any
way? The particular student learning outcomes of interest
depend, of course, on the goals of that specific content design
mode.
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
This chapter explains the approach the researcher used to gain
information on the research problem and includes the research
design, study population and sample size, sampling design and
procedure, data collection methods, measurement of variables.
Procedures used of data collection, data processing, analysis
and presentation and anticipated problems to the study.
3.1 Research Philosophy
A research philosophy is a belief about the way in which data
about a phenomenon should be gathered, analyzed and used. In
this study, the researcher will use interpretivist research
philosophy. Being a case study researcher, interpretivist
philosophy will be used to build on the theory. The study will
seek to establish how learners’ perceptions will be influenced
by experience obtained through learning process. This will be
done in Tucson City, in Arizona, US.3.2 Research design
A research design as a plan, structure and strategy of
investigation to obtain answers to research questions and
control variance. The main objective of this study is to identify
and test an appropriate framework for use in investigating how
various content design factors effect learning outcomes in basic
schools.
3.3 Study Population Sample
The study population will comprise of teachers and learners
from various basic education institutions. The researcher will
target a total of 52 grade four pupils and 7 teachers who guide
the students in learning and evaluate the learning outcomes at
the end of lesson, term and year. 3.4 Sample Size and Sampling
Procedure
A sample is a smaller group or sub-group obtained from the

accessible population. This subgroup is carefully selected so as
to be representative of the whole population with the relevant
characteristics. Sampling is a procedure, process or technique of
choosing a sub-group from a population to participate in the
study. The researcher will use a population of 10 participants as
sample size for basic education learning.3.5 Data Collection
The researcher will collect primary data using questionnaires.
On the other hand, secondary data will be collected by use of
interviews, site study and reviews of relevant documents such
as pupils’ performance reports over different periods (week,
term and year) and observation of pupils’ interaction and
responses in class sessions. The study will have structured
questionnaires designed to collect data; two types of
questionnaires one for the pupils and the other for the teachers.
3.6 Data Analysis
The research data was gathered exclusively through
questionnaires designed in line with the research objectives.
The questionnaire will have 3 sections each will 10- 15
questions meant at exhausting all required data in each section.
Section A- general knowledge and usage aimed at establishing
the extent on usage of electronic devices in learning/teaching by
the respondent. Section B – will cover learning/teaching
techniques. This will list as many techniques as possible from
which various content design factors are derived. The level of
achieving desired learning outcomes amongst each technique
will be established. Section C – Overall response. This will seek
to ascertain how the population feels on integrating ICT in
teaching/learning. A five level Likert scale with weights
ranging from 1-5 will be used by respondents to evaluate the
level of agreement or disagreement (strongly agree -5, agree-4,
not sure-3, disagree-2 and strongly disagree -1). Percentages
will used to find the level of agreement (sum of respondents for
strongly agree and agree), disagreement (sum of respondents for
strongly disagree and disagree) and not sure.

References
Audette, J.G., & Roush, S.E. (2013). Educational perspectives
and teaching styles of faculty who lead international service-
learning experiences. University of Rhode Island: Physical
Therapy Faculty Publications.
Banghart, F. W., & Trull, A. Jr. (1973). Educational Planning.
New York: The Macmillan Company.
Chimombo, J.P.G. (2005): Issues in basic education in
developing countries: an exploration of policy options for
improved delivery. CICE Hiroshima University, Journal of
International Cooperation in Education, Vol. 8 (1), pp. 129-152.
Guskey, T. R. (2000a). Evaluating professional development.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.
Guskey, T. R. (2000b). Grading policies that work against
standards and how to fix them. NASSP Bulletin, 84(620), 20–
29.
Jordan, A., Carlile, O., & Stack, A. (2008). Approaches to
learning: A guide for teachers. McGraw-Hill, Open University
Press: Berkshire.
Kirkpatrick, D. L., & Kirkpatrick, J. D. (2007). Implementing
the four Levels: A practical guide for effective evaluation of
training programs. San Francisco, CA: Koehler Publishers Inc.
Margules, Di (1996). Instructivism or constructivism: which end
of the continuum? Paper given at the AUC Academic
Conference, “From Virtual to Reality,” The University of
Queensland.
Reeves, T. (2008). Evaluating what really matters in computer-
based education. Retrieved
http://www.educationau.edu.au/jahia/Jahia/home/cache/offonce/
pid/179;jsessi
Spady, W. (1994). Outcome-based education: Critical issues and

answers. Arlington, VA: American Association of School
Administrators.
Stufflebeam, D. L. (2007). CIPP Evaluation Model. Retrieved
from
http://www.cglrc.cgiar.org/icraf/toolkit/The_CIPP_evaluation_
model.htm
Appendix 1: Survey Questionnaire
Dear Respondent, we are conducting investigation on the effect
of content design factors on learning outcomes in Basic
Education in the US. The goal is to improve teaching and
learning outcomes for pupils in Basic education. The research
findings will be kept confidential and will be used for academic
purposes only. Please complete the following questionnaire with
specific regard to the above enquiry, by placing a CROSS in the
appropriate box
Gender: Subject(s) Taught:
Strongly Agree
Agree
Neutral
Disagree
Strongly Disagree

General Knowledge/Usage
1. I have taught before using tablet
2. I guide Pupils on how to use the tablet
3. Pupils use the tablet without my guidance
4. Pupils use the tablet before my lesson
5. I use the tablet during each lesson
6. I use the tablet outside lesson hours
7. I use the tablet to teach my subject notes
8. Pupils decide what to be done in each lesson
9. I decide for pupils on what to be done
10. I discuss with pupils on what to be done
Teacher centered vs. Students Centered
11. I guide pupils all through during lessons
12. Pupils use the tablet after each lessons
13. I tell pupils on when to use the tablets
14. Pupils decide on their own when to use the tablets

Strongly Agree
Agree
Neutral
Disagree
Strongly Disagree
Presentation modes
15. I take pupils through class work then gives practices and
exercise after
16. I give exercises while taking Pupils through class work
17. I only take pupils through class work
Access to extra learning materials
18. I use other learning & teaching materials apart from what is
in the tablets for learning e.g. books, seminars
19. I teach my subject with assistance
Use to do remedial work
20. Pupils understand everything as I teach
21. I repeats previous lessons for Pupils to understand
22. Pupils repeat what they have been taught in class during
their free time to understand better
Multi-modal content Verses single mode
23. Pupils like reading only pictures on tablet
24. Pupils like reading diagrams, charts and pictures
25. Pupils like watching only video and audio on table
26. Pupils like reading only text based notes on tablet

Strongly Agree
Agree
Neutral
Disagree
Strongly Disagree
Improved school environment
27. Is the school connected to electricity power

28. All the classes are well painted
29. The school has enough water supply
30. The school compound is well landscaped
Learning outcome
31. Pupils used to prepare for up-coming lessons before having
tablets
32. Pupils never prepared for up-coming lessons before having
tablets Pupils us tablets to revise for past lessons
33. Pupils have learnt to pronounce words using the tablet
34. Pupils have learnt to write words using the tablet
35. Pupils have learnt to read words using the tablet
36. Pupils solve mathematical exercises with the tablet
37. Pupils asked questions in class before having the tablets
38. Pupils don’t ‘ask questions after using the tablet

Thank you for your participation
Appendix 2: Paired T-Test Analysis
Paired Samples Statistics
Mean

N
Std. Deviation
Std. Error Mean
Pair 1
teacher has taught before using a tablet
3.71
7
1.604
.606
teacher has taught before using a tablet_f1
4.29
7
1.113
.421
Pair 2
Teacher guides pupils on how to use the tablet
1.43
7
.535
.202
Teacher guides pupils on how to use the tablet_f1
1.43
7
.535
.202
Pair 3
Pupils use the tablet without any guidance
3.14
7
1.069
.404
Pupils use the tablet without any guidance_f1
2.86

7
1.464
.553
Pair 4
Pupil use tablet before each lesson
3.86
7
.900
.340
Pupil use tablet before each lesson_f1
3.57
7
1.134
.429
Pair 5
Pupils use tablet during each lesson
2.86
7
1.215
.459
Pupils use tablet during each lesson_f1
3.00
7
1.291
.488
Pair 6
Pupil use the tablet outside lesson hours
2.43
7
1.512
.571
Pupil use the tablet outside lesson hours_f1
2.57

7
1.397
.528
Pair 7
Teacher uses the tablet to teach her/his subject notes
2.14
7
.900
.340
Teacher uses the tablet to teach her/his subject notes_f1
2.14
7
.900
.340
Pair 8
Pupils decide what to be done in each lesson
4.57
7
.535
.202
Pupils decide what to be done in each lesson_f1
4.14
7
.690
.261
Pair 9
Teacher decides what to be done in class
1.29
7
.488
.184
Teacher decides what to be done in class_f1
1.86

7
.378
.143
Pair 10
Teacher guides pupils all through during lessons
2.14
7
1.345
.508
Teacher guides pupils all through during lessons_f1
2.57
7
1.272
.481
Pair 11
Teacher tells pupils on when to use tablets
1.43
7
.535
.202
Teacher tells pupils on when to use tablets_f1
1.86
7
.378
.143
Pair 12
Pupils decide on their own when to use the tablets
4.00
7
1.414
.535
Pupils decide on their own when to use the tablets_f1
3.71

7
.951
.360
Pair 13
Teachers takes pupils through class work then gives practice
excises
1.29
7
.488
.184
excises_f1
1.43
7
.535
.202
Pair 14
Pupils do practice exercises while during lessons
1.57
7
.535
.202
Pupils do practice exercises while during lessons_f1
2.29
7
.756
.286
Pair 15
Pupils learn class work without practice exercise
3.71
7
1.380
.522

Pupils learn class work without practice exercise_f1
3.71
7
.951
.360
Pair 16
Teacher uses other learning materials for learning apart from
what is in the tablets for learning.
1.57
7
.787
.297
what is in the tablets for learning_f1
1.43
7
.535
.202
Pair 17
Pupils understand everything when being taught
3.43
7
.535
.202
Pupils understand everything when being taught_f1
3.14
7
.900
.340
Pair 18
Pupils understand after teacher repeats previous lessons
1.86
7
.690

.261
Pupils understand after teacher repeats previous lessons_f1
1.43
7
.535
.202
Pair 19
Pupil understands after repeating what they were taught at their
free time
2.14
7
.900
.340
free time_f1
1.86
7
.690
.261
Pair 20
Pupils like reading only diagrams, charts and picture on tablets
1.43
7
.535
.202
Pupils like reading only diagrams, charts and picture on
tablets_f1
1.71
7
.488
.184
Pair 21
Pupils like reading only video and audio on tablets

2.86
7
1.069
.404
Pupils like reading only video and audio on tablets_f1
3.57
7
.535
.202
Pair 22
Pupils like reading only text based notes on tablets
3.57
7
.535
.202
Pupils like reading only text based notes on tablets_f1
3.86
7
.378
.143
Pair 23
Pupils used to prepare for upcoming lessons before having
tablets
2.71
7
1.380
.522
tablets_f1
3.43
7
1.272
.481

Pair 24
Pupils never to prepared for upcoming lessons before having
tablets
3.29
7
.756
.286
tablets_f1
3.00
7
1.000
.378
Pair 25
Pupils have learnt to pronounce words using the tablet
1.86
7
.690
.261
Pupils have learnt to pronounce words using the tablet_f1
1.86
7
.378
.143
Pair 26
Pupils have learnt to write words using the tablet
2.29
7
.951
.360
Pupils have learnt to write words using the tablet_f1
1.86
7

.378
.143
Pair 27
Pupils have learnt to solve mathematical exercises using the
tablet
2.00
7
.577
.218
tablet_f1
1.86
7
.378
.143
Pair 28
Pupils used to ask questions in class before having tablets
2.57
7
.787
.297
Pupils used to ask questions in class before having tablets_f1
2.57
7
.787
.297
Pair 29
Pupils don't ask questions after using the tablet
3.71
7
1.254
.474
Pupils don't ask questions after using the tablet_f1

3.86
7
.900
.340
Pair 30
The investment is worth undertaking
1.43
7
.535
.202
The investment is worth undertaking_f1
1.43
7
.535
.202
Paired Samples Correlations
N
Correlation
Sig.
Pair 1
teacher has taught before using a tablet & teacher has taught
before using a tablet_f1
7
.053
.910
Pair 2
Teacher guides pupils on how to use the tablet & Teacher
guides pupils on how to use the tablet_f1
7

.417
.352
Pair 3
Pupils use the tablet without any guidance & Pupils use the
tablet without any guidance_f1
7
.335
.463
Pair 4
Pupil use tablet before each lesson & Pupil use tablet before
each lesson_f1
7
-.070
.881
Pair 5
Pupils use tablet during each lesson & Pupils use tablet during
each lesson_f1
7
.106
.821
Pair 6
Pupil use the tablet outside lesson hours & Pupil use the tablet
outside lesson hours_f1
7
-.688
.088
Pair 7
Teacher uses the tablet to teach her/his subject notes & Teacher
uses the tablet to teach her/his subject notes_f1
7
-.029
.950
Pair 8
Pupils decide what to be done in each lesson & Pupils decide
what to be done in each lesson_f1
7

-.258
.576
Pair 9
Teacher decides what to be done in class & Teacher decides
what to be done in class_f1
7
-.645
.117
Pair 10
Teacher guides pupils all through during lessons & Teacher
guides pupils all through during lessons_f1
7
.042
.929
Pair 11
Teacher tells pupils on when to use tablets & Teacher tells
pupils on when to use tablets_f1
7
-.471
.286
Pair 12
Pupils decide on their own when to use the tablets & Pupils
decide on their own when to use the tablets_f1
7
.619
.138
Pair 13
excises & Teachers takes pupils through class work then gives
practice excises_f1
7
-.548
.203
Pair 14
Pupils do practice exercises while during lessons & Pupils do
practice exercises while during lessons_f1

7
-.471
.286
Pair 15
Pupils learn class work without practice exercise & Pupils learn
class work without practice exercise_f1
7
.181
.697
Pair 16
what is in the tablets for learning. & Teacher uses other
learning materials for learning apart from what is in the tablets
for learning_f1
7
-.679
.093
Pair 17
Pupils understand everything when being taught & Pupils
understand everything when being taught_f1
7
-.149
.751
Pair 18
Pupils understand after teacher repeats previous lessons &
Pupils understand after teacher repeats previous lessons_f1
7
.645
.117
Pair 19
free time & Pupil understands after repeating what they were
taught at their free time_f1
7
.038
.935

Pair 20
& Pupils like reading only diagrams, charts and picture on
tablets_f1
7
.548
.203
Pair 21
Pupils like reading only video and audio on tablets & Pupils
like reading only video and audio on tablets_f1
7
.458
.301
Pair 22
Pupils like reading only text based notes on tablets & Pupils
like reading only text based notes on tablets_f1
7
.471
.286
Pair 23
tablets & Pupils used to prepare for upcoming lessons before
having tablets_f1
7
-.678
.094
Pair 24
tablets & Pupils never to prepared for upcoming lessons before
having tablets_f1
7
-.441
.322
Pair 25
Pupils have learnt to pronounce words using the tablet & Pupils
have learnt to pronounce words using the tablet_f1

7
.548
.203
Pair 26
Pupils have learnt to write words using the tablet & Pupils have
learnt to write words using the tablet_f1
7
.596
.158
Pair 27
tablet & Pupils have learnt to solve mathematical exercises
using the tablet_f1
7
.000
1.000
Pair 28
Pupils used to ask questions in class before having tablets &
7
-.615
.141
Pair 29
Pupils don't ask questions after using the tablet & Pupils don't
ask questions after using the tablet_f1
7
-.042
.928
Pair 30
The investment is worth undertaking & The investment is worth
undertaking_f1
7
.417
.352

Paired Samples Test
Paired Differences
t
df
Sig. (2-tailed)
Mean
Std. Deviation
Std. Error Mean
95% Confidence Interval of the Difference
Lower
Upper
Pair 1
teacher has taught before using a tablet - teacher has taught
before using a tablet_f1
-.571
1.902
.719
-2.331
1.188

-.795
6
.457
Pair 2
Teacher guides pupils on how to use the tablet - Teacher guides
pupils on how to use the tablet_f1
.000
.577
.218
-.534
.534
.000
6
1.000
Pair 3
Pupils use the tablet without any guidance - Pupils use the
tablet without any guidance_f1
.286
1.496
.565
-1.098
1.669
.505
6
.631
Pair 4
Pupil use tablet before each lesson - Pupil use tablet before each
lesson_f1
.286
1.496
.565
-1.098
1.669
.505
6
.631

Pair 5
Pupils use tablet during each lesson - Pupils use tablet during
each lesson_f1
-.143
1.676
.634
-1.693
1.407
-.225
6
.829
Pair 6
Pupil use the tablet outside lesson hours - Pupil use the tablet
outside lesson hours_f1
-.143
2.673
1.010
-2.615
2.329
-.141
6
.892
Pair 7
Teacher uses the tablet to teach her/his subject notes - Teacher
uses the tablet to teach her/his subject notes_f1
.000
1.291
.488
-1.194
1.194
.000
6
1.000
Pair 8
Pupils decide what to be done in each lesson - Pupils decide
what to be done in each lesson_f1

.429
.976
.369
-.474
1.331
1.162
6
.289
Pair 9
Teacher decides what to be done in class - Teacher decides what
to be done in class_f1
-.571
.787
.297
-1.299
.156
-1.922
6
.103
Pair 10
Teacher guides pupils all through during lessons - Teacher
guides pupils all through during lessons_f1
-.429
1.813
.685
-2.105
1.248
-.626
6
.555
Pair 11
Teacher tells pupils on when to use tablets - Teacher tells pupils
on when to use tablets_f1
-.429
.787
.297

-1.156
.299
-1.441
6
.200
Pair 12
Pupils decide on their own when to use the tablets - Pupils
decide on their own when to use the tablets_f1
.286
1.113
.421
-.743
1.315
.679
6
.522
Pair 13
excises - Teachers takes pupils through class work then gives
practice excises_f1
-.143
.900
.340
-.975
.689
-.420
6
.689
Pair 14
Pupils do practice exercises while during lessons - Pupils do
practice exercises while during lessons_f1
-.714
1.113
.421
-1.743
.315

-1.698
6
.140
Pair 15
Pupils learn class work without practice exercise - Pupils learn
class work without practice exercise_f1
.000
1.528
.577
-1.413
1.413
.000
6
1.000
Pair 16
what is in the tablets for learning. - Teacher uses other learning
materials for learning apart from what is in the tablets for
learning_f1
.143
1.215
.459
-.981
1.267
.311
6
.766
Pair 17
Pupils understand everything when being taught - Pupils
understand everything when being taught_f1
.286
1.113
.421
-.743
1.315
.679

6
.522
Pair 18
Pupils understand after teacher repeats previous lessons - Pupils
understand after teacher repeats previous lessons_f1
.429
.535
.202
-.066
.923
2.121
6
.078
Pair 19
free time - Pupil understands after repeating what they were
taught at their free time_f1
.286
1.113
.421
-.743
1.315
.679
6
.522
Pair 20
- Pupils like reading only diagrams, charts and picture on
tablets_f1
-.286
.488
.184
-.737
.166
-1.549
6

.172
Pair 21
Pupils like reading only video and audio on tablets - Pupils like
reading only video and audio on tablets_f1
-.714
.951
.360
-1.594
.165
-1.987
6
.094
Pair 22
Pupils like reading only text based notes on tablets - Pupils like
reading only text based notes on tablets_f1
-.286
.488
.184
-.737
.166
-1.549
6
.172
Pair 23
tablets - Pupils used to prepare for upcoming lessons before
having tablets_f1
-.714
2.430
.918
-2.962
1.533
-.778
6
.466
Pair 24

tablets - Pupils never to prepared for upcoming lessons before
having tablets_f1
.286
1.496
.565
-1.098
1.669
.505
6
.631
Pair 25
Pupils have learnt to pronounce words using the tablet - Pupils
have learnt to pronounce words using the tablet_f1
.000
.577
.218
-.534
.534
.000
6
1.000
Pair 26
Pupils have learnt to write words using the tablet - Pupils have
learnt to write words using the tablet_f1
.429
.787
.297
-.299
1.156
1.441
6
.200
Pair 27
tablet - Pupils have learnt to solve mathematical exercises using

the tablet_f1
.143
.690
.261
-.495
.781
.548
6
.604
Pair 28
Pupils used to ask questions in class before having tablets -
.000
1.414
.535
-1.308
1.308
.000
6
1.000
Pair 29
Pupils don't ask questions after using the tablet - Pupils don't
ask questions after using the tablet_f1
-.143
1.574
.595
-1.598
1.312
-.240
6
.818
Pair 30
The investment is worth undertaking - The investment is worth
undertaking_f1
.000
.577

.218
-.534
.534
.000
6
1.000
Appendix 3: Chi-Squared Test
The researcher embarked on a study to establish whether
content design factors have any impact on learning outcomes in

basic education. Teachers who are key stakeholders in learning
were the study group. Through questionnaires, data was
collected from the teachers on how different content design
factors help in preparing for a lesson, students’ abilities with
various content design factors and their performance.
From the data analysis, the researcher collected two sets. The
initial set, referred to as first data set was the baseline of the
study. This is mean data which measured how content design
factors affect learning outcomes in basic education. Different
factors where measured such as ability to read and write,
solving mathematical problem, understanding history and
nature, knowledge on religious studies and social sciences.
Being the baseline, the data will be treated as the expected
values of Chi-Square test.
After employment of relevant contents design factors such as
use of digital content, graphics and audio-visual aids, a second
set of data was collected to measure if there was any
improvement or rather change on learning outcomes. Where the
students better understanding with the added content design
factors, where the teachers finding it more easy to deliver
content with the new aids and if notable change was witnessed
in students’ ability to read, write, solve mathematical problem,
under history and nature or even social studies. In the Chi-
Square test, this data represents the expected values.

Notes:
1. Chi-Square value, X2 = ((O – E)2) ÷E
2. D1 – First data set, made of the expected values.
3. D2 – second data set, made of the observed Values.
4. E Values – expected Values
5. O Values – observed Values.
6. Pair represents each question in the research questionnaire.
H0 , D1 = D2
H 1 , D1 ≠ D2
X2 = 3.7047 ( from the tabulation)
Alpha value (α ) = 0.05
Degree of freedom (DF) = 1
Critical value (CRIT) = 3.84 (from Chi-Square distribution
table)
X 2(1) = 3.70, p < 0.05
X 2 < CRIT
The Chi-Square value is less than the Critical value therefore
accept the null hypothesis.
Position: Accept H0
in
A and p
In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits. I’m in
the third checkout slot, with my back to the door, so I don’t see
them until they’re over by the bread. The one that caught my
eye first was the one in the plaid green two-piece. She was a
chunky kid, with a good tan and a sweet broad soft-looking can
with those two crescents of white just under it, where the sun
never seems to hit, at the top of the backs of her legs. I stood
there with my hand on a box of HiHo crackers trying to
remember if I rang it up or not. I ring it up again and the
customer starts giving me hell. She’s one of these cash-register-
watchers, a witch about fifty with rouge on her cheekbones and

no eyebrows, and I know it made her day to trip me up. She’d
been watching cash registers for fifty years and probably never
seen a mistake before.
By the time I got her feathers smoothed and her goodies into a
bag — she gives me a little snort in passing, if she’d been born
at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem —
by the time I get her on her way the girls had circled around the
bread and were coming back, without a pushcart, back my way
along the counters, in the aisle between the checkouts and the
Special bins. They didn’t even have shoes on. There was this
chunky one, with the two-piece — it was bright green and the
seams on the bra were still sharp and her belly was still pretty
pale so I guessed she just got it (the suit) — there was this one,
with one of those chubby berry-faces, the lips all bunched
together under her nose, this one, and a tall one, with black hair
that hadn’t quite frizzed right, and one of these sunburns right
across under the eyes, and a chin that was too long — you
know, the kind of girl other girls think is very “striking” and
“attractive” but never quite makes it, as they very well know,
which is why they like her so much — and then the third one,
that wasn’t quite so tall. She was the queen. She kind of led
them, the other two peeking around and making their shoulders
round. She didn’t look around, not this queen, she just walked
straight on slowly, on these long white prima-donna legs. She
came down a little hard on her heels, as if she didn’t walk in her
bare feet that much, putting down her heels and then letting the
weight move along to her toes as if she was testing the floor
with every step, putting a little deliberate extra action into it.
You never know for sure how girls’ minds work (do you really
think it’s a mind in there or just a little buzz like a bee in a
glass jar?) but you got the idea she had talked the other two into
coming in here with her, and now she was showing them how to
do it, walk slow and hold yourself straight.
She had on a kind of dirty-pink — beige maybe, I don’t know —
bathing suit with a little nubble all over it, and what got me, the
straps were down. They were off her shoulders looped loose

around the cool tops of her arms, and I guess as a result the suit
had slipped a little on her, so all around the top of the cloth
there was this shining rim. If it hadn’t been there you wouldn’t
have known there could have been anything whiter than those
shoulders. With the straps pushed off, there was nothing
between the top of the suit and the top of her head except
just her, this clean bare plane of the top of her chest down from
the shoulder bones like a dented sheet of metal tilted in the
light. I mean, it was more than pretty.
She had sort of oaky hair that the sun and salt had bleached,
done up in a bun that was unravelling, and a kind of prim face.
Walking into the A & P with your straps down, I suppose it’s
the only kind of face you can have. She held her head so high
her neck, coming up out of those white shoulders, looked kind
of stretched, but I didn’t mind. The longer her neck was, the
more of her there was.
She must have felt in the corner of her eye me and over my
shoulder Stokesie in the second slot watching, but she didn’t
tip. Not this queen. She kept her eyes moving across the racks,
and stopped, and turned so slow it made my stomach rub the
inside of my apron, and buzzed to the other two, who kind of
huddled against her for relief, and then they all three of them
went up the cat-and-dog-food-breakfast-cereal-macaroni-rice-
raisins-seasonings-spreads-spaghetti-soft-drinks-crackers-and-
cookies aisle. From the third slot I look straight up this aisle to
the meat counter, and I watched them all the way. The fat one
with the tan sort of fumbled with the cookies, but on second
thought she put the package back. The sheep pushing their carts
down the aisle — the girls were walking against the usual
traffic (not that we have one-way signs or anything) — were
pretty hilarious. You could see them, when Queenie’s white
shoulders dawned on them, kind of jerk, or hop, or hiccup, but
their eyes snapped back to their own baskets and on they
pushed. I bet you could set off dynamite in an A & P and the
people would by and large keep reaching and checking oatmeal
off their lists and muttering “Let me see, there was a third

thing, began with A, asparagus, no, ah, yes, applesauce!” or
whatever it is they do mutter. But there was no doubt, this
jiggled them. A few houseslaves in pin curlers even looked
around after pushing their carts past to make sure what they had
seen was correct.
You know, it’s one thing to have a girl in a bathing suit down
on the beach, where what with the glare nobody can look at
each other much anyway, and another thing in the cool of the A
& P, under the fluorescent lights, against all those stacked
packages, with her feet paddling along naked over our
checkboard green-and-cream rubber-tile floor.
“Oh Daddy,” Stokesie said beside me. “I feel so faint.”
“Darling,” I said. “Hold me tight.” Stokesie’s married, with two
babies chalked up on his fuselage already, but as far as I can
tell that’s the only difference. He’s twenty-two, and I was
nineteen this April.
“Is it done?” he asks, the responsible married man finding his
voice. I forgot to say he thinks he’s going to be manager some
sunny day, maybe in 1990 when it’s called the Great
Alexandrov and Petrooshki Tea Company or something.
What he meant was, our town is five miles from a beach, with a
big summer colony out on the Point, but we’re right in the
middle of town, and the women generally put on a shirt or
shorts or something before they get out of the car into the
street. And anyway these are usually women with six children
and varicose veins mapping their legs and nobody, including
them, could care less. As I say, we’re right in the middle of
town, and if you stand at our front doors you can see two banks
and the Congregational church and the newspaper store and
three real-estate offices and about twenty-seven old freeloaders
tearing up Central Street because the sewer broke again. It’s not
as if we’re on the Cape; we’re north of Boston and there’s
people in this town haven’t seen the ocean for twenty years.
The girls had reached the meat counter and were asking
McMahon something. He pointed, they pointed, and they
shuffled out of sight behind a pyramid of Diet Delight peaches.

All that was left for us to see was old McMahon patting his
mouth and looking after them sizing up their joints. Poor kids, I
began to feel sorry for them, they couldn’t help it.
Now here comes the sad part of the story, at least my family
says it’s sad, but I don’t think it’s so sad myself. The store’s
pretty empty, it being Thursday afternoon, so there was nothing
much to do except lean on the register and wait for the girls to
show up again. The whole store was like a pinball machine and
I didn’t know which tunnel they’d come out of. After a while
they come around out of the far aisle, around the light bulbs,
records at discount of the Caribbean Six or Tony Martin Sings
or some such gunk you wonder they waste the wax on, sixpacks
of candy bars, and plastic toys done up in cellophane that fall
apart when a kid looks at them anyway. Around they come,
Queenie still leading the way, and holding a little gray jar in her
hand. Slots Three through Seven are unmanned and I could see
her wondering between Stokes and me, but Stokesie with his
usual luck draws an old party in baggy gray pants who stumbles
up with four giant cans of pineapple juice (what do these
bums do with all that pineapple juice? I’ve often asked myself)
so the girls come to me. Queenie puts down the jar and I take it
into my fingers icy cold. Kingfish Fancy Herring Snacks in Pure
Sour Cream: 49¢. Now her hands are empty, not a ring or a
bracelet, bare as God made them, and I wonder where the
money’s coming from. Still with that prim look she lifts a
folded dollar bill out of the hollow at the center of her nubbled
pink top. The jar went heavy in my hand. Really, I thought that
was so cute.
Then everybody’s luck begins to run out. Lengel comes in from
haggling with a truck full of cabbages on the lot and is about to
scuttle into that door marked MANAGER behind which he hides
all day when the girls touch his eye. Lengel’s pretty dreary,
teaches Sunday school and the rest, but he doesn’t miss that
much. He comes over and says, “Girls, this isn’t the beach.”
Queenie blushes, though maybe it’s just a brush of sunburn I
was noticing for the first time, now that she was so close. “My

mother asked me to pick up a jar of herring snacks.” Her voice
kind of startled me, the way voices do when you see the people
first, coming out so flat and dumb yet kind of tony, too, the w ay
it ticked over “pick up” and “snacks.” All of a sudden I slid
right down her voice into her living room. Her father and the
other men were standing around in ice-cream coats and bow ties
and the women were in sandals picking up herring snacks on
toothpicks off a big glass plate and they were all holding drinks
the color of water with olives and sprigs of mint in them. When
my parents have somebody over they get lemonade and if it’s a
real racy affair Schlitz in tall glasses with “They’ll Do It Every
Time” cartoons stencilled on.
“That’s all right,” Lengel said. “But this isn’t the beach.” His
repeating this struck me as funny, as if it had just occurred to
him, and he had been thinking all these years the A & P was a
great big sand dune and he was the head lifeguard. He didn’t
like my smiling — as I say he doesn’t miss much — but he
concentrates on giving the girls that sad Sunday-school–
superintendent stare.
Queenie’s blush is no sunburn now, and the plump one in plaid,
that I liked better from the back — a really sweet can — pipes
up, “We weren’t doing any shopping. We just came in for the
one thing.”
“That makes no difference,” Lengel tells her, and I could see
from the way his eyes went that he hadn’t noticed she was
wearing a two-piece before. “We want you decently dressed
when you come in here.”
“We are decent,” Queenie says suddenly, her lower lip pushing,
getting sore now that she remembers her place, a place from
which the crowd that runs the A & P must look pretty crummy.
Fancy Herring Snacks flashed in her very blue eyes.
“Girls, I don’t want to argue with you. After this come in here
with your shoulders covered. It’s our policy.” He turns his back.
That’s policy for you. Policy is what the kingpins want. What
the others want is juvenile delinquenc y.
All this while, the customers had been showing up with their

carts but, you know, sheep, seeing a scene, they had all bunched
up on Stokesie, who shook open a paper bag as gently as
peeling a peach, not wanting to miss a word. I could feel in the
silence everybody getting nervous, most of all Lengel, who asks
me, “Sammy, have you rung up their purchase?”
I thought and said “No” but it wasn’t about that I was thinking.
I go through the punches, 4, 9, groc, tot — it’s more
complicated than you think, and after you do it often enough, it
begins to make a little song, that you hear words to, in my case
“Hello (bing) there, you (gung) hap-py pee-pul (splat)!” —
the splat being the drawer flying out. I uncrease the bill,
tenderly as you may imagine, it just having come from between
the two smoothest scoops of vanilla I had ever known were
there, and pass a half and a penny into her narrow pink palm,
and nestle the herrings in a bag and twist its neck and hand it
over, all the time thinking.
The girls, and who’d blame them, are in a hurry to get out, so I
say “I quit” to Lengel [loud] enough for them to hear, hoping
they’ll stop and watch me, their unsuspected hero. They keep
right on going, into the electric eye; the door flies open and
they flicker across the lot to their car, Queenie and Plaid and
Big Tall Goony-Goony (not that as raw material she was so
bad), leaving me with Lengel and a kink in his eyebrow.
“Did you say something, Sammy?”
“I said I quit.”
“I thought you did.”
“You didn’t have to embarrass them.”
“It was they who were embarrassing us.”
I started to say something that came out “Fiddle-de-doo.” It’s a
saying of my grandmother’s, and I know she would have been
pleased.
“I don’t think you know what you’re saying,” Lengel said.
“I know you don’t,” I said. “But I do.” I pull the bow at the
back of my apron and start shrugging it off my shoulders. A
couple customers that had been heading for my slot begin to
knock against each other, like scared pigs in a chute.

Lengel sighs and begins to look very patient and old and gray.
He’s been a friend of my parents for years. “Sammy, you don’t
want to do this to your Mom and Dad,” he tells me. It’s true, I
don’t. But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it’s fatal
not to go through with it. I fold the apron, “Sammy” stitched in
red on the pocket, and put it on the counter, and drop the bow
tie on top of it. The bow tie is theirs, if you’ve ever wondered.
“You’ll feel this for the rest of your life,” Lengel says, and I
know that’s true, too, but remembering how he made that pretty
girl blush makes me so scrunchy inside I punch the No Sale tab
and the machine whirs “pee-pul” and the drawer splats out. One
advantage to this scene taking place in summer, I can follow
this up with a clean exit, there’s no fumbling around getting
your coat and galoshes, I just saunter into the electric eye in my
white shirt that my mother ironed the night before, and the door
heaves itself open, and outside the sunshine is skating around
on the asphalt.
I look around for my girls, but they’re gone, of course. There
wasn’t anybody but some young married screaming with her
children about some candy they didn’t get by the door of a
powder-blue Falcon station wagon. Looking back in the big
windows, over the bags of peat moss and aluminum lawn
furniture stacked on the pavement, I could see Lengel in my
place in the slot, checking the sheep through. His face was dark
gray and his back stiff, as if he’d just had an injection of iron,
and my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was
going to be to me hereafter.
Alice walker
Everyday use
I will wait for her in the yard that Maggie and I made so clean
and wavy yesterday afternoon. A yard like this is more
comfortable than most people know. It is not just a yard. It is

like an extended living room. When the hard clay is swept clean
as a floor and the fine sand around the edges lined with tiny,
irregular grooves anyone can come and sit and look up into the
elm tree and wait for the breezes that never come inside the
house.
Maggie will be nervous until after her sister goes: she will stand
hopelessly in corners homely and ashamed of the burn scars
down her arms and legs, eyeing her sister with a mixture of
envy and awe. She thinks her sister has held life always in the
palm of one hand, that “no” is a word the world never learned to
say to her.
You’ve no doubt seen those TV shows where the child who has
“made it” is confronted, as a surprise, by her own mother and
father, tottering in weakly from backstage. (A pleasant surprise,
of course: What would they do if parent and child came on the
show only to curse out and insult each other?) On TV mother
and child embrace and smile into each other’s faces. Sometimes
the mother and father weep, the child wraps them in her arms
and leans across the table to tell how she would not have made
it without their help. I have seen these programs.
Sometimes I dream a dream in which Dee and I are suddenly
brought together on a TV program of this sort. Out of a dark
and soft-seated limousine I am ushered into a bright room filled
with many people. There I meet a smiling, gray, sporty man like
Johnny Carson who shakes my hand and tells me what a fine
girl I have. Then we are on the stage and Dee is embracing me
with tears in her eyes. She pins on my dress a large orchid, even
though she has told me once that she thinks orchids are tacky
flowers.
In real life I am a large, big-boned woman with rough, man-
working hands. In the winter I wear flannel nightgowns to bed
and overalls during the day. I can kill and clean a hog as
mercilessly as a man. My fat keeps me hot in zero weather. I
can work outside all day, breaking ice to get water for washing.
I can eat pork liver cooked over the open fire minutes after it
comes steaming from the hog. One winter I knocked a bull calf

straight in the brain between the eyes with a sledge hammer and
had the meat hung up to chill before nightfall. But of course all
this does not show on television. I am the way my daughter
would want me to be: a hundred pounds lighter, my skin like an
uncooked barley pancake. My hair glistens in the hot bright
lights. Johnny Carson has much to do to keep up with my quick
and witty tongue.
But that is a mistake. I know even before I wake up. Who ever
knew a Johnson with a quick tongue? Who can even imagine me
looking a strange white man in the eye? It seems to me I have
talked to them always with one foot raised in flight, with my
head turned in whichever way is farthest from them. Dee,
though. She would always look anyone in the eye. Hesitation
was no part of her nature.
“How do I look, Mama?” Maggie says, showing just enough of
her thin body enveloped in pink skirt and red blouse for me to
know she’s there, almost hidden by the door.
“Come out into the yard,” I say.
Have you ever seen a lame animal, perhaps a dog run over by
some careless person rich enough to own a car, sidle up to
someone who is ignorant enough to be kind to him? That is the
way my Maggie walks. She has been like this, chin on chest,
eyes on ground, feet in shuffle, ever since the fire that burned
the other house to the ground.
Dee is lighter than Maggie, with nicer hair and a fuller figure.
She’s a woman now, though sometimes I forget. How long ago
was it that the other house burned? Ten, twelve years?
Sometimes I can still hear the flames and feel Maggie’s arms
sticking to me, her hair smoking and her dress falling off her in
little black papery flakes. Her eyes seemed stretched open,
blazed open by the flames reflected in them. And Dee. I see her
standing off under the sweet gum tree she used to dig gum out
of; a look of concentration on her face as she watched the last
dingy gray board of the house fall in toward the red-hot brick
chimney. Why don’t you do a dance around the ashes? I’d
wanted to ask her. She had hated the house that much.

I used to think she hated Maggie, too. But that was before we
raised the money, the church and me, to send her to Augusta to
school. She used to read to us without pity; forcing words, lies,
other folks’ habits, whole lives upon us two, sitting trapped and
ignorant underneath her voice. She washed us in a river of
make-believe, burned us with a lot of knowledge we didn’t
necessarily need to know. Pressed us to her with the serious
way she read, to shove us away at just the moment, like
dimwits, we seemed about to understand.
Dee wanted nice things. A yellow organdy dress to wear to her
graduation from high school; black pumps to match a green suit
she’d made from an old suit somebody gave me. She was
determined to stare down any disaster in her efforts. Her eyelids
would not flicker for minutes at a time. Often I fought off the
temptation to shake her. At sixteen she had a style of her own:
and knew what style was.
I never had an education myself. After second grade the school
was closed down. Don’t ask me why: in 1927 colored asked
fewer questions than they do now. Sometimes Maggie reads to
me. She stumbles along good-naturedly but can’t see well. She
knows she is not bright. Like good looks and money, quickness
passed her by. She will marry John Thomas (who has mossy
teeth in an earnest face) and then I’ll be free to sit here and I
guess just sing church songs to myself. Although I never was a
good singer. Never could carry a tune. I was always better at a
man’s job. I used to love to milk till I was hoofed in the side in
’49. Cows are soothing and slow and don’t bother you, unless
you try to milk them the wrong way.
I have deliberately turned my back on the house. It is three
rooms, just like the one that burned, except the roof is tin; they
don’t make shingle roofs any more. There are no real windows,
just some holes cut in the sides, like the portholes in a ship, but
not round and not square, with rawhide holding the shutters up
on the outside. This house is in a pasture, too, like the other
one. No doubt when Dee sees it she will want to tear it down.
She wrote me once that no matter where we “choose” to live,

she will manage to come see us. But she will never bring her
friends. Maggie and I thought about this and Maggie asked me,
“Mama, when did Dee ever have any friends?”
She had a few. Furtive boys in pink shirts hanging about on
washday after school. Nervous girls who never laughed.
Impressed with her they worshiped the well-turned phrase, the
cute shape, the scalding humor that erupted like bubbles in lye.
She read to them.
When she was courting Jimmy T she didn’t have much time to
pay to us, but turned all her faultfinding power on him.
He flew to marry a cheap gal from a family of ignorant flashy
people. She hardly had time to recompose herself.
When she comes I will meet — but there they are!
Maggie attempts to make a dash for the house, in her shuffling
way, but I stay her with my hand. “Come back here,” I say. And
she stops and tries to dig a well in the sand with her toe.
It is hard to see them clearly through the strong sun. But even
the first glimpse of leg out of the car tells me it is Dee. Her feet
were always neat-looking, as if God himself had shaped them
with a certain style. From the other side of the car comes a
short, stocky man. Hair is all over his head a foot long and
hanging from his chin like a kinky mule tail. I hear Maggie suck
in her breath. “Uhnnnh,” is what it sounds like. Like when you
see the wriggling end of a snake just in front of your foot on the
road. “Uhnnnh.”
Dee next. A dress down to the ground, in this hot weather. A
dress so loud it hurts my eyes. There are yellows and oranges
enough to throw back the light of the sun. I feel my whole face
warming from the heat waves it throws out. Earrings, too, gold
and hanging down to her shoulders. Bracelets dangling and
making noises when she moves her arm up to shake the folds of
the dress out of her armpits. The dress is loose and flows, and
as she walks closer, I like it. I hear Maggie go “Uhnnnh” again.
It is her sister’s hair. It stands straight up like the wool on a
sheep. It is black as night and around the edges are two long
pigtails that rope about like small lizards disappearing behind

her ears.
“Wa-su-zo-Tean-o!” she says, coming on in that gliding way the
dress makes her move. The short stocky fellow with the hair to
his navel is all grinning and he follows up with “Asalamalakim,
my mother and sister!” He moves to hug Maggie but she falls
back, right up against the back of my chair. I feel her trembling
there and when I look up I see the perspiration falling off her
chin.
“Don’t get up,” says Dee. Since I am stout it takes something of
a push. You can see me trying to move a second or two before I
make it. She turns, showing white heels through her sandals,
and goes back to the car. Out she peeks next with a Polaroid.
She stoops down quickly and lines up picture after picture of me
sitting there in front of the house with Maggie cowering behind
me. She never takes a shot without making sure the house is
included. When a cow comes nibbling around the edge of the
yard she snaps it and me and Maggie and the house. Then she
puts the Polaroid in the back seat of the car, and comes up and
kisses me on the forehead.
Meanwhile Asalamalakim is going through motions with
Maggie’s hand. Maggie’s hand is as limp as a fish, and probably
as cold, despite the sweat, and she keeps trying to pull it back.
It looks like Asalamalakim wants to shake hands but wants to
do it fancy. Or maybe he don’t know how people shake hands.
Anyhow, he soon gives up on Maggie.
“Well,” I say. “Dee.”
“No, Mama,” she says. “Not ‘Dee,’ Wangero Leewanika
Kemanjo!”
“What happened to ‘Dee’?” I wanted to know.
“She’s dead,” Wangero said. “I couldn’t bear it any longer
being named after the people who oppress me.”
“You know as well as me you was named after your aunt Dicie,”
I said. Dicie is my sister. She named Dee. We called her “Big
Dee” after Dee was born.
“But who was she named after?” asked Wangero.
“I guess after Grandma Dee,” I said.

“And who was she named after?” asked Wangero.
“Her mother,” I said, and saw Wangero was getting tired.
“That’s about as far back as I can trace it,” I said. Though, in
fact, I probably could have carried it back beyond the Civil War
through the branches.
“Well,” said Asalamalakim, “there you are.”
“Uhnnnh,” I heard Maggie say.
“There I was not,” I said, “before ‘Dicie’ cropped up in our
family, so why should I try to trace it that far back?”
He just stood there grinning, looking down on me like
somebody inspecting a Model A car. Every once in a while he
and Wangero sent eye signals over my head.
“How do you pronounce this name?” I asked.
“You don’t have to call me by it if you don’t want to,” said
Wangero.
“Why shouldn’t I?” I asked. “If that’s what you want us to call
you, we’ll call you.”
“I know it might sound awkward at first,” said Wangero.
“I’ll get used to it,” I said. “Ream it out again.”
Well, soon we got the name out of the way. Asalamalakim had a
name twice as long and three times as hard. After I tripped over
it two or three times he told me to just call him Hakim-a-barber.
I wanted to ask him was he a barber, but I didn’t really think he
was, so I didn’t ask.
“You must belong to those beef-cattle peoples down the road,” I
said. They said “Asalamalakim” when they met you, too, but
they didn’t shake hands. Always too busy: feeding the cattle,
fixing the fences, putting up salt-lick shelters, throwing down
hay. When the white folks poisoned some of the herd the men
stayed up all night with rifles in their hands. I walked a mile
and a half just to see the sight.
Hakim-a-barber said, “I accept some of their doctrines, but
farming and raising cattle is not my style.” (They didn’t tell me,
and I didn’t ask, whether Wangero [Dee] had really gone and
married him.)
We sat down to eat and right away he said he didn’t eat collards

and pork was unclean. Wangero, though, went on through the
chitlins and corn bread, the greens and everything else. She
talked a blue streak over the sweet potatoes. Everything
delighted her. Even the fact that we still used the benches her
daddy made for the table when we couldn’t afford to buy chairs.
“Oh, Mama!” she cried. Then turned to Hakim-a-barber. “I
never knew how lovely these benches are. You can feel the
rump prints,” she said, running her hands underneath her and
along the bench. Then she gave a sigh and her hand closed over
Grandma Dee’s butter dish. “That’s it!” she said. “I knew there
was something I wanted to ask you if I could have.” She jumped
up from the table and went over in the corner where the churn
stood, the milk in its clabber by now. She looked at the churn
and looked at it.
“This churn top is what I need,” she said. “Didn’t Uncle Buddy
whittle it out of a tree you all used to have?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Uh huh,” she said happily. “And I want the dasher, too.”
“Uncle Buddy whittle that, too?” asked the barber.
Dee (Wangero) looked up at me.
“Aunt Dee’s first husband whittled the dash,” said Maggie so
low you almost couldn’t hear her. “His name was Henry, but
they called him Stash.”
“Maggie’s brain is like an elephant’s,” Wangero said, laughing.
“I can use the churn top as a centerpiece for the alcove table,”
she said, sliding a plate over the churn, “and I’ll think of
something artistic to do with the dasher.”
When she finished wrapping the dasher the handle stuck out. I
took it for a moment in my hands. You didn’t even have to look
close to see where hands pushing the dasher up and down to
make butter had left a kind of sink in the wood. In fact, there
were a lot of small sinks; you could see where thumbs and
fingers had sunk into the wood. It was beautiful light yellow
wood, from a tree that grew in the yard where Big Dee and
Stash had lived.
After dinner Dee (Wangero) went to the trunk at the foot of my

bed and started rifling through it. Maggie hung back in the
kitchen over the dishpan. Out came Wangero with two quilts.
They had been pieced by Grandma Dee and then Big Dee and
me had hung them on the quilt frames on the front porch and
quilted them. One was in the Lone Star pattern. The other was
Walk Around the Mountain. In both of them were scraps of
dresses Grandma Dee had worn fifty and more years ago. Bits
and pieces of Grandpa Jarrell’s Paisley shirts. And one teeny
faded blue piece, about the size of a penny matchbox, that was
from Great Grandpa Ezra’s uniform that he wore in the Civil
War.
“Mama,” Wangero said sweet as a bird. “Can I have these old
quilts?”
I heard something fall in the kitchen, and a minute later the
kitchen door slammed.
“Why don’t you take one or two of the others?” I asked. “These
old things was just done by me and Big Dee from some tops
your grandma pieced before she died.”
“No,” said Wangero. “I don’t want those. They are stitched
around the borders by machine.”
“That’ll make them last better,” I said.
“That’s not the point,” said Wangero. “These are all pieces of
dresses Grandma used to wear. She did all this stitching by
hand. Imagine!” She held the quilts securely in her arms,
stroking them.
“Some of the pieces, like those lavender ones, come from old
clothes her mother handed down to her,” I said, moving up to
touch the quilts. Dee (Wangero) moved back just enough so that
I couldn’t reach the quilts. They already belonged to her.
“Imagine!” she breathed again, clutching them closely to her
bosom.
“The truth is,” I said, “I promised to give them quilts to
Maggie, for when she marries John Thomas.”
She gasped like a bee had stung her.
“Maggie can’t appreciate these quilts!” she said. “She’d
probably be backward enough to put them to everyday use.”

“I reckon she would,” I said. “God knows I been saving ’em for
long enough with nobody using ’em. I hope she will!” I didn’t
want to bring up how I had offered Dee (Wangero) a quilt when
she went away to college. Then she had told me they were old-
fashioned, out of style.
“But they’re priceless!” she was saying now, furiously; for she
has a temper. “Maggie would put them on the bed and in five
years they’d be in rags. Less than that!”
“She can always make some more,” I said. “Maggie knows how
to quilt.”
Dee (Wangero) looked at me with hatred. “You just will not
understand. The point is these quilts, these quilts!”
“Well,” I said, stumped. “What would you do with them?”
“Hang them,” she said. As if that was the only thing
you coulddo with quilts.
Maggie by now was standing in the door. I could almost hear
the sound her feet made as they scraped over each other.
“She can have them, Mama,” she said, like somebody used to
never winning anything, or having anything reserved for her. “I
can ’member Grandma Dee without the quilts.”
I looked at her hard. She had filled her bottom lip with
checkerberry snuff and it gave her face a kind of dopey,
hangdog look. It was Grandma Dee and Big Dee who taught her
how to quilt herself. She stood there with her scarred hands
hidden in the folds of her skirt. She looked at her sister with
something like fear but she wasn’t mad at her. This was
Maggie’s portion. This was the way she knew God to work.
When I looked at her like that something hit me in the top of my
head and ran down to the soles of my feet. Just like when I’m in
church and the spirit of God touches me and I get happy and
shout. I did something I never had done before: hugged Maggie
to me, then dragged her on into the room, snatched the quilts
out of Miss Wangero’s hands and dumped them into Maggie’s
lap. Maggie just sat there on my bed with her mouth open.
“Take one or two of the others,” I said to Dee.
But she turned without a word and went out to Hakim-a-barber.

“You just don’t understand,” she said, as Maggie and I came out
to the car.
“What don’t I understand?” I wanted to know.
“Your heritage,” she said. And then she turned to Maggie,
kissed her, and said, “You ought to try to make something of
yourself, too, Maggie. It’s really a new day for us. But from the
way you and Mama still live you’d never know it.”
She put on some sunglasses that hid everything above the tip of
her nose and her chin.
Maggie smiled; maybe at the sunglasses. But a real smile, not
scared. After we watched the car dust settle I asked Maggie to
bring me a dip of snuff. And then the two of us sat there just
enjoying, until it was time to go in the house and go to bed.
SHERMAN ALEXIE (B. 1966)
THIS IS WHAT IT MEANS TOSAY PHOENIX,
ARIZONA 1993
Just after Victor lost his job at the BIA,20 he also found out
that his father had died of a heart attack in Phoenix, Arizona.
Victor hadn’t seen his father in a few years, only talked to him
on the telephone once or twice, but there still was a genetic
pain, which was soon to be pain as real and immediate as a
broken bone.
Victor didn’t have any money. Who does have money on a
reservation, except the cigarette and fireworks salespeople? His
father had a savings account waiting to be claimed, but Victor
needed to find a way to get to Phoenix. Victor’s mother was just
as poor as he was, and the rest of his family didn’t have any use
at all for him. So Victor called the Tribal Council.
“Listen,” Victor said. “My father just died. I need some money
to get to Phoenix to make arrangements.”
“Now, Victor,” the council said. “You know we’re having a
difficult time financially.”

“But I thought the council had special funds set aside for stuff
like this.”
“Now, Victor, we do have some money available for the proper
return of tribal members’ bodies. But I don’t think we have
enough to bring your father all the way back from Phoenix.”
“Well,” Victor said. “It ain’t going to cost all that much. He had
to be cremated. Things were kind of ugly. He died of a heart
attack in his trailer and nobody found him for a week. It was
really hot, too. You get the picture.”
“Now, Victor, we’re sorry for your loss and the circumstances.
But we can really only afford to give you one hundred dollars.”
“That’s not even enough for a plane ticket.”
“Well, you might consider driving down to Phoenix.”
“I don’t have a car. Besides, I was going to drive my father’s
pickup back up here.”
“Now, Victor,” the council said. “We’re sure there is somebody
who could drive you to Phoenix. Or is there somebody who
could lend you the rest of the money?”
“You know there ain’t nobody around with that kind of money.”
“Well, we’re sorry, Victor, but that’s the best we can do.”
Victor accepted the Tribal Council’s offer. What else could he
do? So he signed the proper papers, picked up his check, and
walked over to the Trading Post to cash it.
While Victor stood in line, he watched Thomas Builds-the-Fire
standing near the magazine rack, talking to himself. Like he
always did. Thomas was a storyteller that nobody wanted to
listen to. That’s like being a dentist in a town where everybody
has false teeth.
Victor and Thomas Builds-the-Fire were the same age, had
grown up and played in the dirt together. Ever since Victor
could remember, it was Thomas who always had something to
say.
Once, when they were seven years old, when Victor’s father
still lived with the family, Thomas closed his eyes and told
Victor this story: “Your father’s heart is weak. He is afraid of
his own family. He is afraid of you. Late at night he sits in the

dark. Watches the television until there’s nothing but that white
noise. Sometimes he feels like he wants to buy a motorcycle and
ride away. He wants to run and hide. He doesn’t want to be
found.”
Thomas Builds-the-Fire had known that Victor’s father was
going to leave, knew it before anyone. Now Victor stood in the
Trading Post with a one-hundred-dollar check in his hand,
wondering if Thomas knew that Victor’s father was dead, if he
knew what was going to happen next.
Just then Thomas looked at Victor, smiled, and walked over to
him.
“Victor, I’m sorry about your father,” Thomas said.
“How did you know about it?” Victor asked.
“I heard it on the wind. I heard it from the birds. I felt it in the
sunlight. Also, your mother was just in here crying.”
“Oh,” Victor said and looked around the Trading Post. All the
other Indians stared, surprised that Victor was even talking to
Thomas. Nobody talked to Thomas anymore because he told the
same damn stories over and over again. Victor was embarrassed,
but he thought that Thomas might be able to help him. Victor
felt a sudden need for tradition.
“I can lend you the money you need,” Thomas said suddenly.
“But you have to take me with you.”
“I can’t take your money,” Victor said. “I mean, I haven’t
hardly talked to you in years. We’re not really friends
anymore.”
“I didn’t say we were friends. I said you had to take me with
you.”
“Let me think about it.”
Victor went home with his one hundred dollars and sat at the
kitchen table. He held his head in his hands and thought about
Thomas Builds-the-Fire, remembered little details, tears and
scars, the bicycle they shared for a summer, so many stories.
Thomas Builds-the-Fire sat on the bicycle, waited in Victor’s
yard. He was ten years old and skinny. His hair was dirty
because it was the Fourth of July.

“Victor,” Thomas yelled. “Hurry up. We’re going to miss the
fireworks.”
After a few minutes, Victor ran out of his house, jumped the
porch railing, and landed gracefully on the sidewalk.
“And the judges award him a 9.95, the highest score of the
summer,” Thomas said, clapped, laughed.
“That was perfect, cousin,” Victor said. “And it’s my turn to
ride the bike.”
Thomas gave up the bike and they headed for the fairgrounds. It
was nearly dark and the fireworks were about to start.
“You know,” Thomas said. “It’s strange how us Indians
celebrate the Fourth of July. It ain’t like it
was our independence everybody was fighting for.”
“You think about things too much,” Victor said. “It’s just
supposed to be fun. Maybe Junior will be there.”
“Which Junior? Everybody on this reservation is named Junior.”
And they both laughed.
The fireworks were small, hardly more than a few bottle rockets
and a fountain. But it was enough for two Indian boys. Years
later, they would need much more.
Afterwards, sitting in the dark, fighting off mosquitoes, Victor
turned to Thomas Builds-the-Fire.
“Hey,” Victor said. “Tell me a story.”
Thomas closed his eyes and told this story: “There were these
two Indian boys who wanted to be warriors. But it was too late
to be warriors in the old way. All the horses were gone. So the
two Indian boys stole a car and drove to the city. They parked
the stolen car in front of the police station and then hitchhiked
back home to the reservation. When they got back, all their
friends cheered and their parents’ eyes shone with pride. You
were very brave, everybody said to the two Indian boys. Very
brave.”
“Ya-hey,” Victor said. “That’s a good one. I wish I could be a
warrior.”
“Me, too,” Thomas said.
They went home together in the dark, Thomas on the bike now,

Victor on foot. They walked through shadows and light from
streetlamps.
“We’ve come a long ways,” Thomas said. “We have outdoor
lighting.”
“All I need is the stars,” Victor said. “And besides, you still
think about things too much.”
They separated then, each headed for home, both laughing all
the way.
Victor sat at his kitchen table. He counted his one hundred
dollars again and again. He knew he needed more to make it to
Phoenix and back. He knew he needed Thomas Builds-the-Fire.
So he put his money in his wallet and opened the front door to
find Thomas on the porch.
“Ya-hey, Victor,” Thomas said. “I knew you’d call me.”
Thomas walked into the living room and sat down on Victor’s
favorite chair.
“I’ve got some money saved up,” Thomas said. “It’s enough to
get us down there, but you have to get us back.”
“I’ve got this hundred dollars,” Victor said. “And my dad had a
savings account I’m going to claim.”
“How much in your dad’s account?”
“Enough. A few hundred.”
“Sounds good. When we leaving?”
When they were fifteen and had long since stopped being
friends, Victor and Thomas got into a fistfight. That is, Victor
was really drunk and beat Thomas up for no reason at all. All
the other Indian boys stood around and watched it happen.
Junior was there and so were Lester, Seymour, and a lot of
others. The beating might have gone on until Thomas was dead
if Norma Many Horses hadn’t come along and stopped it.
“Hey, you boys,” Norma yelled and jumped out of her car.
“Leave him alone.”
If it had been someone else, even another man, the Indian boys
would’ve just ignored the warnings. But Norma was a warrior.
She was powerful. She could have picked up any two of the
boys and smashed their skulls together. But worse than that, she

would have dragged them all over to some tipi and made them
listen to some elder tell a dusty old story.
The Indian boys scattered, and Norma walked over to Thomas
and picked him up.
“Hey, little man, are you okay?” she asked.
Thomas gave her a thumbs up.
“Why they always picking on you?”
Thomas shook his head, closed his eyes, but no stories came to
him, no words or music. He just wanted to go home, to lie in his
bed and let his dreams tell his stories for him.
Thomas Builds-the-Fire and Victor sat next to each other in the
airplane, coach section. A tiny white woman had the window
seat. She was busy twisting her body into pretzels. She was
flexible.
“I have to ask,” Thomas said, and Victor closed his eyes in
embarrassment.
“Don’t,” Victor said.
“Excuse me, miss,” Thomas asked. “Are you a gymnast or
something?”
“There’s no something about it,” she said. “I was first alternate
on the 1980 Olympic team.”
“Really?” Thomas asked.
“Really.”
“I mean, you used to be a world-class athlete?” Thomas asked.
“My husband still thinks I am.”
Thomas Builds-the-Fire smiled. She was a mental gymnast, too.
She pulled her leg straight up against her body so that she
could’ve kissed her kneecap.
“I wish I could do that,” Thomas said.
Victor was ready to jump out of the plane. Thomas, that crazy
Indian storyteller with ratty old braids and broken teeth, was
flirting with a beautiful Olympic gymnast. Nobody back home
on the reservation would ever believe it.
“Well,” the gymnast said. “It’s easy. Try it.”
Thomas grabbed at his leg and tried to pull it up into the same
position as the gymnast. He couldn’t even come close, which

made Victor and the gymnast laugh.
“Hey,” she asked. “You two are Indian, right?”
“Full-blood,” Victor said.
“Not me,” Thomas said. “I’m half magician on my mother’s side
and half clown on my father’s.”
They all laughed.
“What are your names?” she asked.
“Victor and Thomas.”
“Mine is Cathy. Pleased to meet you all.”
The three of them talked for the duration of the flight. Cathy the
gymnast complained about the government, how they screwed
the 1980 Olympic team by boycotting.21
“Sounds like you all got a lot in common with Indians,” Thomas
said.
Nobody laughed.
After the plane landed in Phoenix and they had all found their
way to the terminal, Cathy the gymnast smiled and waved good-
bye.
“She was really nice,” Thomas said.
“Yeah, but everybody talks to everybody on airplanes,” Victor
said. “It’s too bad we can’t always be that way.”
“You always used to tell me I think too much,” Thomas said.
“Now it sounds like you do.”
“Maybe I caught it from you.”
“Yeah.”
Thomas and Victor rode in a taxi to the trailer where Victor’s
father died.
“Listen,” Victor said as they stopped in front of the trailer. “I
never told you I was sorry for beating you up that time.”
“Oh, it was nothing. We were just kids and you were drunk.”
“Yeah, but I’m still sorry.”
“That’s all right.”
Victor paid for the taxi and the two of them stood in the hot
Phoenix summer. They could smell the trailer.
“This ain’t going to be nice,” Victor said. “You don’t have to
go in.”

“You’re going to need help.”
Victor walked to the front door and opened it. The stink rolled
out and made them both gag. Victor’s father had lain in that
trailer for a week in hundred-degree temperatures before anyone
found him. And the only reason anyone found him was because
of the smell. They needed dental records to identify him. That’s
exactly what the coroner said. They needed dental records.
“Oh, man,” Victor said. “I don’t know if I can do this.”
“Well, then don’t.”
“But there might be something valuable in there.”
“I thought his money was in the bank.”
“It is. I was talking about pictures and letters and stuff like
that.”
“Oh,” Thomas said as he held his breath and followed Victor
into the trailer.
When Victor was twelve, he stepped into an underground wasp
nest. His foot was caught in the hole, and no matter how hard he
struggled, Victor couldn’t pull free. He might have died there,
stung a thousand times, if Thomas Builds-the-Fire had not come
by.
“Run,” Thomas yelled and pulled Victor’s foot from the hole.
They ran then, hard as they ever had, faster than Billy Mills,
faster than Jim Thorpe, faster than the wasps could fly.
Victor and Thomas ran until they couldn’t breathe, ran until it
was cold and dark outside, ran until they were lost and it took
hours to find their way home. All the way back, Victor counted
his stings.
“Seven,” Victor said. “My lucky number.”
Victor didn’t find much to keep in the trailer. Only a photo
album and a stereo. Everything else had that smell stuck in it or
was useless anyway.
“I guess this is all,” Victor said. “It ain’t much.”
“Better than nothing,” Thomas said.
“Yeah, and I do have the pickup.”
“Yeah,” Thomas said. “It’s in good shape.”
“Dad was good about that stuff.”

“Yeah, I remember your dad.”
“Really?” Victor asked. “What do you remember?”
Thomas Builds-the-Fire closed his eyes and told this story: “I
remember when I had this dream that told me to go to Spokane,
to stand by the Falls in the middle of the city and wait for a
sign. I knew I had to go there but I didn’t have a car. Didn’t
have a license. I was only thirteen. So I walked all the way,
took me all day, and I finally made it to the Falls. I stood there
for an hour waiting. Then your dad came walking up. What the
hell are you doing here? he asked me. I said, Waiting for a
vision. Then your father said, All you’re going to get here is
mugged. So he drove me over to Denny’s, bought me dinner,
and then drove me home to the reservation. For a long time I
was mad because I thought my dreams had lied to me. But they
didn’t. Your dad was my vision. Take care of each other is what
my dreams were saying. Take care of each other.”
Victor was quiet for a long time. He searched his mind for
memories of his father, found the good ones, found a few bad
ones, added it all up, and smiled.
“My father never told me about finding you in Spokane,” Victor
said.
“He said he wouldn’t tell anybody. Didn’t want me to get in
trouble. But he said I had to watch out for you as part of the
deal.”
“Really?”
“Really. Your father said you would need the help. He was
right.”
“That’s why you came down here with me, isn’t it?” Victor
asked.
“I came because of your father.”
Victor and Thomas climbed into the pickup, drove over to the
bank, and claimed the three hundred dollars in the savings
account.
Thomas Builds-the-Fire could fly.
Once, he jumped off the roof of the tribal school and flapped his
arms like a crazy eagle. And he flew. For a second, he hovered,

suspended above all the other Indian boys who were too smart
or too scared to jump.
“He’s flying,” Junior yelled, and Seymour was busy looking for
the trick wires or mirrors. But it was real. As real as the dirt
when Thomas lost altitude and crashed to the ground.
He broke his arm in two places.
“He broke his wing,” Victor chanted, and the other Indian boys
joined in, made it a tribal song.
“He broke his wing, he broke his wing, he broke his wing,” all
the Indian boys chanted as they ran off, flapping their wings,
wishing they could fly, too. They hated Thomas for his courage,
his brief moment as a bird. Everybody has dreams about flying.
Thomas flew.
One of his dreams came true for just a second, just enough to
make it real.
Victor’s father, his ashes, fit in one wooden box with enough
left over to fill a cardboard box.
“He always was a big man,” Thomas said.
Victor carried part of his father and Thomas carried the rest out
to the pickup. They set him down carefully behind the seats, put
a cowboy hat on the wooden box and a Dodgers cap on the
cardboard box. That’s the way it was supposed to be.
“Ready to head back home?” Victor asked.
“It’s going to be a long drive.”
“Yeah, take a couple days, maybe.”
“We can take turns,” Thomas said.
“Okay,” Victor said, but they didn’t take turns. Victor drove for
sixteen hours straight north, made it halfway up Nevada toward
home before he finally pulled over.
“Hey, Thomas,” Victor said. “You got to drive for a while.”
“Okay.”
Thomas Builds-the-Fire slid behind the wheel and started off
down the road. All through Nevada, Thomas and Victor had
been amazed at the lack of animal life, at the absence of water,
of movement.
“Where is everything?” Victor had asked more than once.

Now when Thomas was finally driving they saw the first
animal, maybe the only animal in Nevada. It was a long-eared
jackrabbit.
“Look,” Victor yelled. “It’s alive.”
Thomas and Victor were busy congratulating themselves on
their discovery when the jackrabbit darted out into the road and
under the wheels of the pickup.
“Stop the goddamn car,” Victor yelled, and Thomas did stop,
backed the pickup to the dead jackrabbit.
“Oh, man, he’s dead,” Victor said as he looked at the squashed
animal.
“Really dead.”
“The only thing alive in this whole state and we just killed it.”
“I don’t know,” Thomas said. “I think it was suicide.”
Victor looked around the desert, sniffed the air, felt the
emptiness and loneliness, and nodded his head.
“Yeah,” Victor said. “It had to be suicide.”
“I can’t believe this,” Thomas said. “You drive for a thousand
miles and there ain’t even any bugs smashed on the windshield.
I drive for ten seconds and kill the only living thing in Nevada.”
“Yeah,” Victor said. “Maybe I should drive.”
“Maybe you should.”
Thomas Builds-the-Fire walked through the corridors of the
tribal school by himself. Nobody wanted to be anywhere near
him because of all those stories. Story after story.
Thomas closed his eyes and this story came to him: “We are all
given one thing by which our lives are measured, one
determination. Mine are the stories which can change or not
change the world. It doesn’t matter which as long as I continue
to tell the stories. My father, he died on Okinawa in World War
II, died fighting for this country, which had tried to kill him for
years. My mother, she died giving birth to me, died while I was
still inside her. She pushed me out into the world with her last
breath. I have no brothers or sisters. I have only my stories
which came to me before I even had the words to speak. I
learned a thousand stories before I took my first thousand steps.

They are all I have. It’s all I can do.”
Thomas Builds-the-Fire told his stories to all those who would
stop and listen. He kept telling them long after people had
stopped listening.
Victor and Thomas made it back to the reservation just as the
sun was rising. It was the beginning of a new day on earth, but
the same old shit on the reservation.
“Good morning,” Thomas said.
“Good morning.”
The tribe was waking up, ready for work, eating breakfast,
reading the newspaper, just like everybody else does. Willene
LeBret was out in her garden wearing a bathrobe. She waved
when Thomas and Victor drove by.
“Crazy Indians made it,” she said to herself and went back to
her roses.
Victor stopped the pickup in front of Thomas Builds-the-Fire’s
HUD house.22 They both yawned, stretched a little, shook dust
from their bodies.
“I’m tired,” Victor said.
“Of everything,” Thomas added.
They both searched for words to end the journey. Victor needed
to thank Thomas for his help, for the money, and make the
promise to pay it all back.
“Don’t worry about the money,” Thomas said. “It don’t make
any difference anyhow.”
“Probably not, enit?”
“Nope.”
Victor knew that Thomas would remain the crazy storyteller
who talked to dogs and cars, who listened to the wind and pine
trees. Victor knew that he couldn’t really be friends with
Thomas, even after all that had happened. It was cruel but it
was real. As real as the ashes, as Victor’s father, sitting behind
the seats.
“I know how it is,” Thomas said. “I know you ain’t going to
treat me any better than you did before. I know your friends
would give you too much shit about it.”

Victor was ashamed of himself. Whatever happened to the tribal
ties, the sense of community? The only real thing he shared
with anybody was a bottle and broken dreams. He owed Thomas
something, anything.
“Listen,” Victor said and handed Thomas the cardboard box
which contained half of his father. “I want you to have this.”
Thomas took the ashes and smiled, closed his eyes, and told this
story: “I’m going to travel to Spokane Falls one last time and
toss these ashes into the water. And your father will rise like a
salmon, leap over the bridge, over me, and find his way home.
It will be beautiful. His teeth will shine like silver, like a
rainbow. He will rise, Victor, he will rise.”
Victor smiled.
“I was planning on doing the same thing with my half,” Victor
said. “But I didn’t imagine my father looking anything like a
salmon. I thought it’d be like cleaning the attic or something.
Like letting things go after they’ve stopped having any use.”
“Nothing stops, cousin,” Thomas said. “Nothing stops.”
Thomas Builds-the-Fire got out of the pickup and walked up his
driveway. Victor started the pickup and began the drive home.
“Wait,” Thomas yelled suddenly from his porch. “I just got to
ask one favor.”
Victor stopped the pickup, leaned out the window, and shouted
back. “What do you want?”
“Just one time when I’m telling a story somewhere, why don’t
you stop and listen?” Thomas asked.
“Just once?”
“Just once.”
Victor waved his arms to let Thomas know that the deal was
good. It was a fair trade, and that was all Victor had ever
wanted from his whole life. So Victor drove his father’s pickup
toward home while Thomas went into his house, closed the door
behind him, and heard a new story come to him in the silence
afterwards.

A and p
In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits. I’m in
the third checkout slot, with my back to the door, so I don’t see
them until they’re over by the bread. The one that caught my
eye first was the one in the plaid green two-piece. She was a
chunky kid, with a good tan and a sweet broad soft-looking can
with those two crescents of white just under it, where the sun
never seems to hit, at the top of the backs of her legs. I stood
there with my hand on a box of HiHo crackers trying to
remember if I rang it up or not. I ring it up again and the
customer starts giving me hell. She’s one of these cash-register-
watchers, a witch about fifty with rouge on her cheekbones and
no eyebrows, and I know it made her day to trip me up. She’d
been watching cash registers for fifty years and probably never
seen a mistake before.
By the time I got her feathers smoothed and her goodies into a
bag — she gives me a little snort in passing, if she’d been born
at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem —
by the time I get her on her way the girls had circled around the
bread and were coming back, without a pushcart, back my way
along the counters, in the aisle between the checkouts and the
Special bins. They didn’t even have shoes on. There was this
chunky one, with the two-piece — it was bright green and the
seams on the bra were still sharp and her belly was still pretty
pale so I guessed she just got it (the suit) — there was this one,
with one of those chubby berry-faces, the lips all bunched
together under her nose, this one, and a tall one, with black hair
that hadn’t quite frizzed right, and one of these sunburns right
across under the eyes, and a chin that was too long — you
know, the kind of girl other girls think is very “striking” and
“attractive” but never quite makes it, as they very well know,
which is why they like her so much — and then the third one,
that wasn’t quite so tall. She was the queen. She kind of led
them, the other two peeking around and making their shoulders
round. She didn’t look around, not this queen, she just w alked
straight on slowly, on these long white prima-donna legs. She

came down a little hard on her heels, as if she didn’t walk in her
bare feet that much, putting down her heels and then letting the
weight move along to her toes as if she was testing the floor
with every step, putting a little deliberate extra action into it.
You never know for sure how girls’ minds work (do you really
think it’s a mind in there or just a little buzz like a bee in a
glass jar?) but you got the idea she had talked the other two into
coming in here with her, and now she was showing them how to
do it, walk slow and hold yourself straight.
She had on a kind of dirty-pink — beige maybe, I don’t know —
bathing suit with a little nubble all over it, and what got me, the
straps were down. They were off her shoulders looped loose
around the cool tops of her arms, and I guess as a result the suit
had slipped a little on her, so all around the top of the cloth
there was this shining rim. If it hadn’t been there you wouldn’t
have known there could have been anything whiter than those
shoulders. With the straps pushed off, there was nothing
between the top of the suit and the top of her head except
just her, this clean bare plane of the top of her chest down from
the shoulder bones like a dented sheet of metal tilted in the
light. I mean, it was more than pretty.
She had sort of oaky hair that the sun and salt had bleached,
done up in a bun that was unravelling, and a kind of prim face.
Walking into the A & P with your straps down, I suppose it’s
the only kind of face you can have. She held her head so high
her neck, coming up out of those white shoulders, looked kind
of stretched, but I didn’t mind. The longer her neck was, the
more of her there was.
She must have felt in the corner of her eye me and over my
shoulder Stokesie in the second slot watching, but she didn’t
tip. Not this queen. She kept her eyes moving across the racks,
and stopped, and turned so slow it made my stomach rub the
inside of my apron, and buzzed to the other two, who kind of
huddled against her for relief, and then they all three of them
went up the cat-and-dog-food-breakfast-cereal-macaroni-rice-
raisins-seasonings-spreads-spaghetti-soft-drinks-crackers-and-

14RUNNING HEAD Content Design Factors in E-learning

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