“The steam engine!” someone shouted.

I let my aggravation over Christian’s continued defiance go as I met Sheldon’s eyes and mentally tallied Team Three.

“Which did what?” I called out, walking for the whiteboard again.

I heard a chair screech behind me as someone shot up. “It allowed a wide range of machines to be powered!”

I recognized Marcus’s voice and placed another point for Team One and one for Team Three on the board.

“What else?”

“The telegraph!” someone called.

“And what was its purpose?”

“To um…” The girl’s voice drifted off, while everyone else whispered in their groups or flipped through their notes.

“Come on,” I urged. “You’re heading for Earth, and your spaceship is out of control. You’re going to crash!” I shouted, a smile tilting my lips.

“Communicate over long distances using Morse code!” Dane called out, his eyes wide with excitement.

“They already could communicate over long distances by writing letters,” I challenged.

“But the telegraph was quicker!” he shouted, pointing his finger up in the air as if declaring war.

I laughed. “Good!” I praised, walking to the board and marking points.

Turning around, I walked back down the aisle, paying special attention to Christian.

“Now,” I started. “Imagine that you need a ride home, and cell phones don’t exist. How do you get home?” I asked.

“Find a phone,” Sidney Jane answered.

But I shot back. “The school’s closed, so you can’t use theirs.”

“Go to a business and use their phone,” Ryan Cruzate called out.

I shrugged. “No one answers when you call.”

“Walk home,” Shelby Roussel continued the problem-solving.

I nodded. “Okay, you got there, but you don’t have a key.”

“Sit your butt outside,” Marcus joked, a few kids joining in the laughter.

“It’s raining,” I argued again.

Trey Watts locked his hands behind his head. “Go to a friend’s and wait,” he suggested.

“They’re not home, either.” I winced with fake sympathy.

“Call someone —”

I stopped her with a head shake about the same time she realized we’d already been through that. The class laughed when they remembered that they don’t have cell phones in this scenario. How easy it was to forget that we no longer had something we didn’t realize we relied on so much.

And there really was no solution. You adjust and cope, but you can’t make it the same again.

I paced the aisle, feeling Christian’s silence like a deafening weight to my left.

“Now, we can survive without cell phones and microwaves,” I explained, “but advances in technology have obviously made life easier. To the point where, in some cases, we don’t know what we’d do without them.”

“If your mom – or dad – had a cell phone,” I went on, “you could’ve reached them wherever they were, no matter that they weren’t home. Now, we know what some of the big inventions during the Industrial Revolution were, and we know what they did, but what was the impact on our country and our daily lives after they came into existence?” I asked. “How did they make life easier? Or more difficult? How does new technology” – I raised my voice for emphasis – “forever change the course of our lives?”

I gazed around the room, seeing their contemplative expressions. I hoped they weren’t merely blank and that they were actually thinking.

Maybe I’d asked too many questions at once.

I glanced to Christian, who stared at me, looking very much like he had something to say but was holding back.

“Make a T-chart,” I ordered. “Label pros and cons and then put your pencils down.”

The students did what was asked of them. They opened their notebooks to a blank page, drawing one line down the middle and one across the top and labeling the two sections.

After they’d replaced their pencils on their desks, I went on.

“Revolution usually means quick, dramatic change,” I pointed out. “Do you think the Industrial Revolution was aptly named? Were the changes in production and distribution fast, or were they a steady development over time?”

I walked up the last aisle and stopped. “Christian, what do you think?”

He shook his head, looking bored. “I think it was fast, I guess.”

“Why?”

He dropped his eyes, mumbling, “I don’t know.”

I got closer. “You don’t have to know.” I kept my voice light. “Tell me what you think.”

His eyes shot up to mine. “I don’t know,” he repeated, his voice turning angry.

“It was decades,” I shot out, knowing I was close to overstepping my bounds. One of the first things you learn about classroom management is to never call out a student in front of the class.

But I needed a reaction out of him. I needed him to do something. To say something.

“Is that fast or steady, Christian? What do you think?”

“It’s all about perspective, I guess!” he barked. “Humans are, like, two hundred thousand years old, so yeah, a lot of advancement in only a few decades would be fast,” he argued. “Some civilizations in history barely made any progress in generations, while others a lot. Everyone’s frame of reference is different!”