A、Because she believed strongly in the value of reading. B、Because she was an English teacher and her own children had read a lo

(I): Good teachers can always find a way to encourage their students to work hard and learn well. That year, in the local school, there was a math teacher who became well known nationwide for her webpage stories. Today we have with us Irene Smith. She has worked with her students for more than ten years to research, write and illustrate those stories. Irene,(16)tell me, how does a multimedia and math teacher end up leading a project that has students write stories about local history?
(S): My lab is the high school’s multimedia lab. When developing my program, the district decided that they would like to have one room—my room—house all new technologies.(17)So ten years ago, I received several scanners that, at the time, cost about $1,100, and I wanted to have a project that put them to good use.(17)I asked my students to look for really old pictures that maybe their grandparents or their parents had in their possession. The first pictures that a student brought in were(17)in a box of maybe 80 photographs that her grandmother had in her attic.(17)Some of the photos were over a hundred years old! There were photographs of football players, sports activities, old buildings—just wonderful pictures. The kids loved seeing grandma in a bathing suit! So, that’s how the project started.(17)We started scanning the photos and we built ourselves a database. The second year we did the same thing: we brought in more photos, and we continued to scan.
(I): So, how did the story writing component come about?
(S): (18)I’m an advocate of reading, having four of my own children. When they were younger I read to them all the time, and today they are all strong readers. I thought, wouldn’t it be neat if one of the English teachers could have her students write stories that my students could associate with our old pictures.(18)We could then build these stories into webpages and post them on the Internet. Our third grades have local history in their curriculum so 1 thought that we could gear the project to them.
(I): I would imagine that this project would be a great way for an English teacher to pursue various teaching goals and standards.
(S): (19)In our school district, we have major assignments for each course called benchmarks. One of our English teacher’s benchmarks was a writing and research project. Thanks to Mrs. Happeny and her benchmark, we had about 100 students writing our stories that first year. Over the years we have had so much success with this project that I think that we are going to do it again this school year.
Now listen to the following recording and answer questions 16 to 19.
16. What was Irene’s project mainly about?
17. What did they do in the first year when the project started?
18. Why did Irene combine her project with reading and writing?
19. What does benchmark mean in her school?