Shadow, Silence

With one exception, three of my professors assigned initial projects that required observing students in some form or another.  And all of us are required to write a demographic study--a kind of narrative about the school we're placed in.  So today I went into the belly of the beast, observing eight different classes and interviewing the school counselor and the principal.

Mostly I shadowed one student, Kailee, who I identified early on as a quiet kid with weak writing skills.  I wanted to know more about her.  I observed her in my Language Art Class (Laura was teaching), in a math class, in PE, in Woodshop and in Science class.  I mean, I observed the whole class (it wasn't like I was just sitting there staring at her the whole time, that would have been peculiar), but I paid particular attention to her, her interactions in the class with her peers and the teacher.

Kailee is a classic slips-through-the-cracks kid.  She is obedient, following instructions dutifully and pretty much immediately.  She looks at the board when something written on it; she attends to the textbook when she is supposed to; she writes when she is supposed to write.  She sits quietly and doesn't interrupt her peers.  She never talks back, mostly because she never talks.  And, more importantly, she is never spoken to.

Which brings me to the subject of wood shop.  Edison has a wood shop program.  And the more I think about it the more I think every child should take it (along with band and PE).  It has been in these contexts that I have seen children at Edison able to be themselves without (too much) fear of reprisal from adults.  This may have a lot to do with the great gentleness and generosity of the wood shop teacher, Brett Stall, or there may just be something about working with wood that just worked for a lot of these kids.  (Also: the very notion of wood shop is terrifying to me, all those little middle school fingers moving so quickly around all those very fast and sharp and care-less saws.  I don't know how Mr. Stall can do it without having repeated panic attacks.)

During wood shop, Mr. Stall spoke to Kailee on two separate occasions about the project she was working on.  The first time she had to wait with a group of boys to have a little chat; the second time she finished a task and then went to show him her progress and get further instruction.  He helped her measure a piece of wood, rearrange the letters in her name (she was making some sort of name plate) and get set up with a sander.

The two times that Kailee spoke with Mr. Stall were the only times she spoke to an adult during the entire day (at least as far as I was able to see).  Put another way: of the 6 adults whose classes she was in, only one spoke to her with any sense of interest, care or concern.  And that fact just about broke my heart.  When I shared that observation with Mr. Stall at the end of the day, he got this far away look about him, as though he was simultaneous glad and horrified--glad, I imagined, because he had passed the test, hadn't let the kid slip by, and horrified because he cared about the kids and his school, and he knew, in that moment, that this girl, who he saw and worked with every day, was, as we spoke, slipping through the cracks.