She sits in the far right corner of my classroom, arms folded over chest, hair falling over eyes. She never makes eye contact, she never asks for help, and she certainly doesn't talk to me or smile. When I walk around the class, as I do frequently, checking for understanding, she has the arm block perfected, body hunched over, arm curled around her workspace, a defeated embrace that prevents me from assessing her ability. At the end of class, she shoves all that work into her notebook and shuffles away, leaving me with no measure of her progress. She has been the one I simply cannot reach. I have made jokes, appealed, cajoled, smiled, begged, coddled, and scolded. Each of my attempts at reaching her and gaining her trust have been met with the same sullen wall of blank apathy.
This is exactly the kind of student who shakes me to my core. I have prided myself on winning over the difficult ones, calming the anxious ones, and enlightening the befuddled ones. Am I not the teacher I thought I was? What am I doing wrong? Driving home each night, my stomach churns as I rerun the class, trying to decide if I lost her or I bore her. Perhaps I didn't explain the concept clearly enough and her attitude is just a front to mask confusion? Or is it that she knows all this material already and she's frustrated with the slow pace of a GED class? There's no telling really; she's not enlightening me no matter how I've questioned and I won't force the issue for fear of driving her away. If nothing else, her attendance is regular and she does what's asked of her even if she won't let me see the work.
This has been our uncomfortable biweekly dance for the last 3 months until just this week, when a slight shift occurred. This week, as our final science lesson, I taught a lesson on ecosystems. As usual, her narrowed eyes fixed intently on the wall somewhere slightly to the right and above me as I taught. As usual, her face didn't flicker, her expression didn't change. When I divvied up the class into groups to work on creating food webs featuring different biomes, she participated. Slowly and sullenly, but obediently, she began the project, reading the packet on temperate deciduous forests that I assigned her group. Even when I made my offhand remark to the class, "If you aren't artists, that's fine. Just write the names of the organisms in your web. However, if any of you are blessed with any artistic talent, the walls of my office are pretty bare. I'd love to see some pictures," I didn't notice any shift in the atmosphere.
Something happened as I was making my rounds, though. I worked my way through the classroom, quietly muttering things like, "the arrow points to the consumer," and, "are you sure manatees eat fish; I'm pretty sure they're herbivorous." I happened to catch a glimpse of a corner of her food web that had snuck out from underneath the wall of her arm. Oh! A deer! And what a beautiful deer it was. "You're so talented!" I exclaimed. Apparently, that wasn't the right thing to say either because she frowned and quickly hid even the corner of her page away from me again. A quarter of an hour later class was over and I collected the food webs, thanking those who had put illustrations in theirs and remarking how nice they would look on my office walls. The web she slid across the desk to me was beautiful. Each creature was drawn with remarkable skill and vivid personality: a squirrel, deer, a wolf, even an earthworm. It was such a work of art that I showed it off to the subsequent two GED classes who were doing the same project as an example of what they could attain to.
The next class period, I thanked her again, telling her I had used her lovely web as an example for my other classes. If I thought that would melt her icy expression, I was wrong. She didn't say anything in return and she didn't appear to warm to me at all. And her attitude? Well, it didn't seem to change a bit either. Another 3 hour class went by just as all the others. At the end of the evening, as I wrapped up class and said my goodbyes and have-a-great-weekend's to everyone, she hung back in her corner, clutching her stack of books and avoiding my gaze. Finally, as the last of her chatting classmates trickled out through the door, she walked up to me, thrust a piece of paper into my hands and hurried out into the hall. In shock, I surveyed the sheet of scratch paper. Most of it was taken up with side work from solving 2-step equations with integers but on it were two drawings: an exquisitely detailed illustration of a proud dragon curled up in the right hand corner of the page and the head of an animated wolf in the opposite corner. For once, my drive home was joyous; what a relief! And do you know what I did yesterday? I hung a food web, a dragon, and a wolf on my office wall.
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