The back of the class kid

I have a student, let's call him Tom, who from day one of my class mastered the art of taciturnity. He's one of those teens for whom speaking is just too much to ask. Silent, back of the class all the time, barely ever cracks a smile. But he did his work and his home work and I figured I should just let him be. He also scored very high scores on all my tests, when the rest of the class was struggling to kick out 65's or 75's. Not a surprise that even though he's in a remedial class he scored very high on the January test as well. Clearly somewhere in the totally silent, introverted head of his was a brain.

Today I walked by his usual spot in the back of the room and glanced at his notebook. To my surprise it was filled with notes from my lecture, but more than that, he had created drawings of analogies related to my lesson. The respiratory system notes had a drawing of two men, one labeled "Cell" and the other a UPS delivery guy. The UPS delivery guy was delivering packages of "oxygen" to Cell guy. For my lecture on the digestive system he drew a factory robot and a conveyer belt, as it churned out digested molecules, clearly labeled in the notes "starch --> glucose, proteins --> amino acids."

These analogies were so clever I actually want to steal them for future use...

I then looked on his transcript. He's repeating a grade. On paper he's a very poor student. I spoke with his science teacher from last year and she shuddered. "Forget him," she said. "Not worth it."

This year has been hard. I did find myself a position and it's worlds better than being an ATR but I'm just a provisional hire, I have no job security, and some days it's hard to wake up to travel 1.5 hours one way to work. But things like this keep me encouraged. I realized that the silent, sullen back of the class kid in his own way was the one paying the most attention to me. That I has triggered in him an interest in science that wasn't previously there. There isn't a paycheck in the world that can equal the joy I felt flipping through his notebook today, and seeing everything I said in class reinterpreted into drawings.

http://nyceducator.com/2013/02/the-back-of-class-kid.html