Hi all,
We are having a meeting about R.M.-9th tomorrow. Mom and dad will be there. (If he passes at least one class, apparently his parents will allow him to attend art camp.)
Can you please reply to me with a couple lines of feedback on R.M. and his recent performance in your class?
Thanks,
Henry, and the Educational Support Team
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Hi Henry,
I have not seen much from RM this quarter. He still sleeps through most class periods. Even when he is awake he is not engaging in any class work and leaves his materials behind every class. He is missing the last two summatives and is on track to not pass history 9. Let me know if you have any other questions.
Monica
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Henry,
We did a test yesterday in Earth Science. While his score on the factual part was ok, his score on the written or conceptual knowledge part was lacking. He very quickly scribbled some items down [hard to read and not altogether correct]. As far as participation goes, he still sleeps in class. When I ask him to wake up and engage, he pulls out his laptop. Then he denies doing it.
Evan Drown
Science Teacher
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Henry,
His behavior of late has required me to send him to the principal’s office. He has been poking a 10th grade student in the neck with a pencil. He needs to understand personal space and appropriate behaviors. RM is now between a 2 and a 3 for his grade; he is most probably going to fail with a 2 point something.
Sandra Wilson
Math Teacher
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Henry,
R is not without literary sensitivity. He quickly grasps complex texts, but he has not submitted enough work to earn credit for the course.
-Ellen
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Hey Henry, thanks for reaching out.
I know I can be a little, as one colleague recently put it, “verbose,” and I know you’ve intimated on a few occasions that shorter is better for these check-ins, so I’ll do my best to keep this brief.
R has his ups and downs. This quarter, he has spent an inordinate amount of time on a free choice sculpture of a rat. It began with a rather brutal mangling of clay a few weeks ago. Globs of clay littering the table where he’d worked. He “produced” nothing. All his starting material was torn up in shreds. And he left it there for me to clean up.
Digital art by Lew Holzman
The next class he did nothing but study pictures of rats on the internet, rats in every conceivable pose and location. A lot of New York City rats on or near banana peels. He kept flipping through images of rats. Exterminator ads popped up after a while. Then R asked me for a sixty-pound block of clay, which I obviously did not provide. I did supply a large block, perhaps ten pounds. He covered the clay with wet rags and sat on a stool with the clay on the bench and stared at it, entering almost a meditative state. Forty minutes passed. Other students, who’ve grown inured to his behavior over this year began approaching him to see if he was alive. When they touched him, he made the startled noise of maybe a dinosaur or frog. Then he unwrapped the clay and went to work, very finely this time, not like the assault from two days ago. Clay tool in his hand like a surgeon’s scalpel, he gouged and pared the material for over an hour (skipping lunch and the beginning of his next period). Then he was gone for a week (no reason given). Returning, he smashed his sculpture without even removing the rags. But he quickly rolled it out and started in again with the clay tools. He was sweating that day. There was another week of this.
Ultimately, what he ended with was quite astonishing. Haggard, cadaverous, a grey rodent appearing to hold the weight of the world on its spine. It reminded me of a wet Chinese rat I had seen in Hunan Province when I was a student. The figure made me very sad. He had created a texture on the rat’s fur that I had never seen before. It looked as delicate as thistledown. The whiskers (one of which was broken) held a cheekiness and a tragedy to them, jutting out awkwardly from the snout. And the teeth were sublimely detailed. Eyes like pits. Eyes seeming to follow an endless tunnel that bore light but never revealed its terminus. It was the best sculpture I’ve seen in my teaching career . . . 27 years. Shortly after finishing, another student came in and smashed the rat. Completely ruined it! That student said R had started it when R poked him in the neck with a pencil. I sent him to the office.
RM’s reaction was curious. He drew in a deep breath and then exhaled. Relief is what I thought he felt. Relief! How do you figure that? Destruction and rebirth even on the level of clay can take a toll on a person . . . I don’t know. Regardless, RM passes.
Yours,
Elena Baxter
Smoky Quartz 