Preface
When I met Matt, he was a 5th grader and I was a first-year teacher. To Matt, school was irrelevant, and he told me so every day by writing that very word—spelled correctly and in red crayon—across the top of any assignment he found personally distasteful. More often than I can recount, Matt would then turn his red-crayoned message into a paper airplane and land it expertly on the top of my desk, causing my heart to sink and my frustrations to rise. I was stymied, as nothing I was told to do in my education courses—ignore his behavior, reward compliance, have a one-on-one meeting with Matt—worked. We had a very bad year … until March.
On a cold morning that could not rightfully be called spring in the northern New Hampshire town where I taught, Matt entered my classroom having just been sprayed by a skunk. It might be hard to believe, but this smelly incident changed my career and, I hope, Matt's education forever. Here's how.
Figure
Matt had been checking on his backyard "business" of maple sugar farming. Maple sap starts to flow as the days get a tad longer and warmer, and Matt was checking on the buckets attached to his sugar maples to see how much bounty he'd collected. He had signed contracts with neighbors to tap their trees in return for some of the syrup he and his dad would make from the collected sap that they distilled into sweet, liquid sugar. He was also trying (in vain) to sell his product at our town's single grocery store, but he couldn't do so without having his syrup OK'd for quality by the state department of agriculture. The skunk came into play due to the fact that maple sugaring season also happens to be mating season for these smelly carnivores, and Matt had inadvertently waltzed between two amorous skunks that were seeking a bit of privacy.
Matt and I talked (downwind) about this incident and decided, together, that maple sugar would become a main focus of his curriculum. This was hardly something I could have planned in advance; rather, it was my desperate attempt to salvage even a bit of learning from this misbegotten school year. So, from that day forward, Matt's math assignments changed from engaging in rote drills to more relevant tasks, such as making change and converting volume amounts. Reading and writing assignments involved filling out invoices and making posters to advertise his product. A major social studies assignment evolved into a photo essay highlighting his maple sugar farming skills (complete with an original script), presented in the now-quaint carousel slide projector technology of the 1970s. Science involved talking to a mentor from the community who was an established maple sugar farmer and would help Matt gain the state department of agriculture's stamp of approval (which happened two years later). Matt even spoke at a Rotary Club luncheon where, truth be told, he listened to old war stories and contributed a tasteless joke or two to the colorful discussion. All in all, we ended our time together that year on much sounder footing than how we began.
Was Matt an underachiever prior to this maple syrup epiphany? I think not. Rather, I believe Matt was "selective"—not "turned off"—when it came to his education. What Matt needed was a reason to learn, a reason to care about school, and a purpose that went beyond what he perceived as stale textbooks. Almost like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, Matt found the magic of learning to be right in his own backyard—not a Kansas cornfield but a New Hampshire sugar maple grove called home.
Today, Matt is living in Alaska among the woods he has always loved and is more than 50 years old. Thanks to Matt, I came to appreciate early in my career that "underachievement" is a whole lot more complex than just doing poorly in school. Its foundation is something much more basic: dignity, or the lack thereof, that kids such as Matt believe is absent from this educational enterprise we call school.
In the following pages, I wish to present you with a snapshot of underachievement that may look far different from what you envision it to be. While giving you practical solutions to reach these students, I ask you to open yourself up and allow a new perspective on this perplexing problem that has dogged the lives of smart, poorly performing kids for far too long.
One logistical point: throughout this book, you will read about the experiences of various students I've had the honor and pleasure to teach or counsel. Portions of some of these student examples have appeared in a few of my previous books (especially the cases of Marty and Sierra that I present in Chapter 1), and many of the examples I use are "composites" of several students whose individual stories are rolled into one story. I have no doubt that you'll also see several of your own students through my examples and the student quotes I've included throughout.
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