Love Note
Posted by: ciswy in cliques, disappointment, fitting in, junior high school, middle school, tags: art class, bias, gender, gifted child, jocks, junior high school, left out, loner, shop class, stereotyping, the eighties, wood shop, young for your gradeby Tanya Foubert
Junior high school
It’s the mid 80’s. I’m 10 and in 7th grade.
I’m a loner and have been since nursery school. Even the idea of having a friend is completely foreign to me. My class is the amalgamation of the “smart” kids of the entire school district and we are all attending an full-time, every day “enrichment” program. It is 1.5 hours away by bus, meaning I leave home at 7:05am, well before sunrise for much of the school year. I am 2 years younger than all of my classmates. My entire wardobe consists of jewel-toned jogging suits and I am crowned with a bright red afro (thanks to an unfortunate haircut). I obsessively listen to the other kids but when I try to act social with them, even they can tell I’m mimicing. They think I’m a freak. In a classroom full of kids that were supposed to be like me… I’m still a freak.
I discover that I really enjoy working with my hands when we start taking wood shop. I’ve begged to be allowed to take weekly wood shop class with the boys, because my other choices are home economics and art, and I already know how to bake, use a sewing machine and have no artistic skill whatsoever. Reluctantly, the teacher grants me permission to join the class when my homeroom teacher intervenes on my behalf. I am delighted.
Wood shop is apparently a proving ground for the budding adolescent male, where the jocks suddenly are on equal academic footing with the nerds. The teacher belongs to the jock group, I can tell by the way he stands and who he jokes with, but beyond that classification the social nuances are lost on me. For once I’m so different I’m left completely alone… a girl isn’t worth the time of the jocks or the nerds.
We do different projects to learn to use the different tools, moving from hand tools to power tools and then onto the machines, giant sanders, saws, lathes. My success is mediocre, but I don’t care! It’s new and I love the smells and sounds and solitude of the projects. After a few weeks, the teacher tells us to prepare on graph paper a design to cut out on the jigsaw. Something with some curves and some straight edges, and he’ll approve the designs before we’re allowed to copy it onto a piece of wood. I spend the next week tracing and retracing the same design… a musical 1/8th note, where the note is a heart shape. I plan to carefully sand it and colour several different samples of the design for myself, trying to decide on what colour will look nicest hanging on my bedroom wall. I painstakingly draw more than a dozen of them, trying to get the
perfect balance of heart-to-stem, the heart shape proportional and not to fat, not to thin, the stem not so thick as to throw off the balance of the picture, the tail on the eighth note gracefully curved and angled.
Finally, the morning of the class arrives and I eagerly wait my turn, to have my design approved so I can pick out a piece of pine from the scrap bin and start work. I watch while the teacher nods and smiles at the jock’s designs, and sighs but approves the nerd’s designs. I present my own coloured master plan, on graph paper as specified, and wait.
The teacher frowns. His eyes narrow. I don’t know how to read it yet. Angrily, he gestures towards the drawing. “What is this supposed to be?”
“A love note!” I say proudly. I feel it is both clever and cute and am eager to learn how to use the jigsaw.
His face clenches, he crumples it up and tosses it in the waste-paper basket, tells me to sit at my desk. I’m too confused to cry while he steps into the next room, the art room, and speaks to the teacher briefly. I am shortly steered by the shoulder into art class, where I spend the remaining 6 weeks of the semester making a coil pot out of clay, my cheeks burning with shame because I still don’t know what I’ve done wrong.
The incident was never mentioned again.
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Did you ever figure out what happened?
Near as I can figure (and I’m pulling together similarities to other incidents since that had the same echo), he thought I was behaving inappropriately, almost hitting on him.
I think this is a good example of why we need to teach kids to demand answers. You should have at least asked somebody why you were shuffled off like that.
Well, since the teacher was one of the jocks too, it’s no wonder he was unable to look beyond his own big, fat ego to see a job well done. And to crumple it up and throw it in the trash like that was not only ignorant but cruel. I hope you eventually got to learn to use a jigsaw in the years that followed.
If it’s any consolation to you, he’s probably a balding, middle aged ‘has been’ with a beer belly by now! LOL
Hugs,
Steph