Inside Out: The Case of Max

Inside Out: The Case of Max

Max was short; not Tom Thumb but smaller than everyone else in his seventh grade class. He’d been living with relatives because his mother drank a lot and didn’t seem to notice when Max came or went, or was hungry. Max had never met his father. He was failing every class. Teachers described him as friendly, even tempered, usually present and singularly unconcerned about his grades. He couldn’t read very well and didn’t attend remedial reading classes. He refused to attend counseling sessions arranged by the school though an aunt encouraged him to do so.

I first learned about Max from my daughter Katie, one of Max’s classmates. Katie told me that Max was funny and nice; that everyone liked him and wondered why he never did his homework. Katie had invited Max home after school and wanted to know whether I would make cookies. She thought probably Max didn’t have homemade cookies very often. I was looking forward to meeting him.

There were small lumps of dough on the cookie sheet when they came in. We said hello and Max asked what I was doing. Cookies, I said; they’ll be ready soon. Max peered into the dough bowl and frowned in the direction of the cookie sheet: “How come they get to be cookies from those?” he asked, pointing toward the cookie sheet. I explained about raising agents. He concentrated, nodding with interest as I went along; then he wanted to know whether the cookie dough would rise up around the chocolate chips and walnuts, which didn’t have raising agents. I smiled at him and hugged him lightly, which he shrugged off though not convincingly, and we addressed his question. Max asked whether he could come back the next day. I phoned Max’s aunt and paid a call. She wanted to know why I’d bother. I explained that Max had talent and I might be able to catalyze it.

Thereafter Max visited often. We always had cookies and milk, and soon Max wanted to make the dough. He dreamed up recipes and experimented, and for a while had fun, but what really fascinated Max was my sewing machine. I had lots of threads that Max liked to organize variously by shades of color, by size, or by type. He liked the shine of the silky buttonhole threads and the filament ones made for sewing sequins but it was the machine itself that finally captured his imagination.

He watched as the thread moved along when I stitched, and peered for a long time at the machine moving and still. He asked me to show him how to thread the machine, what the bobbin was for, and then whether he could have a pencil and paper so he could draw the parts. I gave him a pencil, a pencil sharpener, an eraser and some paper. Once he’d made his sketches, I offered him the sewing machine manual and he pored over the illustrations. He wanted a folder for his own drawings and made one out of newspaper. I suggested he label the folder Max’s Work. “I like that,” he said, grinning for the first time, and drew an elaborate logo for his folder.

For some time after that, Max didn’t visit. Katie wanted to phone his aunt’s house but I knew better. “He’s in gestation,” I said. “Just give him time. “ His aunt phoned in frustration, saying Max had asked whether he could take apart her toaster and her iron, and whether she had the manuals, which she didn’t. But she did have an old toaster in the basement to relinquish. The next day Max phoned: How do you spell touch, he wanted to know. Then Max set the toaster up in a corner of his room along with a sign: Max’s Work. Please don’t touch.

Six weeks later Max came back as if no time had passed. He had a proper paper folder, which he’d made of construction paper and in which he had stored meticulous drawings of a toaster, an iron, an ironing board, a baby stroller, and a bicycle – all carefully labeled. He said he could see by looking how the ironing board, the stroller and the bicycle worked, but he didn’t know about the iron and toaster and demanded explanations. He said he’d asked people how to spell the words for his labels.

Phase Two: Max spotted a small computer on which I had booted SMILE, some discovery learning software from England. He wandered over and within minutes was once more asking for a pencil and paper – this time to record his experiments. SMILE software is best in class for engaging people and spurring them to raise questions - and there’s neither reading nor mathematics required though they are mathematical in nature and always inspire language. Within ten minutes, Max was hooked. He loved the programs and worked on them tirelessly for weeks. Katie joined in and soon several from the school were visiting and working on SMILE experiments.

You won’t be surprised that soon Max wanted to know how a computer works. I explained the basics but Max wanted to see for himself and take one apart. I retrieved an old Acorn from the basement and presented it to him in a worn travel bag. There aren’t words to describe the shine in his eyes or Max’s pride when he picked up the case and said, “Is this really mine?” I got teary and laughed and drove Max back to his aunt’s house. Max hugged that bag all the way home.

That was in early November, and we didn’t see Max again until just before Christmas when he showed up with a thick box that held dozens of drawings – of appliances, buildings, machines, cars, a piano, a motorcycle. “There are too many things to draw,” he grumbled, “and things I could make. What am I supposed to do now?”

“What would you like to do?” I asked.

“I’d like to teach everyone how a computer works and how to use SMILE software,” he said. A few days later we went to school and arranged for Max to show SMILE software to his math teacher, and they made a plan to prepare for Max to do an assembly about the computer and the software. Thereafter Max was in school every day. He did all his homework, complaining to me and Katie that he was often bored but never unhappy, and began to participate enthusiastically in class discussions. For Christmas I gave Max a professional technical drawing set, some fine paper and a sketch pad, and all of it in a portfolio-type carrying case. I’ve never seen anyone look so proud as Max did when he held it to him and said, “Thank you.”
_ _ _

Max changed course and pursued a constructive, learning life in a socially appropriate way. He had attended neither counseling nor remedial classes; rather, he had followed an orderly set of steps in intellectual development that he’d skipped as a child. He exchanged ideas in conversation, he observed, he drew; he raised questions which he understood and about which he cared - and he followed up on them. He moved from observation to documentation; from questions to experiments and on to higher order thinking and problem solving. He was moving along an orderly pathway and things felt right. Questions lead to work, and work leads to discovery, learning and new questions.

In that environment, internal discipline kicks in. No external discipline needed; you have to work hard to stop the process. Hard wiring predisposing us to pursue work is nature’s way of ensuring we learn - in order to get better and better at what we do, in order to compete successfully, and in order to take a place in society. All it takes is something that triggers a question. From there, the person will make an orderly, systematic and rigorous attempt to answer it. Unhindered, the pursuit of questions takes on a compelling life of its own.

All teachers can help students find work; it just takes learning how design or select materials that trigger questions, and knowing how to help people follow up to find answers.

Here’s an example from university level work. I taught Human Development in the Psychology Department of a small local college. I called the course Psychology through Literature. The curriculum was a few short stories and two novels (carefully chosen for the characters and the story). Students could choose what to read, and joined in groups to discuss. Inevitably, they came upon the characters’ behaviors and questioned it: why did they behave that way; what motivated them? I stepped in with suggestions for research, and they were away.

Students studied more psychology and roamed more widely in that class than in any other psychology class I’d ever taught using a standard curriculum and text books. Though the springboard materials differed, I used this approach in all the psychology courses I taught, and after three years, more of my students were accepted to graduate programs than any other group. It wasn’t my teaching; it was my understanding of how people learn.

You will see another example in The Case of David, on this blog site. Before I started working in this prison, the government’s Director of Prison Services bet me that instructional materials alone couldn’t reduce reoffending. I won that bet, thanks to the materials I’d designed. They were virtually cost free, being principally photocopy paper, but oh how carefully I designed what I drew onto them.

--Helen Kelly 26 January 2010