I was never really a big fan of Shop class as a kid. You know what I’m talking about; that junior high school nightmare of woodworking, metal welding, and plastic cutting/ heating/bending. I think the only thing I successfully constructed in Shop during my entire middle school career was a plastic picture frame that only stayed in one piece because it was exactly that: a single piece of plastic that I found in the trash which happened to be the exact size of the picture that I wanted it to cover. Or at least it was after I took a pair of scissors to the picture itself. Paper is easier to cut than plastic, after all. Call it the Thinking Man’s approach to the problem.

Beyond that everything I drafted, glued, hammered, or soldered in Shop was a disaster. One day we were supposed to convert this miniature plan in our textbooks for a birdhouse or something into a full-scale blueprint before construction. I couldn’t figure out how to do the math and ended up just drawing another miniature birdhouse. Mr. Reese* asked me what I was doing and I said I was drawing it as a joke. He said “Ha, ha, very funny, if you don’t finish your real blueprint before the bell rings you’re getting a zero.”

Thank God my arch-enemy at that age, Todd Meshke, ran by five minutes later and yanked the lever under my drafting table, which made the top slam down on my hand. This was a popular trick amongst the upstanding young men in the class at that time, ranking right up there with atomic wedgies and the like. I ended up with three bashed fingers that were black and blue under the fingernails for the next three months (after that the nails all sort of rotted off by themselves and then re-grew—a process that made one of my sisters physically sick to watch). But at least I got out of having to turn in my appropriately converted full-scale birdhouse blueprint. In fact, looking back on it, that incident is probably what nudged my grade up from an “F” to a “D-.”

Now if you would have asked me back then what my problem was with this class, I would have shrugged my shoulders in wordless mystery. But I can tell you now: It was embarrassment. I didn’t have an interpreter in that class (not only because ADA laws didn’t exist back then, but also because I didn’t know ASL at that time). So I never really got too much out of the explanations that the other guys would pick up on in five minutes flat.

That wasn’t why I was embarrassed, though. There are certain things I just cannot make heads or tails out of—whether I have an interpreter or not—and math is one of them. Blueprints are another. It’s simply the way my brain is built. I’m not great at converting the abstract to the physical. Well actually that’s not entirely accurate, because all thought is abstract, so any expression of thought almost has to be physical (such as the words on this page, for example, which you can physically see).

What I really mean is that there are certain things that I can only understand by seeing and touching and feeling and experiencing—explanations and lectures before the fact won’t help much. Tell me about interest rates on credit cards, for example, and I’ll smile and nod cheerfully through the whole presentation. 22%? I’ll yell “Great!” and splurge away at Best Buy with no clue whatsoever as to what the hell I’m doing. It won’t be until after I see my first monthly bill (or even my second after letting the first month’s balance carry over) that I’ll freak out.

But once that happens, let me assure you, I most definitely won’t remain so shy about cutting plastic—in fact I’ll probably use the same scissors on my credit card that I used to hack up that photograph back in Shop class. I’m not lazy. I’m not irresponsible. I’m not dumb. I just don’t learn in the same way as all those other guys back in Shop apparently did. How do I know that this is true? I figured it out during the month Mr. Reese was sick.

I never found out what happened to him—I just heard years later that it was a long-term health problem. The sub who took over, Mr. Jay, was a much older guy… probably somebody who came temporarily out of retirement. He had a very easy and laid-back style of teaching. You could immediately see the difference between how these two men managed a classroom. Mr. Reese wasn’t a bad teacher or anything; far from it. It’s just that he was crisper, more abrupt, more by-the-book. Read this, draw that, build that. One, two, three. He had his classes divided down to the precise minutes allotted for each activity. And as you worked he’d ceaselessly pace the room, checking on everything, never leaving anything or anyone unsupervised for very long.

Mr. Jay had nowhere near that much speed. He stood only with great difficulty and seemed greatly relieved to reach the stool at the front of the classroom each morning. At first a lot of guys gave him a hard time, thinking he’d never be able to control the classroom. How wrong they turned out to be! All he had to do was sit down and work his magic.

Mind you now, I couldn’t actually follow most of his words, but I didn’t have to, because he made a much bigger show out of what he wanted us to understand than Mr. Reese could ever hope to be capable of. Let me give you an example: One day Mr. Jay brought this little plastic tube to class. It was maybe about as long as a common pen. He spent around ten minutes talking about the tube in that easy drawl of his. The exchange of energy between him and the class was incredible. In those ten minutes everyone there laughed twenty times. I’m talking bullies; real jerks—the types of students a teacher would dread having to face every day. Yet these guys were sitting there rapt with attention.

Anyway, at the end of his little drawl, Mr. Jay said something like, “Now for our next class, I bet you that I can take this plastic tube here and tie it in a knot.” Then he passed the tube around so we could see that it was hard plastic and not bendable in any way.

Now I’m not going to exaggerate here and say that everyone left the class debating how Mr. Jay would do this. It was a normal day, you know? By the time Gym rolled around two periods later, Todd Meshke was back to his usual bullshit, stealing Tony Suttcliffe’s shorts and whipping Wiffle balls at peoples’ heads. But the next day everyone in Shop was quiet and waiting patiently while Mr. Jay shuffled over to his stool and sat down. Mr. Jay didn’t have to tell anyone to pay attention or to get their books out or anything like that. He owned that classroom.

Long story short, Mr. Jay ended up simply holding the tube over a Bunsen burner that he borrowed from the science lab up the hall. He heated the tube until it turned red in the center and could be stretched out into a fine little thread, and then carefully tied it in a knot, just as he promised he would.

Looking back on it now, the thing I remember most about that class was the grins. It was obvious what Mr. Jay was going to do as soon as he lit the burner, but nobody minded the predictability. They appreciated how thoroughly they had been tricked.

No, not even that. They appreciated how thoroughly they had just been entertained.

Mr. Jay is probably the only guy who actually managed to teach me something about the subject of plastic in Shop class. He also taught me what kind of teacher I wanted to be, even though I couldn’t have told you back then that I would even end up being a teacher.

I also learned something else. I learned that I don’t like it when people approach the art of teaching in the same way that factory workers approach the construction of a standard cardboard box. This flap goes here, that flap goes there—one, two, three. Fold, tuck, seal.

In my head, I guess, I understand the need for terms such as a “curriculum plan,” and a “rubric” and “outcomes.” In this world of budgets, accountability, and manpower hours, these things are certainly important. But in my heart I harbor a growing irritation for people who speak only this language. And believe me, the feeling is mutual. You can see the hostility in their eyes. If it’s not meticulously mapped out to the point where it deprives both the teacher and student alike of every last vestige of enjoyment either one might have otherwise gotten out of a classroom, then it’s not really education. If it’s spontaneous and surprising, it’s not rigorous enough. A laugh of wonder or a grin can’t be converted to raw, hard data. Enjoyment can’t be used to track performance (“engagement,” on the other hand, can, but that’s primarily measured by “time on task,” and not by curiosity or awe).

I don’t know if I’m off base here or not, but I think we need to get back to the educational world that had enough room for Mr. Jay. Even if it sometimes seems that we’re falling behind everyone else in terms of performance; even if our deepest instincts tell us that real life is often not fun or easy or enjoyable, and we would be doing our children a disservice if we didn’t prepare them for such a world… we should still slow down and ask ourselves exactly what it is that we wish to accomplish. Do we want our students to actually understand and relate to what we teach them, or do we want to develop an educational system in which they’ll have to clock in and out every time they enter or leave the classroom?

Because if we keep on going like this, that might just end up being the only performance assessment we’ll have prepared ourselves to trust.

*All names have been changed.