Chapter 4: Evidence and Appearances

The bus crossed into Florida somewhere around the state line marker on I-75 and I felt, without quite deciding to feel it, a specific lightening. Not relief exactly — relief implies a threat receding, and the things I was leaving in Charlotte were not threats so much as weights, the accumulated gravitational pull of a domestic situation and an institutional history that had been exerting force on my trajectory for years. What I felt was closer to the sensation of putting down something heavy that you have been carrying long enough to have forgotten you were carrying it, and then noticing, in the sudden absence of the weight, the specific shape of what you had been accommodating.

I shifted in the seat and looked at the flat Florida landscape beginning to assert itself outside the window — the scrub pine and the sand and the particular quality of light that was different from Carolina light in ways I couldn’t immediately categorize but registered as new — and I thought about school.

I had been a good student in the way that a person who is substantially more interested in what they are teaching themselves than in what they are being taught can still be a good student: by maintaining enough awareness of the official curriculum to perform competently when performance was required, while directing the majority of my actual attention toward whatever problem currently occupied the workbench or the computer or the notebook.

The teachers had found this arrangement variously tolerable and infuriating, according to their individual thresholds for a student who was clearly not paying attention and was equally clearly prepared to answer any question posed to them. Several of them had developed the specific habit of calling on me at moments they calculated to be maximally inconvenient — mid-problem on the workbench notebook, mid-chapter in the book I had inside the textbook, mid-calculation on the margin of whatever handout was in front of me — with the transparent intention of catching me unprepared and using the catching as grounds for the remedial attention they wanted to deliver.

I answered the questions. Not because I was performing attentiveness but because the questions, being about material I had read and processed before the class generally reached it, were answerable without requiring me to surface from whatever I was actually doing. I answered them in the precise minimum necessary to demonstrate the knowledge and then returned to what I had been doing, which I understood was itself a form of aggression in the eyes of certain teachers, because it made clear that the question had been a minor interruption rather than a significant event.

The school counselor, Mr. Vreeland, was the one adult in the building who had looked at my file and my class performance and the gap between them and drawn the correct conclusion. He called me into his office in the spring of my eighth-grade year and told me, without preamble, that he understood what I was doing and why, and that he was going to try to protect the space I needed to do it, but that I was going to have to give him something to work with.

I asked what he meant.

He said: stop doing it so visibly. They know you’re not listening. You know they know. The transaction is already adversarial and you’re maintaining it out of — he paused, searching for the word — principle, I think. And I understand the principle. But the principle is costing you institutional capital you might need later.

I thought about this and concluded he was right in his assessment of the situation and right that the correct response was adjustment rather than resistance, because resistance was a form of engagement and engagement was a cost I preferred to minimize. I became slightly less visible in my inattention. I tilted the notebook so the angle was less obvious. I positioned the book inside the textbook with more care.

The teachers remained variously tolerant, because Mr. Vreeland had conversations with several of them that I was not present for and whose content I never learned but whose effect was a reduction in the frequency of the pointed questioning. Not elimination — some of them were committed to the practice and Mr. Vreeland’s authority had limits — but reduction.

The situation was, in the two years following that conversation, approximately stable. I attended school. I performed when required. I conducted my actual education in the margins, on the computer at home, in Mrs. Langdon’s kitchen when the conversation turned technical. The school was a bureaucratic obligation I had learned to fulfill at minimum viable cost, and for two years that arrangement held.

The group project was assigned on a Tuesday in October, in the chemistry class taught by Mr. Hendricks, who was one of the teachers whose relationship with my visible inattention had not been improved by Mr. Vreeland’s conversations and who assigned the project in a way that suggested he had designed it specifically to produce problems for students who preferred to work independently.

Four students per group, topic assigned, presentation due in three weeks. The objective, as stated in the assignment sheet, was to demonstrate collaborative research and communication skills alongside the technical content.

My group was Torres, Briggs, and Wentworth. I had no prior working relationship with any of them and no particular impressions of them beyond what three years of proximate attendance had produced, which was the general knowledge that Torres was socially organized and the de facto leader of any group she was placed in, that Briggs followed Torres’s lead with the specific loyalty of someone whose social position was contingent on that alignment, and that Wentworth was good-natured and relatively capable but primarily interested in completing the assignment with the minimum friction necessary to get a passing grade.

I had no objection to any of these orientations. They were all rational responses to the incentive structure of a high school group project. My own orientation was to complete the project to the standard the assignment required, in the most efficient manner available, with the minimum expenditure of meeting time and the maximum ratio of actual work to discussion of actual work.

The collision was structural before it was personal.

Torres’s model for a group project was collaborative in the social sense: regular meetings, shared decision-making at every stage, the building of consensus that produced a unified product and, as a secondary output, the feeling of having done something together. This model required substantial investment of time in communication about the work in addition to the time spent on the work itself, and it distributed the decision-making across the group in a way that slowed the process but produced buy-in from all participants.

My model was parallel execution: divide the work into components according to each person’s strengths, execute independently, integrate at defined checkpoints, review the integrated product, deliver. This model required less total time, produced a higher-quality output per hour invested, and had the disadvantage of being experienced by people who preferred Torres’s model as cold and uncollegiate and probably arrogant.

I proposed my model at the first meeting. Torres proposed hers. The subsequent twenty minutes were the specific kind of discussion that produced no resolution because the two positions were not actually about the project — they were about the preferred mode of working together, and neither of us was going to find the other’s mode preferable by the end of a twenty-minute conversation.