Building Something from Nothing

“What do you see and why?” Upper Arlington High School IB Language & Literature HL teacher Sean Martin, asked. “What might this be about?”

“That guy might be a coal miner, in a town meeting,” one student offered, “and those guys are government leaders.” 

Martin nodded, asking for evidence.

“Well, the older gentleman is dressed up and that guy isn’t. He’s wearing clothes that are more blue collar.” 

The student’s voice trailed off, thinking, and another student jumped in, asserting confidently that the man was “obviously disagreeing.”

“Is that how they’re looking at him?” Martin asked, placing an emphasis on the word “is,” and in so doing, he extended an invitation for the student to look closer.

“Well look at the body language and the eyes,” the student clarified. “The woman, her eyes are looking at him.”

“So she’s looking at him, but you drew the conclusion that the audience was hostile,” Martin reminded her. “What led you to think that?”

“Well, now that I’m looking at it, maybe I don’t see hostility,” she said, scanning the image for clues. “I guess I started by looking at the man on the left, and there’s no emotion on his face so I thought…”

“Wait, he might be saying something unusual or unexpected…” someone else broke in. “All of them are focused up, looking up, and the guy standing is looking up too.”

“So you’re saying the expressions on the faces are important?”

“Yes.”

“He might be in between ideas,” the first student offered. “Maybe he just finished talking which is why the people next to him are staring at him, and the people in the back are looking forward.”

The lively dialogue continued. Mr. Martin was clearly using this moment as a training ground for future conversations about initial impressions, challenging students to use precise language to formulate arguments rooted in evidence. Once they gave their observations, he guided them to examine each quadrant of the painting, delving into the significance, or insignificance, of details, —the painter’s purpose and intent—debating how the story might change if they cropped out or photoshopped certain elements. He asked them to zoom out, and then to add or subtract people and objects, and then, to shift their view above or below. Each time, they hypothesized how the narrative might change, what the new scene would say, and whether or not it mattered.

Martin then brought up the standards of the course and asked them to explain how their thinking mapped back to what he was expected to teach. He wanted to connect their thinking to the language of thinking. Not too long after they started, the bell signaled a break. 

When they returned to their seats, IB Cultural Anthropology HL teacher—and Martin’s co-collaborator— Linda Carmichael, greeted students with a metacognitive reflection. 

“So I’m in class seeing the lessons too,” she started, deep in thought. “And I’m looking through each lesson and learning Mr. Martin’s curriculum alongside you. The whole time I’m sitting there thinking ‘how can I connect this to my curriculum or something I can present?’” 

Eyes, rapt with curiosity, looked at her. It wasn’t often a teacher admitted what she didn’t know.

“I will share what I heard,” she told them, “and hopefully build upon that a little bit in how we try to understand our first ethnography. When you read the text, you will immediately go and interpret things like you did with the painting…that’s what humans do,” she said. And then she continued, connecting the discussion she planned for the day to an activity they did the previous week, walking students across the bridge between past to present, between language, literature and cultural anthropology, between an individual world and the world. 

At one point, students giggled about the soap shrine they had set up by a classroom sink, and Mr. Martin leaned over to let me in on the joke. “So there was this story we read,” he started, but at that point, it didn’t matter. As they sat and giggled, I wasn’t sure who was more delighted, me or them. Only a couple weeks into the year, they had already made memories, they had already broken into laughter, they had already opened up the kind of space where learning happened collaboratively.

It’s pretty powerful to watch a group like that, to witness their journey to grow into themselves, especially after COVID. It doesn’t always happen for every class. Bells come quickly, distance feels safe, the business of knowing keeps pounding on the door with pressing matters that tend to get in the way, so when a group of strangers actually choose to mix and bond, to stop and giggle, to wonder and wander and share, while it can look a bit chaotic, or feel a little scary, the truth is, it’s also a recipe for magic. 

Martin and Carmichael are two of the most courageous educators I know, and this cohort of students happens to be uncharacteristically brave. Without having any idea what these next two years would bring them, each one lept, with faith, and committed to the task of building something from nothing. Studying words and language and culture, the heartbeat of what makes us human. 

I know their journey is just starting, but I’d say the road looks pretty good so far.