When “Things Not Seen” was published in the year 2001, it offered a new hook into the world of those children in middle school – the children in seventh and eight grades who are usually aged between 12 and 14.
This is the age when children encounter an entirely different management system, and they usually end up acting stunned by the changes that take place both at their home and at their school.
It seems that practically overnight, the 12-14 year-old who is Andrew Clements’s reader finds that he or she is earning much less in terms of smiles and pats on the back from both parents and teachers. They have suddenly grown into more difficult creatures who are less adorable and less malleable. It often seems to them that their parents see them as big imposters who have replaced the adorable and malleable little children that everyone loved to have around on the rug.
At school, these kids are suddenly being managed in bigger and more anonymous middle schools under rotating teachers who are each working with hundreds of other middle-school students.
Everything in the first day of middle school then in one day becomes anti-familial. This is in stark contrast of the elementary school that the student just emerged from, where the classroom emulates a young family with the teacher as an anchoring parent. And at home during the elementary school period, things had been twice as familial as compared to what happens just a little later on.
But then in middle school, there are kids in the classroom who are on “meds.” Ritalin (methylphenidate) is still the cultural drug of our time for the middle-school student. It tones the student down and makes him or her more pliant in the environment of the classroom. This classroom today has become very agenda-driven and so more serious against any competition from the individual student versus the class plan. The acidic-based Ritalin is supposed to turn a student who is entirely too visible in the classroom into more of a non-intrusive invisible factor – the invisible protagonist Bobby in Clements’s “Things Not Seen.”
In our American tradition, neither Huckleberry Finn nor Tom Sawyer were nearly that invisible, and neither were Annie Oakley nor Amelia Earhart, and Horatio Alger was the opposite of invisible. But these prototypes of American youth were of a different era when Americans with great showmanship wrested power from the Europeans to command the world’s center stage. Today’s public schools work to do away with their stage-stealing Huckleberry Finns, Tom Sawyers, Annie Oakley’s, Amelia Earhart’s and Horatio Lagers.
Today it is more of a picture of Ritalin and the general public-school environment working to make the American student quieter and more passive. At the same time that while the schools are making a lot of Americans turn into drugged duds, the work in the nation has been absorbed by stronger and more daring owners from more energized places in the world.
A couple of years ago, while I was visiting a middle school in one beaten-up Californian county that had over 15 percent unemployment, I was happy that the principal – who had an “Ed.D” which allowed herself to be called a “doctor” – was interested in talking with me about students who “act out.” In a time when the family is helpless and unemployed, there would surely be more occasions of the middle-school students reacting against the invisibility of an entire family. Talking has now become an antagonist against the invisibility of silence.
The Ed.D “doctor” agreed with me on the term of “acting out,” but her solution was to expel all the students who were doing that. She accompanied her report with body language of moving the students out, by jerking her thumb over her shoulder.
This makes the classroom scene easier, of course, by just expelling the noisy ones. But my problem in understanding all this is that I don’t come from a teaching background or any place where silence is successful. In New York City, where I lived before moving to California, all the most successful places I had been to were also the noisiest. In some Wall Street trading places, it is noisier than hell.
A decade later, “Things Not Seen” comes on as strong as ever. Andrew Clements brilliantly diagnosed the pacified and Ritalin-drugged American middle-school student in his “Things Not Seen.” In the book, the only person who can recognize an “invisible” student is a blind girl. Clements comprehensively captured the feeling of panic of what his reader goes through when invisibility in a middle school gets close to extinguishment.
Even our present vocabulary holds us back when we attempt to describe the advantages of an assertive student over an extinguished student. Today when you even bring up the idea of “assertive students,” you conjure the image of a gang of “assertive students” waiting to jump the teacher when he or she tries to go home. But that’s not being assertive; that’s being an ass.
Chris Sharp- Commentary
Chris Sharp is an Educator and a prize-winning professional writer. He has recently published a new book titled His com“Dangerous Learning: The New Schooling in California.” mentaries represent his own opinions and not necessarily the views of any organization he may be affiliated with or those of the West Ranch Beacon.