47program after his first year (2004-2005) During that year, however, faculty

had learned of his intention to found a lutherie class at the rural high school where he taught. “Lutherie” is not even a word in common usage; it means “stringed-instrument building.” Tony was seemingly interested in combining his two passions: music (he was an accomplished guitarist) and teaching mathematics. As we learned during the visit, the school and the district and the community supported the program in varied ways. Tony had also been successful in securing grants for the work, and the district reportedly helped purchase a CNC (computer-numerical-controlled) router, which some students, we were told, had learned to program.

Context

After the site was nominated, researchers learned that Tony had indeed established the class and that it was operating successfully in 2007. Tony and the school leadership agreed to participate in the study, and in May 2008 we interviewed both the superintendent and the assistant principal, the two teachers involved in the lutherie class (including Tony), as well as a former teacher, parents, students, and community members without children currently in the school.

School and district. Lafayette County High School, enrolling over 1,000 students in grades 9-12, is a comprehensive four-year public high school. It is a Title I school, and about half the students are eligible to receive subsidized meals. Seven 50-minute periods comprise the instructional day. The Lafayette County School District (about 8,000 students) at this writing operates 8 elementary schools, 2 middle schools, 2 high schools, an adult education center, a preschool, and a community-education program for citizens 55 or older. The district, though rural, ranks among the largest 20 (of 176) in Kentucky. The school is located in the county seat.

Community. The county seat, however, operates its own school district, the Lafayette City Schools, which enroll about 1,500 students (and about 400 in the town high school). Such circumstances are common in rural Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia. There, the remaining “independent” town schools were more successfully defended from state consolidation efforts by local citizens enjoying generally more affluent circumstances in the previous century than schools out in the countryside; available census data suggests this differential, if it once existed here, no longer does (both county-district high schools have subsidized meal rates of about 50%, whereas town district’s high school has a rate of about 60%). Lafayette, both town (pop. ~ 13,000) and county (pop. ~ 48,000, exclusive of the town), retain a comparatively healthy rural economy, though neither the town nor the county district qualifies as “affluent,” except possibly by comparison with the destitute coal counties to the mountainous east.

as “the Ohio Navy,” according to one interviewee) come to the area each year, most during the summer (Wikipedia, 2010), and our interviewees, indeed, spoke repeatedly of the heavy summertime traffic on county roads and of the economic benefit of the lake. Interviewees also told us that Lafayette has become the central shopping location for County residents, and a medical hub, with its regional hospital. Unusually for rural places, then, both Lafayette City and Lafayette County exhibit steady population growth from 1800 through 2008 (Wikipedia, 2010). County population has increased nearly 60% since 1950, and the town population by 75%. A nearby coal county, famed for industrial unrest and union organizing, has, by contrast, lost nearly 55% of its 1950 population. Among rural counties, then, Lafayette County as a whole (including the town) has fared rather well: median household income in 2008 was about $33,000 and mean household income was about $45,000: 41% of households reported 2008 incomes below $25,000 and 42% reported between $25,000 and $75,000. By skin color, the population is 96% “white,” 2% “brown,” and 1% “yellow” (US Bureau of the Census, 2010).

Within a workforce of about 24,000 in 2008, employment in the county (including the town) is sharply concentrated in education and human services (7,000 employed). Other industries employing substantial proportions of local workers include manufacturing (4,000), transportation and related industries (3,000), recreation and related industries (2,000) and construction (2,000) (US Bureau of the Census, 2010).

Education. Lafayette County High School offers a reported 127 courses to students, including: Physics, Forensic Science, Economics, Equine Science, Agricultural Science, Studio Art, Banking and Financial Services, Legal and Medical Office, Network Administration, Travel and Tourism Marketing, Theatre and Drama and JROTC. The new County Area Technical Center offers five other programs for students likely to seek employment after high school: automotive technology, construction technology, health sciences, information technology, and welding technology. The Technical Center seems to enroll about 15 students in each program, under the tutelage of a single faculty member (inferences from suppressed website).

State accountability report cards show somewhat lower percentages of students at Lafayette County High School scoring at “proficient or distinguished” levels than the other County high school, which was recently ranked by US News and World Report (January 2010) among the “best” American high schools (“Bronze Medal,” source data suppressed). Lafayette County High School, however, despite a high proportion of students on subsidized meals, is judged by the State to be “progressing” towards the commonwealth goal of making all students “proficient or distinguished” by 2014. In other words, the school is not academically troubled. Current (2008) percentages of students judged “proficient or distinguished” by

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accountability tests are reading (grade 10, 54%); math (grade 11, 31%); science (grade 11, 47%); social studies (grade 11, 38%); and writing portfolio (grade 12) 45%. (Kentucky Department of Education, 2010).

Lafayette Community College is also located in the town of Lafayette. Indeed, the origins of the this two-year college rest with the Lafayette City Board of Education, which established Lafayette Technical College in 1940. The current school (with its six locations) is the result of a 2002 merger of three local postsecondary institutions (local reference suppressed to safeguard confidentiality). Again, Lafayette County—though no interstate runs through it—presents a somewhat unusual rural profile. One might also note that Berea College, famed for Appalachian cultural programming, is an hour’s drive distant (about 45 miles over secondary roads).

Of adult county residents, 76% have completed at least high school, as of 2008. About 24% of Lafayette residents have some postsecondary experience or an associate’s degree, and 14% at least a bachelor’s degree. In 2008, nearly as many residents (about 3,000) were enrolled in college or graduate programs at present as are enrolled in the county’s three high schools (US Bureau of the Census, 2010).

Themes

The themes identified here, as at other sites, relate to one another, often in nuanced and significant ways, and together suggest a single story about the connectedness of schooling to the local community, a story more to be inferred than definitively concluded, either from the themes or from a reading of the full transcript. It is a contested connectedness, as in most rural places. These themes are: (1) the evolving competence of youth; (2) frustration, patience, and problem-solving; (3) mathematical immanence and imminence; and (4) trespass to keep it together. The first two themes are easy to grasp, even given the evident contradictions and tensions, but themes three and four are more subtle and so interestingly contradictory that they might strike some readers as ambiguous or perhaps as too much of a stretch. These second themes, however, are the ones that most stitch up the story on view when data were gathered in 2008, in the eyes of the report author.

The evolving competence of youth.What are schools for? Neither pollsters nor researchers typically put this question to ordinary citizens, though sometimes local groups do ask selected citizens what sort of person (sometimes “product”) the schools should produce, or what “every student should know and be able to do.” We didn’t ask, either, but interviewees, both adults and high school students, did seem to offer a response, and this theme characterizes that response.

Those we interviewed expressed strong concern (in dozens of references) about competence to do something. These references, in this study, of course, all occur as commentary on involvement with the lutherie class, and so these views are tied to what the class seems to be doing, and doing unusually by comparison to what interviewees saw as the usual routine. The assistant principal, for instance, observed,

It has given us a little notoriety . . . because . . . we have parents now remembering when they went to school they built a little bookshelf and now here this, this child [is]… building not only a guitar but a very handsome guitar that ... is acoustically sound…. I think they’re amazed that a high school student is doing something in…what they [would] call “shop.”

Transcripts characterize this reaction from the community again and again. A former lutherie student, for instance, reported, “I’ve been in the paper a couple of times with my instruments and people just come up to me and they’re like, ‘Oh, it’s so amazing that you can do that.’” When asked about how she reacted when her daughter brought her dulcimer home, a parent responded: Well, I’ll tell you: I was very shocked. Now to begin with I got a letter coming in that said she was going to be recognized from the Chamber of Commerce and they actually had her dulcimer on display at several different places throughout the community. And I was really surprised to see the detail and the work on it.

The surprise to parents, to the Chamber of Commerce, and to the common readers of local newspapers seems to have been simply that their own children in their own school could create such subtle products as musical instruments. According to one interviewee, “They just can’t believe that… high school students can…do stuff like that.”

One parent summed up this awe with considerable insight and deep appreciation in the following interchange, which probed the interviewee about competence:

RESEARCHER:: She’s working on the guitar, and yet the Adirondack

chair sits unfinished. Why is that, do you think?

PARENT:: I mean, there’s some satisfaction probably to seeing that chair

sitting out on the porch but, I mean, that’s what it does: It sits there on the porch. It doesn’t really perform a function any different than any other lounge chair might. You know, when you take that dulcimer and you put in Tony Perdue’s hands and he tunes that…and plays music on it, it’s creating something. You know, that Adirondack chair doesn’t have a life of its own, doesn’t create anything, where those instruments, they have a life of their own that’s going to go on.

It seems, then, that the lutherie class has caught not only the attention of the community, but its imagination, arguably through the specific ways its final products connect to community life, and particularly, the ongoing evolution of local meanings.

As any creative worker knows, however, a finished tangible object ensues from a process of struggle. Doing good work is not simple, not easy, not fast, and it remains somewhat unsure at every step, even to seasoned workers—whose expertise perhaps consists in ways to deal with the inherent uncertainty. For such reasons and others, confronting the possibility of doing good work is, in fact, frightening for students, since the confrontation embeds the option or the possibility of doing bad work.

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