The best work in my classroom for two straight years belonged to a girl I marked down for silence. This is the long version of my correction.
October of 1995, sixth period, and I had her piece up on the board rail in front of nineteen kids.
It was a gouache study of the underside of a bridge, the Layton one, and it was better than anything I had gotten out of a high school junior in six years, and I was showing it off partly for her and mostly for me.
“Marnie. Talk about your color choices here.”
“They’re the colors it was.”
“Okay — but you’ve pushed the greens. Why did you push the greens?”
She looked at it a while. Nineteen kids waiting.
“I didn’t push them,” she said. “That’s what’s under there.”
And she sat down, and Renae Ondrejko said something to break it up, and we moved on to the next one, and I remember standing there with a grease pencil in my hand feeling like I’d asked a bricklayer to explain a wall.
For thirty years my sentence about Marnie Vukovich was three words. I said it in that building, I said it at the state conference in Harrisburg, and I said it twice to a superintendent: she isn’t trying.
I could have handed you the documentation, and in a public school documentation is the whole religion. She did not turn in a written reflection all year, either year. She did not enter the county show. She would not put a title on anything, and when I told her a title was required she wrote Bridge on the tag, and when I told her that wasn’t a title she wrote Bridge again. She missed the March first portfolio deadline, which was the state scholarship portfolio, which I had been telling that building since her sophomore year she was going to win. And when it passed she did not come see me. She did not explain, or apologize, or make an excuse I could have worked with. She came to class the next Monday and started something new.
I am sixty-two. I retired in June after thirty-seven years and I cleaned that room out myself over two days, and the last thing in it was a filing cabinet I had not opened since the Clinton administration.
In my basement in Dunbar Township, on a shelf behind the Christmas boxes, there is a black presentation case, twenty by twenty-six, twelve of her pieces sleeved inside it and a blank statement sheet on top. It has been down there since June of 1996. Thirty years. She has never known I have it.
The vo-tech’s fiftieth is the eleventh of October and they have asked me to hang a show of student work going back to 1976, and I want those twelve on that wall more than I have wanted anything professionally in a decade, and I have not asked her, and the reason I have not asked her is something this page is going to have to contain.
The four letters showed up on a Tuesday in February of 2014 at a district in-service, which is where all the good things happen.
Deb Salvucci ran guidance for twenty years and she was at my table with a coffee, and we were talking about a junior of mine who was going to fail out of a program he was the best kid in, and Deb said, not even looking up, “Oh, he’s an ISFP. We get about one a year and we lose about one a year.”
I said something rude about horoscopes for people who can’t meet a deadline. Deb laughed and let it go, because she was good at her job.
What happened next was nothing, for twelve years, and I can account for that. I had a three-word sentence about Marnie Vukovich and it had been load-tested. It got me through a lot of Marches.
ISFP vs INFP: Two Drawers
There were two of them in that section and I graded them the same and I was wrong twice.
Renae Ondrejko sat one table over from Marnie for two years. Same March first deadline, same blank space in the submission log, same conversation with me in the hall in April where neither one of them said anything I could use.
In June, clearing the flat files, I pulled both drawers.
Marnie’s had twelve pieces in it. Finished, sleeved, dated in pencil on the back in the corner the way I taught them, in order. A complete portfolio, ready to go, requiring nothing but four sentences and a signature. The statement sheet was in there, blank, uncreased.
Renae’s had forty-one pieces in it and not one of them was done. The same seated figure eleven times. Four versions of one page with the horizon moved. A thing she’d started in October and gone back into in November and again in February, which I know because she used a different pencil each time and told me so, at length, twice.
I put both drawers in the same category for three decades: girls who didn’t turn it in.
If you had set those two drawers in front of me in June of 1996 and asked me to write down the difference, I’d have written neither one turned it in and gone to lunch. It took me until this July to get the rest of it, and I only got it because I finally had the time to sit down.
Start with what the two of them share, because that is the whole reason the mistake is available to a person. Each of those girls carried a valuation of the work — a settled, exact, wholly private sense of what a thing was — and neither one would put it up for a vote. Not defiance. In two years neither of them raised her voice at me one time. There was a reading, arrived at somewhere I had no key to, and the fact that I was the adult holding the grease pencil did not move it a millimeter.
Now the difference. Degree has nothing to do with it and neither does temperature. The difference is where that valuation gets aimed.
Marnie’s is aimed at the object on the table, and it shuts. This panel, this hand, today. She had a firm view about which of those twelve were any good and she had finished having it, and once she had finished having it there was nothing left to do with them.
Renae’s is aimed at everything the work could still turn into, and it will not shut, because shutting forecloses. There is a fortieth version because the thirty-ninth ruled nothing out. She has an MFA from 2006, she adjuncts at a branch campus and works a garden center in spring, and she is on a body of work she began in 2011, and when I called her in July she told me for twenty minutes about a direction it might go and she was happy the whole time.
Now hand each girl the other one’s drawer. Marnie carrying the proliferation has nothing finished to withhold, so there is no refusal, so there is no story. Renae carrying the closing turns something in that October, takes the eleven hundred dollars, and spends thirty years never finding out what she is for.
The other eighteen in that room: four to the Army, three to Penn State branch campuses, one who runs the biggest excavating outfit in the county now and drives past that building twice a day, two to the state prison at Fayette on the guard side, one dead in 2004, one who does hair in Uniontown and cuts mine, three I lost entirely, and four still in Connellsville doing something I never found out. That is a class. Every year is a class. I stopped keeping the ones who worked out in a separate part of my head around 2002 because it was making me a worse teacher.
ISFP Traits: What She Would and Would Not Say
Everything in a public school runs through a rubric, and a rubric has four columns, and the columns that year were Advanced, Proficient, Basic, Below Basic. You put the criteria down the left side and you score across, and the whole thing rests on one assumption, which is that the work can be turned into the columns without anything falling out.
Marnie Vukovich scored Advanced on execution every single time and Below Basic on reflection every single time, for two years, and I want you to look at that and understand that I filed it as inconsistent effort.
She was not quiet. This is the part I got backwards. Ask her about One Shot versus the water-based and you will be there fifteen minutes. Ask her to hold a quill and show a kid the pull and she is patient past what I could manage. What she would not do is say a thing about the work that she did not think was true, and the reflection column is built entirely out of sentences a seventeen-year-old does not believe. This piece demonstrates my growth as an artist. She would leave it blank before she would write that.
I took it as sullenness for two years, because sullenness was in my columns and this was not.
The titles were the same fight in miniature. The county show entry form has a line for title and the line is not optional, and I told her that, and she wrote Bridge. I said a title is how the work introduces itself. She said it was a bridge. I said that was a label and not a title, and could she give me something with some thought behind it, and she took the tag back and wrote Bridge again in the same handwriting and handed it to me, and she did not look one bit pleased with herself, and that is the detail I would ask you to keep. She was not being smart. There was a thing on the paper and she was not going to put a different thing on the paper.
I have graded four hundred kids who would have written anything I asked for. They would have written This piece demonstrates my growth as an artist in a heartbeat and gone to lunch, and I gave every one of them a four in that column, and I never once asked whether they meant it.
The one time I pushed hard was in January of that senior year. I sat her down after school and told her she was going to lose the scholarship over four sentences and that four sentences was nothing, that it was a form, that nobody read them, that I would write it for her and she could sign it.
She said, “Then it’d be yours.”
I said something about how that was not the point. And she said okay, and she sat there another minute, and then she said she had to catch the bus.
ISFP Strengths and Weaknesses: The Meeting in May
The strength is not complicated and I have never had trouble saying it. That girl could see. The drawing was a consequence. She could look at the underside of a bridge in November light and put down what was in front of her instead of what a person knows is there, which is the thing you cannot teach and which I have watched four hundred kids fail to learn.
There was a boy in that section named Chris Tarr who could not get a face to sit on a neck, and I had worked with him for a year, and I had said everything I know how to say about the cylinder and the pit of the throat. In February Marnie came around the table on her way somewhere, stopped, put one finger about an inch off his paper without touching it, and said, “Your ear’s too low. Ears run eye to nose.” Then she kept walking. That was the whole intervention. He fixed it that afternoon and he never had the problem again and he does tattoo work in Uniontown now and has told that story to me twice.
And she was fast, and she did not agonize, and she did not perform.
Now the other half, and it comes off the same spool. If your only instrument for what is true is your own reading of the thing in front of you, then a form is a machine for making you lie, and you will not operate it, and every good in this world that comes through a form goes to somebody else.
The eleventh of May, 1996. Deb Salvucci’s office, second floor, the chair with the bad caster.
We were doing co-op recommendations and the shop in Scottdale had one slot and I had two kids for it. And Deb had the folder open and said, “What about Vukovich,” and looked at me.
And I said: “Marnie doesn’t finish things.”
I want to be exact, because a woman who softens this is writing herself a card. It was not a considered professional judgment and it did not come out of me tired. It came out of me hot. I had told that building for two years that this girl was going to be the first state medal that program ever had, and I had said it in a meeting with the superintendent in the room, and on the first of March she made me a person who oversells her kids. And in that chair with the bad caster it felt good to be right about her, and I said the sentence, and Deb wrote it down, because Deb wrote everything down, and the slot went to Chris Tarr.
I never told anybody that. Not Gary. Nobody, for thirty years, until this paragraph.
ISFP Under Stress: The Only Time I Saw Her Cold
Twice a year that program had a thing called the review, where a panel of three came in and scored the kids against a checklist and gave them a number.
Marnie’s junior review, spring of ’95, went sideways because a man from an ad agency in Greensburg spent nine minutes explaining to her that hand lettering was a dead trade and that she needed to be on a computer, and he was not unkind about it, and he was mostly right about 1995.
She did not argue. What she did was go absolutely flat, and then she started grading him. She asked him what he had made lately. She asked what the last thing was that he did with his hands. She said, in that room, that the type on his own business card was set wrong and told him why, in about forty words, correctly. Sixteen years old. Then she sat there with her hands in her lap.
The descriptions of this type do not prepare you for that, and here is the thing they leave out: at the end of its rope, the soft one goes hard.
What comes out is a sudden accounting. A ledger nobody in the room knew was being kept, read off in a level voice, landing on the one place a man is thin. It is not temper and it does not blow over. What is coming out is the private valuation, which had been running the whole time on everything in that room including him, finally said out loud because he had made it worth the saying.
I apologized to that man in the hallway and he was decent about it. Marnie got a four on execution and a one on professionalism at that review, and I wrote the one, and she never mentioned it. I have thought since about which of the two of them I should have apologized to.
Twice a year for two years and that is the only time I ever saw it. The rest of the time she was the easiest kid in that room to have around, which is why the review threw me and why I filed it as an outburst rather than as information.
And a thing said plainly, since I sat in an office for thirty-seven years and watched teenagers and mostly guessed. A bad stretch that passes is a bad stretch. When it does not pass — when the flatness stays for months, when it stops being about anything that happened — that is not a personality type and it is not artistic temperament. No teacher is the right instrument for it, and neither is one word on this page. It wants a physician, or somebody licensed to do therapy, and I will take the bluntness over the elegance here.
ISFP Behavior: A Truck Door in Connellsville
Her shop is on a side street off Crawford Avenue. She opened it in 2004. She letters fire apparatus for departments in four counties, she does gold leaf on storefront glass, and in the summer she does dirt-track cars, which she calls the fun money.
I went the second week of July, four weeks after I cleaned out my room. I had told Gary I was going to the Giant Eagle in Connellsville, which was true in the sense that I did also go to the Giant Eagle.
The front is a counter and a rack of paint and a calendar with the whole fall blocked out in pencil. The back has two bays and a compressor and a bench about eleven feet long that is the cleanest surface I have ever seen in a working shop. There is no sign on that building. She has never had a sign on that building, which every letterer I have ever met thinks is hilarious, and she thinks is fine.
She had a pumper door up on sawhorses and she was laying gold size, and she talked at me the whole time, easy, the way you talk to somebody’s mother in a waiting room. About the size and how long you let it come to tack — she puts a knuckle to it, she doesn’t time it. About the man in Ohio she gets the leaf from and how he is eighty-one and has not raised his price since 2019. She asked about Gary’s back. She asked whether they ever fixed the ventilation in the kiln room and I said they took the kiln out in 2011 and she said, “Huh,” and that was all she had about that.
I had a speech worked up in the car and I did not use one word of it.
I asked her about the first of March, 1996.
“The sheet,” she said. She did not look up. “Yeah. It wanted me to say those were better than the ones before. They weren’t. The fall ones were better. I told you that.”
“You never told me that.”
“I did. In the hall.” She checked her tack with a knuckle. “You said the fall ones were juvenile.”
“Marnie, it was a form.”
“I know what it was.” She got the book of leaf out and opened it. “I wasn’t going to put my name on it.”
I said something about the scholarship, and about the co-op slot, and I got about three sentences into it before I realized I was arguing with her about her own life on her own sawhorses. And she let me finish, and then she said:
“I saw the case up on your shelf when I came back to do the demo. The one with the leaf ones in it.”
“That was 2009.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I figured you were using them with the kids.”
She laid the first leaf and it took, and she did the next one, and after a while I said I ought to let her work.
I sat in the car outside that shop for eleven minutes with the air on. Then I drove out Route 711 to Normalville and back, which is thirty-two minutes and is what I do.
What Is the ISFP Personality Type: Four Columns
I looked the four letters up that week. Twelve years after Deb said them at a table with a coffee in her hand. Counted across the whole country it lands near one in eleven, with the women’s column a step ahead.
I — not shy. She’ll talk all afternoon. It means the deciding happens on the inside, alone, with no session, and arrives already done.
S — the actual thing, physically present, comes first and comes in through the eyes and the hands. That’s what’s under there. I asked a question about intention and she gave me a report about a bridge, because to her I had asked about the bridge.
F — what settles a matter is a valuation, held privately, felt with an accuracy the rest of us do not have access to. Not warmth. Not agreeableness. She never once agreed with me about anything.
P — nothing gets closed off just because a calendar says so. A date on a form is a fact about the office.
Under the letters the framework sorts four habits by how much equipment a person has for each, and that sorting is what separates one of these from the next. Here the private valuation has the most and the outward machinery has the least, and in between sits the physical present. Which produces a woman who can put down exactly what is under a bridge, and can tell you in level language why a man’s business card is wrong, and cannot fill in four sentences to get eleven hundred dollars.
Some numbers, because I have read more district data than any person should. This is one of the common ones — call it nine in a hundred, a little more of them women than men, which means a room of twenty has two, which matches what I saw. As for the other figures out there: nearly all of them come from people who sought the questionnaire out or were handed it at work, and what you learn from that is who volunteers. A school psychologist would call it a convenience sample and then use it anyway, which is also what I did for thirty-seven years with everything.
And a word about the weight of the whole apparatus, because I am not going to sell you something. The four underlying measures are real; they hold still when you measure twice, which is more than I can say for most of what got put in front of me at in-service. The step where four measures become sixteen named kinds of person is where it gets soft — that step is a convenience, and the evidence for it has never been what the confidence around it suggests. Use it the way I finally used it, which is as a reason to ask a second question. And it is written about crowds. If you have come here to be summed up, the useful part is wherever the summary comes off you, because that is the part no rubric in the world has a column for.
Eleven of the twelve in that case I can account for. The eleventh is a kitchen at night with nobody in it and it is better than the other eleven put together, and in July I described it to her and she said she doesn’t remember making it, and she was not being cute. She doesn’t.
ISFP Cognitive Functions: Where the No Comes From
The first habit is a valuation. It is private, and it does not deliberate. The framework’s own names, in her order: introverted feeling, extraverted sensing, introverted intuition, extraverted thinking — and the first one is doing most of the work.
Preference is the wrong word for it and so is taste. Call it a reading of what a thing actually is, arrived at without steps, held to a precision the person cannot demonstrate to anybody, and immovable. That is where the no came from. There was no fear in that girl. There was a fact — those aren’t better than the fall ones — and a sheet that required her to state the opposite, and between those two things there was never going to be a negotiation, and I spent an hour in January negotiating.
The second habit is the physical present, and it is why she is completely happy on a Tuesday with a door on sawhorses. Whatever is in front of her is the entire material. Not a step toward anything. Not a portfolio piece. A door.
She has a third habit and almost no trust in it: the long look, the one that tells you where a thing ends up. She has it. When I told her in January she would lose the scholarship, she said okay, and I have thought for a long time that okay was ignorance, and I have had to put that down, because she was working in that trade at nineteen and it is 2026 and she is booked into February.
And the fourth chair is empty, and it is the chair that every institution on earth is built around: the outward machinery. Deadlines, forms, rankings, standing up in a room and making your own case. She is not weak at that the way a person is weak at math. There is nothing in the chair, and asking for it is like asking somebody to be taller, and a school is a building assembled out of that one thing and nothing else.
I called Renae Ondrejko the night after the shop and I did not have a good reason. I told her about the pumper door and the gold leaf and I said something about what a shame it was, all that, ending up on fire trucks. And Renae, who has been adjuncting for eleven years, said, “Is it a shame?” And I said yes. And I said it again when she didn’t take it, and I kept at it a while, and she got off the phone.
Dolly Vukovich drove that girl to two years of Saturday sessions in a Cavalier with a bad heater and I know that because I unlocked the building for them. Marnie told me in July that her mother never once said a word against any of it.
I still think there was something in that house. I have not got a thing to base it on and I am not moving off it.
ISFP Careers: What the Calendar Says
She is booked into February and she turns work down.
The trade is not dead, which is the part that man from Greensburg got wrong in 1995: computers took the cheap end of it and left the end that has to be done by a hand, and there are not many hands. Departments wait for her. A pumper is eleven to fourteen thousand dollars in lettering and leaf and it takes her three weeks and she has done a hundred and some.
She has an apprentice now, a kid from Perryopolis, second year. I asked her what she has him doing and she said layout and pounce patterns and cleaning quills, which is what you would have had somebody doing in 1948, and she said it takes about four years and that there is no way to make it take three.
Naming this and paying for it are two different transactions and they do not clear at the same rate, and untangling the second one wants somebody who has signed the front of a paycheck. I have only ever signed the back. Nor does the same ability walk into a room attached to the same reception on everybody who carries it, and that is a separate essay with a separate writer.
That building has two sections of what I taught now instead of three. The kiln came out in 2011 because nobody would certify the ventilation. In 2013 they renamed the program Digital Media, which was the right call and I fought it for eight months. A program is not a subject. A program is an enrollment number, a room, a certification, and one adult who will stay, and when any one of those goes the whole thing goes, and I have watched four go in that building since Marnie graduated.
ISFP Relationships and Compatibility: Being Told the Truth for Thirty Years
Here is what it is to be around one of these. You will never be lied to. Not about your work, not about your haircut, not about whether she wants to come. It is a level of accuracy nobody in your ordinary life provides and it is a very strange gift to receive, because it also means she will not tell you the small warm untrue thing that everybody else uses to get through a Tuesday.
And you will not be argued with, which sounds restful and is not. There is no hearing. There is no version where you make your case and she reconsiders, because the deciding already happened somewhere you cannot go, and what you are getting is a report on a settled matter, delivered kindly, by somebody who is not withholding anything from you.
I had a colleague ask me once why I never just made her. Detention, a call home, a zero, the whole apparatus. And the answer is that I did try all of it in the fall of her senior year and it works exactly as well as you would expect, because none of those instruments touch a valuation. You can make a kid sit in a room. You cannot make her think the fall pieces were worse than the spring ones. And when a school runs out of leverage on a child, what it does — what I did — is start describing her character instead, and that description goes in a file and it outlives everybody.
Living inside that accuracy at a kitchen table every night, instead of meeting it twice a week in a room I was running, is somebody else’s testimony and I have not earned it. And accuracy aimed at two different people does not do the same damage to both.
The thing that took me the longest is that she is not carrying it. There is no wound in her. I built a monument out of the first of March, 1996 and kept it in a basement thirty years, and she thought I had been using her leaf studies to teach the sophomores, and was glad about it.
ISFP Personal Growth: The Case
Everything published about growth for this type is a page of encouragement about putting yourself out there, and I taught teenagers for thirty-seven years and I can tell you what a page of encouragement is worth.
What I actually watched happen once was smaller. In January of her senior year that girl sat in my room after the buses left and told me, out loud, to my face, that if I wrote the statement it would be mine. That was her whole case and she made it and I ran right over it. She had it in her. It came out at a table, after hours, with nobody else in the room, in five words, one time, to somebody who had asked her a direct question and then did not listen to the answer.
I have gone over what the conditions were and I cannot manufacture them, and I have decided that the people who spend years trying to are all doing the same arithmetic I am.
I took the case down there on August second. I did not open it in the car, which I had planned to.
She wiped her hands and looked at it on the counter and said, “Huh,” and put it under the bench by the compressor, and did not open it, and asked me if I wanted a water.
I did ask about October. She said she would think about it, in the voice people use, and I am going to hang eleven other people’s work and one blank space, or I am going to hang the eleven and not say anything, and I know which of those I want and I know who it is for.
Before I left I ordered a mailbox. Our name on both sides, and the number, black with a gold outline, which is ninety dollars and she does them in the winter when the shop is slow.
She got a spiral book out from under the register and wrote it down.
“Zelenak. Is that with a C or a K?”
The people in these essays are composites drawn from long observation. The theory is not.