How I Learned The Word “Silhouette”

     If you’re like me, you remember when you learned the word “silhouette.” (Spelling that word still brings me close to a panic attack.)

     I was in second grade. It must have been February sometime because we were doing a Presidents’ Day project in art class. I don’t remember hearing the word silhouette, but it probably wouldn’t have registered with me if I had. I didn’t know what the word meant.

     The teacher handed out white paper with black profile outlines of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. The two presidents were facing each other, and even as a second grader, I knew who the men were from just that outline. We were to then turn the outlines into silhouettes.  

     After we had been working for a few minutes, the teacher reminded us that these were silhouettes, so they needed to be dark to show up in the hallway. I was perplexed because I wasn’t sure how I could make my project darker than it was without it looking silly.

     A few minutes later, I was diligently working, trying to make things as dark as I could, when I noticed the teacher and the classroom aid. They were standing next to each other, looking at my desk, and trying to hide their snickering. I can still see it vividly in my mind.

Let me be clear, I don’t think it was mean spirited or malicious. In fact, those two were some of my favorite teachers. They had simply seen what I was drawing and realized that I didn’t know what the word silhouette meant. While every other child in the class was filling in their presidential profiles with as much black crayon as they could, I had taken a different approach.

I had made my profiles as life-like as I could: lightly with the orange crayon for peach skin, black and white for the hair, lightly with red for the lips. That’s why I was so confused when I was told to make them dark. If I went much darker with the orange, it wouldn’t look like skin. If I went darker with the red, it would look like lipstick.

It was only after the projects were displayed in the hall that I realized what was going on. Twenty-some black silhouette pairs, and my version, in living color.

There are a few points I want to make with this story.

1. Good for those teachers for still displaying my work. It was not the assignment and clearly stuck out, but I was still included with the class.

2. We have all been me in this situation. The one person who didn’t know an important piece of information that everyone else took for granted.

3. We have all been the teacher in this situation. We assume a shared knowledge, and so skip explanations. That might be the most important takeaway.

I don’t know if I wasn’t told or simply didn’t hear the explanation of what a silhouette was. Everyone else in the class seemed to know so it’s very possible my mind was wandering at the time.

I do know that as an adult, I tend to over contextualize. Some readers may have picked up on this over the years. Part of this tendency comes from being an educator. I want the concepts I convey to be clear and accurate. Mostly though, I have too often been the person in the group missing the assumed shared knowledge. I know how quickly communication can break down simply because we assume everyone else knows what we know. Time spent unifying knowledge is time well spent.