In 8100 again: The sounds of students breaking

This chapter begins with a collage of narratives collected during a one-year ethnographic study at a large Midwestern high school. The music a student plays as a part of a self-harm ritual is central to the break as one of many human and non-human interactions of breaking. Unlike students who spend time in the juvenile detention center or in medical hospitals for extended illnesses, teachers were not solicited for homework so students could keep up on their studies in class. The knotted relationships between schooling, schools, and students that are central to how and what children learn has reverberations on individual and group assemblages. The sounds of students breaking can be heard every single day in schools. The pills, the knife, the gun-those are the sounds of the product that happens after breaking has occurred as a process of schooling.