<human>: Background: I'm a music teacher at a middle school, and I have four sections of general music that I instruct daily.  I've gotten to the point where I can handle the wild kids, in fact I'd actually rather deal with a chatty class than a lifeless one.  But I haven't seen a kid like this: He sits there.  And then he sits there some more.  He does nothing else.  I hand out papers to the class and while everyone else is working diligently, he stares at it blankly.  He will write absolutely nothing, even when he sees that I am going around the room checking students' progress, or collecting the papers.  Once he even fell asleep, to the point that it took three of us to wake him up.  

I took some time to check into his background.  He started out the year pretty average, and has gotten progressively worse as the year went on.  He's now almost a straight-F student and I see that other teachers are seeing the same thing I am.

I asked him once if he was okay.  He said yes.  When I confronted him on his lack of participation he didn't really show any emotion.  It's actually kind of disturbing to see, but me, being the eternal optimist, am not quite ready to write the kid off as deadweight.  So I turn to the collective wisdom here.  Were any of you in this kid's shoes in school?  How do you feel about it now, looking back?  Was there a teacher that you resonated with eventually that pulled you out of that death spiral?  Or, was there one thing you were looking for that you never found?  Maybe if I get some stories here I can find a new way to punch through the shield he has up that I haven't thought of.

Can you condense the text into a few key points?
<bot>: Teacher sees that student is a lifeless, straight-F chunk of flotsam.  Looking for similar stories from Reddit to find some way to get him to respond positively.