A Success For Both Of Us, If We Can Have One
When you said a 7th grade class, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I thought you had made it to the next grade along with some of the other knuckleheads I had seen the year before. No matter. You’d be in my class and I was going to make you love math, even if you were given a score of a 1. You were told to repeat the grade earlier on because they place your value on a math test instead of your academic potential. They saw a red mark and a “promotion-in-doubt” next to your ID and thought it would be best if you repeated the material, even if that test didn’t really indicate your capacity for the material, but your capacity to pass that test.
Again, no matter.
A few days after I figured out how I would approach you, one of the first things I said to you after class was that we were going to prove everyone wrong about your math capacity. If only I used that same line with everyone else in my class, or else they might have done better. There you were, quietly kicking ass while nothing on your report changed. You were still labeled a 1 in math even as you were slowly creeping up in your grades. Your
