Eighth grade, and the math teacher who scared me straight

If I could go back to one year, it would be this one. Not to make my own life easier, exactly. I would go back to take my younger self by the shoulders and explain how school actually works, because nobody ever had, and I was about to spend years learning it the slow, embarrassing way.

I have been honest in the sixth- and seventh-grade posts that I was not a good student in middle school. I still do not fully understand what happened or why. I was a cheerful kid who showed up, sat down, and copied whatever the teacher put on the board. I just never ran any of it through the part of my brain that actually learns. Eighth grade is where that finally caught up with me, and, by sheer luck, where someone finally cared enough to say so out loud.

Moving upstairs

Eighth grade meant we finally got to move upstairs. The middle school kept a short hallway up there just for eighth graders. It was probably the same length as the seventh-grade hallway, but it felt smaller, and I think the reason was simple: my classes were clustered right at the start of it that year, instead of way down at the far end like the year before. You could stand at the top of the stairs and practically see your whole day.

It also felt, even at the time, like the last year of something. The friends I had were all sort of grouped together by how we were tracked through classes, and I did not know it yet, but high school was going to scatter every bit of that.

The teachers

I genuinely loved almost all of my eighth-grade teachers. My English teacher was cool, and that was the class where I first started to actually enjoy reading instead of just getting through it. My science teacher was wonderful. At one point she had us each build a playable game for the rest of the class to rotate through, and I asked her if I could make mine on the computer if she would let kids take turns at her machine between the other games. She thought that was a great idea and told me to go for it, so I built a science version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. I was so proud of that thing.

The one exception was my social studies teacher, who was just a strange man. His signature move, during quiet work time, was to stand at the window, catch the sunlight off his wristwatch, and flash it into a kid’s eyes across the room, then look perfectly innocent when you glanced up, like the sun had done it on its own. I never did figure him out.

By eighth grade, the pattern around my computer skills was already old news. Going all the way back to sixth grade, at least half of my teachers seemed to clock that I had a natural knack for computers. One had told me to remember her when I became the next Bill Gates. My seventh-grade math teacher had written in my yearbook to sell her some stock when I started my own company. (For the record: I never did get a company off the ground with public stock to hand out. It just was not the path I took. I really did try.) So the people in that building mostly believed I was going somewhere. Which is exactly what makes the next part land the way it did.

Sixth-grade math, for the third time

Here is the math situation, laid out plainly. I had failed sixth-grade math in sixth grade. I retook it in seventh grade and failed it again. So in eighth grade I was sitting in sixth-grade math for the third time, an eighth grader doing the work of a kid two grades younger.

And I want to be clear that I was not goofing off. I went to class. I had a sweet, patient, genuinely loving math teacher, and I sat there and took my notes and listened, exactly the way I thought you were supposed to. What I did not do, what nobody had ever shown me how to do, was actually learn it. I know now that I do not learn by sitting and listening. I learn by doing, by example, by watching someone work problem after problem after problem until the shape of it clicks. Show me ten fractions and I am lost. Show me fifty, and then sit next to me while I try them myself, and I will get there. I just had no idea that was how my own head worked, so I kept failing the easiest math in the building and could not have told you why.

The hallway

I do not know exactly what set off what happened next, but somewhere around the middle of the year, probably right after another test came back failed, my math teacher called me out into the hallway.

That alone was alarming. I almost never got in trouble, and I almost never got pulled aside for anything, so I was already nervous standing out there. I was not much over five feet tall. And instead of talking down at me, she knelt on the floor so we were eye to eye, took both my hands, looked right at me, and said, listen to me, I have something very important to tell you.

She told me she knew how good I was with computers. She said I could probably get pretty far in life on natural talent alone. But, she said, every place I would want to go next, high school, college, a real job doing computer work, was going to expect me to be good at math, and was going to assume I already was. And then she said, to my face, “you are fucking your life up with this math stuff.”

I had never heard a teacher say a word like that in my life. She said she knew I was capable. She said I needed to do my homework, sit with it, actually put the time in, because if I did not turn it around now it was going to be too late, and it could quietly close doors I did not even know existed yet. Then she stood up and said maybe, maybe, I could still pass the class that year, but only if I tried as hard as I had ever tried at anything.

I just stood in that hallway after she walked off. I think I was in a daze for the rest of the day, partly from the swearing and partly from the plain fact that an adult had cared enough to be that blunt with me.

What I wish someone had told me sooner

That talk is the whole reason I can write the rest of this so calmly, so let me put down the thing I would tell my younger self if I ever got the chance.

You do not have to be the kid with his hand up. Being shy is fine. But there is a difference between not wanting to answer and not being able to. So sit in class ready. When the teacher asks the room a question, have the answer already forming in your head, said silently to yourself, confident, whether or not you ever raise your hand. If you want to raise it, raise it. If you do not, at least be the kid who could have. And when you do not understand something, ask. I know asking is the worst when you are shy. I know it feels like admitting you are behind. But the teacher is standing right there for exactly that reason, and the longer you sit on a thing you do not get, the more it stacks up behind you. Mine stacked up for three years.

The real lesson underneath all of it is the one from the seventh-grade post: copying notes is not learning, and “I did my homework” is not the same sentence as “I understand this.” I just had to fail the same class three times to believe it.

The A+ program, and the resolve

I did try harder after that. But I did not get a tidy movie ending. By that point I was so far behind in the gradebook that I sat down, did the actual arithmetic, and realized it was mathematically impossible to pass sixth-grade math that year. I would have needed a perfect score on everything left, no exceptions. So I gave it my best and still failed sixth-grade math in eighth grade. Three for three.

What changed was not that year. It was what I decided about the next one.

Missouri had a thing back then called the A+ program. If you kept your grades above a line, showed up, stayed out of trouble, never failed a class, and put in around fifty hours tutoring other students, the state would pay for two years at the community college of your choice. We did not have much money growing up. I knew for a fact my parents were never going to write a tuition check, and honestly I had no picture yet of what my future even was. But two free years of college for the price of not failing? That I understood.

So by the end of eighth grade I had made up my mind completely: when I got to high school, I was never going to fail a class again. Ever. And I will give my eighth- grade math teacher full credit for that, kneeling on a hallway floor and refusing to be polite about it.

Here is the spoiler I am happy to hand over right now. In high school I turned the whole thing around. I never failed another class, in anything, math or science or language or otherwise. I went from a kid pulling straight Cs and Fs to very nearly straight As. A couple of Bs slipped in, but it never mattered, my average was never once in danger. And years later I did my A+ tutoring hours with my friend Diana. We went back to the elementary school I grew up in and helped kids with their homework after class, nearly every other day for a couple of months our senior year. The math teacher who swore at me in a hallway is a big part of why any of that happened.

The friends I had, and then didn’t

There is a bittersweet edge to eighth grade, though. It was the last year I really had that friend group. We were all tracked into roughly the same classes, so the people around me were the people I happened to be educated next to, and a lot of them were good company. I still missed having Mike around, my computer friend since fourth grade, who always seemed to land on a different team. But I had people who liked me and wanted me around.

What I did not see coming was that turning my act around would cost me that group. Most of the kids I sat with did not make the same decision I did, and as I started climbing, I quietly left them behind. The catch is that climbing did not mean catching up. I stayed two and three grades behind in math the entire time: sixth- grade math as a freshman, seventh-grade math as a sophomore, eighth-grade math as a junior, ninth-grade math my senior year. So I was always alone in those rooms, older than the material, with none of my friends in there with me. That is a whole story of its own. For now I will just say that improving and feeling lonely turned out to be the same stretch of road, and that an entirely new set of friends was waiting for me freshman year. I am looking forward to writing about them.

Band, one last time

Eighth grade was also the end of my run as a school musician. I finished out band on the clarinet, more out of momentum than love, exactly like I said I would at the end of the seventh-grade post. High school was going to require both concert band and marching band, and I had zero interest in marching. I did not like sports then and I do not like them now, so the idea of hauling a clarinet out to a football game to help fire up the stands never sounded like fun or like me. So I quietly set the instrument down and did not pick it back up.

The year that opened with September 11

There is one more thing about eighth grade, and it is too big to fold in here, so it gets its own post. The year began with the morning that rearranged the entire world, the September 11 attacks, and I was the kid who ended up hooking the TV up so my class could watch it happen. I have written that whole day out separately: Where I was on September 11.