Apology Accepted

There are very few people in the world that I actively dislike. I tend to genuinely like, and get along well with, all kinds of people, including people who are very different from myself.

Sometimes, though, people dislike me, or I dislike them. It's an ordinary fact of life, and I don't usually get too bothered.

Partly because of my personality, and partly because teachers tend to like good students, I usually got along well with my teachers, even teachers that the other kids disliked. It was always a surprise when there was serious personality clash.

The year I was a sophomore in high school, there was serious personality clash with my math teacher. For starters, he did not understand, or like, people who didn't like math. On the twice yearly standardized tests that the district administered, I'd been scoring at "grade 12, month 9" (or high school graduate) since 7th or 8th grade in most subjects, but in math I scored "only" two years above grade level. For me, that was struggling. Math gave me a headache.

My teacher expressed the opinion - not just privately, in conferences or on my papers, but publicly, out loud in class - that I struggled with math because, "Math is a logical, precise science. You do not have a logical mind. You have an undisciplined, chaotic mind." Way to motivate, Mr. B.

He loved to tell us that, "Everything is math. Music, sports, architecture, art - it's all math. If you can't do math, you can't do anything." My strong suit, language, was apparently an undesirable gift. In English classes, I got As without even trying. In math, I knocked myself out for Bs. My teacher was unamused.

The fact that I was a theater student opened me up to more ridicule. It was particularly fierce when my drama teacher decided to produce "A Midsummer Night's Dream." The first day I walked into class with my script, without referencing me in particular - or, for that matter referencing math, the subject of the class - our math teacher delivered a lecture about the pointlessness of studying any work by an author who'd been dead for centuries.

He always called us up to see our grades on the Friday before report cards came out. It was my last required semester of math, and I didn't care too much about the grade. Still, it was painful to see a C. I had never gotten a C, in anything. I couldn't recall more than a couple of assignments that I'd gotten Cs on. I must have really tanked the final, I decided, for it to negate all the Bs and the few As I'd gotten. So, I gritted my teeth, thanked my lucky stars that I was done with math, and sat back down.

Monday came; report cards were handed out. I had an F in math.

AN F. I had never gotten an F on even a single assignment, in my entire life. I was stunned.

I went up to him after school to question it. "On Friday, you showed me your book, and it said I had a C."

I will never forget his answer. "That's what you earned, but this is what I thought you deserved."

Wow.

My mother was even more furious than I was. A brilliant woman, she was also, deeply, a pacifist. She tried not to make waves, rock the boat, upset the apple cart - whatever your stock cliche for stirring up trouble is. She believed in making nice and smoothing over and turning the other cheek. And yet, she made an appointment for herself and me with the school principal.

She explained the problem. "So, what do you want me to do?" the principal asked.

"Require him to give her the grade that she earned."

He was aghast. "I can't get involved in the grading process! I can't tell teachers what grades they can and can't give!"

Mom demanded to know what the official school, or district, policies were. She wanted to know if it was possible to get my grades from the gradebook, or my assignments, and recalculate. The only answer she got was, "Grading is up to the individual teacher. I can't get involved."

"So, there's no oversight? What are the assignments for? Why have tests? Are you telling me that a child can earn As all year, then be handed a F on a report card, just because the teacher feels like it?"

"Well, yes. I can't get involved in the grading process."

We left angrier than we were when we arrived. Mom vetoed my suggestion of complaining to someone at the district level - "It'll just be more of the same." The next year, I took a semester of one of the easiest math classes offered, just to fill my credit requirement. I thought, and said, very uncomplimentary things about both the teacher and the (now retired) principal.

My senior year, I was asked to be on the tech crew for the school's first faculty play. It's now a pretty standard practice in our area, but at the time, it was a brand new idea: have the faculty act in a play to raise money for scholarships. The students would be the crew, since we already know what to do.

My old math teacher, Mr. B, was in the play.

I could not get over the irony. After all the hours I'd had to listen to him say things like, "I don't know why the school even has a fine arts department. We're supposed to be in the business of education," now he was acting?

Still, I'm polite. I treated him as though there was no bad blood between us. Actually, I treated him as if I'd never met him before. I was polite, I was informative and helpful when I needed to be, but I was not friendly. I was one of those kids who got along well with teachers, so with some, there was joking and laughter, almost as if they were my peers. Not with Mr. B. If you didn't know either of us, I don't think you would have noticed anything amiss. (Maybe I'm kidding myself, and I was glaring daggers, but I don't think so.) He never brought up the fact that he knew me before we were introduced at rehearsals. The distant-but-cordial thing worked for me.

One day, as we neared the performance dates, he walked up and stood next to me as I watched the action onstage. He didn't look at me; he looked straight ahead at the show. I wondered why he'd chosen that spot to stand in, but I said nothing. It's a free country; the man could stand wherever he chose.

We never made small talk - anything we'd said to each other had been show related. Now, after standing there for a few minutes, he said, while still staring straight ahead, "I can see why you like this - this sort of thing."

You could have knocked me over with a feather. I briefly considered snapping something like, "About darned time," but I didn't. Also looking straight ahead, I said, in a conversational tone, "It's a lot of fun, isn't it?"

"Yes. It is." He stayed there for another few seconds, then nodded, still looking out at the stage, and walked away.

Message received. I knew that had been an apology. I also knew that it must have been agonizing for him to say anything. He didn't have to. It must have been a very difficult thing to do. From his nod, it seemed that the corresponding answer had also been received - apology accepted.

When I told one of my best friends (one who knew the backstory), she was furious. "That's not good enough! If he wants to apologize, he needs to look you in the eye and actually apologize!"

"No, he doesn't. He didn't have to say anything." Two years' worth of my anger was erased.

As I got older, and learned more about psychology and gender differences, I learned that most women are not OK with typically male communication like that - no eye contact, no mention of the actual subject at hand - but I knew what it must have cost him, dignity-wise, to even attempt to say such a thing, and to a student, no less. It was as good as it was ever going to get, and it was good enough for me.

I did hope that, maybe, he'd be a little less harsh the next time a linguistically competent, number challenged student landed in his class. Maybe, now, he'd be less scathing. I sincerely hoped that he'd never again fail a student because of a personality clash. I have no way of knowing if he did or not, but I like to think that he changed a bit. Even teachers are in school to learn.

After that, he got the same smiles, the same "break a leg," even some of the joking that I gave the other teachers in the cast. I could be wrong, but it seemed to make him happy.

Even a little sincere apology goes a long way.