A Look Back on Briefly Failing Chemistry
High school was the first time the roots of my teeth were raked over Tabasco sauce.
Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a magnet school in Fairfax County, Virginia, was no picnic. Far more difficult than college and law school. It was the only time when I would look at my weekly planner on Sunday night and not know how I would make it to Friday. When high school football and hoops are on Friday night, you have to conquer those five days.
Tenth-grade chemistry was the worst experience of my formal education. The worst. There’s no need to dig up my teacher’s name from discarded bones, so I’ll just refer to him as Teacher. That’s my best compromise so that I don’t dub him Terrible Teacher or God Awful Teacher or considerably worse. Just Teacher for our purposes.
He taught as well as a dead cat and had the empathy of a lab beaker.
At the midterm of our first nine-week grading period, our class’ grade rundown for 24 students looked like this:
A – 1 student
B – 2 students
F – 21 students
I kid you not. No one can make this up. But Teacher didn’t have to – it was real. It was us. You can guess where I fell.
Everything hit the fan on parents’ night.
Are you trying to screw our kids?
How is my daughter going to get into Duke with a failing grade in 10th-grade chemistry?
Who do you think you are, Teacher?
At least that’s how I’ve always imagined it – parents’ night isn’t for students.
Teacher shaped up right quick. From then on, more Crayola Color Chemistry Lab Set and less graduate-level Organic Chem or whatever he pretended we could learn. I finished that year with a (B) in his course, which was more a result of his unshakable post-parents’-night-induced anxiety than any wonder I performed.
And congratulations, Teacher, I have hated chemistry ever since. Never touched it again. Never read about it. Buried it and the shovel.
Years later, I learned that Teacher had become Dr. Teacher and was wildly popular among his freshman biology students. Well good for them. They learned about photosynthesis and multicellular organisms.
We learned not much at all.
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Daniel, thanks for your kind words. I had some great teachers at that HS, especially in English. But this guy was a piece of work.
“He taught as well as a dead cat and had the empathy of a lab beaker” 😆
Had many teachers like that in my time, Ben. Probably why I failed so many subjects!
Another great little story 👍🏼