The Story of Mr. H

*Names have been shortened for anonymity*

At fourteen years old, I did not yet have the confidence that many of those around me had had at the time. I was a shy girl who sat at the back of the class hoping to be noticed for something more than my hard work and excellent grades. I wanted to feel like I was more than just my achievements but didn't know how to bring that into fruition.

Yes, I did have a small group of very loving, supportive friends that I can still call family to this day but sometimes, we all need a little boost to our confidence from an authority figure we look up to, and that was what I needed at the time.

And that was precisely what Mr. H had given me.

Mr. H was a bald, spectacled man who came to work with the same outfit every day, a polo shirt that looked to be made of linen whose color matched whatever his mood was that day along with dark brown pants with brown dress shoes to match. He would carry with him either a Calculus or Physics book—which undoubtedly had some difficult problems he liked to challenge us with on any given day—and a black computer bag.

He was unique in both his dress choice and his attitude. He was both my Math and Physics teacher and the best one I've ever had.

I remember Mathematics being my favorite subject because being in Mr. H's class not only encouraged us to improve our skills, but demanded it from every one of us. Mr. H was special in that he always had a life lesson to impart and somehow dexterously found ways to interweave this advice with whatever Calculus lesson he would be teaching on any given day.

Over time, as we got to know him better, we realized being a teacher was never his first choice. He dreamt long ago of becoming a pilot but when he was much younger, pilots had to have close to 20/20 vision to be able to fly. Unfortunately, wearing eyeglasses at the time was considered a disability for anyone who hoped to pursue that line of work.

And so his dreams went down the gutter, and he decided to become a teacher instead. I was never aware why he made this decision but considering his captivating style of teaching, I knew everything happened for a reason.

Something I never forgot was how he once made it known to all of us tenth graders how close he considered himself to us but how little we were aware of it.

And he was right.

My friends and I didn't know how close he would remain to our hearts until some years after graduating high school. But there was one moment in particular that stood out the most to me after all these years. It was a memory that I cherished and kept locked away in my heart because it was one of those things that made me feel truly special.

Each year during the Winter break, all students were given a homework load the size of Antarctica so that they could forget any possibility of having any break whatsoever.

There was one Winter break where I solved so many Calculus problems that I was eating Trigonometry puzzles for breakfast and settling down in the evening with Pascal's theorems, and the funny part is, I remember enjoying most of it, despite knowing a lot of my answers may have not been fully correct. I just wanted to make Mr. H proud. And I am so glad to say that I did.

After I handed in my answers which were noted down on graph double-paper, I felt an immediate sense of relief to have finally been done with them. And the next day, once Mr. H's first foot made an entrance into our classroom, a dead silence swept the room. Everyone was eager to know how he/she did.

And instead of handing out the papers to everyone and starting the day with a new lesson like most teachers would do, he did something different this one time. He took out all the papers of the students in our class, and placed them on his desk before beginning his brutal autopsy of every student's character, skills, and attitude in class. He stayed in his seat the entire time, only moving after finishing his review of any particular student's work, so he could hand the graded work to the students in front of him and they could pass it down to the specified offender. His eyes were twinkling with the joy of childish mischief, I could just see it at the time.

What we quickly inferred was that he was going from the lowest achievers to the highest in his nerve-wracking analyses. Those with more decent grades got a much less disheartening review from him which was relieving, to say the least.

And at some point, towards the end, he got to me.

I was the only one he didn't critique yet. When he grabbed hold of my paper, he took one look at me before his eyes scanned the rest of the class, and he put it very simply: "N here has something that no one else has," he said. The silence that followed was filled with what seemed to be his pride and an acknowledgment of my accomplishment. It was as if the better we did, the less words he needed to say. And I had the sense I knew what he was talking about, but he never clarified what it was that I had. "Good work," he added before handing out my paper to be passed down to me.

That was it.

And then he started class as if nothing had taken place seconds before.

My heart bloomed with joy and I held my head up higher with pride that day.

Sometimes, we all need an encouraging word to move forward in whatever avenue we are trying to improve but I never knew until many years later how crucial his words would be in my life and how it would even affect my career choices. This short story is a testament to how much power words can hold and the effect that they could have on someone who, at some point in time, forgot that he/she was special.

In the wise words of Maya Angelou, "I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."

Thank you, Mr. H, for making me feel more special than I once thought I was.