I had been sick. Sick enough to lose a month of my life. I barely woke up for two weeks, and the week after I was still a zombie. My grades suffered terribly. I could see the concern in my teacher’s eyes when I came back to class. I looked like a skeleton.
It was the last year of middle school. It was a trimester system. Summer trimester was summer break, and the other two were for school. It was in the last trimester of the last year of middle school—I felt like I was going to die—when I finally had a clue.
There was a celebration at the end of the year for all the students who did well, a GPA of 3.5 or more. They would be honored by coming up before the student body and having their names read alongside their GPA.
Most of the student body was on stage. Except, we couldn’t fit all those students on a stage. Most of the student body was on the gym floor; the rest of us were in the bleachers. A few students were in the bleachers, their GPA a 3.4 or lower.
My science teacher leaned down and expressed this consolation to me: “If you hadn’t been sick, you’d be up there.” The sentiment was true. I had often been so honored. This might have been the first time I saw it from the other side, how common it was to be good.
It was a clue, I think, to how worthless that sort of “education” was.
Tale Told 