1.
“Basically in HS we had this maths teacher. She wasn’t too good at handling rowdy HS kids, and everybody made fun of her in various ways. It could be really cruel, and I imagine it’s one of the reasons why she was such a quiet, nervous teacher. Anyway, because all my friends were doing it, and because I hated school and most of my teachers, I took to making fun of her behind her back just like everyone else, and generally being a rude little brat in class. Now what makes this awful is that, around my final years of secondary school, this teacher had the heart to take me in for hour-long study sessions after school to help me with increasingly difficult maths. If memory serves, this was mandatory for not doing homework, which is how I wound up going.”
“And I wasn’t exactly thrilled at the time, but now I realize that this teacher was really just trying to get me acquainted with maths, as she would with any other student, in spite of how rude I was and how easily she could have just given up and said “Fuck it, this little jerk doesn’t want to learn”. But the horrible thing was, even after she started teaching me after class, and even after I started to appreciate her efforts towards the end of my year, I still gave in to peer pressure and made fun of her behind her back. I didn’t have the balls to tell my friends what I really thought, or to openly acknowledge that I could be very wrong about people. These days, I’m pursuing a career that often involves programming and maths, and in addition to the fact that I find maths more and more useful each year, I’m also really starting to see how fascinating and elegant it is. I really wish that I’d been a smart enough person back in class to see what my teacher was trying to show me, instead of just mocking her like a little prick.” — Anonymous
