In 10th grade we took world history. I can’t remember the name of the teacher, I am confident one of my high school friends on Facebook will give it to me, if I don’t remember it by the time I post this. He also coached one of the basketball teams, and his nephew was one of our classmates, but I can’t member his name…

I am a history nerd. I have always liked history, I’ve read history for fun for as long as I can remember, and I was a very good history student. I had straight A’s in world history all year, and I might’ve had 100 average in that class going into the final. On the final I got an F. Or something close to an F. Super low. Not “ooh, I did so bad…I only  got an 89. Like a legit shit-show of a grade.. It is by far the lowest grade I received in high school.  As you might expect, I took it with the grace and humility that you would imagine an uptight nerdy white boy would. Meaning of course but I threw a nutty! Like a Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh “I LIKE BEER!” vibe. 

All year long, the class had been a rousing, almost Socratic, set of discussions between the teacher and the students about the major concepts and epochs of western civilization, and I must have been one of the most active participants in this class. The final was a series of essay questions where we were expected to integrate the ideas into essays that demonstrated our understanding and mastery of the year. I think the last week of classes were review and all we did was integrate all eras and ideas into one big picture before final. For the exam itself, we were given a big stack of blank, I think unlined, paper to write our essays on. We had a half a dozen essay questions and I wrote out my answers in rough draft form, and had enough time to re-copy them from my horrible chicken scratch to my best, mechanical drafting, handwriting.

Have you seen the movie Real Genius? At the end of that movie Val Kilmer’s character finishes his physics final and drops his paper off on the teachers desk with an asinine smirk, hands the teacher an F.U. apple, and a note that says “I aced this.” That’s the way I remember feeling as I handed in my world history final.

How’d we find out our grades? Were the posted? I don’t remember, but however it happened, I went to talk to the teacher about how I managed to do so stellarly bad on the test. He Indicated that I had completely omitted one of the five or six essay questions. The two of us quickly agreed that I had probably thrown away a final draft essay question with all my rough draft scratch paper.

I begged him to change my grade, and give me a grade I would have gotten, if I hadn’t done something so boneheaded. (Oh the entitlement) He told me he couldn’t do that, but also told me not to worry about it, in some reassuring way. I definitely was not reassured, because I had my head up my own ass, but I distinctly remember him trying to get me to chill. Probably attempting to teach me a life lesson, and maybe that grades weren’t that important in the long run. None of that was getting through to my uptight 16-year-old brain that day.

When he “refused to change my grade” (my recollection) I went with my sob story to the vice principal and principal or somebody in administration who I thought could tell him what to do. I’m such a weenie. The next thing I remember is meeting with him again where he effectively told me that I was such a weenie. And then I needed to chill. I don’t remember if he told me right then, or made me wait until the official report card came in the mail, but he had obviously taken into account the error on my exam, and my final grade for the class was a 95, instead of the 78 or some thing that I had calculated it would be. Yes, I’m the kind of kid who would calculate in advance what my final grade would be, in advance, based on various scores. (Remind me to tell you about gas-pump math sometime). 

So, another Kevin classic, in which the hero’s boneheaded behavior, and self-inflicted error gets resolved with little or no consequence, but a lesson is learned, in some very small way. Only to be repeated. I am one lucky man.