I’ve Been Wondering If My High School Teacher Faked My Grades
I was cleaning out my mom’s garage last weekend, hauling boxes of old junk out to the driveway for her estate sale, when I found my 11th grade AP Bio binder tucked under a stack of my dad’s old golf clubs. The cover’s still peeling from where I spilled a blue raspberry slushie on it on the way to school the first week, and when I flipped it open, there was my old transcript tucked between a stained lab report on onion cells and a crumpled prom invitation from a boy I can’t even remember the name of. That’s when the question popped back into my head, the one I’ve had off and on for 14 years now.
Let me do the math for you, like I’ve done it a hundred times in my head. I got a 52 on the midterm. I can see the red ink still, scrawled at the top of the test, which is still taped to the inside back of that binder. I skipped three full labs that semester, never turned in the reports. I missed the big evolution unit test entirely because I couldn’t get out of bed that morning—my parents had announced their divorce two weeks prior, and some days I just pulled the covers over my head and told my mom I was sick, and she let me, because she was too busy arguing about the 401k to fight me. Mr. Henderson never even sent a reminder email or called home about the missing work. I just figured he forgot.
Then the final. I showed up because I had to, didn’t study a single minute. I sat in the back row, chewed through three pieces of gum, left the last two full pages of questions blank. I counted my possible points on the walk out of the gym: maximum I could get was a 68, even if every single answer I wrote was right. Even with the class curve, that would average out to a C- at best, right? 52 midterm, zero for three labs, 68 final—there’s no way that adds up to anything higher. But when final grades posted, it was a B+. A solid B plus.
Mr. Henderson wore the same faded green flannel every Friday, kept a jar of lemon drops on his desk that were always sticky from kids opening and closing the lid a hundred times a day. He had a little brown tobacco stain on the corner of his mustache from chewing in his car before school. Once, I fell asleep during a lecture after pulling an all-nighter helping my mom pack up my dad’s things, and he didn’t wake me up. He just brought an extra scratchy blanket from the storage closet and tucked it around my shoulders when the AC was blowing right on my neck. I only woke up when the bell rang, everyone was gone, and the blanket was folded neat on the desk next to me.
After that terrible midterm, I stayed after class because I didn’t want to go to my next period, didn’t want to see my friends who all had intact families and perfect GPAs and no idea what it felt like to have your whole home turn upside down in a week. He was packing up his bag to leave, asked me what was wrong, and I just started sobbing. Couldn’t even talk for five minutes. I blurted out everything, how my dad was moving to Oregon and didn’t even want me to visit every other weekend, how my best friend stopped talking to me because I was “too much lately,” how I couldn’t remember the last time I cared about a stupid test grade. He just stood there, nodded, gave me a sticky lemon drop from the jar. Said he got it, that sometimes life gets in the way of the lesson plan.
I looked him up on Facebook a couple days after finding the binder. He retired three years ago, lives upstate now, posts photos of his tomato garden every summer. The latest post was a picture of a giant heirloom tomato, said it weighed two whole pounds. I typed out a message three times. First it was “Hey Mr. Henderson, it’s me, [my name], I was going through old stuff and was wondering…” deleted that. Then I tried “I just wanted to say thank you for being nice to me when everything fell apart…” that felt weird, out of the blue. He’s had hundreds of students, he probably doesn’t remember the crying kid in the back of AP Bio. I just closed the app. What if I’m wrong? What if it was just a typo, a data entry mistake when he uploaded grades to the office, and I’m over here making a big deal out of nothing? What if I’m right? Do I thank him? Do I apologize for not earning it? It’s all so awkward.
Here’s the funny contradiction, the thing that nags at me a little. I’m an ER nurse now. I’m the person who yells at my coworkers if they cut corners on charting, if they fudge a vital sign just to make it look normal. I return extra change if the cashier gives me five dollars too much. I’ve always believed you earn what you get, no exceptions. But I can’t bring myself to feel that guilty about this, if it was faked. I was 16. I was breaking apart. That B+ kept my GPA high enough to keep my partial academic scholarship to state school. I couldn’t have afforded my nursing degree without that scholarship. I’m a good nurse. I take care of people every day, I show up, I work hard. I don’t think that one grade, fake or not, takes any of that away.
Last night, I laid in bed thinking about it, wondering if he ever thinks about it. If he even remembers doing it, if he did. I think maybe he did. I think he saw a kid drowning and threw her a life raft that fit the rules just enough, even if it wasn’t exactly earned. I still don’t know for sure. I put the binder back in the box, taped the lid shut, wrote “keep” on the side in Sharpie. I don’t think I’ll ever send that message. Some questions don’t need an answer, I guess. I just keep thinking about what he said that day, that grades are just paper, not people. I guess he was right, even if I didn’t believe it back then.
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