I was never a good student in school.  I was just trying to do the bare minimum to graduate and get the hell out of there so I could just get on with my life.  I received better grades in the classes I enjoyed but I still never worked to my full potential and didn’t apply myself the way I could have.  Even with English, my favorite subject, I was always more interested in the book I was reading for leisure than the required reading I was supposed to be tested on for class.

I got by without cheating but I couldn’t even work a graphing calculator properly and could barely even wrap my head around some of the theorems we were studying.  I did do better with ecology though.  Being away from the confinement of the classroom and its rows of desks and chairs and outside identifying birds and flowers suited me much more.  What can I say?  Math and science were never my strong suits.  

Luckily for me though, I had a few teachers on my side that would give me passing grades even though I didn’t deserve it or sign me out of the classes I ditched so I wouldn’t get in trouble with the dean’s office.  One teacher would even take me aside and offer me cookies if I seemed to be having a particularly grueling day.  I thought I was getting away with murder but some of my teachers obviously saw more in me than I saw in myself at that young age.  They saw that I was an artist and that I would never be a mathematician or scientist, so they gave me the grades I needed to fulfill my class requirements.  I’m sure some of them questioned my future since I was shy and had a hard time articulating myself.  I was known around school for my eccentric behavior but still I had few friends.  I didn’t know where to fit in or how to break out of my shell and just about everything I did at that age was awkward to some extent. 

But those few teachers, I don’t know what they saw in me.  Maybe they felt sorry for me or maybe they just thought I was a dumb kid who was never going to amount to anything and definitely wasn’t going to understand whatever it was they were trying to teach me.  Or perhaps they noticed the glint in my eye that said to hell with this place, I want to be on my own experiencing the world in my own way, creating my own experiments that didn’t go by the book and that had nothing to do with the experiments being performed in the science lab.  Who knows, maybe they just saw that I was a little awkward and needed some additional help.  Whatever it was, they were angels.  If it weren’t for those teachers and their help, I never would have received a high school diploma, let alone passed science class.