Showdown

When I was in high school, I was an uber-nerd (perhaps I still am now).  I sang in chorus, was on the student council, took piano lessons, got good grades, did academic bowl, and honestly never did anything illegal.  I was the kid who, upon running into a teacher in the hall without a hall-pass, would receive a wave and a smile instead of an interrogation about my destination.  “Oh, it’s Jonathan.  He’s probably going to a study session or something.  And if not, he’s definitely not doing anything bad.”  It was a safe assumption.

I remember I once received detention for forgetting some homework.  It was mortifying.  I think my teacher thought it would be good for me to feel like I had been bad for once in my life.  She was a chain-smoker, and while I don’t think she was a very good English teacher, the class was entertaining.  She would regularly break down into coughing fits and say things like “Oh [hack hack] this chalk dust is really [hurl] terrible!” or “[Spasm] I can see you are all [fit] struggling with the ragweed [attack] today too!”  She loved talking about sex scandals, and it was extraordinarily easy to get her side-tracked as long as you had some juicy comment to make.  English was always one of my best subjects, but this teacher simply would not give me an A.  She just laughed when I once asked her why I had gotten a lower grade than expected on a paper.  I didn’t like it, but I can’t deny that she has proved to be the English teacher I refer to most from all my years of schooling.  Her life would undeniably make a great movie.  God rest her soul.

But the real showdown of the century came two years later in my senior year English class. I actually loved the class.  The teacher helped me develop tremendously as a writer, but our class gave her some trouble from time to time.  We did a project near the end of the year that was intended to be a fun, though serious, activity.  We were to write a reflective essay concerning something of personal significance and read it aloud to music of our choice.  On the day I was to go, I stood up and read mine.  It was terribly grave and was accompanied by a depressing Shostakovitch string quartet that was written shortly after the composer was forced to join the Communist Party.  A few other classmates read theirs, also serious, often melancholy.

Then one of the quietest members of the class, though also one of the most comical, stood up with somber face to read his essay.  He hit the play button on the CD player, and what should grace our ears but the theme song of Pokemon, “Gotta Catch ‘Em All.”  He launched into a long and colorful explanation of how Pokemon had changed his life, how every little furry creature inspired him to greatness, how it didn’t matter if your opponent was big and bad if you could be like Pikachu and zap them with lightning.  I was inspired.  So was the rest of the class, and we all struggled to restrain our mirth which grew at the same rate as the rage upon our teacher’s face.  The speech ended; we didn’t dare applaud; steam rose from my teacher’s ruby face.  She then launched into an invective as livid as our classmate’s speech was comical.  We left the class unsure if we should laugh more or feel ashamed.  I think most of us opted for laughter.

While this was the most notable conflict during the class, it certainly was not the only one.  But I doubt she anticipated any trouble from someone like me.  This teacher gave me more Cs and Ds than I have received in any other class.  All year you would write short, timed essays and get them back ripped to shreds.  But it seemed that the final grades always rose substantially at the end of the year.  The mid-year grades were more for motivation to do well on the AP exam than for anything else.  For me, though, Cs and Ds were to be avoided at all costs, even if I knew my class average would precipitously jump before grades came out. 

At the end of a long train of bad grades on these essays, I received yet another unsatisfactory grade.  Apparently so had many others, so our teacher decided to write us a sample essay on the same topic we had all just dragged through the mud.  She went up to the overhead and began to write.  As she wrote, she talked about how she would frame her thesis.  The first point was one I included in my own thesis.  She discussed it for awhile and I thought I must have really messed up the next two points.  Then she got to her second point – also identical to mine.  Then I was beginning to think my grade was too low.  Finally, we reached her third point, and it too was in my own thesis.  I sulked in pity for a few moments as she expounded, but I finally raised my hand, heart pounding, mood black, and said, “I wrote exactly the same thing you did and you gave me a 72!”  I also thought I had written it more eloquently. 

She expressed her doubt, and I could have left it there.  But I couldn’t let go.  I fired back.  There was no turning back now.  I hurled myself in headlong, expostulating on my seventeen-year-old brilliance, succinctly summing up all my paper’s merits with force and persuasion.  My teacher calmly responded saying something that I did not really hear.  I immediately retorted, and she again responded calmly.  After a few more of these passes, she began to become frustrated.  It continued, building, my classmates looking on in dread, wondering what was going to happen to me, until finally, I heard what my teacher said.  “What do you want?  Would it make you happy if I gave you a 96?” she spoke with passion and a red face.  Not really expecting her to have actually given in, I said, pausingly, “Yes?”  “Fine!  Have your 96!”  She slammed down her pen, came to my desk, took my paper, crossed out the old grade with my pen and wrote a large 96 atop it, her upper lip twitching in fury.  The bell rang, thankfully, as we all sat in stunned silence, or in my case, fearful silence.  My grade had just risen 24 points; my stature had fallen much further. 

I later ran into my English teacher from the previous year, who happened to have in her possession at that time one of my college recommendations, uncompleted.  She also happened to be very good friends with my current teacher.  “So, Jonathan, I heard you had a little run-in today?”  I blushed, never having considered that this would undoubtedly get around.  At that point I knew I couldn’t just let the incident go.  I ended up apologizing to my current teacher, and we finished the year on good terms, and I still got my college recommendation from my former teacher.  But it was surely an episode to be remembered: the day the good kid went bad.

I have always been very concerned with being right.  I will argue my point until I am blue in the face and I get my 24 points.  Even if I don’t get the points, I will still argue.  I must be right.  I must be logical.  You must listen to reason.  Regardless of the topic, the most important thing to me is the cogency of the argument, and if I am convinced that my own perspective is cogent, then yours must not be.  It is fortunate that I have a wife who is similarly logical and who is not easily hurt.  We don’t really ever argue, not in the traditional sense.  But we have epic debates.  Whenever someone asks us if we fight, I always refer them to our multi-day standoff on the intent of the Framers with regard to the Second Amendment.  It was legendary.  I ended up being wrong.

Sometimes it is important to stand your ground on an idea, especially when it comes to moral issues.  For instance, I will always be opposed to racism, regardless of who encourages me to accept it.  But more often than not, life is not about being right.  For the more common interactions in life, the wise path is more subtle.  The argument with my English teacher probably only endangered our mutual amity.  At worst, I might have gotten a detrimental college recommendation from my former teacher.  Today, my interaction with authority has greater ramifications.  A similar encounter with my boss could easily lead to the loss of my job.  In certain places in the world, the unwillingness to stand down could land me in jail.

I have been learning this reality slowly and painfully for the last several years of my life.  I am passionate about truth, so it has been difficult for me to back down.  Sometimes the need to be correct only leads to the deterioration of a relationship, and relationships are much more important than a trivial fact or two.  In business, if you don’t know the right people, you can’t get anything done.  You look high and low until you find someone who knows what you need.  But it’s even worse when you know the person who can help you, but that person stymies your efforts because of a broken relationship.  The same is true in almost every realm of life.  Knowing truth is important, but it only leads to progress if you can convince someone else of it too.  So when it comes to everyday interactions, the people who are able to achieve great things and push the world in the right direction are always more concerned with being effective than with being right.