Nice Try

by Josh Gondelman

  It was not the circumstances of our meeting that made us nemeses. It was irrefutably personal. In part, it was that the way she taught was not the way I learned. Day after day, our brains rubbed each other the wrong way. We wore each other down like the thighs on a pair of corduroy pants. But more than that, she just didn’t like me, and that drove me batshit berserk. How could she not recognize the delightful balance I struck? I was studious but not uptight; clever but not distracting; high achieving but not intensely competitive with my classmates. What more did she want from me?

  If you are looking for a way to spin my psyche out into parking lot doughnuts of desperation, all you have to do is hint ever so gently that you’d enjoy it more if maybe we didn’t spend so much time together. I will, without fail, overcorrect whatever behavior you find unsatisfactory and send my entire personality careening in the opposite direction.

  Example: Between my sophomore and junior year in college, my girlfriend at the time went back home to California for the summer. Each week, I’d send her an elaborate package featuring a letter (often written in character) and a little gift. If this sounds smothering to you, you’re right! It was! My girlfriend once brought up that she found the weekly deliveries a bit much. I spent the next week fretting. I didn’t want to disregard her input, but how else could I show I was a devoted long-distance boyfriend? The next week, I slapped a Post-it note reading “Whatever” onto a brick, crammed the brick into a flat-rate Priority Mail envelope, and mailed it to her. Was that the act of an unhinged maniac? Yes. Was it her favorite thing I mailed her all summer? Also yes. (We broke up the week the fall semester started, obviously, but we are good friends now.)

  Ms. Walensky didn’t just hint that I wasn’t her favorite student, she practically announced it. She rolled her eyes when I raised my hand to ask questions. She sighed disapprovingly when handing back my homework assignments. She mocked my answers when I participated in class. Nothing I did was good or right or enough. And when I tried the opposite—laying low in an attempt to skate through our ninety-minute class unnoticed—that didn’t work, either. I wasn’t used to being frustrated like this by a teacher. I was supposed to be good at school. Sputtering through Spanish class gave me the same feeling as when you lose track of your online banking password. How can I not crack this code? This was supposed to be a problem for other people, not me.

  Look, I used to be a teacher. All teachers want their students to learn and grow. But every teacher also has those kids who, when they’re out sick for a day, inspire a silent prayer of gratitude to god, or the universe, or whichever student came back from spring break with the flu bug that’s going around. For Ms. Walensky, I was that kid. I’m surprised I never walked into the classroom to find her sneezing on my midterm exam before handing it to me or rubbing an uncooked chicken breast on my desk.

  My psychological breakdown began almost as soon as sophomore year started. I could have handled a bad grade or two.1 But for a teacher to dislike me based on my personality was something I just could not abide. I wasn’t always the best student in each of my classes, but I strove to be the most good in all of them. It wasn’t that I was a suck-up or a teacher’s pet. (I definitely was.) I just wanted every teacher to think I was a bright, shining star destined for greatness.

  Even if I wasn’t setting the curve with my test results, I wanted to make the sharpest, wittiest comments during in-class discussions and seem like the kind of kid who, if he didn’t have an assignment complete, must have had a really good reason for it. And also I wanted to get, like, the second-best grades.

  Most of the time, my strategy worked. I finished high school fourth in my class, which please believe me I have not brought up in at least ten years. My junior-year English teacher2 wrote me a college recommendation so effusive about my potential that I’m slightly ashamed of becoming a medium-successful comedian and writer rather than the first Jewish pope or a newly discovered dwarf planet. (Not the astronomer who discovered the dwarf planet, the thing itself.)

  Ms. Walensky, however, was neither charmed by my personality nor impressed by my classwork. She had no interest in my clever asides or digressions, and no level of conversational fluidity or grammatical expertise with the Spanish language could convince her that I was a dedicated student. It was worse than getting bad grades. Bad grades reflect poor work. This was about my personality, which I believed at the time to be excellent. Although, almost as upsettingly, my grades in Ms. Walensky’s class were also not stellar.

  From the beginning of the year onward, she gave homework assignments that I found inane, and I struggled to complete them. Tasks like, “I want two pages of work, front and back, on textbook pages fifty-five through fifty-seven.” Sometimes the book had practice exercises on the pages she assigned, but she directed us not to focus too much on those. Other times, she would point us to a table of contents, the title page for a new chapter, and a list of ten vocabulary words.

  “What do you want us to do?” we asked, at first.

  “Whatever you want. Just make sure it’s two pages, front and back.”

  At first, I did my best to complete her busywork. I wrote practice sentences with unfamiliar vocabulary words. I did the exercises the textbook editors prescribed. I was used to putting in the effort with assignments that I found challenging (except trigonometry. Fuck triangles, and fuck their whole crew. Fuck cosines, fuck sines, and especially fuck tangents.) and coasting through tasks that were easy. I wasn’t accustomed to education as an exercise in volume of work done. But it was my homework, so I did it. Because I wanted to be the most good.

  Then, gradually, Ms. Walensky stopped checking our assignments, and I lost my goddamn mind. I’d spend two hours staring at the pages of my textbook and free-associating to fill the blank pages. I would have liked to show you the turtle. She would have liked to give me the tomato. We would have liked to throw them the chinchillas. It quickly grew repetitive and incoherent, like the verses of a Red Hot Chili Peppers song. And then to show up in class and have the teacher not even validate the effort? Screw that. I wanted to stand up on my chair and display my work to her like Rafiki presenting Simba on Pride Rock. Do you see this? Do you see what a good kid I am? Gaze upon my works and . . . I don’t know . . . put a little check mark on the top of the page.

  I complained about my situation to anyone who would listen. My parents. My classmates. Friends at other schools with no frame of reference.

  “She just doesn’t like boys,” said my friend Cate with a shrug at play rehearsal, in response to my lamentations. Cate was a year ahead of me and was in her second consecutive year of Spanish with Walensky. She was one of the teacher’s favorites, a hardworking student with a studious disposition. Her words brought me some comfort. Maybe it wasn’t me. Maybe I was being prejudiced against because of my gender. What a relief. And, as a high school boy, I probably deserved some level of skepticism and distrust. “Just do the work and you’ll be fine,” Cate assured me.

  Still, over time I let my work slip. Once, the only paper I’d had on hand was college ruled, so it had twice as many lines as the wide-ruled notebook sheets we usually worked with. So, to compensate, I did a page and a half of homework instead of two. It worked out to the same amount of lines, but because it wasn’t two full pages, I didn’t earn full credit. I became despondent, and my effort continued to erode. Some nights I started doing one page front and back, and then read ahead in the textbook. Or I wouldn’t read ahead. Or I’d just do one side of a page because nothing matters so why bother?

  My final breaking point came in our last Spanish class before winter break. Ms. Walensky had prepared a lesson on holiday traditions around the world. “Does anyone know how mistletoe was originally used around Christmas?” she asked the class.

  I raised my hand. “Well, back in the day, if you didn’t like someone, you’d take a little mistletoe and sprinkle it in their eggnog, then . . . boom,” I joked, caught up in the holiday spirit.

  Ms. Walensky
stared at me, revolted, the way you might look at a dog cleaning its butt with its tongue. I know you can’t help it, but you disgust me, her face said.

  “Why would you say that?” she replied. “No. Mistletoe was burned as part of a pagan ritual. It’s poisonous. I bet you didn’t know that,” she said. Of course I had known that. It was the entire premise of my joke. You’d use the poison berries to murder someone with their festive holiday beverage. (It wasn’t a great joke, but I still stand by the fact that it makes logical sense.)

  When we came back from break, things continued to deteriorate. My every attempt to participate in class was met with withering stares. She responded to any question I asked as if I’d raised my hand and commented, “Excuse me, I need to go to the bathroom, but I forget how and where to do that.” The attention I paid to my Spanish homework continued to diminish. I had other things to do, and I was learning the material. Why waste my time on something I’d never get credit for anyway? But my teacher’s personal distaste for me caused me so much anxiety that I couldn’t even enjoy the spite of disregarding her assignments.

  During one homework check, Walensky was walking up and down the rows, inspecting everyone’s work. Not whether it was good, whether it was simply enough. I dug through my backpack, desperate to come up with any notes I could show her. She stopped in front of my desk. I handed her my meager scribbling.

  “Where is the rest of it?” she asked, knowing the answer.

  “That’s all I’ve got,” I said quietly.

  “Well, that wasn’t the assignment.”

  “I think I’m having trouble figuring out how to complete the assignments to your specifications,” I replied, completely worn down and desperate to figure out how to fix things. “Is there any way I could come in after class and talk about how I could do better?”

  She laughed, which felt unfair, because I had said some very funny things in her class, and that was not one of them.

  “The year is more than halfway over, and now you want help on your homework?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, no,” she replied. And that was that.

  I saw Cate at play rehearsal that night. We were chatting backstage, waiting to rehearse a scene, when for once she brought up the topic of Ms. Walensky’s Spanish class. Cate seemed to have a new insight, but she was reluctant to share it.

  “So . . .” she began, “I think Walensky was making fun of you in my class. She brought up someone wanting homework help this late in the year and started laughing.” At that point in my life, I had very little professional experience in any field, but a teacher shit-talking a student to her other classes struck me as profoundly unprofessional.

  Over the course of the year, my parents noticed my slow descent into madness (or, en español, locura). In part, they saw my increasing frustration as I tried to conjure up each night’s two pages (which was really four pages, and yes, I will still die on this hill) of verb conjugations and sentence constructions engineered to showcase vocabulary words. The other, larger part of my parents’ awareness of my stress was aided by my complaining.

  During this period, I complained a lot. I mean, also, I complain a lot now. Not in the sense of “I’d like to speak to your manager to lodge a formal complaint.” The complaining I like is the good, old-fashioned love-of-the-game kvetch, as my ancestors might have called it. It’s very satisfying and even soothing when done right, like scratching a mosquito bite. There’s an art to it, a delicate balance. You have to go hard enough that the itch gets taken care of, but not so hard that you make the initial problem worse. By the time winter break ended, I’d long passed the point of no return. My spirited trash talk had tipped, irreversibly, into the realm of sincere despair. I shuffled through the house, practically gnashing my teeth and rending my clothes in dread.

  My mother, very generously, offered to talk to the principal on my behalf, which felt like a big deal. I didn’t have what are now known as “helicopter parents,” the kind who hover at all times, ready to swoop in and lift their children out of a troubling situation like the presence of danger or gluten. My folks were more like the Toyota Camry of parents. They were always steady, dependable, and there for me. But they weren’t the high-speed getaway types. Aside from my dad once getting ejected from my youth basketball game for arguing with a referee who’d told me to shut up (I was probably complaining at the time), they generally advised me on how to deal with difficult authority figures rather than fighting such battles for me. So for my mom to volunteer to handle this one meant that my complaining had gone above and beyond its normal volume and frequency. For months, I demurred. I felt certain that if only I could prove to Ms. Walensky what a good kid I was, our tension would evaporate.

  After I heard that my Spanish teacher had been making fun of me to her other classes (en inglés, no less!), I took my mother up on her offer. The vice-principal agreed to meet with us, and he listened to my concerns; my teacher had a personal vendetta against me, a Very Good Student, a charge that was (as far as I could tell) both concerning and clear cut. The vice-principal, a man in his fifties with graying hair, the very pinnacle of what I’d grown up picturing as a Serious Authority Figure, nodded while my mother and I took turns speaking.

  When we finished detailing the abuses I’d suffered, allegations I was certain were sufficient to land my Spanish teacher in The Hague or at the very least one of those asylums for the criminally eccentric that Batman sends his enemies to, the vice-principal offered his response. Ms. Walensky, he told us, was very old. That, of course, was not news to me. But, he continued, on account of her oldness and nearness to retirement and general crankiness, this particular fight was not one he cared to pick with his employee.

  My options were, as he saw them, to drop out of honors-level Spanish into an intermediate class with another teacher or suck it up and finish out the year. In short: Life’s not fair. Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown (or, in this case, Little Havana). I didn’t like his decision, but I understood it. As someone who disagreed with Ms. Walensky for ninety minutes, two to three times a week, I could say for certain that confronting her was not something I’d do if I could find a way to avoid the experience.

  There was no way I was going to drop the class. For one thing, that’s not what a Good Kid does. For another, I was determined to propel myself through the end of the year on an engine fueled by spite. She didn’t like me? Well, I didn’t like her. And unlike my Spanish teacher, I possessed youth and vigor and a volatility bestowed on me by my out-of-whack adolescent hormones. It’s like the adrenaline that flows through a mother’s body when lifting a car off a kid, but for slamming a door and yelling, “You’ll never understand, Dad!”

  I should stop for a second and note here that with the benefit of almost twenty years of hindsight, I do realize that Ms. Walensky was not a bad person. She was, as the vice-principal said, an old woman approaching retirement with years as a successful educator under her belt. She was also very sick, frequently missing days and then weeks at a time of school. Even then, I didn’t wish harm on her, but every time I arrived at her classroom to find her desk empty or occupied by an unprepared substitute, I felt an entire snow day’s level of relief concentrated into a single class period.

  The endorphin rush I felt when Ms. Walensky was absent was amplified by the fact that I had basically stopped doing my homework assignments. I still did some homework. I couldn’t fully deactivate the good kid part of my brain. But I did just enough to learn the grammar and the vocabulary that we covered in class, and then I stopped. I figured that if I was getting scowls and reprisals for doing 90 percent of my homework, it couldn’t get much worse if I dropped down to a breezy 25 percent completion rate. What would Ms. Walensky do, force-feed me mistletoe? And if she wasn’t in class to check the assignments most days, all the better.

  It still felt bad that Ms. Walensky didn’t like me. But even on the days that she felt well enough to make it to school and thought to inspect our assignments, I
realized there was only so bad it could get. Sure, her footsteps approaching my desk twisted my guts, the way a bully’s fist grabs and scrunches your T-shirt so he can pull you close and let his other fist do some real damage. But once she had marked my work unsatisfactory and moved on to the next student, everything relaxed. I didn’t like that she couldn’t stand me, but I accepted it as an immutable point of fact. Once I stopped trying to convince her to get on board with the Josh Gondelman Experience (having me in her class, not a jam band I was trying to start), my life became easier and happier.

  I never cut class. I have always been constitutionally incapable of not showing up places I am expected to show up. Even in college when I had mono (not from anything fun), I made it to every lecture. And I always took notes and participated in group discussions. It was important to me (outside of my willful homework negligence) to get good grades. I didn’t want to screw up my GPA in a huff, and I did want to prove that I could learn the material without doing hours of inane busywork every night. I think, in the end, I squeaked out an A− for the year, which I took as validation of both my learning style and the endurance I displayed during our educational war of attrition.

  And the sweetest part of that grade: I knew how much she hated to give it to me.

  The Present-Tense Conjugation of the Spanish Verb Nadar, Which Means “to Swim”

  (As Best as I Can Remember It)

  I swim—nado

  You swim—nadas

  He or she swims/you (formal) swim—nada

  We swim—nadamos

  You (plural, in Spain) swim—nadáis

  They/you (plural) swim—nadan

  Screech

  At my core, I am and always have been uncool, and in high school I hit my lifetime hipness nadir. I did musical theater. I was in the marching band. I didn’t drink. I owned only a single pair of extremely-wide-leg1 JNCO pants, and they were bile-colored corduroys. During my brief tenure on the junior varsity basketball team (my only traditionally cool extracurricular), instead of high-top sneakers, I wore throwback Adidas Superstars. Instead of wearing prescription goggles, I got a pair of thick black Buddy Holly glasses (the kind basketball players in black-and-white photos wore before Black and white players were allowed on the same courts). On one level, I liked the retro style, but on another, I wanted everyone else to know that I knew that even while playing sports, I was still kind of a dweeb.