I had originally drafted this as part of the Letters To My Teachers series, but upon completion I realized that this lesson does not belong in the same category as the teachers who really inspired me.   This teacher helped me accept mental illness as a reality; that we are surrounded by mentally ill people and sometimes they have power over us   Below is a letter to Mrs. R:

I'm writing this letter to you because I wanted to thank you for showing me the complications of the human condition at age 11.  I mean this in no sarcastic way.  Your 6th grade social studies class, with a focus on Antiquity, The Middle Ages and The Renaissance was extremely challenging for me.  You taught us about The Cloisters Museum, in Manhattan, and inspired me to want to travel into Manhattan to see the more unique museum offerings.  I became fascinated with The Middle Ages.

The thing is, you had this glitch.  I'm sorry to use that word, but it is the point of this letter.  You really, really, really hated "erasures".  That was the word you used so often that at age 35, it is still ingrained.  I think you might have even grinded your teeth slightly every time you said it, unless I'm confusing you with Nurse Diesel from Mel Brooks' High Anxiety.  (Shout out to Cloris Leachman).

All of our exams were on Scantron.  You felt strongly that using the pencil eraser to change our own answers during an exam would mess up the Scantron machine's automatic scoring.  Perhaps you also thought we could use that as an argument to get our test scores improved after the fact?  In any case, you banned the usage of pencil erasers from our examination tool set.  You banned them so much that you even reviewed Scantrons post-grading for evidence of erasures and if you saw one, even if the erasure was the result of a student realizing a mistake was made and then chose the correct answer, you would deduct points anyway.  Oh, the cruelty.

In later years, other teachers would make use of this other tool called "the pen" (ok, that's sarcastic).  Teachers would ask us to finalize our answers at the end of the examination period by circling our final answers in pen, just in case the Scantron graded us incorrectly, there was a way for both teacher and student to make a valid claim.

What was the lesson in all of this?  You taught me that teachers are human.  Something really upset you about this pencil eraser object and there was no changing your mind.  My parents brought it up during parent-teacher conferences.  You were unchangeable.  I would argue that you had an unfair policy.  However, you taught me that life is unfair.  There are going to be rules that might seem arbitrary sometimes.  Maybe you had been affected in the past by some angry parents for grading Scantrons in a certain way and that's why you had to institute this policy?  I'll never know.  You prepared me to understand that there are just going to be people who are in power that will cause the powerless some level of agony and for some period of time, it will be necessary to find a coping mechanism.

I think the stress of not being able to erase my answers or use a scratch pad made it harder for me to academically succeed.  However, not everything in junior high school is about getting good grades.  I certainly did not have them until much later in the 8th grade (6th grade was an academic disaster for me).   I feel like I survived after getting through your class.  I feel like I somehow understood your pain.

You had some sort of eye operation at one point.  I saw you on the sidewalk walking to your car while I was walking home from school one day.  I said "hi" to you, because I was raised to treat teachers with respect.  You did not respond.  You looked at me like I was crazy.  I thought maybe you did not recognize me?  Maybe you literally couldn't see me because of your eye surgery?  But if that's the case, you probably shouldn't have been driving.  Maybe someone was coming to pick you up?  (It was always so weird living so close to school and seeing your teachers on your local streets and then have them pretend like they don't really know you.  It kind of defeats the whole purpose of having communities and neighborhoods). I was not offended though.  I saw your pain.  I saw that you were a complicated person and clearly something had happened in the past that caused you to view students as something slightly less than human.  It was okay.  I thought my fellow students who were bullying each other incessantly and beating each other bloody in the lunchroom every day were less than human as well.

In a way, you made me feel less crazy during a time when I felt like the rules I was raised with were breaking down around me.

Thank you,

Jonathan