Unfiltered Story #312413
I had a High School English teacher that had a tendency to always pick stories to teach that seemed designed to depress others. From Dystopian fiction to short stories with downer endings to humans turning savage at a drop of a hat the moment society changes. The closest thing we got to a positive story was the ‘Catcher in the Rye’; the story of a depressed mental patient telling us about a world full of phonies, lost of innocence, and that growing up sucks.
This teacher’s class ended up being my least favorite class that year, not because he was otherwise a bad teacher, but just because I got so sick of every story seeming to say that mankind sucked and we weren’t going to get any better. I just wanted a chance to read one story with a remotely positive, or just neutral, message!
Not long after I graduated I happened to run into this teacher and his wife at a bookstore. After polite hello’s my teacher introduced me to his wife.
Teacher: “This is [my name], he was the closest I had to an individual in my class last year.”
Me: “Oh umm, thank you?”
That phrase just stuck with me afterwards. I’m pretty sure he meant it as a compliment, but I still didn’t know how one is suppose to take that statement. My best guess is it meant “Well all humans suck, but this guy at least was antisocial enough that he didn’t suck quite as much as the rest of his peers.” Though even that sort of fails to work when you consider that many of the books we read, like Lord of the Flies and The Invisible Man, implied society was the only thing keeping humans from turning into savage monsters. If anything shouldn’t being individualistic just mean society would do a worse job of keeping my feral side contained?
A decade and a half later and i still think this is the strangest compliment I’ve ever gotten. But at the very least I suppose you can say this teacher’s lessons did stick with me, if not quite the way he intended. Here’s to you Mr Teacher, I hope you eventually found at least a little optimism in your own life.
