Fear and failure

This is my report card from junior year in high school. I kept it in my briefcase for years. It’s an important reminder of where I began, and how much I had to learn along the way.

And the first thing I had to learn was about learning.

I enjoyed school–the friends, the sports, the goofing around. Just not so much the actual school. Reading, tests, papers, that stuff.

My friend Robbie (now my wife) helped me with my homework. I never had the patience to read, and figured it just wasn’t for me. Looking back, it’s amazing how little I understood myself.

The first book I ever read all the way through was Baseball is My Life, by Tom Seaver, who was a pitcher for the New York Mets. I was 16. Aside from that, I asked other people to tell me what the book was about and just winged it.

My favorite teacher in high school was Mr. Dunn, who taught English. The last month of my senior year we had a long paper to write. As usual, I had someone write it for me. When I handed it in, he pulled me out of class, furious. He said, “‘Duce, I know you get help from time to time but THIS?! It’s not one word from you. YOU have to rewrite the whole paper or I’ll flunk you, and you will not graduate.” I wrote a new paper (with some help), and graduated. We remained friends long after high school, and I wish he’d lived long enough to see these books.

In the years since, I’ve become a relentless reader. It’s how I learned about anxiety and developed the tools to manage it. I read at least a book a week. So clearly, something was off with that report card. I wasn’t lazy. It’s not that I couldn’t read. The more I look back on that piece of paper, the more I wonder how much anxiety may have frozen me out of exploring my own academic potential.

I can’t know for sure what was going on back then, but I do know that when students address anxiety early, it clears away obstacles to their own scholastic success, and hopefully they won’t have to endure report cards like mine.