(What If? Exercise: Read the description here.)

I must be a terrible teacher.

Since college, all I ever wanted to do was teach. I studied pedagogy for years. I took student teacher positions at three different schools. And I graduated from my university with highest honors. But evidently, I was unprepared for the real challenge of being a full-time teacher.

I was sure my students would hate me just for teaching everyone’s least favorite subject. So from my first day, I tried to make math as fun and accessible as possible. I tried to create stories with numbers. I came up with scenarios that had applicable solutions. I made every effort to explain problems in a way even the slowest kids could understand. I thought if I made my class interesting enough, they would want to put in the effort to learn.

But I never saw any appreciation from my students. They never asked questions in class, even though my subject is difficult and unpopular. They never requested extra credit, even though I offered dozens of worksheets to help them pass their tests. They never came to my after-school tutoring sessions, even though I sat in my classroom for two extra hours every Tuesday and Thursday just to clear their doubts. By all accounts, they were utterly determined not to learn math.

Yet miraculously, as I sit here grading their final exam, they all seem to have passed with flying colors. Even without answers or extra credit or tutoring, not a single student has flunked my class. It’s as if they all banded together and studied hard on their own time just so they wouldn’t have to endure my class for another semester. Math is extremely difficult; there’s no way they did so well based on my lessons alone. They must have gotten help. Just not from me. Because they hate me.

There’s no other explanation. I must be a terrible teacher.

This story is based on What If? Exercise 24: “The Unreliable Narrator”. The exercise is to write a self-deceiving first-person story containing clues that the narrator is not the person she thinks she is. The objective is to create a narrator who unwittingly reveals that her judgment of people and events is too subjective to be trusted, so readers must create a more objective version of the story for themselves. I hope you enjoy what I’ve written! Thanks for reading!

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