-1

An old professor's email hit me harder than any lecture did

Last Tuesday I got a note from my econ professor, the one I skipped class to wash dishes at Denny's. He said he remembered me as the student who asked questions but never showed up for exams, and that leaving was probably the right call for my head at the time. It made me rethink whether I quit for the right reasons or just because I was scared of failing, and now I'm wondering if anyone else has had a teacher say something that changed how they see their dropout.

1 comments

1 Comment

ward.fiona1d ago

...because that reminded me of something that happened to my buddy Marcus back in community college. He dropped out halfway through his second year, same sort of thing, just couldn't keep up and felt like a fraud sitting in those lectures. Years later he ran into his old biology teacher at a gas station, and she said she always figured he'd end up doing something with his hands because he was the only kid who actually took apart the lab equipment to understand how it worked. He told me that one sentence flipped a switch for him, he realized he wasn't a failure, he just needed a different kind of classroom. He's now running his own HVAC repair business and says he still thinks about that gas station conversation a lot.