Vol. 5, Issue 10: It's Not About The Grade
How Borrowed Belief Gets Us Through The Best and Worst of Times
I graduated 6th grade in 1988.*
*I generally hate these “we’re closer to X today than Y is to X” memes where X is something really old like Abe Lincoln and Y is something even older like your mom** or something, but somehow 1988 feels older than all of those things
**I laughed for 10 minutes at this
Kevin Arnold entered 7th grade around the same time I did. So for me, the Wonder Years* was more than just a sitcom that I watched. For a lot of reasons, it felt like a life that I was actively living as a newly minted teenager being raised in nondescript suburbs, even though it was more of my parents’ generation than mine. It was funny and it captured the absolute awkwardness and fun of growing up, but also the sadness and hurt that come with moving through adolescence.
*This Jon Friedman bit about the Wonder Years is one of the internet’s greatest gifts
The closing scene of the first episode sat with me for weeks*. Kevin finding Winnie in the woods, sitting on a log mourning the death of her brother in Vietnam and the two sharing their first kiss. I wrote in my last post about love and loss being able to sit next to each other in the same heart. This scene is a perfect encapsulation of that.
*There’s an interesting (to me) aside here. I did some research to validate my memories of the show that I wanted to use here and they were what I would call “mostly accurate,” with a fair amount of conflation of moments from the pilot episode with the final episode of the first season. The one thing I did remember accurately, weirdly, was that the song “Tears of a Clown” (released in 1970) played at the dance in the season 1 finale (which took place in 1968). I smugly brought this to Claude to validate my assumption that they fucked up and its reply was interesting, which was effectively that we don’t remember our childhood as historians; we remember them as storytellers, so the anachronism even if unintentional doesn’t matter. It’s about feeling, not accuracy. Nice to be put in my place by a fucking robot, but here we are.
But that’s not what I want to talk about again. There’s a different episode that my brain returns to a lot, even after all these years. It comes later in the show’s run in Season 3.
It’s an episode called “Goodbye”
In short, Kevin is struggling in algebra, working hard, but just looking to skate by with an “easy C”*. His teacher, Mr. Collins, won’t let him settle. They begin afterschool tutoring together, with Kevin making great progress until one day Mr. Collins abruptly ends their work. Kevin takes this as a great rejection and he intentionally bombs the big test that Friday, thinking he’ll stick it to the teacher. He comes back Monday, looking for his teacher intending to apologize, but it turns out the reason Mr. Collins ended the sessions was because he was very sick and he’d died of a heart condition over the weekend.
*One of the other reasons Kevin Arnold resonated with me is because were the exact same kind of student
The twist is that Mr. Collins* threw away Kevin’s test, forgiving the reaction and leaving a blank one for him to take knowing that Kevin had the ability in him to succeed. Kevin completes the exam and hands it to the sub, stating that there’s no need to grade it - “it’s an A” he says. The final moment is poignant. As Kevin leaves the classroom, he hears his name and turns back to see a vision of Mr. Collins sitting behind his desk. He pauses for a beat and says “Good job, Mr. Collins,” the highest praise Mr. Collins offered students during his classes.
*Weirdly, I also had a math teacher named Mr. Collins. He was my calculus teacher during my senior year and he and I had an understanding, which was he would let eat my bagel** and read the Daily News sports section in his class and I wouldn’t disrupt the entire class while doing it. If you’re out there and reading this Mr. Collins, cheers to you.
**Bialy, lox spread, peach Snapple
Now look, we all know that I’m an incredibly emotional person and I could go on and on (and on and on) about the emotional pull of this episode. Honestly, if you’re a certain kind of cynic, this type of stuff can come off extremely heavy handed. But because I’m here and I’m writing and this is my Substack, I’ll state outright that may not be wrong, but I don’t care. There’s a really big thing here and I’ve spent the last 2 months thinking through the philosophical center and this is the conclusion that I’ve come to:
Kevin thinks that the conflict here is about algebra. It isn’t. It’s about someone seeing a future version of you before you can see that version yourself. It’s about confusing accountability for criticism. And it’s about mistaking belief for pressure. And this isn’t always the case, because nothing is 100%, but sometimes the people pushing hardest are the first people who are capable of seeing the best version of you.
My Mr. Collins was Dr. Coleman.
As with Mr. Collins, Dr. Coleman wasn’t about what he taught. He was about how he taught. His ability to see things from multiple perspectives and convey them and his insistence that we do the same because certainly was dangerous. His belief that the means were as important as the ends and the thinking mattered as much as the answer. He demanded more from us because he believed we could deliver more.
At the time, I was like “I don’t have more to give, so I’m just gonna keep disappointing this guy, I guess.” But years later, I realized that he wasn’t demanding more because he was disappointed. He was demanding it because he knew before I did that I did have more to give, that I was capable of more.
That’s an incredibly powerful distinction.
Dr. Coleman passed away unexpectedly (and very young, if he were still alive he’d be younger than my parents) when I was in college, just a couple of years after I’d had him for English for my junior and senior years. My friend Doug and I came home for the funeral and we reminisced a bit about him, but the one thing that I’ve always wondered was whether he knew how impactful he was to me in my life. I hope he did. I was one of thousands of students he’d had in his career, so it’s hard to be sure.
Eventually, life starts taking people away from you. And those losses change you and rearrange your emotional structure. I’ve started thinking less about whether people love me and more about whether they know how much they’ve meant to me. Because as I get older, I’ve realized the best gifts that people have given me weren’t answers. The best gifts I’ve gotten were the confidence that I hadn’t yet figured out, the belief in me that they carried until I could carry it myself.
Loss over the last few years shook my foundation pretty hard, but as always, my support structure held firm. People reminding me who I was when I couldn’t see past the nest day. People who saw resilience in me, decency, strength, perspective that I didn’t know I had until I could see it myself. Like Mr. Collins did for Kevin. Like so many people have done for me. I borrow belief from them every single day of my life.
We all spend part of our lives living on borrowed belief. Someone else sees a version of us we haven’t met yet, and if we’re lucky, they refuse to let us settle for the person we think we are. The real tragedy is that we often don’t recognize what they gave us until they’ve already left the classroom. We assume there will be another semester to see them or another text they’ll respond to or another conversation over a cup of coffee. There isn’t always.
Sometimes the most important lessons aren’t the ones written on the blackboard; they’re the ones you don’t fully grasp until it’s too late. If someone has been carrying belief in you that you couldn’t yet carry yourself, let’s not wait as long as Kevin Arnold did.
Let’s tell each other now.
I keep saying I’m back and then I keep fading into the background for a bit, but such is life as a person with mild to moderate ADHD and a thousand half-formed ideas.
A few things going on:
Greg and I continue to push out episodes of Leadership In that we’re super proud of. You can find them all here.
I’m a chapter and a half into my book about TV theme songs, which I’m really having fun with but also haven’t touched in a couple of months. I’m back in that.
I have a piece about the IRONMAN 70.3 that I ran in New Mexico a few weeks ago and the White Sands National Park that I’m picking away at
I’ve got a huge piece for The History of It All about the Biffication of our political system that I’ve been working on for 6 months that I’m hoping will be out the door in the next 4 weeks