gushing and blushing

I.

I read my horoscope today.

This is what it said:

There's a new elective surgery that makes it impossible to ever blush again. It's an expensive procedure that involves boring a hole in your armpit and cutting the nerve endings that are responsible. I wouldn't recommend it for you, even though you're entering a phase when you'll be more prone than usual to blushing. Why? Because, according to my projections, your main reason for blushing in the coming days will be due to receiving sudden, unexpected, or long-withheld praise. I believe it'll be a time when you're acknowledged for the good things you do. Blush away!


I thought, great. Bring on the praises. I could use the boost this week.






II.

During lunch, a parent volunteer came up to me and asked if I had a minute. She said I've changed her life and she wanted to tell me about it. Uh, hell yeah, I have a minute. This lady is the mother of a sophomore I had in my class last term, and she said she waited until he was no longer in my class to tell me this story.

When she was here for the open house two years ago, when her son was applying as an 8th grader, she ended up in my class. I taught a poem—either Genny Lim's "Sweet n' Sour" or W. H. Auden's "Musée des Beaux Artes," I think. The mom told me that she learned English as a second language in high school, and she was traumatized as a student of English by a terrible English teacher. She did not know until the last minute if she was going to pass her class; at the same time, ironically, she was the valedictorian of her class on graduation day because of her amazing accomplishment—mastering English in three years. (Interestingly enough, I also was the student who gave the graduation address in English to my high school classmates in Turkey.)

For the first time after all those years, this woman sat in my class, read and discussed a poem, and she was surprised to find herself thinking "I can do this!" She told me this story today because "I had to let you know," she said, and because inspired by me, my class and her experience in it, she's gone back to college, is now taking English courses, and she says "I never want to stop taking English classes."