Mentors

He always wore mirrored sunglasses, the kind the “Boss” with the rifle does in Cool Hand Luke. We thought maybe he was hungover all the time, his bloodshot eyes something he didn’t want us to report to our parents.

            The man was one mean mother of a 6th-grade teacher.

            Fortunately, I was in the other section; there were two. The unhappy unfortunates, and the happy us.  Our teacher was a teddy bear, full of love for us and nurturing compassion.

Where was he today? Why were we suffering being babysat by this nasty guy?

            I stared at the block of numbers on the board. I recognized all of them; I could count. I did not, however, recognize any of them as what he called them: prime numbers.

            “Come on, come on, come on!” he yelled, helping none of us identify them. “Hurry up!”

            We were supposed to circle them, these mystical prime numbers, picking them out of these huge blocks of numbers he’d thrown up randomly on the chalkboard.

There were four of us, all from the other class section. With the kind teacher. It had to be some kind of emergency for him to abandon us like this.

            I should have prayed for the Fire Marshall to stop by and point out to Darth Vader that the room was overcrowded, forcing him to release his clutch our section and return to our classroom next door, regardless of our having to be unsupervised. Better to rely on us to exhibit our best behavior alone than be burned to a crisp.

            Of course, at that age I didn’t even know what a Fire Marshall was. All four of us, we the visiting scholars from the other section, stared at the four densely packed groups of numbers.

            We ignorant four glanced at each other, chalk sticks at the ready, just in case divine intervention struck with the sudden knowledge of just exactly what prime numbers were.

            “Geez you guys are pitiful,” he spouted sarcastically. “What does he teach you over there?”

            The Boss yelled out the names of four of his students, told us dumbells to hand over the chalk to them and sit the hell down.

            I sat trembling and amazed as these four disciples circled all the prime numbers without hesitation. I could see no reason why any of those numbers were called prime.

            My math education did not improve from that point on. If I were the proverbial sponge of learning, when it came to mathematics, I was too full already. Full of tears and sopped up blood spilled over having been battered by numbers, shivved repeated and left to bleed out by the letter X, and his evil sidekicks, Y and Z.

            It wasn’t until I was 26 years old, sitting in an algebra night class, that I learned from a very kind teacher what prime numbers were. The explanation was so simple: a number that could only be divided by itself and one.

            I sat there amazed by this brief description, remembered how cruel that 6th-grade teacher had been, and how he’d not been mentor enough to take 30 seconds to tell us what prime numbers were.

            Until that moment, I had become the one who needed mirrored shades to hide the lifetime of grief, up to that point, that I’d suffered with numbers.

            I sometimes wonder what happened to the wonderful teacher who shepherded my section through that year. The other guy, well, I sometimes imagine what might have happened to him.

            But we must forgive, right? That’s the way we should all live our lives. As people overflowing with compassion for others, that willingness to accept them as they are and understand what misfortunes may have led them to turn out the persons they have become.

            Sincerely, I try and try to live my life this way, I do. But I’m only human.