Have you no strength?

Freshman year of high school, I had this English teacher, a nun, who everyone thought was pretty mean. She seemed very strict and the atmosphere in her classroom seemed way too tense for 14- and 15-year-olds. This nun permanently turned me off to reading Charles Dickens after making us all read Great Expectations. I’m sure if I could go back today and see things through an adult’s eyes, I would find some wisdom in her teaching style, like you can find wisdom in a lot of things that you rejected when you were young. Anyway, I once took a multiple-choice test for her where we had to fill in the little bubbles with our No. 2 pencils. I had apparently not pressed hard enough on the pencil and the answers were very faint. In the margins, Sister wrote, “Have you no strength?!”

Well, Sister, let me tell you something about strength. Strength goes beyond the mere pressing of a pencil on paper. It’s about what’s in your heart. It’s about being able to get up every day and face the trials before you—whether they be mean English teachers or hateful coworkers throwing produce at you in the lunchroom—with a spine of steel. So, Sister, you can’t measure the strength of a person by how dark that graphite smear is on a multiple-choice freshman English test. The most feather-light pencil touch can belie the most adamantine heart. I am a strong person, Sister. I am a strong person and no comment in red pen on the side of my 31-year-old test can take that away from me.