being where
you’ve been.

Normally we didn’t have quizzes in math club, because it was a club not a class, but on Monday we had one. Mr. Clifton called it a “whiz quiz,” to try to trick us into thinking it might be more fun than a regular quiz, I bet, but I was not tricked. It was all about multiplication, and I got almost all the answers wrong.

After math club was over, I stayed behind to tell Mr. Clifton something when nobody else was in the room.

“I don’t think I should be in math club anymore,” I told him.

Mr. Clifton set down the stack of papers he was holding. “Albie?” he said, like my name was a question. “Why would you want to drop out?”

“I just . . .” I scuffed my foot along the carpet. “I’m not very good at math. I think I . . .” I scuffed my foot some more, harder. “I don’t think I should do any math anymore.”

“Albie.” That time my name was not a question.

Mr. Clifton didn’t say anything after that, and I figured maybe he was waiting for me to look at him instead of at my shoes. So finally I did. Even though my shoes were more interesting.

“I want to show you something.” That’s what he said.

Mr. Clifton walked around behind his desk and pointed to something on the wall—a small blue piece of paper in a square black frame. I followed him so I could look at it more closely. I stood on my tiptoes and stuck my nose right close to the glass.

It was a report card.

NAME:	Daniel Clifton
GRADE:	4th
SCORES
SCIENCE:	A
SOC. STUDIES:	B+
ART:	A-
READING:	A
MATH:	F

“That’s yours?” I asked, settling down from my tiptoes.

“Yep,” Mr. Clifton said.

“Mr. Clifton,” I told him, very seriously, “you should probably take that down. Because otherwise someone might find out that you got an F in math.”

Mr. Clifton just laughed at that, a real guffaw. “I keep it there on purpose,” he said.

My eyes went wide. “You do?” That sounded crazy to me. Because why would anyone ever want to hang up an F report card, in a frame and everything? The worst report card I’d ever gotten from Mountford Prep had three U’s for Unsatisfactory, and I threw that one down the garbage chute. I definitely didn’t frame it.

“You can’t get where you’re going without being where you’ve been.”

That’s what Mr. Clifton said while I was still staring at his F report card.

“Huh?” That’s what I said.

“My grandmother always used to tell me that,” Mr. Clifton explained. “When I was a boy.”

“Oh,” I said.

I wonder if Mr. Clifton’s grandmother ever saw that F report card.

“When I was a kid,” Mr. Clifton said, “I hated math. Hated it. Because I was bad at it, and because I thought it didn’t make any sense.”

I nodded at that, because it was true. Math didn’t make any sense.

“So that’s why I decided to become a math teacher.”

I stopped nodding when Mr. Clifton said that last part. Because that was a thing that didn’t make any sense.

“What?” I said. “Why?”

He shrugged. “I figured if math didn’t make any sense to me, it probably didn’t make sense to lots of other people. So I promised myself that if I ever did figure it out, I’d become a math teacher so I could help other people who’d had trouble, just like me.” He reached up and straightened the report card in its frame so it was exactly even to the ground. “It took a lot of hard work, but I’m glad every day that I made that decision and didn’t end up with some super-easy profession, like neurosurgeon.”

I just stared at him. Because I knew that Mr. Clifton liked to tell bad jokes, but this time I couldn’t tell if he was joking. Who would actually want to be a math teacher?

“So I can’t drop out of math club, then?” I asked.

“Not even a little,” Mr. Clifton told me.