Mrs. Restivo

I don't want to write "Mrs. Restivo was an influential teacher" because that sentence has been murdered by every school essay ever written. I remember her as a person in a room with me during a period where I was changing very quickly. [add classroom description] I remember the lab equipment, the way the class felt, the fact that by senior year teachers were not only authority figures but adults I had known long enough to accumulate an actual relationship with. She saw the version of me that was doing the weird accelerated math thing and trying to finish high school perfectly and also taking being a Jehovah's Witness extremely seriously. I don't know what she thought the trajectory was. I thought I knew.

There are lots of little memories I need to recover here instead of filling them in with generic teacher sentiment. [insert memory] [insert experiment/lab] [insert conversation] The top-ten pictures are one of the sharp ones. I remember crying. Not necessarily because anything bad happened. It was the compression of years into an image, the realization that this whole optimization had become visible as a final group of kids standing there near the end. I want to find the actual picture and put it here. [embed: top-ten photo] I also want to write what I felt without pretending I already understood why I felt it. I was proud. I was overwhelmed. I was probably exhausted. The thing I had not originally even known to compete for had become one of the organizing metrics of my senior year, and now the measurement was basically over.

Then there was the lab-equipment thing near the end of senior year. I remember taking equipment and feeling confused about the whole interaction. [write exact event after memory verification] This is one of those memories where I have the emotional residue—confusion, a sense that the social meaning was not what I thought it was—but I do not want to fabricate the missing dialogue. The point may end up being partly that I was often socially literal. If I believed something had been offered or permitted, I could act on the object-level interpretation and only later notice there had been an entire relational subtext other people considered obvious.

I saw her later at Starbucks and felt embarrassed. [verify location/timing] I want to remember exactly why. Was I embarrassed about where my life had gone? About having not followed the future teachers probably expected from the top-ten kid? About the JW decision? About being seen outside the bounded role where I knew how to be impressive? It might have been all of it, or something much simpler. This is why I need to write the scenes now and then interrogate them rather than allowing one elegant explanation to eat the rest.

There is something painful about the asymmetry between student memory and teacher memory. A teacher can permanently alter the trajectory of a child through ordinary competent attention and then teach hundreds more children. For me, individual teachers become structural nodes in the autobiography. For them, I was one kid in a class that happened sixteen years ago. That is not unfair. It is just how the graph works. But it means the student can carry an encounter much longer than the adult who generated it.

Mrs. Restivo sits right near a hinge. Before her, school is mostly this engine that keeps rewarding curiosity and effort. During those last years, it becomes explicitly competitive and terminal: class rank, graduation, scholarship decisions, the question of what all this accumulated potential is FOR. She is attached to the last period where the adults around me could look at the metrics and assume the next step was obvious.

[embed: class/lab photos] [embed: top-ten photo] [scan: assignments or notes if any] [annotation: later Starbucks memory]

It was not obvious to me. Or rather, it WAS obvious to me, and that was the problem. Everybody else was looking at rank seven and seeing college. I was looking at basically the same evidence and seeing a chance to prove that I valued Jehovah more than the world.