My Teacher Called Me A Failure Until The Janitor Said Something That Made Her Blush.

The Grilling

The video call with Vikram happened the next evening in my bedroom with my laptop propped up on my desk. He appeared on screen and looked exactly as intense as Mr. Castillo had warned.

Vikram pulled apart my user acquisition strategy right away, asking how much each channel cost and what the conversion rates were. He questioned my customer lifetime value calculations and pointed out that my profit margins would get squeezed significantly if I had to hire real employees instead of freelancers.

Every time I answered one question, he had three more ready. He wanted to know about competitive threats and why students wouldn’t just use free alternatives.

He asked what made my matching algorithm actually better than random assignment and why I thought I could scale this without it falling apart.

But after an hour of tough questions, he said the core product was solid and the market timing was good. He wanted to introduce me to two other people who might be interested in investing or advising.

The call ended, and I sat there feeling exhausted but also validated. Vikram had taken me seriously as a real business, not just a kid’s hobby project.

The Method to the Madness

Friday morning, I walked into AP Chemistry and took Mrs. Duran’s equilibrium quiz. I deliberately showed every single step of my work using exactly the format she demonstrated in class earlier that week.

Each problem got broken down with clear labels for the initial conditions, the equilibrium expression, the table, and the final calculation. It felt slow and inefficient compared to how I naturally solved problems, but I forced myself to follow her system precisely.

The problems themselves were straightforward, and I knew this material cold. The real test was whether I could stop solving things my own way and prove I understood her approach.

I finished with time to spare and used the extra minutes to review every line, making sure my notation matched her examples. Walking out of class, I felt cautiously hopeful that maybe this time she wouldn’t have an excuse to mark me down.

The weekend stretched ahead, and I had investor emails to respond to and app updates to review. But for now, I just wanted to believe I’d done enough to pass her test.

During lunch that same Friday, I sat in the cafeteria with my laptop open and drafted an email to Joyce Hendricks. I kept my tone professional and focused on specific examples rather than just complaining about unfair treatment.

I attached scans of three previous chemistry tests where my answers arrived at correct solutions but got marked wrong because I used different methods than Mrs. Duran demonstrated in class. Each attachment had my work circled in red with her comments about improper format or missing steps, even though the final answers matched the textbook solutions exactly.

I explained that I believed the grading was inconsistent and based on methodology preferences rather than actual understanding of the material.

Before hitting send, I added Mr. Castillo to the CC line as a witness to our previous conversation about my app and the confrontation with Mrs. Duran. My finger hovered over the send button for a solid minute while I reread everything twice, checking for any hint of disrespect or accusation that could backfire.

Finally, I clicked send and closed my laptop, feeling my heart beat faster.

Administrative Interests

Two hours later, during my free period, I checked my email and found a response from Joyce already waiting.

She asked me to come to her office Monday after school and said she was requesting that Mrs. Duran also attend to discuss the grading concerns. The email was professionally neutral, but the speed of her response and the fact she was bringing Mrs. Duran in made it clear she was taking this seriously.

I forwarded the email to Mr. Castillo with a quick thanks for supporting me.

That evening, while I was working on app updates, my phone buzzed with a text from him. He said he was proud of me for using the proper channels instead of just complaining to friends or giving up.

He offered to attend the Monday meeting as a faculty advocate if I wanted someone there besides just me, Mrs. Duran, and Joyce.

Saturday morning, I started building a comparison document that showed my work side-by-side with the textbook approach for each disputed problem. I pulled out all my old chemistry tests and carefully photographed each page, then organized them in a shared document with annotations explaining my reasoning for each problem.

I wrote out both my solution method and the standard textbook method, showing how they arrived at the same answer through different paths. The work took most of the day because I wanted everything crystal clear and impossible to argue with.

Sunday evening, I met Mr. Castillo at a coffee shop near school, and we practiced how I would present my case without sounding defensive or like I was attacking Mrs. Duran personally.

He coached me to frame everything as requesting clearer rubrics and acceptance of multiple valid solution methods rather than demanding my grades be changed or saying she was wrong to fail me.

He pointed out that administrators care more about policy improvements that help all students than about individual grade disputes. We role-played the meeting, with him asking tough questions about why I thought my methods were acceptable and whether I had tried to follow her format before complaining.

By the end, I felt more confident about staying calm and professional even if Mrs. Duran got defensive or Joyce asked hard questions.

The Reality of Revenue

Sunday night around 11:00, I opened my email to find a message from Vikram asking for detailed financial breakdowns of my app business.

He wanted server costs broken out by provider and usage tier, and payment processing fees calculated as both flat amounts and percentages. He asked for developer expenses itemized by project with hourly rates, and customer acquisition costs separated by channel, showing how much I spent on each marketing method and how many users came from each source.

The level of detail he requested made me realize how informal my bookkeeping had been up to this point. I tracked revenue obsessively because seeing the numbers grow was exciting, but my expenses were scattered across three different credit cards and two bank accounts with no organized system.

I opened a spreadsheet and started pulling transaction histories from every account, trying to categorize each expense properly. Server costs were easy because I had monthly bills from the same providers.

Developer payments were mostly straightforward because I used the same freelance platform. But marketing expenses were a mess of small transactions for Facebook ads and Google ads and Instagram promotions that I had to dig through individually.

By 1:00 in the morning, I had a rough P&L statement that showed my actual profit margins were thinner than I thought once I accounted for everything properly.

The 40,000 in monthly revenue looked impressive, but after subtracting 12,000 for servers, 8,000 for developers, 6,000 for marketing, another 3,000 for payment processing fees, and random other costs, I was actually netting closer to 11,000 per month.

Still good money for a high school side project, but not the massive success the gross revenue number suggested. I sent the spreadsheet to Vikram at 2:00 in the morning, then collapsed into bed.