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

Coaching for the Oral Assessment

Friday after school, I headed to the chemistry lab for my usual cleanup duty and found Mr. Castillo already there organizing supplies.

He said he wanted to help me prepare for Monday’s oral assessment by playing the role of a tough examiner. We spent the next hour going through equilibrium problems from my textbook.

He would read a problem, and I would start solving it out loud, explaining each step. Then he would interrupt with pointed questions about why I chose that particular approach and how I would explain my reasoning to someone who learned the material differently.

At first, I got defensive, trying to prove my method was better, but he kept pushing back, asking me to consider the perspective of a student who found my shortcuts confusing.

He made me walk through the same problems using the standard textbook format, showing all the intermediate steps I normally skipped.

It felt slow and tedious, but I started to see how someone without my intuition might need those extra steps to follow the logic. His coaching helped me realize the oral assessment was not about defending my preferred method as superior; it was about demonstrating I understood the material well enough to explain it multiple ways depending on what a student needed.

By the end of the session, I felt more confident about Monday. Mr. Castillo reminded me to stay patient even if Mrs. Duran tried to rattle me with nitpicky questions.

The goal was to prove I knew the chemistry, not to win an argument about teaching methods.

Retaliation in the Lab

The following Monday in AP Chemistry, Mrs. Duran assigned lab partners for an experiment about reaction rates. After we finished, she made a big show of pointing out that some students had left their stations messy.

She walked around inspecting each area and stopping at my table, even though I had cleaned everything properly. Then she announced loudly that I would stay after to clean up—not just my station, but also the stations of several other students who had actually made the messes.

She added a comment about how students who question authority need to prove their commitment to the class through extra effort. Everyone turned to stare at me, and a few people smirked.

I felt my face getting hot, but bit my tongue and just nodded. After class ended, I started gathering dirty beakers and wiping down the other lab tables while my classmates filed out.

The work was not hard, but the public humiliation stung. Mrs. Duran sat at her desk grading papers and occasionally glancing up to make sure I was working.

About 20 minutes into the cleanup, Mr. Castillo walked past the open classroom door with his cleaning cart. He paused and looked in, seeing me scrubbing lab tables while Mrs. Duran watched.

His expression shifted to something like disapproval, and he shook his head slightly before continuing down the hallway. The small gesture of solidarity made me feel less alone, even though he did not say anything.

The Demonstration Begins

Tuesday afternoon, I showed up to Mrs. Duran’s classroom after school for the first part of my demonstration assessment. Joyce Hendricks was already there, sitting in a student desk near the back with a notepad.

Mrs. Duran had prepared five equilibrium problems written on the whiteboard, ranging from simple to complex. She told me to work through each one out loud, explaining my reasoning step by step and showing how I could solve them using both the standard textbook approach and alternative methods that achieved the same result.

I started with the first problem, which involved calculating equilibrium concentrations from initial conditions and an equilibrium constant.

I walked through the standard table method, labeling initial concentrations, changes, and equilibrium values. Then I showed how you could also set up the same problem using a system of equations if you understood the underlying algebra.

Mrs. Duran interrupted, asking why I had written the equilibrium expression a certain way and whether my notation was standard. I explained my notation matched the textbook, but I could write it differently if that was clearer.

She asked several more questions about terminology and whether I was using proper significant figures. I stayed patient and answered everything carefully.

Joyce took notes and occasionally asked her own clarifying questions about how I had learned these alternative approaches and whether I understood when each method was most useful.

The second and third problems went similarly, with me demonstrating multiple solution paths and Mrs. Duran finding small things to question.

By the fourth problem, which involved a complex multi-step equilibrium, I could tell Joyce was satisfied I knew the material. She asked me to explain how I would teach this concept to another student who was struggling, and I walked through how I would break it down into smaller pieces.

The fifth problem was the hardest, involving temperature effects on equilibrium, and I had to really think through my explanation. But I managed to show both the thermodynamic approach using Le Chatelier’s principle and the mathematical approach using the van’t Hoff equation.

By the end of the hour session, I felt like I had proven my understanding, even if Mrs. Duran would not admit it. Joyce thanked me for my time and said she would review her notes with the administration.

Navigating Bureaucracy

Wednesday afternoon, I met Foster McPherson in the district office downtown. His office was small and cluttered with computer equipment and binders of policy documents.

Foster turned out to be surprisingly reasonable and not at all the bureaucrat I had worried about. He explained that because my app served students under 18 and operated partly on the school networks, the district had a responsibility to make sure it met privacy regulations.

He walked me through FERPA, which protected student educational records, and COPPA, which required parental consent for collecting personal information from anyone under 13.

Since my app had users as young as 14, I needed to get explicit parental consent before collecting any data. I also needed a clear privacy policy explaining what information I collected, how I used it, and who had access to it.

Foster said I should consider an external security audit to verify my data protection practices met industry standards. The requirements were not impossible, but they would take serious time and possibly money to implement properly.

He gave me a 30-day deadline to get everything compliant, or the district would block access to my site on the school networks. I asked what specifically I needed to do, and he pulled out a checklist: a parental consent system for all users under 18, a privacy policy written in clear language, data encryption for sensitive information, and regular security updates.

Foster said he actually wanted to support student innovation and was not trying to shut me down; he just needed to make sure I was protecting student privacy properly.

I thanked him for being reasonable and promised to start working on compliance immediately. Walking out of the district office, I felt overwhelmed by everything I needed to do, but also relieved that Foster seemed willing to work with me instead of just blocking my app.

Vision and Responsibility

Thursday evening, I met Vikram in person for the first time at a coffee shop downtown near the business district. He was younger than I expected, maybe late 30s, with dark hair and wearing jeans and a plain t-shirt under a casual jacket.

He carried a beat-up laptop covered in startup stickers and ordered a black coffee before we sat down at a corner table. For the next two hours, he grilled me about my long-term vision for the app.

Did I want to build a real company, or was this just a side project until college? What were the biggest competitive threats, and how would I defend against them?

What would happen if one of the big education technology companies launched a similar feature? He asked tough questions about user retention and whether students would stick with my app once they graduated or moved to different schools.

His hardest question came about an hour in when he asked what would happen to my users if I sold to one of the companies that had made acquisition offers.

Would the new owners keep running the platform the same way, or would they shut it down and absorb the users into their existing products? Had I thought about the responsibility I had to students who depended on my app for homework help?

The question caught me off guard because I had been thinking about acquisition offers purely in terms of money and what I could do with it. I had not really considered what would happen to the 3,000 students using my service every week.

Vikram said that was exactly the kind of thinking that separated entrepreneurs who built lasting companies from people who just wanted a quick exit.

He told me about a founder he had invested in years ago who turned down a big acquisition offer because he felt responsible to his users and wanted to keep building something that actually helped people. That company eventually became worth way more than the initial offer, and the founder never regretted his decision.

By the end of our conversation, I realized I had not thought nearly enough about the ethical implications of my decisions. Vikram said he was interested in investing, but wanted to see me develop a clearer vision for what I was building beyond just growing revenue numbers.