The question was never answered. I was a curious boy, but the schools were not concerned with curiosity. They were concerned with compliance. I loved a few of my teachers. But I cannot say that I truly believed any of them. Some years after I’d left school, after I’d dropped out of college, I heard a few lines from Nas that struck me:

Ecstasy, coke, you say it’s love, it is poison

Schools where I learn they should be burned, it is poison

Your grandmother taught me to read when I was only four. She also taught me to write, by which I mean not simply organizing a set of sentences into a series of paragraphs, but organizing them as a means of investigation. When I was in trouble at school (which was quite often) she would make me write about it. The writing had to answer a series of questions: Why did I feel the need to talk at the same time as my teacher? Why did I not believe that my teacher was entitled to respect? How would I want someone to behave while I was talking? What would I do the next time I felt the urge to talk to my friends during a lesson? I have given you these same assignments. I gave them to you not because I thought they would curb your behavior - they certainly did not curb mine - but because these were the earliest acts of interrogation, of drawing myself into consciousness. Your grandmother was not teaching me how to behave in class. She was teaching me how to ruthlessly interrogate the subject that elicited the most sympathy and rationalizing - myself. Here was the lesson: I was not an innocent. My impulses were not filled with unfailing virtue. And feeling that I was as human as anyone, this must be true for other humans. If I was not innocent, then they were not innocent. Could this mix of motivation also affect the stories they tell? The cities they built? The country they claimed as given to them by God?

I don’t think that my actions changed in a way that prompted this; my position did. And what this meant was that things I’d once been privy to became increasingly unavailable to me. Gradually, snarky behavior, grousing, and rudeness disappeared from view - from my view, anyway. I rarely saw bad behavior because people wouldn’t exhibit it in front of me. I was out of a certain loop, and it was essential that I never lose sight of that fact. If I wasn’t careful to be vigilant and self-aware, I might well draw the wrong conclusions.

The new tutor was different. She was relational, not gushy, but attentive. She intuitively understood you were working under the weight, the history, of a reputation— that it was “in the air,” waiting to be validated by your first frustration. She knew that any sign of a lack of confidence in your ability could send you into a churn of self-doubt and very likely kill your interest.

It began with wiseness. She engaged you with challenge. She picked problems captured by that phrase, “at the frontier of your skills.” “Now this is level three . . . It’s going to get more difficult.” Her instruction was Socratic. She wanted you to see that your own thinking could solve problems. She corrected you by asking questions about your reasoning. She inoculated you against frustration. She made it seem normal: “Now, this may be a little harder since it has been a minute since we have done that type of problem.” Her praise was largely indirect— “we’re ready for the next level of work”— or she reminded you of how hard the problem you solved was— with just a note of being impressed. She diminished your failures; “I think I didn’t tell you what I wanted.” She used questions to stimulate your curiosity; “OK, can you think of yet another way to solve the problem?” Her questions focused on you solving the small parts of math problems that enabled you to solve whole problems. She avoided any focus on the question of your math ability. She gave no direct praise or criticism of your performance or ability. She used no incentives. She simply led you, in tiny increments, to see your math potential for yourself. You accumulated successes. You became more engaged, more curious, more confident. You began to feel like you could do these problems— your math identity notwithstanding.