When You’re Not in Control of Your Life
I happen to know the exact moment that my life was changed for the better, and it had nothing to do with anything I did or deserved. It was because of Dr. Friedman.
This isn’t your typical inspirational-teacher story. Dr. Friedman wasn’t my English instructor, he didn’t run the school paper, and he didn’t point me down the path of journalism. He was my seventh-grade history teacher, and I wasn’t struggling in his class. That’s what made what happened so unlikely—and so consequential.
In my school, students were introduced to essay tests in junior high. History exams no longer took the form of questions with short answers, but now required one to organize information into a readable argument. This should have been easy for me. As the son of two educators, one of them a
