Seventh grade. Pretty much suits no one. All the awkwardness and puberty, plus the post-pandemic crazy. And yet it suits Jake. He likes seventh grade. He likes his middle school. And he’s becoming the best version of himself as most people detour into unrecognizable.
Last week Ms. Mooney calls me. I’m having a day. I answer my cell, bracing myself for something. His stomach had been hurting the night before.
Now we hear a lot about Ms. Mooney, Jacob’s math teacher. She seems to bring her real-world challenges to the seventh grade classroom regularly. And Jacob comes home and tells us all about it. I can certainly appreciate that. I’ll never forget my MBA stats professor teaching us a problem where the starring role was held by a man selling calculators door-to-door. He completely lost me when he followed that nonsense with a problem where I was responsible for sizing an oil tanker. Yeah… you do not want me or any of these other yahoos in this class sizing your oil tanker. Absurd.
So after telling me Jacob isn’t in trouble or hurt, she says she has a story she needs to share with me. It starts with her chasing her son in socks and somehow slipping and slamming her face into her own couch. Gives herself a concussion, a black eye, and possibly a fractured orbital bone. Poor Ms. Mooney! After a day or two, she returns back to the classroom but still isn’t 100%.
She says that in the middle of class she stops and puts her hand to her head and in front of the entire class, Jacob turns around and asks her if she’s OK. Apparently this is not expected behavior from middle school boys. She says a couple of teachers had asked how she was doing, but no one with as much genuine concern.
She told me he’s a really special kid. She called him a rockstar. She sees him.
I was having a hard, hard day and her call was so unexpected and appreciated. Thank you Ms. Mooney. You are a rockstar.