Every time our 2nd grade math teacher Sir Oscar entered the classroom, a bunch of my classmates, about five at a time, would go running towards him to give him a hug.
He was tall, so they could only really hug his legs and maybe his hip. The rest of the class would laugh and enjoy seeing him trying to balance himself, with his hands raised sideways so he wouldn’t fall over.
I remember the first thing Sir Oscar ever taught me was multiplying numbers with lots of zeroes at the end. “It’s easy,” he said, “all you have to do is count the zeroes of one number and add them to the end of the other. Here, you try.”
At the time, these were advanced lessons he taught me in the summer. During those hot summer days, we would sit outside the classroom, with our armchairs adjacent to each other. He talked, I listened. He wrote, I answered.
Sir Oscar taught me a great lesson that I would bring with me all the way to college: math is simple.
He explained that math is learning how to solve the concept of a problem and simply solving an actual problem using what you’ve learned from the abstract concept. Learn the concept and apply to an actual situation. Simple.
In math class one day, two of my classmates got into a fight.
Let’s call them Ryan and Frank. I don’t remember what the fight was about, but in 2nd grade, these things happened often and were caused by the silliest things. For all I knew, it could’ve been because Ryan borrowed Frank’s pencil and dropped it on the floor. Our batch was a wild one (it still was when we finally graduated years later).
When you’re 8 years old, fights are all about the grappling, maybe a few kicks, some hair pulling. But more often than not, what determines the winner is tears.
Crying is like the kid version of tapping out. Once tears are shed, that’s it, we have a winner. So when two of my classmates were at it, we knew one of them was bound to tap out.
Eventually, Ryan shed the first tear.
But at that point, Sir Oscar was already crouched down trying to separate the two before one of them rips the other’s face off with the aggressive grappling. Meanwhile, the rest of the class was in frenzy. Some of us were huddled around Ryan, some stared from the sidelines, a few were on Frank’s corner. There was a lot of murmuring and pointing at Ryan going on: “Oh my God. Is he crying?”
It was not until Sir Oscar got the two to calm down and stepped back at the front of the room that the whole class settled down.
I’ve always found it interesting how people in authority handled crises like the 8 year-old grappling spree the class had just witnessed. So when he was on his way up front, I paid attention to what he was about to say.
How was he going to explain this to a bunch of kids?
He faced the class and I noticed that his eyes were a little watery.
To this day, I’m not sure why one of my favorite childhood teachers was tearing up in front of the class after the fight. Maybe he was empathizing. Maybe he was affected in some personal way, I don’t know. But that day, Sir Oscar taught me another great lesson.
He faced us, teary-eyed, and with a shaky voice, he said, “It’s okay to cry. When you cry, you clean your eyes.”
Looking back fifteen years later, it’s clear now what he meant to teach us that day. When we weep, we blur our vision for a moment and we begin to see, but not with our eyes.
It doesn’t matter if you have 20/20 vision, if you’re color-blind, or legally blind, when you weep, you see clearer.