A student rushed in to my classroom in between classes on Friday, out of breath, and said, “Ms. Rowse, I have to tell you something and I’ve been looking for you all day!”
Things like this always worry me, especially these past couple of weeks, as students have trusted me with painful, awful things they are dealing with. So I cautiously said, “What’s up?”
And this gorgeous girl, a senior, a preacher’s daughter, pianist, trumpeter, AP Scholar, and just generally awesomely nice kid said, with a twinge of bewilderment in her eyes: “I got into Harvard!”
I almost cried.
A long week of grading, Christmas concerts, Facebook turmoil, and of course, Sandy Hook…I was feeling like Felicity Huffman’s character in Sports Night, at the end of Season One when she screams, “I need one good thing to happen, and I need it to happen right now!” And her boss, who’d been out for months with a stroke, strolls into the newsroom.
That’s how I felt when this student told me her news. I needed one good thing to happen this week (and certainly more than one good thing DID happen this week, but emotionally, it’s been a rough one).
It’s not common for kids from Nebraska to get into Harvard. And she doesn’t know if she’ll go–Harvard is a lot of money, after all–but she. got. in.
And this girl, this possibly Harvard-bound girl, wanted me to know, to hear it from her and not from her peers (who were definitely talking about it by the end of the day). Why?
“You wrote my letter of recommendation, and I’m sure that helped me get in!” she said, without guile, in complete humility.
I smiled at her and said, “It was all you, kiddo. I had nothing to do with it.”
