Hopefully you can relate

Today I want to talk about the undeserved blemishes people place on your character, often for everyone to see. 

When I was twelve, our Geography teacher did this to me. She had marked our books, and had placed stamps on the pages she thought were good. One day, she told us to go up to her desk if we had gotten three stamps or more. Three stamps meant a sticker, and it was also recorded on the system. 

I joined the queue, and it was only when she looked through my book to put a line through the stamps (so they couldn’t be used twice) did I realise I didn’t have three stamps, I only had two. The confusion happened because it turned out that a particular stamp, even though it looked like two separate stamps with a very small gap in the middle, was actually one stamp. I didn’t know this, because I had been in a different class to everyone the year before, and in that class our teacher had never used that particular stamp.

The teacher looked at me accusingly, and when I explained the above to her she said in front of the whole class, something along the lines of ‘Well I don’t see why! You’re in Year 8 now!’ and wouldn’t accept my explanations. Some people are just so closed off to it all.

It was humiliating. Now everyone in the class could have me down as a cheat; the type of person who would rather lie and sneak around to get the same results as people who had legitimately earned it. And the worst thing was, I couldn’t prove it. I couldn’t prove my intention, so there would always be a blemish on my character. This isn’t the first time something like this has happened to me, and I’m sure it won’t be the last.

Anyway, hopefully you can relate.

If anything like that has happened to you, I would love to hear about it in the comments!!

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