Professors: Withhold final judgment

By the end of last week, I had heard enough about celebrity deaths.

Locally, we also had to grapple with the fatal Metro crash near Fort Totten as well.

Also last week, my mother found out one of her former professors at Loyola University in Baltimore had been killed when a tree branch fell and crushed her car. My mother complained the woman had once wrongly given her a low grade, and she said other students had trouble with her as well.

My mother's words got me thinking: Everyone's got that professor they hated. Maybe you got a terrible grade you didn't deserve, or maybe he or she belittled you in front of the class. Or maybe you just didn't get along with that particular professor. After class you grumble, "I wish something bad would happen to them." How would you feel if something actually happened?

If you're religious in the least or simply aware of "right" and "wrong," you've no doubt had this discussion before. Many people go through life thinking that they are good and any potential malefactors are, well, bad. It's easy to generally conceptualize good and evil, but what about the person who just cut you off in traffic? Definitely evil.

Naturally, it's difficult to have sympathy for an antagonistic authority figure. It seems like a violation of trust that someone who was supposed to educate you instead made your schooling more difficult. The professor was in the wrong, so every misfortune that person suffers is deserved, right? But what if this particular professor was right? What if her students had just been petty and demanding of her, souring their relationship? Would it have been "just desserts" if one of her rotten students had flunked out?

And the student-teacher relationship was only one portion of that professor's life. A bad deed in the classroom belies the many good deeds she could have done at home and in her community. She wasn't just an educator but also a mother, a wife and a friend. These are all roles she will be greatly missed for by dozens - if not hundreds - of people who knew her in various ways.

And then there are the smaller parts she played in the lives of people who will never get to truly know her. She could have left a waiter an especially generous tip. On the other hand, she could've been the person who just cut you off in traffic a few blocks away from meeting her maker.

I personally think it's too much to ask to be a good person at all times of life to everyone - our human nature prevents us from being perfect. But it's a noble goal to recognize we are human, and hopefully few people in our lives will consciously and actively work to make our lives more difficult.

We all have bad days. We all make questionable decisions. And sometimes, we give low grades. I don't know why that professor may have been so disliked by her students. But we'll definitely never know if she went to the grave thinking not everyone would remember her kindly.

Dan Reed graduated in May with degrees in architecture and English. He can be reached at reeddbk@gmail.com.