When I was little, I was cross-eyed which made me look stupid. Since my two eyes pointed in different directions and saw different things, I had trouble learning to read. This only confirmed my stupidity. In fact, my elementary school principal told my parents that they had to "face facts," that I was a "dim bulb." My mother never believed the principal nor forgot his words. She taught me to read when the schools gave up on me and when I began to perform well in school, despite my poor performance on "objective," "scientific," standardized tests, I was labeled an "overachiever." Somehow, I was cheating the system.

So when I became a college professor, I swore to myself that I would never misjudge my students, never jump to conclusions. This is a very tough task, one that I often fail at, particularly so with the student whose story I describe below.

I knew very little about my student "W." except that she excelled in my class. Yet, after I returned each exam and assignment, she would come up to me to discuss her grade. I could not understand why she did this. She got A's on everything so why did she haggle with me over a test score of 96, insisting that the score should be a 97? On the last day of the school year, I turned in all my final grades to the college registrar (W. got an A), and spent the rest of the day straightening up my office, thinking happily about the freedom that lay ahead of me. Just then, W. walked into my office and asked if she could meet with me the following day. She planned to apply to dental school and wanted me to write her a letter of recommendation. I told her that of course we could meet, but inwardly I was thinking that she was the last student I wanted to see. As for dental school, she probably wanted to go, I thought uncharitably, so that she could have a nice, secure, predictable job. (My apologies to dentists for this thought.)

W. came to my office the next day with her "Why I want to be a dentist" essay. She explained that she was not a native English speaker and hoped that I would read over her essay to correct the grammar. As I read the essay (which was grammatically perfect), I felt my face flush with for this is what I learned.

W. was born the youngest of six children to a desperately poor family in Viet Nam. When she was 9 years old, her parents put her and her 16-year-old sister on a boat to travel to Hong Kong and a better life. There were some adults on the boat but no other family members. At one point the boat broke down in Chinese waters, but some kind fishermen helped fix the motor. They made it to Hong Kong ten days before Hong Kong closed its borders to Vietnamese refugees.

W. spent two years in the refugee camp, on a tarp on the ground. She was embarrassed for her sister, now with the body of a mature woman, for the two of them were still wearing the same clothes that they wore when they left Viet Nam. To mend her sister's clothes, W broke off a piece of barbed wire from the fence surrounding the refugee camp and fashioned it into a needle. She then unwound some threads from her sleeping tarp and, with her makeshift needle, patched her sister's clothes. (At this point in the essay, I looked up and asked W. how she knew to do this, and she said, simply, that she was good with her hands.)

W. had always had bad gums and teeth and assumed that the accompanying was something that everyone felt. At the refugee camp, she saw a dentist who pulled out the bad teeth and gave her the tools to take care of her mouth and gums. This was a revelation to W. - that she could go through life without mouth pain.

Meanwhile representatives from several countries interviewed W. and her sister and finally the United States allowed W. and her sister to immigrate. They arrived in a US city where a small community of other Vietnamese helped them set up their own apartment. W.'s sister got a job as a manicurist while W. went to high school and worked after school in a dentist's office. Ten years after they left Viet Nam, W. and her sister brought their parents to this country.

Now I understood why W had argued over every test point and grade. She had had to fight for everything she received in her life. Needless to say, I wrote W. the best letter of recommendation I could write. She was admitted to every dental school that she applied to. Since that time, I've lost track of W., but I have no doubt that she is somewhere in the world providing exceptional dental care to those who can least afford it.