When Good Grades Are Relative to Relatives

I was never a good student. If my teachers could have invented a grade below F for me, it would have been called “Lower, lower, we’ll tell you when to stop.” In my defense, the instructors who said I could do better if I applied myself never noticed how focused I was while staring out the classroom window.

My academic achievements or lack thereof contrasted greatly with my older sister and brother, Joyce and Cliff. They were in advanced classes, members of the National Honor Society, excelled in music, had perfect SAT scores, and did all this without warning slips or notes to our parents requesting special meetings with the teacher.

I don’t mean to criticize students who enjoy school, do their homework and are proud of their achievements. My wife is one of those. How ironic is it that I, who never understood why we had to learn Latin – to this day, I have never bartered with a fructus merchant – married someone who was a college Latin major.

To hammer home the differing journeys taken by me and my siblings, my teachers would occasionally ask: “Why aren’t you as smart as your older brother and sister?” I didn’t realize at the time this was more indicative of my instructors’ lack of sensitivity and intelligence than my struggles passing Introduction to Algebra. Would it have changed anything if I did? Aside from replacing my unhealthy low self-esteem with a healthy dose of anger and rage, probably not.

There wasn’t much I could do about the difference between me and my older brother and sister in the academic department. But there was something I could to for my younger brother, who followed me in school.

Tommy was a charming, gifted, athletic kid and a worse student than I, but like me, smart in other ways. His idea of academic achievement was finding his assigned seat in class and remembering every excuse for forgetting to do his homework.

He didn’t need my help, but I was able to ease his academic pressures in a way that really counted. It happened one day when a high school teacher approached him in a hallway and said to him:

“I hope you don’t end up like your older brother.”

My work was done.

Comedy writer Ben Alper has written for Jay Leno, David Letterman and others. He is the author of “Live From the Beginning of Time: Late Night Comedy Monologues Through the Ages”