Then, she ran toward me and threw her arms around me in a bear hug.

“Thank you for giving me a great year,” she mumbled in my ear. “You’re the best.”

With that, she bolted out of the classroom. I just stood there in shock.

Racheli, who came to our seminary a few years later, was the polar opposite of Henny. She was one of the stars of the seminary: the student every teacher loved, the classmate whose notes everyone wanted to borrow, the girl who asked all the right questions in class and knew all the right answers. She was also the one who would volunteer any time something needed to get done and stick around to clean up and help out after meals and activities.

One of the rules in our seminary — it’s a pretty standard seminary rule, actually — is that the girls are required to lock their dorm rooms during school hours. Over the years we’ve had plenty of thefts in the dorm, and keeping the dorm rooms locked is the best way to prevent these unpleasant situations.

Locked doors can lead to other types of unpleasantness, however, such as when one girl locks the door to the room and another girl finds herself locked out without a key. In the beginning, girls would simply go to the eim bayit and ask her to open the dorm room for them. But because this solution was so easy, girls were forgetting their keys all the time, which meant that the eim bayit had to constantly run around and open doors for them. Eventually, we made a rule that the eim bayit is not allowed to open dorm rooms. If a girl forgot to take her key with her, she’d have to locate one of her roommates and get the key from her.

One Motzaei Shabbos, Racheli returned to the dorm and found herself without a key. When she called to tell me this, I was surprised, because Racheli never made any special requests or broke any rules.

“I know I’m supposed to have my key with me,” Racheli said apologetically, “but I ran out in a hurry on Friday, and my roommates aren’t back yet from Shabbos. Would it be possible for you to ask the eim bayit to open my door just this once?”

It was tempting to call the eim bayit and tell her to go and open Racheli’s door for her. After all, Racheli was such a good girl. Didn’t she deserve some extra consideration? And she had asked so politely, too.

But then I stopped myself. The rule about not bothering the eim bayit to open a door had nothing to do with who the student was or how she asked. If, say, a girl like Henny had asked me to open the door, I wouldn’t have thought twice about saying no. So why was Racheli different? Did being a top student mean that you had the right to disturb the eim bayit?

“I’m sorry, Racheli,” I said, “but the school policy is that the eim bayit doesn’t open doors. If this were an emergency, I’d make an exception, but seeing as it’s not, I have to ask you to wait until one of your roommates gets back.”

“No problem, Mrs. Biderstein,” she said, a tinge of disappointment in her voice. “Gut voch.”

At the end of that year, I wasn’t surprised when I received a long letter from Racheli in her beautiful, flowing handwriting thanking me for all that I had done for her and describing what an amazing seminary year she had had. Racheli actually wrote similar thank-you letters to every teacher and staff member; she was that type of girl.

What did surprise me was the last paragraph of her letter to me. “The thing I want to thank you for most was the priceless lesson you taught me when you didn’t let the eim bayit open my dorm room that Motzaei Shabbos,” she wrote. “Because I’ve always been a good girl, no one has ever told me no. My whole life, whenever I asked for something, I always got it, even if no one else would have gotten it. You taught me that I’m not above the rules, that I’m not perfect, that I still have plenty to work on. That was an eye-opener for me.”

It was an eye-opener for me, too.

Then there was Yehudis. Yehudis was very much a loner, the type of girl who flew under the radar both socially and academically. Her grades were okay, not good enough or bad enough to get noticed, and she seemed to revel in being invisible.

Yehudis wasn’t one of those girls who would come to my house or office just to schmooze, nor was she one of the girls whose lackluster academic performance or spotty attendance required me to chase her down for a heart-to-heart. I could easily have ignored her all year, which is what most of her teachers and classmates did. But I’ve learned, over the years, that there’s no such thing as a girl who doesn’t need attention, and I didn’t want any girl to go home with the feeling that no one in the seminary had cared about her. So I make it my mission to notice girls like Yehudis and reach out to them.

All year, I tried making conversation with Yehudis. “So, Yehudis, how was your Shabbos?” “Yehudis, you look great today! What’s happening?” “Yehudis, how did the test go yesterday?” “Yehudis, where are you going to be for Pesach?”

Invariably, I would get a one-word answer: “Okay.” “Fine.” “Good.” “Home.” When she was feeling talkative, she’d give me three words: “I don’t know.”

None of my efforts at getting through to Yehudis seemed to bear fruit. No matter how hard I tried to coax some meaningful responses out of her, I kept getting stonewalled by her all year.

Still, I felt that the fact that Yehudis wasn’t engaging in the conversations I tried to start didn’t absolve me of continuing to try. At very least, she’d know that if she ever did want to talk to a staff member, there was someone in the school who knew she existed.

The day she left, I found a thank-you card from Yehudis on my desk. “Even though I never opened up and spoke to you,” she had written, “I want you to know how much I appreciate your efforts. It was good to know someone was there for me.”

Who would have thought?

Not every encounter with a Henny, or a Yehudis, or a Racheli ends this way. Of the thousands of seminary students I’ve interacted with, the vast majority have not given me any indication that they appreciated my efforts to enforce the rules, tolerate their obnoxious behavior, or reach out to them despite their own apparent disinterest in having a relationship with me. In these three cases, I underestimated the students and didn’t realize that beneath the surface they recognized that I was doing what was best for them.

These encounters taught me that when you do the right thing for a student, deep down she appreciates it, even if her behavior would seem to indicate the opposite. But in order to do what’s right for a student, you have to focus on what she really needs, instead of reacting to her in kind and mirroring her cues.

That’s easier said than done. Let’s face it: With the challenging students, we’re automatically tougher, more vigilant, more intractable. With the superstar students, we’re naturally softer, more considerate, more yielding. And the mediocre students we tend to forget about.

But the challenging students also need our respect and warmth. The superstar students also need the security of knowing that there are rules and boundaries. And the mediocre students also deserve — and perhaps crave — our attention.

As a mechaneches, I can’t fall into the trap of quid pro quo. If a student behaves poorly, that doesn’t mean I should be harsh with her. If her behavior is exemplary, that doesn’t mean I should bend the rules for her. And if she makes herself invisible, that doesn’t mean I should ignore her.

My job is not to inscribe my students in the book of the wicked, the book of the righteous, or the book of the mediocre and treat them accordingly. Rather, my job is to give every student what she needs — respect, warmth, boundaries, attention — regardless of whether her behavior makes me want to give it to her.

That’s the way I want Hashem to treat me, too. Because when those three books open on Rosh Hashanah, I’m in all of them.

Some days, I feel like a rasha gamur — I snapped at my kids, I forgot to daven, I missed my weekly shiur, I didn’t manage to prepare supper. At those times, I have to remind myself that Hashem still loves me and hasn’t given up on me.

Other days, I feel like a tzaddik gamur — I was calm and patient with my kids, I davened with kavanah and even managed to say some extra Tehillim, I went to a shiur, I cooked supper for a sick neighbor. At those times, I have to know that being a goody-goody doesn’t earn me immunity up in Shamayim. Hashem still notices my misdemeanors and makes sure I’m working on whatever I’m here in this world to fix.

And then there are the days when I feel like an absolute beinoni — I went through the motions of life mechanically, without connecting to Hashem or the people around me. At those times, I have to remember that I’m not invisible — Hashem still sees me, cares about me, and is looking out for me.

Like Henny, I don’t want Hashem to treat me harshly; I want Him to consider my extenuating circumstances and deal with me compassionately. Like Racheli, I don’t want Hashem to wink at my misdemeanors and character flaws; I want him to guide me along the path to self-perfection and prod me to stretch myself to greater heights. And like Yehudis, I don’t want Hashem to let me coast through a life of mediocrity; I want Him to be there with me and seek a relationship with me.

(Originally Featured in Mishpacha Issue 678)