I Loved To Teach

We still lived in Carthage when our first child, Lorinda Lee (Lori) was born. This small rural box-factory town had seemed to welcome us with open arms. It was a two-class society, and teachers, unless they were natives, were usually on the outside of both classes. I wish I had worked harder to reach and understand the poor. No one had given a shower for Margaret, everyone supposing that someone else would; but when they realized the oversight, we had a parade of gift-giving visitors for several weeks, and Lori became the best-dressed baby for miles around. Both of our families were far away and oriented to letting kids stand on their own two feet once they were married.

When Lorinda was ten days old, we had suddenly decided to dash off to Harlem, Montana, to share her with our family and friends there before school started in Indiana. We were really not prepared for the generosity of our little town upon our return. I came to realize that it was much the same in times of grieving. One neighbor, Helen Patton, who did floral arranging and had lovely gardens, had brought flowers the day Margaret was to come home from the hospital, and she brought a fresh arrangement as a replacement every day until we left for Montana.

She was such an artist! On the first day I took the flowers from her and placed them on Margaret’s dresser. Helen said kindly, "That’s very nice if you prefer it, but I arranged the flowers to go here," and she moved them to a spot on the chest. I was startled at the difference in the beauty of that bouquet in the new location. I learned two things that day–let the artist have his/her say with his creation–it will give him greater fulfillment–and onstage, try placing things in several places before making final decisions. A small change can sometimes make a great difference in the total effect. I always took great care in dressing the set.

Other neighbors brought food, and the older ones looked in on us every day to make sure we were all right and the baby was doing well. I am always awed and overwhelmed by those who take the time to be caring. Sometimes I have felt oppressed when I myself have had neither the time nor the means to show how greatly I cared. I find in searching my memory that I seem to have some bizarre association with everyone. Who could have guessed that Guy and Chloe Ewing, across the street, had a daughter, Jule Ging, who would become important as members of my church and whose grandson, Norman, would be in my sophomore English class at Charlottesville. Chloe caught her arm in the ringer of her old fashioned washing machine (just like the one Margaret’s mother used in her basement) and was badly hurt. They introduced us to our favorite kind of squash with a crook neck and kept us in supply that summer.

Another neighbor whose name I have forgotten had a porch swing where we sat and talked and she held the baby. Bees had made a hive in the south wall of her house, and when they tore off the siding, there was a mountain of honey.

Another neighbor had stopped over when we lived at Bud and Gladys Smith’s house—four houses north on Main Street—to tell us that she could foretell the sex of a baby by watching the mother walk from behind. We, she announced, were to have a boy. “And relax about this.” she sent on. “This baby is not going to be born for three more months.”

We didn’t tell her that Margaret was in labor and we had gone shopping to make sure it didn’t stop. Our daughter was born later that same day.

Jim and Katy Ellis, who ran a garage in town and whose three children were bright spots in our lives, would stop by and say, "We’re running over to Knightstown (about five miles down the road) to see Grandma. Can we borrow Lori for an hour or so." And off they’d go. When Lori was three, "Grandma’s" was to be her first funeral. Katy was a wonderful person to help a child understand mortality.

Lori was born in the summer after Margaret and I had signed contracts in the nearby town of Charlottesville. Margaret was reluctant to change schools, although the building was newer and her room had a private bathroom for the children to share with the other first grade class.  When Bill Skinner released her from her contract because she was pregnant and “We need to be sure our teachers are able to start school on the first day.”  Margaret had already signed a contract, but Bill had not given her a copy.  The county superintendent said he did know that he had received her contract but wouldn’t swear to it in a court of law.  When I went to Indiana State Teachers’ Association, and they wouldn’t look into it, we never sent another dime to that organization.  We soon learned that Mr. Skinner had been named by the new governor as the state personnel director, we understood politics a bit better. 

We drove back and forth that first year. Helen Patton, the flower lady who was our new nearest neighbor across the street to the south, was the teacher I replaced. I composed the following poem that year from the happiness that bubbled in my heart. The world seemed a kind place in 1961 in Carthage, Indiana.

OUR NEWBORN LORI

I caught a glimpse of God today.
Her tiny face was round and red.
Chubby fingers tugged about my heart
As they encircled my thumb.
Those blue eyes couldn’t see,
But I saw her,
And deep within those eyes
I know that I saw God today.

As a member of the Bahá’í Faith, I have learned that God is, of course, not to be seen or understood. He is that unknowable essence that is seen only as we see His attributes reflected in the virtues of human beings and in the perfections and writings of His divine messengers.

One day at Southport, I asked the lovely white-haired lady in the room I used during my split-lunch period what she did when ‘they’ offered her something. “I always take it,” she said, “even if I don’t want it.” And that became my policy too. She always put it in her desk for later, but I preferred to let them watch me enjoy a bite or two first if it was edible stuff. If it wasn’t, I displayed it prominently on the desk.

Once, I received the gift of Life’s Little Instruction Book. I read a few pages to the class and stood it on top of a row of books on my desktop. After class it was gone. An hour later a girl dropped by between classes to tell me the name of the very troubled student who had taken it. I reacted by saying, “You know what? Maybe she really needed it more than I did.” And we both laughed and dismissed the matter. Soon the young lady dropped out of school, and all hope of my book’s return was gone.

I never did learn to scowl. When I related that line to my senior English class of seventeen great kids at Carthage the following year, Joe Foust, whose twinkling blue eyes I still remember vividly after fifty years, offered, “Who is this lady?  I’m gonna go over there and beat her up.”  Joe was one of the two boys who lived on the farm I drove by every day when I taught in Charlottesville but lived in Carthage. The yard was strewn with broken, rusty machinery.  I told him often that he really needed to learn to spell before he set off for college.  “Mr. Rhoades,” he would reply, “I am never gonna go to college.”  A year later, he came up to me in church and said, “Mr. Rhoades, I can spell anything.  I’m in pre-med at Tri-State, and you wouldn’t believe the words I have learned to spell.”

But back at Southport, Mr. Leedy could only choose to back her up when she had said, “I will not have this young man in my department another year.” And because he blackballed me to every principal who considered hiring me, I took the job in Carthage, where they had many teachers to hire and little to offer other than the best kids on the planet in small classes and a second chance–a chance to shine. My gratitude to those men and women far exceeds theirs to me, although one of them, David Ruby, a most successful business executive, said to me at my retirement party, “All I hear from these people is about the plays. I enjoyed those plays too. I got to deliver the most-practiced kiss in history onstage to the woman who has been my wife all these years. But what I want you to know is how much I learned in your classroom. I would never have made it through college without that class!” Gosh, David and Ann, can you even guess how much that meant to me. Even more than the offer to use your vacation home in Alabama, which was so kind of you. And Ann was in the AV room, always close to mine for sixteen years. If I realized I was sick or injured, I made a bee line for that library where I knew Ann Ruby and Betty Donceal would patch me up or give me tea or coffee and sometimes insist that I be taken home. I hated missing school.

Ann once looked at a copy I was printing out on the library copy machine and quizzed, “Did you write this on a typewriter?  Do you have a typewriter in your room?”

“Yes,” I said, proud of the little portable that had gotten suddenly cheap enough for me to get one.

“Throw it away!”  And she took me to one of the three computers in the reading room, and my introduction to a new age of literacy began.  No strikeovers, no erasures—possible perfection.

*         *         *

Mr. Skinner, the elected township trustee, who did the hiring and firing of teachers in 1959, had said he knew someone on the board of trustees at Southport. When he told me it was a Mr. Davis, I realized he was the father of the brightest girl I had taught. I had tried to get her moved into an E class, but she was determined to stay, and the same system that required us to stay on the same page as those E classes for this very reason explained that the E classes were overcrowded that period, although none of those classes were the size of mine.

In December the school newspaper had had a writing contest. A winner from each class (class of 1959, 1960, etc.) would have his writing printed in the Christmas edition of the school paper. That would only allow for one freshman winner. However, from the freshman entries they chose two winners—one comical and one a serious poem. No one but me seemed even to notice the fact that with eight freshman English teachers, all veterans except me, both winners were from my low-ability classes. The comic entry was a letter to Santa, written by a football player who got a ‘D’ in the course. The poem was written by a little girl whose father happened to be on the school board. She, of course, would have gotten an ‘A’ even without a bell curve.

I asked Mr. Skinner to contact her father for a recommendation. He did but he agreed to hire me only if Margaret came to teach first grade, which meant we must leave the bungalow we had purchased in May to reside in Carthage. I doubt if she would have moved otherwise—her contract at Bluff Avenue Elementary School had been renewed, and our little home was near her school. However, we were to love living in the town of Carthage where neighbors were neighborly and students became lifelong friends. Isn’t it interesting that with two yearly salaries of $4,090, we had been able to save enough money to make a $1,000 down payment on a $10,500 bungalow? In those days teachers got no paychecks in the summer, and we learned that if we saved a thousand dollars during the school year, we could take a vacation and still make it through to the first fall paycheck.

Actually, though, the reason we had saved so much was that no one had informed me at the beginning of my junior year of college when I was transferring back to ICU that Teaching of High School English was only offered in alternate years, and if I didn’t take it then, it would not be available my senior year. Margaret Goldsmith and I were married on graduation day. I worked all summer to complete a correspondence course. I remember that one question on one lesson asked me to compare five English textbooks and state the weaknesses and strengths of each. I had finished the course in September, but had to wait for my grade. As soon as I received it, I sent it to the State of Indiana Department of Education, and requested that they rush my teacher’s license to Southport High School. When my license was still not there in January, my paychecks stopped. This was, I presume, to prod me into finishing the correspondence course post haste. There was no convincing that school corporation to do otherwise. I felt I was a pawn. This makes me wonder how many potentially gifted teachers have been pushed out of the profession by circumstance “beyond anyone’s control.”

At one Southwestern play rehearsal students from nearby Shelbyville (my students claimed) stopped by and soaped all the windows of all the parked cars so completely that one could not see out. When I was informed of this Halloween prank, I allowed a few students at a time to clean their windows. I was too busy, so after all students were gone and I had locked up, I went out with dread to assess the damages to my car. Imagine my surprise to see my car sparkling clean with no soap remaining on the windows.

I have had many pranks to deal with over the years, mostly at play practice where they loved to hide my Volkswagen bug or set it up on the sidewalk where there was a high curb. Once when I forgot to lock it, they pushed it down a hill to the track and piled track hurdles around it until they had used them all. When I had discovered that the deed was done, they came running from all directions to set it back and share in my delight at learning they weren’t really going to leave me stranded. These things usually happened near performance day when spirits were getting high. The pranks stopped when I got older—I don’t think they do these things to old men they respect, and maybe that’s a blessing. They show their affection in more direct ways.

*         *         *

The meanest tricks I can remember were cruel and inspired by the perpetrators’ exaggerated sense of anger. The first teacher-victim was an attractive young divorcee—sexy. Her room was next to mine and our doors were side by side. Several students must have been in cahoots to carry off such a plan, one standing at the end of the hallway during the noon hour as class time grew near, the other having adjusted his Bic lighter to make a torch to be held to her doorknob. At the signal that she was approaching, he could withdraw. Many watched, I was told, as she put her key in the lock, turned it and grasped the doorknob without a thought. “Yeoooow!!” she yelled, throwing her keys into the air, dropping her purse and books, and shaking her burnt palm and fingers as some snickered and others laughed out loud.

The trickster’s identity was not hard to discern. He was identified and called to the office where he confessed the deed. He had asked repeatedly to be taken out of her class and put into mine, but always to no avail. Now she would refuse to allow him in her room ever. So, after he spent a few days in the behavior clinic, I had a new personage in my fourth period English class. He was nobody’s hero in there, but I thought it was too much like rewarding him for a vile act by giving in to his demands.

This misdeed reminded me of another one ten years earlier, two schools back. Down the hall from me at Eastern in the new building, an inexperienced young teacher had taken up residence. I only knew that he often used videotapes of television programs to keep his history class busy and that his classes were often rowdy. One day as he was lecturing at the chalkboard, a student was applying his Bic to a penny held by a pair of tweezers. While students watched as the teacher was writing on the board, the Bic was shut off, the tweezers made a big arc as students in two rows leaned away. The “hot” penny rolled down the aisle and clattered against the front baseboard.
“All right now, you guys, just stop that before you begin. Who threw this (here he stooped to pick it up as he spoke) p-e-e-e-n-n-e-e-y?” as he threw the coin clear across the room and put the two or three offended fingers into his mouth. His blisters only lasted a couple of days, and none of us ever knew who the culprit was.

Fortunately, none of these tricks ever happened to me. I guess the worst prank was one I perpetuated after Tammy, in third grade at the time, gave me a glass bell to keep on my desk. Her teacher used one, and Tammy thought all teachers should have a bell to ring for quiet. The students acted as though they hated the sound of that bell, and soon whenever I came in from hall duty at the beginning of each class, the bell would be gone. As I began class, I would pretend they didn’t know what I was looking for as I talked about the assignment and moved about the room, casually searching in an obvious, subverted manner. If I didn’t locate it, it would suddenly reappear in its place near the end of the hour. If I did find it and rang it to see if it was still working, they would groan.

One day when I was absent, students in the first-period class hid the bell in the waste basket. No one thought any more about the bell after they realized there was a substitute teacher for the day. So the janitor must have thrown it away at the end of the day. I asked about my priceless little bell, and they realized what they had done. The following school day I had three bells—one metal dome that one hits with the palm, one metal schoolroom bell shaped like the missing one, and one decorative bell. I put them all away. Permanently. But after the musical that year, the cast presented me with a fancy brass engraved dinner bell to be hung on the wall. I gave it a prominent place on the wall, all right—at home.

But the the meanest prank of which I was victim was played by students in my last-period class my first year at Greenfield. They were, by and large, males—you guessed it, football players. How I struggled to get them to work. I went home many a night wondering whatever had made me think I wanted to be a teacher. On our last day together, as each student turned in his exam, he asked to use the restroom.  As no one was gone very long and they drifted up one at a time, I continued to let them go. (The restroom was nearby.)

When the final bell of the school year sounded, ending that class period, all filed out jubilantly, calling out, “Goodbye, Mr. Rhoades. I bet you’ll miss us.” Things along that line. And I followed them into the hall saying farewells. When I went through the door, it was as if the whole hallway of people was in on the joke. I was the only person to be soaked by those water balloons they had been filling in readiness. I don’t know how I managed to think the affair was funny. I’m not sure how I let my laughter fill that hall. Maybe it was because I was so glad that year was over!

A few years later Margaret and I stopped at a garage sale, and one of the boys from that class, a good student, and by then a recent Purdue graduate, came into the garage. “Well, hello, Eric.” And I congratulated him. His aunt was there, and I had taught her at Eastern a number of years before when she was Jama Johnson and her father owned a tavern in Greenfield called the Lincoln Inn, which has been gone a long time. As we were leaving, I heard Eric say to his mother and aunt, “That is the kindest man I ever knew.” Boy, I could have told you a lot of things I would have thought he might say about me, but never in a thousand years could I have anticipated that a student in that class would have seen kindness through my impatience, my persistence, and even, at times, my anger.

On one occasion a new student was enrolled in my class because he had punched out his history teacher during class—one punch that had laid him out. So they had taken him out of history and put him into my class in the middle of the year. He already had one English 9 class, which he was failing. A vice-principal told him in my presence that if he got into any trouble he would be going to The Indiana Boys’ School. I believe he got this break because his prospects in football were so good. I seated him in front of the only other football player in that class, which proved to be a foolish move. One day their tempers flared. I got between them and ordered the one I knew would obey, George, to the hallway. I was putting the class to work independently so that I could explain to George that I hoped not to send them to the office because of the dire consequences in store for the other young man, and I intended to offer to separate them on the seating chart permanently.

Suddenly, the door opened, and my nemesis came dragging George back into the room, because “He can’t learn anything in the hall. Now, Mr. Rhoades has the right to send you to the hall if he thinks he needs to, but if he does, I’m going to bring you right back in here because you can’t learn anything in the hall. Go on with class.” And she sat down in an empty seat near the door to make certain I was paying proper attention to subject matter, muttering, of course, so that my students and I could hear, “This’ll never do! This’ll never do.”

*         *         *

On one occasion I was returning a book of spelling lists that I had borrowed from the teacher across the hall. As I had come from study hall in a different wing and on another floor, I hadn’t gotten there on time. As I crossed the hall, I realized my students were absolutely quiet. There could be only one explanation—she was there.

There she stood, looking with that scowl at the front desk in the middle row which had been turned over as a prank. No one was assigned to that seat. Mrs. Copsey began to shriek as if I had instigated the deed, “You will find out who has done this, and you will report to me before the hour is over—or else!”

When she was gone, I announced casually to the class, “Mrs. Copsey is my immediate superior, and I try to abide by her rulings, but this is my classroom, and I have no intention of reporting anyone over this matter. However, I would appreciate it if the person who did this would now turn it over so we can get on with class.”

Two boys got up apologetically and turned the chair upright. They never meant to get me in trouble. “I know that. Thank you for setting it right.” Then I turned to the assignment. Someone pointed at the intercom as we continued as if nothing had happened. I once thought that I lost my job that day. I now know that I was doomed from day one. But I have learned that without trials we can never grow, and I was beginning to grow. She was the greatest example of negative peer pressure I was to have the pleasure of experiencing in my lifetime.

To the sincere ones, tests are as a gift from God… an expert student prepareth and memorizeth his lessons and exercises with the utmost effort, and in the day of examination he appeareth with infinite joy before the master. Likewise the pure gold shineth radiantly in the fire of test… it (the test) removeth the rust of egotism from the mirror of the heart until the Sun of Truth may shine therein.                                                       –Bahá’u’lláh

There was a handsome, likeable athlete in that class whom I remember only as Joe.  He sat in a front seat near the windows, and he smiled a great deal.  One day, as I arrived, rushing from another wing, he met me outside the classroom to give me some advice..  “Mr. Rhoades, they are planning to pull a joke on you.  At exactly 11:00, everyone is going to cough.  I think it would be neat if you coughed too.”  So, as kids began to keep a close eye on the wall clock, I was prepared.  And at exactly 11:00, I coughed with them, we all laughed, and the fuse was diffused.  I was touched by his loyalty and chose to follow his advice. It was a great moment of surprise as I stopped talking, looked quizzically at them and then at the clock so many had been watching, and coughed with a twinkle in my eye. Then, I went right back to business as usual.

In my last-period freshman English class first semester, I had a student named Vinous Barnes (funny that his name should stay with me all these years). He was a senior, and this was his last chance at English 9. On the first day he raised his hand, and when I called on him, he said, “Mr. Rhoades, you wouldn’t fail a student if he really tried, would you?”

I said, “Believe me, Vinous, if you really try, I’ll get you through this with a passing grade.”

But Vinous didn’t try. He tried me. He tried sleeping in class. He missed a lot, and he didn’t pass English 9–again.

A few days into the second semester, when I no longer had this boy in class, I was driving to school behind a school bus when I realized that Vinous Barnes was displaying the middle finger of his right hand at the back window of that bus. I followed that finger for about three blocks, getting more angry by the block. Then, I turned off, took a shortcut and sped to the bus loading zone where I awaited that bus’ arrival. Imagine my surprise when the bus pulled in and he did not get off. If he was still on the bus, he was hiding, but I think someone would have pointed to the spot if that were the case. My anger began to dissipate and I began to see the humor in the whole situation before I got to my first-period study hall. I never saw Vinous Barnes again.

Chapter 3

Back to the Beginning

I began my teaching at Southport High School near Indianapolis in 1958, and I found few rewards that first year. Students were grouped according to ability and I got only classes with low expectations. I caught every germ the kids brought in, and I had no support group outside of a few remarkable kids, one lovely elderly English teacher and one young math teacher who shared my prep period. I saw the principal only three times during the year–all negative encounters.

He first confronted me just after Thanksgiving vacation in 1958. Margaret and I had returned from South Bend violently ill. My head throbbed and pounded and I gagged as I cleaned up her vomit. It was, I think, the only day I missed all year. Somehow Mr. Leedy learned that she was absent from her elementary school on Monday after vacation also, and he was quick to assume that we had committed what I didn’t even realize was an unforgivable sin—extending the vacation period. The landlady had called a doctor who made a house call for someone in her family, (doctors did that in 1958, even to see some young teachers who were not their patients) and she sent him out to our garage cottage to see us as well. She could have verified that we were in no condition to attend school had I realized he doubted my integrity. No one advised me to get a note from the doctor.

*         *         *

The second time he spoke to me was the day I was asked to cover a junior homeroom for someone I didn’t know. I taught no juniors. The class was orderly and all were studying except for a boy at the back who was amusing himself and those around him with a wooden dog of bead-like parts strung together on elastic strings attached to a moveable disk on the bottom of the base. I took it away from him and said he could get it off the teacher’s desk after class. I thought no one was looking; I casually picked it up and inspected it to see how it worked. I had barely touched the disk, but the dog buckled his hind legs two or three times in quick succession. I looked up to see that every eye was on me, and when my face turned red, the class burst into raucous laughter. Instantly, Mr. Leedy was in the room shouting over the noise, "Mr. Rhoades, can’t you control this class?”

Just as instantly, he was gone. My delight turned to humiliation. Tears formed in my eyes. I suddenly had the loyalty of about fifty kids whose names I didn’t even know. They tried to assure me that this was not unusual behavior–their class was near the office, and he had been there before. His actions were important to me because I became determined never again to allow the humiliation of anyone within the confines of my classroom.

Two years later when another principal in another school, Carthage, without meaning to catch me in particular, put me in an embarrassing situation during a teachers’ meeting, I just got up and walked out. That was a school where teacher dedication was rather scarce that year, and I was compelled to be the librarian, teach English, sponsor the newspaper, direct the plays, sponsor National Honor Society and the senior class, and chaperone the class trip to Washington and New York. I also began a Teen Canteen to give the youth of that small town something to do almost every Tuesday and Thursday, got Community Chest to fund it and held dances and a talent/beauty contest. I had convinced the students to meet in our homes to put together the very first yearbook the school had ever had. The circumstance implied that I had been shirking hall duty, when in reality I had never missed my assigned duty until that day when I had received permission to leave the building at lunch time.

“Teachers are not doing their hall duty,” he exclaimed. “This is not an option. I would be willing to bet that you don’t even know who is on hall duty this week.” At this point Mr. Gardner, the senior member of the faculty raised his hand and was recognized.

“It’s John Rhoades,” he replied. At that precise moment I rose and exited the room, obviously angry. The principal hurriedly closed the meeting and came to find me. His apologies were kind and profuse, and my anger quickly subsided.

*         *         *

This is an early version—when it was clearer in my mind—of a situation I have mentioned before.  The third encounter with my first principal took place in his office discussing grades. I was very youthful in appearance, and my class size averaged forty-seven. I had one small class of thirty-seven, and one of forty-nine. The others were larger. English classes were divided into three ability groups. Each English teacher got at least one E class, except me. Those E classes were, of course, much smaller than mine. I had all of the bottom level grade nine classes. I have never understood the logic behind small classes for the well-motivated students and large classes with discipline problems galore for poor students.  I believe he was not aware of this.

My department chairwoman was elderly and impossible for me to deal with because of her obvious and blatant loathing for me. I later learned she was asked to retire in the early months of the following school year when her eccentricities began to focus on the only remaining male English teacher, a man who had been around awhile and was respected. She had been allotted three class periods a day for supervision. She often spent most of each in my classroom. It was her decision that all freshman teachers were to follow the same schedule. We were, that is, to be on the same page of our textbooks as the E classes so that we could all take departmental exams and they could be put into one gigantic curve. She then made charts which she placed on the wall outside her room with teachers’ names affixed to it to prove to all that I was an ineffectual teacher, as my classes scored lowest, of course. After the first grading period, I received a lecture from the principal on lowering my standards. I explained that I didn’t test them or give them the failing grades—I really had no opportunity to teach them. I asked to be allowed to instruct them on their skill level. "I don’t care what you do, just don’t give so many F’s," was his plea. He decided to require that my grades in each class form a bell curve which I was to put in his mailbox. Evidently my department chairperson was not informed of this.

I took that as a mandate for me to ignore her schedule and teach my classes at their own speed. They took her departmental tests over material we hadn’t studied yet. I used them as diagnostic tools at most, and put grades from my own tests into my gradebook for averaging. She was furious. At the end of the first semester, exam grades were on the report cards. She inspected my grade cards, the distribution of which she handled, and saw the discrepancy between her grades on my departmental finals and the exam grades I had placed on their cards in the final exam square. She had given nearly all of them F’s, whereas I had given as many A’s as F’s, as many B’s as D’s, and a majority of C’s. (How’s that for justice in education?)

*         *         *

From that point on I was the object of her daily target practice. When she began to listen in on my classes over the intercom, my students knew it was she.

This was the first time I recognized openly what I came to acknowledge as “silent noise”—anything which commands any student’s attention away from the subject at hand. Inevitably, a few of them would point at the speaker, intending to let me know that the “enemy” was present. That she was the enemy had become obvious to them in the three classes she had visited so often. Never once did she offer a constructive criticism, and her voice when she spoke to me was disrespectful and full of loathing. Also, one period a day I used her classroom. She rarely left any room on her chalkboard for me to utilize, although it was last period and her classes were over, but on one occasion I neglected to erase what I had placed in the small place that was left, and she gave me a lecture on my inconsiderate bad manners. Her only advice to me was that I would never make a teacher until I learned to scowl. By that measure alone, I could tell she was a wonderful example to hold up to a fledgling teacher.

Ethel Harlan, at Eastern Hancock years later, would tell me that the finest approach to a new class was to give them an assignment on the first day and stand at the front of each row and stare them down. I think that was probably good advice; it reminded me of my father’s saying he wrestled a young bull calf every day when it was small enough for him to handle. The first day he had any difficulty was the last day he did this. His reasoning was that the bull would never attack him because it believed that Dad would still be able to take him down. Interesting.  I think Ethel Harlan was a wonderful teacher and a superb example of integrity to the whole school.  She was also the librarian—taught only senior English—and, therefore, was available for advice and instruction nearly all day.  I learned the finer points of English grammar from her one on one, and I found her to be nearly infallible.

My last few years I taught only speech and Drama classes, and there was a tremendous feeling that a weight had been lifted. I believe that special ed teachers deserve to have stars in their crowns. As a substitute teacher in Lexington after my retirement, I taught everything but English at first—even taught in a Montessori first-through-third-grade class. I had no equipment for that, no training. Children were so foxy with subs, and blatant. Then I began to accept only high school and middle school assignments. High school English teachers began to ask for me, and finally, I began to feel I really was in my element. One day I accepted a special-education assignment. The sub-finder was desperate. There would be two aides in the room. So I accepted, and very soon I got only calls for special ed. I had no training, and felt that I was a failure. I had to call for reinforcements, for the principal. Only when I began to refuse those assignments did I again get to teach in my field.  When a highly respected English teacher was dealing with her mother’s fatal illness, I took her classes before and after her mother’s death.  Initially, she told me how she would prepare assignments and pick up the paper to be graded.  After two days, I could see that we would be building up a mountain of work that called for little or no knowledge on the part of the sub.  “I have taught this material many times, and I would love the opportunity to teach your classes.  The students and I could keep the grading up-to-date almost daily, and you could concentrate on your life away from school.”

After that, I got requests for service in the English department at that school almost every day, and my life became much more pleasant..  I went into that teacher’s room about two months later to ask her a question, as she was department chairperson.  One of the boys in the room announced, “Hi, Mr. Rhoades.  Do you know you are my favorite substitute teacher since I’ve been in high school.  Well, actually, you’re my favorite of all the subs I’ve ever had.”  I wasn’t running a popularity contest, but I don’t think his comment did any harm to my subbing assignments, and not long after that, I was hired by that school to teach reading to students who were failing in all subjects.  I’ll get to that sometime later.

*         *         *

After an English departmental meeting in which Mr. Albano pressed for higher SAT scores in English, I followed him to his office to make this statement: “When English gets to be important enough that the administration stops treating it as a step-child, things will improve.”

“I have no idea what you mean, Mr. Rhoades.”

“Do you realize that (and here I named four English teachers) teachers who were hired with majors in other fields (and I named a former guidance counselor and a former phys ed teacher) were moved into the English department for one reason or another?” I went on with the list. “I don’t mean to imply that these people are not good teachers—they are personable and conscientious, but you would not hire math teachers in this manner. I have taught difficult students with low abilities because I had tolerance for them, but I have never taught a gifted class that uses the skills I learned from editing a college newspaper or a junior literature class that would benefit from my master’s specialization in American lit. Perhaps there are other things that are of greater importance than SAT scores.” He asked that I write it up. I believe that every teacher hired in the English department since that day has been an English major and some of the non-majors have retired or gone on to other posts. (This paragraph was composed in 1996; I have no concept of hiring practices, etc., since that time.)

For my first three years at Greenfield-Central, I taught the most challenging general English classes.  These classes were much larger than any gifted English class.  This does not make great sense to me.  The needy students would progress much more rapidly with more individual attention from the teacher.  Many times gifted classes spent a lot of time on group projects that put little or no pressure on the teacher, either for maintaining order or grading papers.

The same year that I started at Greenfield-Central, 1979-80, I had dropped in at Eastern Hancock during the summer, as one of the Southwestern teachers told me he had run into the band director from Eastern on the golf course, and they had spoken of me.  There was the implication that I could return to Eastern anytime.  What the new (to me) superintendent of five years told me was that my position didn’t exist any more.  I had worked rather tirelessly on the introduction of “phase-elective” English curriculum, and the weight of that program fell heavily on my shoulders.  I taught poetry (6 week courses), folklore, drama, speech, Roberts’ Rules of Order, and all English 9 classes.  We found that students relinquished study halls to take several English department offerings.  The superintendent said, “So you’re Jack Rhoades.  I’m glad to meet you.  Do you realize that in five year of curriculum meetings with parents and teachers, there has never been a meeting where your name did not come up.”  I was hoping that meant they spoke well of me!

*         *         *

I once grew tired of hearing two teachers in the teachers’ lounge complain about their “remedial” English classes. These classes were peopled with students with special problems and difficulties, but they were limited to fifteen students in size. They carried a stigma. When I offered to teach them, I was honest. I felt like these students deserved to have a teacher who could love them. I also felt that anyone with my load of night work should have a few classes that would require little overtime grading.

I was successful with these kids whose names appeared on the absence list under detention so often that I knew some of them made it a point to be tossed out of some class nearly every day. I tried to learn where all these students were coming from. I decided, after a long setting-in period of time, to have an informal day when we went to the “Cougar Meeting Room” so we would be in a room with tables and windows to look out while we talked and in which we could have refreshments. One student said to me, “Mr. Rhoades, why are you doing this? Don’t you know teachers hate us?” The sad part is that I did know it—first hand.

When some members of that class did reach graduation, Eli Lily, our Partner in Education, had a special day for the leaders. They wanted the leaders of every group of any description. One of these boys was there. Mr. Albano relayed the message that when the boy was asked what he attributed his success in school to when so many of his friends had “fallen through the cracks,” he said, “Teachers like Mr. Rhoades.“ Now, I know that no system of rewards that any educational body might set up would include a teacher whose students rapidly forgot most of the subject matter he presented unless he somehow tied it to practicalities such as getting along with others, respecting yourself, and living with manners; who taught primarily by getting along with all of them, showing respect for their differences, and being mannerly with them.

I had asked that class that day, because some of them had abilities they wouldn’t use, “What grade were you in when you started to cheat on things.” I didn’t use any kind of test or quiz that they could cheat on because they did it so skillfully and outrageously, and I found it demeaning for them and me and felt it tested me more on my ability to catch them than it tested any of them on anything.

If caught red-handed, they had learned, they said, to become loud and angry. “Are you calling me a cheater?” they would shout. They made it bad enough that few teachers bothered to catch them more than once. They told me that the cheating had started in first grade. “Why?” I asked. “I know you could do the work.”

“Why not?” was their retort. They had played their teachers like a musical instrument and had come to enjoy the tune.

I had them sit in groups of three or four during a period of time when we concentrated on writing every day.  I think students are only willing to share things with a teacher if they think he/she likes them, but they are not hesitant to share with each other in a group of their cronies.  The goal was for each of them to identify five mistakes that they made most often and stop making them.  They had to read and sign each other’s work, and I allowed them to go to the “machines” for refreshments.  I had gotten permission through guidance where they said, “If you are getting anything out of these kids, you are the only teacher who is.  Go for it.”  Mr. Cline hated the intrusion in the cafeteria where he held a study hall that period and went to the office to try to put a stop to it.  Dean of Students, Don Jackson said, “I just wish you could be a mouse and sit in the room when they talk about you.”  They were in his office whenever they got kicked out of class, and he referred to them as “his rummies.”  They loved that guy in a special way.  He once had said of my classes, “You’re doing something right.  I never see them (meaning they didn’t want to miss my classes, I think).”

After two or three years, the department chair felt they were not getting the essentials under my tutelage, so they were taken from me and given to her.  After one year there were no more classes of remedial English.

Drama club at Greenfield-Central came to have a support group, a parent organization called WABAC, standing for “We act better around crowds.” Initiated by Carolyn Cash, WABAC was reinforced by dedicated activist parents such as Sarah Davis, Susie Broome and Barb Padgett (super seamstress), all moms whose kids graduated from Hancock County Children’s Theater, where, for three years I had taken on costuming as they took on pageantry.  My large room had become the costume room.  Ladies brought in sewing machines, ironing boards; I added glue guns and tools, costume racks and turned student desks into work tables.  We went up into the costume lofts and, looking at many costumes as simply material, pulled anything that might fit into that show’s style.  One by one, we brought the ninety-plus children to the room, found suitable attire and made it fit.  A few kids, like Robby Soloway from the Mt. Vernon area, had grandmothers or moms that made their memorable costumes (cowardly lion, etc.)from scratch.  But drama club had no such parent input then.  Add such wonderful people as Jim Padgett, the finest carpenter around, Carolyn Haas, Dean and Jo Felker and a host of others and strength begins to develop perfections. These parents came because they loved their kids and stayed because the kids welcomed them so warmly that they had great fun.

*         *         *

I have to relate here one incident from that version of Dolly that exemplifies the workings of the team. Things were at a standstill onstage because we reached a period when the athletic department and National Honor Society needed the facility; so we moved to the gym floor to work on choreography, which was in the capable hands of Gail Noland Powell. One of her gifts was perfect pitch. One of mine was the ability to see the total picture in the beginning. One night she had put a kick line in the one spot it could not happen—the moment when the waiters needed to start down the runway ramp. When I took those steps out, Gail cried and the students argued with me.  I had taken the score before rehearsals started and showed Gail this spot and the kick it would take to bring the waiters down the runway.  But she loved the kick line in that spot, as did the kids.

They had no idea where the runway would be or that it would be sloping and specialty- lighted, so I seemed to them to be tyrannical. Although I took Gail to the stage and walked through the runway, she couldn’t imagine it and went home in tears, but she found another place for that bit, and when the runway was in place, viewed the results with pride. She sat on the piano bench with Margaret, sharing the songs as they turned pages for each other. Margaret was our live rehearsal pianist. Neither Gail nor I could abide working with tapes, but when Gail was pregnant with twin boys and left us to be a mother (lucky beautiful boys). David Alewine choreographed his sophomore and junior years with an incredible schedule that required him to work at times with tapes, and we came to love that as a way to get runthroughs onstage sooner.

So when the leads came to me to work on punching up “Dancing” at one end of the gym, Gail worked with the chorus at the other. The choreography for “Dancing” was lovely, and I knew it would be excitingly funny when the farcical moves were put in. I had reached the point at which Barnaby begins to learn to dance when I saw Gail had stopped working and was watching with tears in her eyes. “I’m sorry, kids, but I just can’t do this to Gail. I sent her home in tears last night, and I’m not going to do that to her tonight. She works far too hard for me to treat her that way.” Jon and Andrea Clark Dolly) had begun to capture the fun of the farce, and although they were both as close to Gail as I, Andrea said with vehemence, “Mr. Rhoades, we need this. JUST DO IT!!” And so we did. Once things were in place, Gail could enjoy as I did the way her beautiful movements flowed in and out of the humor.  It was a rare piece of perfection, and I treasure the memory of it.

*         *         *

David Alewine was the president of drama club my last year. My daughter Tammy was the only other student elected president during the sophomore year to serve the junior year. When I announced I was to retire, David set about beginning his career. He was again to be drum major and co-president of drama club with Dustin Davis, but he elected to take his senior year at Idlewild School of the Performing Arts in California, which offered him a scholarship. He earned two awards that year—best dancer and “Spirit of Idlewild.” At his audition there, he showed that he was not adequately trained as most of their dancers had been.  With his Childlren’s Theater money, he had taken a class at Butler University, but band camp had interrupted, and he attended only two classes.  He showed them the moves from the class he took.  One of the dance teachers said, “Now, could you reverse that?”  And he did everything exactly backwards.  “David,” she responded, “No one can do that!”  And they recognized a rare gift.  He is dancing professionally—I hope he is doing some choreography! What a natural! What a leader!  His skills learned on the field with the band blended with his choreography. 

I once was told by a quiet little girl in a freshman English class that she was enjoying being in the chorus, but that David didn’t know her.  So at rehearsal that night I took her where he was working with a small group, and I said, “David, this is _______.  Do you know her?”  He glanced up and replied, “Oh, yes, Number 37 (or whatever it was).”  And she nodded agreement.  He had their placement by numbers on sheets of paper he worked tirelessly with.  I often paired David with Ryan Anthony, also a children’s theater sensation.  I told Ryan’s parents after his first play, “If that kid was mine, I’d take him to Hollywood.”  But I got to enjoy his grace and talent for several years. David also did a fine job onstage, singing and acting. His little brother, Jeff, who was a stand-out in Children’s Theater, began high school the year I left as did Catherine Davis, who later was to major in theater at Yale.

We had wonderful cast parties.  At my first cast party at Greenfield-Central, there were former students who monopolized the event.  They were advocates of a former teacher.  I had started the year $200 thanks to them and had spent six weeks tearing apart cardboard scenery to rescue a bit of lumber.  There was not one piece of usable scenery, and it had taken many, many extra hours to build a huge set that was the pride of my life at the time.  Tim Leonard, the drama club president had ridiculed it as we built it, often during rehearsals, although I built it to be his showcase—he had the lead.  I didn’t often state my belief that I could tell in a stellar performance that, more than anything else, it was performed with pleasing me in mind.  Tim stood out in that it was obvious his intention was to outdo me.  I was proud of the show, but felt anyone could tell that I hadn’t had much input into his character.  His fan club was at that party, and one girl, who had worked on costumes at DePauw criticized costumes, especially one of Martha Schwer’s dresses.  (Actually, her costume was missing suddenly—no doubt taken as a prank—and she was wearing the light weight black coat she was to have carried over her arm.  No mention of the set the art teacher had called “a Broadway set.”

Our cast parties became events at which parents were welcome, but they didn’t involve alumni.  The highlight of the evening was when one of the actors would take the chair position and call upon people to recollect special moments from the show or the rehearsal period.  We adults stood in the doorways and grinned from ear to ear until the moment I blinked the lights and announced, “Folks, this party is over.”  And they dispersed.  Perhaps to spend the night with a friend or group of friends, but not under my jurisdiction.  Any negativity, if there was some, diidn’t get back to me.

When I left the Greenfield-Central schools, they hired first-year teachers to replace me, both in the speech department and with the drama. Neither of these great kids ever got a rewarding role in my absence, although Jeff made state finals in diving several years and was drum major in the band. Catherine put her energy into sports and publications.  Sometimes, as in the case of Rodney Coe, I heard criticism about one actor getting many fine roles. My counter was that they didn’t make the most gifted ball player sit on the bench because they wanted to give others a chance to shine. You put leaders in leadership roles, and everyone benefits. After my retirement, the parents’ organization was abandoned and the program I believed anyone could run collapsed.

While I was technical director with the Lexington (KY) Ballet, they performed The Wall based upon Pink Floyd.  I needed bizarre costumes (only a few) and I knew where I could get them, so I returned to Greenfield and talked to my latest replacement (the third in three years), then went into the maze of costumes that only I knew how to find things in and borrowed about ten really obsolete pieces.  The moms of WABAC had gone through the costumes and filled several bags of throw-aways that I was instructed not to look into.  When I went through the bags, I found they were about to discard everything I would need for the peasantry in my next show, My Fair Lady, so I taught them how to distress clothing.  What I borrowed, they would have thrown away.

A few minutes later the English department chairperson met me in the hallway, saying, “Jack, those are not your costumes.  Miss _______ came to me and said she felt like she had been shit upon.”  My hackles rose.  Had I not searched on weekends for years to amass those things I saw possibilities for?  “Mary,” I replied, “in sixteen years, I never refused to lend any costume to anyone associated with theater.  Indiana Central borrowed everything for Guys and Dolls, Anderson borrowed lots of stuff for Sound of Music, Tim Leonard borrowed costumes for Mt. Vernon’s Harvey.  Often some things were not returned—In Tim’s case, not one thing.  I intended to be generous.  Is some new policy to begin with me?  And I was allowed to take the things I needed.  I only went back one other time for a few props I knew were there.  They had finally searched and found a deserving man to rebuild their program.  This man, I realized was more talented than I, although I looked at his wonderful set for The Diary of Anne Frank, and just felt in my gut that mine, adapted from a model by Gail Sturm, had been as good or better.

When I returned those props I’d used in a Winchester, Kentucky, production of Oliver, I thought he, under the pressure of scenery work, a massive staircase I wouldn’t have had the nerve to attempt, I thought he seemed imposed upon, but he showed me how the department had been upgraded, and I was awed.  Finally, in what had been my space, I saw growth.  Mary Parido, in telling me about my immediate replacement (I was not involved in the decision) seemed to me to gloat a bit as she said, “It’s a woman.  She’s been in law school.  I think she’ll be alright.  After a difficult year, that teacher was gone.  I wondered what I had missed by not attending law school.

After five years, I dropped in for a visit.  I always said that no one remembers you after five years.  I shouldn’t have said that, I guess.  When Margaret and I went into the offices at a new end of the building to visit with cohorts (remember, Margaret was the treasurer and had trained the current treasurer), the French teacher introduced us to the new principal, who said, “So this is Mr. Rhoades!”  My surprised response was, “You’ve heard the name?”  Anyway, life goes on, and life is good.

Once when I was serving on a North Central evaluating team,
I showed the portion of the video of Hello, Dolly! that presented
the title song. The audience had interrupted the song sixteen
times and stood at the point where the waiters were just about
to back up the ramp and do an encore. “Well, what I want to know
is where did you get that audience. We did Li’l Abner last season
and the audience didn’t applaud for a single song.”

“I guess that’s where we’re different, because I would never have
allowed my audience to get by with that. After the second number
with no applause, I would have been out there in a spotlight,
explaining to the audience that applause is immediate feedback
that tells student actors whether they have been successful or not.
A sparse applause tells them the song was not too good. No applause
tells them nothing and leaves them inert. These are your kids as
much as they are mine. I have trained them for six weeks or so as
well as I know how. Now it’s your turn.”

I had recently seen Carol Channing in Dolly and realized that the
audience was waiting for her to appear.  She rode in on a horse car,
as did our Andrea Clark, and I just wished that when Andrea lowered
the newspaper to show her face, she too would hear applause.  So a half
hour before curtain, I went out to talk to the audience.  “You who are
here this early are the backbone of this organization,” I said.  And I asked
them to watch for that wonderful senior girl who was in her last show and
surprise her with applause.  And they did, as well as other actors/
actresses who were giving their last performance that closing night.
And for the waiters gallop, they stood and cheered.  What a hoot!

After one really fine show during my early days at Greenfield when there had not been a single missed line, a single pause, a single prop missing, nor a light or sound cue flubbed, the audience didn’t stand. Now, I never hoped they would do this habitually for just any mediocre performance, but when they witnessed excellence, I felt that they should reward it. I felt that they would have jumped up for their children but refrained because I had failed to win their hearts. How much this audience had loved Doc Barrett, who preceded me. I had put up the most beautiful, professional set possible with its sliding doors, circular stairway and beautiful bay window.  They had entered to the smell of frying bacon.  We served three meals in that show  and a kitchen area with cookware and dish washing supplies.  What a crew!  Larry Andrick, Lori Corbin and David Arland were in that show, and they had worked so hard. “Folks,” I said, “these kids went far beyond my expectations tonight. This very difficult show was flawless. Do you realize how much it lifts their spirits when the audience acknowledges that excellence—that it makes them work even harder the next time? Awards and trophies cost money and go to a few leaders. Standing costs you nothing and leaves no one out. Now, let’s go back and do the bows again so we can get it right.”

Do you think they thought I was arrogant and egocentric? Maybe some did, but I believe most people in the audience felt a thrill as the lights dimmed and area spots began to pick up a few cast members in frozen poses, fading and rising on another spot as if photos were being taken by an old fashioned camera. It is in the script of Life with Father to do the curtain call just this way. Sometimes an audience resists standing because everyone is just waiting to see what others will do. This was the only show of mine that my brother Dan was to see.  He was home from California for my father’s funeral, and brother Chuck had said, “Jack has a show this weekend, and we are going to see it!”  Dan told me afterward that he taught at a college where the ad building of two universities faced each other two blocks apart, and that he felt neither of those schools could have equaled that performance.  High praise from him meant more that a standing ovation.

My very first standing ovation was in the gym at Eastern Hancock when Jerry Davis and Darlene Speers performed in Oliver.  A handsome wrestler named Steve Harding died so beautifully as police shot him on the top row of bleachers and he propelled himself down to the gym floor.  A boy named Stan Willen played Mr. Bumble and his huge tenor voice and rotund height added wonderfully to the role.  Stan died in the worst crash in the nation on July 4th the next summer.  A car came across the median on the divided highway and the head-on collision killed everyone in both vehicles.  As senior sponsor I was to take the whole class to the funeral home, and as I had worked in the funeral home at Carthage with my dear friend Frank Hampton, I was appalled to see open caskets, Stan with black stitches descending from his red hairline and his face swollen badly.  I insisted that the caskets be closed.  As the whole family had gone together to their rewards, and as his father was also the minister who had objected to his son’s participation in theater, there was no one to take charge of that room with four caskets—mother, father, sister, and Stan.  A grandparent (maybe two) had died there as well, but they weren’t at this funeral home.

When a few relatives arrived, they wouldn’t let them see into the caskets, and they came to me.  One of the women was very pregnant.  I told the undertaker that, of course they should have a private viewing where no one could observe their grieving and the caskets could be opened one at a time.  When I had seen them, there was loud weeping and wailing as is considered normal in their religious persuasion, but it had torn me apart.  But I digress….

The show, Oliver, was good enough for that huge audience (the cars had spilled past the parking lot into every nearby street for several blocks in the little town of Charlottesville) to have stood to show their pleasure at such hard work from so many.  But they didn’t stand.  I was sitting near the front in the audience, as was always my practice, and I clearly heard a woman say, after the moment of possibility had, I thought, passed, “This is ridiculous!  At our school we would stand up.”  And when she stood,  that large body of parents and friends leaped instantly to their feet, as if they had been just waiting for a signal.  What a thrill that moment was.  It was a first for me, I think.

Every audience is a different crowd, and all our crowds at Greenfield began to show the kids the kind of respect they deserved after a job well-done. And I’d say we got what the kids called “standing ovations” about half the time. But never did I see a crowd so excited that they would stand in the middle of a show—except this once for that high-stepping chorus line of twenty-four athletic males portraying the waiters in Hello, Dolly! on that red-carpeted runway with its flashing running lights. I was certain that there were few schools (in Indiana, anyway) that could get that many men who would get up there in the first place, let alone work so many extra hours before school and late at night to get Gail’s superb choreography precisely right.

I had, early on, subscribed to the “noble failure” theory in selecting plays that perhaps seemed impossible to do in the present circumstance, so it is consistent with my practices at small schools to allow waitresses in that line if boys are not available. I remember being surprised when one first-string basketball player had told me at auditions, “Mr. Rhoades, I don’t want a part. What I really want to do is be one of those waiters!” And Aaron Smith led in that kick line that brought the audience to its feet. Jon Gabrielsen, our Cornelius, played college basketball at Taylor University. He was six-three at tryouts and growing so fast we had to redo costumes twice. Barnaby was a six-three tennis stand-out, Rich Wood, who went to Notre Dame.

I apologize to readers who don’t know us for using names, but the pleasure that comes from remembering these folks, just makes it necessary.  I apologize to the great co-workers whose names I forget to mention because I feel it becomes cumbersome to fill pages with names people don’t know.  Perhaps if a show recalls to a reader someone they felt should be named, they could comment to me.

I don’t think the athletes came because of me—I know they loved and admired Gail Powell, our superb young chorus teacher, but I also know they would not have come had they not known there would be excellence and a large audience that would appreciate that excellence—a great combination.  There have always been in my life supporting colleagues who blessed and inspired me.  None more so than Gail.  One year we had the same prep period and we always saw each other briefly in the office, and I looked forward to it.  One day she didn’t speak, and I was certain something I had done had offended her.  I was in my classroom mulling this over when she bubbled in.  “I missed seeing you in the office today,” she offered.  I said that I had been there and admitted that I thought she was mad at me.  She came to the stage end of the room where I was, and as she hugged me, she was saying, “Mr. Rhoades, how could I ever be angry with you?”  She was for all of us a brilliant star.

Andrew Kelley from children’s theater (Linda Quick found him and worked with him as Captain Hook, his first role in the first Children’s Theater production) was in that line of men. He was a freshman with so much drive that it was not in his mind to stand out by overacting, he just did everything “full out,” as dancers say. Seniors came to me to say, “Mr. Rhoades, (this in a whiney voice) would you please say something to Andrew? He doesn’t listen to us.”

“Kids,” I would say, “when you get this learned perfectly and get a feeling for the farce, you will all look just like Andrew Kelley—and they did!” What a powerhouse onstage that young man turned out to be. But he comes later.

I read an article in the paper recently explaining that teacher rewards should not be tied to student achievement, and I would like to comment on that. I have for years listened to Eli Lily employees planning to spend their large bonus checks. In Kentucky, I listened to a husband and wife, both of whom worked for Toyota. Each got a $5,000 bonus per year. Tell me what a teacher might have to do to get a $100 bonus. There is no such thing. Might not some rewards be discretionary for the recognition of a project that involved many students and was very successful. My friends who work at a factory can get their children “on” when they reach an age. What might my children just inherit from my employer? Not even a job as a janitor is available to them. Those jobs go to the children of other custodial help.

Gail Noland, the G-C chorus teacher, who was one of my partners in music-drama productions, received a $1,000 community award as distinguished teacher and a TV good teacher award. I believe she spent it all setting up a program utilizing the music department at Butler University in Indianapolis to benefit her students, even though it made more ongoing work for her.

My friends who receive hourly wages get time and a half for overtime, sometimes double pay. For overtime labor done after the school day ended, my lifetime wage averages about ten cents an hour. Maybe less. And I gave up vacation after vacation to get the scenery work done ahead of time.  When I created a yearbook at Carthage, the trustee promised I’d be paid for that job the next year.  Sure enough, my contract included $25 for yearbook.  The reward I got was paid out in love.

*         *         *

Know thou of a certainty that Love is the secret of God’s holy Dispensation, the manifestation of the All-Merciful, the fountain of spiritual outpourings. Love is heaven’s kindly light, the Holy Spirit’s eternal breath that vivifieth the human soul. Love is the cause of God’s revelation unto man, the vital bond inherent in accordance with the divine creation, in the realities of things. Love is the one means that ensureth true felicity both in this world and the next, Love is the light that guideth in darkness, the living link that uniteth God with man, that assureth the progress of every illumined soul. Love is the most great law that ruleth this mighty and heavenly cycle, the unique power that bindeth together the divers elements of this material world, the supreme magnetic force that directeth the movements of the spheres in the celestial realms. Love revealeth with unfailing and limitless power the mysteries latent in the universe. Love is the spirit of life unto the adorned body of mankind, the establisher of true civilization in this mortal world, and the shedder of imperishable glory upon every high-aiming race and nation.                                                            –from Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá

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I always had my students join hands in a circle before each performance (the make-up kids and parents who were there, too) and I gave a few brief introductory remarks. I thanked them. I told them (without noting that these were concepts from the Bahá’í writings) that unity was the strongest force in the universe and that love was the force that holds the atoms together. “We don’t really know much about love in our world except that nearly everyone on the planet is semi-starved of this vital food and every soul leaps with joy when it confronts him. “If we do this performance in a way that displays our unity and affection for each other and the degree to which we love what we are doing, if we reach out with love to those out there who came just for us, they won’t know what it is, but they will feel that they have encountered a powerful force. That alone will make this play a memorable event in their lives.”

Then they got a chance to talk—officers and leads, if they wanted to; then anyone who had a thought to share did so. I could fill pages with what I feel are wonderful stories that have become obvious during the circle. And on the few occasions when I felt I couldn’t interrupt, and we had to hold the curtain briefly, we had built an audience that would know that whatever was going on “back there” was significant, important enough to warrant a slight delay, and that the play, once it began would be abundantly worth waiting for.