I Loved To Teach

An assistant basketball coach at Southwestern had played for Indiana University and a bit of pro ball. I once asked him if he had ever coached a kid who was more talented than he was himself. “Never!” was his instantaneous reply. “Never!”

And I felt genuinely sorry for him. I could see in every interested student a potential that went beyond my own talents, and whenever a child’s near perfection became challenging, my spirit soared with gratefulness. I did something with Vince that I was never to do again. It was a very difficult task to add to my busy schedule—and to his. I cast us together in a short British comedy with three characters—he and I and a nosy female boarding house matron who appeared on and off. Box and Cox, a one-act done on Broadway in the thirties, was one I had taken on in college, when I was Cox. Now, heavier, I was Box, and Vince took on the role of Cox. The introduction said the play should last thirty minutes, but even after all lines were memorized (I knew all of his; he knew all of mine.  We got off a few times in rehearsal and ran a couple pages before we realized we had switched roles ), we barely got through it in a fifty-five minute period. It was a matter of honing our timing. On performance night we were clocked at exactly thirty minutes—really rapid-fire stuff. I felt it was the best way I could sharpen his comic timing and stage presence. I believe it endeared me to that school’s growing audience to witness that performance side of me so intimately.

Losing him to college was like severing an umbilical cord. I think I never dared let a student become that important to me again, although many became very vital to my life and happiness. The young lady, ironically named Carol Cox, also turned in a superior performance and took on a nearly-impossibly-challenging role the next year with amazing success. A girl of large proportions, she was convincing and hilarious in the difficult romantic role (over 600 lines) of Cornelia Otis Skinner in Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, a play I had appeared in while in high school under Mr. James Lewis Casaday, whose life was full at the time with training the talents of Sidney Pollack. Her comic timing was a thing of beauty as was Debbie Culver’s, who played Emily (also over 600 lines).

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This play had been my first success as a director, at Carthage when Bonnie Howard and Barbara Wilson wowed that small-town crowd. For months I had heard over and over about Bayard Baker (just a name to me, but a legend to Carthage). I was told he was the finest teacher that ever taught there, now (in 1959) an elderly gentleman in the community, and he had directed the plays. Martha Trowbridge, wife of Town Marshall Hugh Trowbridge and the custodian of the community center where all plays were done, loved to tell me that I was not doing things right. “When I was in school, we had Bayard Baker, and he put a row of chairs backstage and lined us up. We did not talk unless we were onstage and it was our turn.”

I, on the other hand, had encouraged Margaret to bake pizzas and bring them to us during practice. I had even allowed a few students to leave to go down to Peavey’s Drug Store (actually, his name was Mr. Ledbetter—I believe the nickname came from some television program) a block away. Soon others brought cookies, etc. And play practice was FUN! At the first performance there was a buzz among the kids. “Bayard Baker is here.” “Did you know that Bayard Baker is out there?”

And so I thought I would finally meet the man who had become a legend. But after the show, which was, as Emily in Our Town said, “…like silk off a spool”, he left without speaking to me. I asked Bonnie what he had said to her. He told her that he had never had that much talent to work with. (I took that as a personal compliment, no matter how it was intended.) I felt a little exonerated. At Southport, Mrs. Copsey, the department chair who had visited my classroom every day listened in on the intercom (students would point at the speaker when it clicked on)  and who clearly despised me.  I used her classroom last period, and once I forgot to erase her chalkboard.  (She never erased anything to make room for my use,)  She told me I was NOT a gentleman!  My intense desire was to prove myself with that play after seeing a very mediocre senior play was rendered unconscious when the elderly Mrs. Copsey, not willing to shadow me in the evenings had canceled the junior play, saying, “That young young man could never pull it off.”

Our Hearts not only required handling teenagers, it also required period costumes (the roaring twenties), building some scenery flats, and changing scenes. In thirty-six years of being in charge of a building at night, often with no other adult in the building, I can only remember three incidents that required the attention of an administrator, the worst being when someone who had been pushed bumped into the trophy case with the state champion football trophy in it and broke the glass.  Not the way I wanted to be linked with the school’s highest moment.

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In his junior English class I had noticed that Vincent, whose computer-sharp mind raced faster than his pen, sometimes wrote sentences that defied grammatical examination. So I dragged that class through every grammatical construction in the English language and made them diagram them. Is it bad to be so challenged by a student that you “bone up” every night to be worthy of him in the classroom? Soon his writing took on a new discipline. I tested over everything we had studied on the final, and I gave them the option of diagramming a single “sentence” instead of taking the exam. It filled the chalkboard at the front of the room. On Vince’s final there was not one error. No one chose to diagram. In speech class that afternoon, I gave him two pieces of paper taped together and asked him to do me a favor—diagram the sentence on the board. He filled both pages with gerund phrases, nominative absolutes, adjective, adverb, noun clauses and more on frames and lines. Of course, it was done flawlessly. His writing skills became worthy of a man of many perfections aided with this knowledge.

Many students simply refused to allow their minds to dwell on parts of speech and grammatical constructions, and I suspect teachers don’t dwell on them these days.  At Greenfield-Central, I developed a simplified system that didn’t require rewriting the words.  Students still balked, but I will, much later, explain that system, along with some of the classroom “fun” I created to teach, for example, the long list of prepositions.

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