SOME LESSON PLANS and TOUCHING MEMORIES
Chapter 6
“The Tell-tale Heart”
I can’t remember when I first read "The Tell-tale Heart" to my classes as a dramatic presentation, but I do know because of the following incident that I had already arrived at what is now quite routine by the time I left Carthage in 1961. I had learned that the much-loved story by Poe took exactly twenty minutes to read aloud, even with all the dramatic pauses I could muster. So I always started it exactly twenty minutes before the final bell for a class. I think I perhaps felt I was having some difficulty reaching the seniors at the new school in Charlottesville, and I decided to hit ‘em with my best shot—so, only four weeks into the school year, I found myself watching the clock for the moment to begin. I turned my necktie askew, mussed my hair, pushed my glasses down on my nose, arranged the front of the room so that a chair sat just in front of my lectern with empty space in front of it where I could emote on the floor—killing, dying, pantomiming and grunting when I wasn’t tapping my fingers on the hollow lectern behind my back to simulate the beating of the heart.
I concentrated on vocal variety, strange eyes, especially using a high chin to look both egocentric and, with much white showing in my eyes, quite mad; and, to make what I felt was the slow-moving section more captivating, I twitched one side of my face with increasing fury. I smiled my sweetest smile as I told of dismembering the body. I lowered my voice to a whisper just before my loudest shriek, “Ha! Would a madman have been as wise as this?”
Finally, just before the bell, I fell to the floor in an exhausted emotional frenzy, and as the bell rang, I stood and bowed amid polite applause where there had been raucous approval in the past. Then a frozen silence, followed with slow and orderly movement out of the classroom—any way out that kept them from passing close to me. This made me realize that they were not sure the new teacher was quite sane. I think it was at least a month after that before any student in that room stayed after class to ask me a question. Since that experience I have waited to read that story until the students in a class have come to know me quite well. Then, just before fall break, near Halloween, I gave a bit of a preface and called it the only gift I could afford for all my students.
* * *
In 1971, when I was firmly entrenched in the brand new classrooms in the new Eastern Hancock building, there was a convocation featuring the swing choir from Lapel High School, where I had taught for one year four years earlier.
The eighth graders at Lapel, now seniors, comprised the best class it was ever my privilege to teach. Their basketball team had never lost a game in three years of competition, and the top seven athletes all had straight A’s. They also were in choir, and we used them in the chorus of Lapel’s first musical, Brigadoon. During that previous summer, the janitors had destroyed all scenery stored under the stage at the end of the gym because it was a fire hazard. It was made of plywood and 2×2’s, and I would never have used it.
Mr. Roudebush, the principal, asked me to build new scenery in time for the senior play (directed by someone else). Mr. McKamey, the band director, helped me a lot by matching my hours, bringing band kids to help, and taking me home to eat Mrs. McKamey’s good cooking. I designed a very complicated set so that it would include every set piece I would need for Brigadoon in the spring. Several years later Jeannine Terhune told me that a new principal decided they should have scenery that was professionally made. The old was destroyed and new was ordered. When it arrived the kids exclaimed, “Hey, that’s just like the scenery we got rid of.” But, of course, it didn’t have layer upon layer of paint on it. Had I been there, I would have simply replaced the canvas.
Anyway, back at Eastern, Jeannine Terhune’s smartly dressed and highly polished swing choir had wowed the entire school with their assembly program and their astonishingly good looks. After lunch while I was teaching a freshman English class, the visitors were being given a tour when the door opened, and a 6’3” red haired boy named Meredith Ray walked to the back of the room and sat down, saying, “This is the part of Eastern Hancock I want to see.”
The girls were agog. “Well, Meredith,” I grinned, “what would you most like to see?”
Without the slightest hesitation, he asked, “Mr. Rhoades, have you read “The Tell-Tale Heart” for these kids?” I had not, so I did it then. When I had finished, he walked to the front, shook my hand, said, “Thanks a lot, Mr. Rhoades.” Then he was gone.
