“Beautify your tongues, O people, with truthfulness, and adorn your souls with the ornament of honesty.” –Bahá’u’lláh
In 1946, my grade-school principal, a Mr. Harris at South Bend Franklin Elementary School, came into my sixth-grade class to talk about honesty. He set a very high standard, and I don’t know if many others adopted it as I did, but I think teachers need to talk about standards to the kids they hope to influence. He said that we should all be so honest that if a pencil were to be left in the groove on our desk, it would still be there when the owner returned the next day. None of us would take it because we would know it was not ours. I have a small drawer in our secretary full of unsharpened new pencils. When I pick one up on the street (to protect it, I guess), I think of Mr. Harris.
One incident was repeated with both of our sons—the matter of stealing something that involved the Danner’s (five and dime) Store. In each case I took them back and had them explain their actions and make restitution to the store manager. As an adult in a position of authority, John was once tricked by a customer into a shortage that exceeded $700. The boss explained to John that he in no way suspected him of any wrong-doing, but he would like him to tell the other employees that he had been required to pay back half the money that was missing. John was nearly as insistent about repaying the money as his boss was that he would not, but John would not lie to the other employees by misrepresenting the matter.
A few days later a lady called and asked to speak with the owner. She told how her sister-in-law was bragging that she had taken the money back when the young man turned his back right after she laid it on the counter. It was a relief for John, although no action was taken, but his boss had once told him, “John, I feel I could trust you with anything and everything I own.”
Trustworthiness is the greatest door to the security and tranquillity of mankind. The stability of every affair always depends on it, and the worlds of honor, glory and affluence are illuminated by its light. –Bahá’u’lláh
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Southwestern High School is a consolidation of three very small rural schools in Shelby County, Indiana. When I arrived upon the scene on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving vacation in 1975, the most recent attempt at a class play had been scheduled for the previous weekend, but had fallen through under the teacher I was to replace, making it three years since the last play.
Margaret and I had decided with the birth of our fourth child that we would go into business instead of teaching. I had been spending countless hours at the school in the evenings preparing for plays and proms, and I felt I was experiencing personal growth and development that was satisfying to me at the expense of my wonderful family. Drama Club had begun to produce musicals so that Margaret, at the piano, could participate and get to know the students I worked with. John had learned to lower two seats in the auditorium and sleep curled around an arm post. Danny slept in his infant seat until he learned to sleep on the concrete floor.
At Wabash College during a summer institute, I had found a path to enter the school of directing at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, a school that had paved the way for my entrance as an actor in 1955 when my parents stepped in with moral objections to this profession. So we bought a five-unit Victorian home to repair which would give us financial support while we were in London. Our new home sold quickly with a provision that allowed us to stay in the home while we worked to make the old house into a home. Before the month was out, the buyers insisted we must move.
There was another matter that was involved in these decisions. Margaret was unhappy at school and had too much education and experience to find another position on the elementary level. I think it might be well for me to mention what I have observed in many cases of selecting elementary teachers to praise and reward. For a long time what has been stressed above all else is firm discipline. Margaret was youthful, but she was a kindly mother-figure to her students, and they loved her and learned under her guidance. However, she was teamed, or pitted against, another second-grade teacher whose goals and methods were diametrically opposite. That teacher did not have indoor recess if it rained. Her students remained at their seats in silence. Lunch time was not to be a social time for her students. She assigned seats and did not allow them to talk.
Margaret, on the other hand, often had several group activities going on at the same time and knew well the difference between the sounds of learning and noise. But when evaluation time came around, Margaret’s evaluation was critical and the other teacher flaunted her evaluation which held her up as a paragon of virtue. Margaret had a child in her class who was already far behind others his age. Teachers found him appalling and repulsive, but Margaret treated him exactly as the others. When a music program was scheduled at night, he told her he wished he could come, but he had no way to get there. She went after him, brought him and took him home afterwards. Other teachers asked, “What is HE doing here? Well, how did he get here? You what? Whatever did you do that for?”
And one morning he stood wide-eyed beside her desk waiting to talk to her before class. She had her arm around him as he told her, “She tried to kill herself last night. It was really something. There were cops and firemen and an ambulance and everything.” Of course, it was obvious that he referred to his mother. The two of them lived alone, and he had gotten himself to school that day.
Years later, when Margaret was no longer a teacher, the Bahá’ís gave us a hard assignment on behalf of a mentally impaired man in our community. After his father had passed away, two women and a boy had moved into his small garage apartment. They were on welfare and taking advantage of him. We were to tell them they would have to move. When the door opened, there stood a young man of perhaps fifteen. His eyes widened and he grinned as he recognized his second-grade teacher. “Mom!” he called, “Mrs. Rhoades is here. You remember about Mrs. Rhoades. She’s the one.” And there was the thought conveyed in the statement that in all his years of education, she was the only one.
* * *
Soon after we moved into the historical home, two things happened that changed our plans about London—a recession and Margaret’s personal illness. We had the grand opening of our interior decorating studio and no one came. We went two months without a single sale. And just about the time, two years later, when we could have begun to see our way to carry out the London plans, we learned that Margaret had multiple sclerosis. I abandoned those plans, and we continued to reside in the Victorian home in historic downtown Greenfield. By then I was enjoying an unusually happy “honeymoon period” with students and audiences at that small school in the next county to the south—Southwestern..
In early October after watching our savings dissipate, I had filed an application with the teachers’ employment agency in Indianapolis where I was told not to despair. “With your credentials you will find a job.” Then I went to Indianapolis Public Schools where l knew there were still many openings and was told they would never hire me—I had too much education and too much experience. They could hire two teachers for what they would have to pay me.
At the regular employment bureau, I was told that there were only jobs at minimum wage. "Well," I sighed, "I can make more than that hanging wallpaper!"
"Can you hang wallpaper?" she asked, now interested, I thought. Maybe that was a job opportunity.
"Yes, it was sometimes my summer occupation."
"Well, You’d better hang wallpaper!" And I was dismissed.
There is a serious flaw in the state-controlled education system that gives teachers only two ways to overcome the snail-paced increments in salaries—they can go into administration (especially if they find the classroom hard to deal with or coaching too demanding), or they can change school corporations. However, the very fact of having a resume that displays an inability to stay in one location is a deterrent to moving often, and once one has a master’s degree and fifteen years experience, he has difficulty landing a position in a higher-paying corporation. Students, of course, have been indoctrinated with the concept that success is determined by salary, which labels nearly every teacher a failure—someone to look down upon.
A student told me during my first difficult year that he didn’t need an education. He would enter a military career at age seventeen, and retire after twenty years with a higher annual salary than I could ever hope to have by that time. I had signed that contract for $3,900 that year.
