I must warn the pragmatist who would scour these pages looking for meaning that my life has been transcendental in nature. I have lived amid muck and not felt a part of it, have loved the “muckers” without judging their particular stirrings. Students who have sat in my classroom endured an almost subconscious attempt to create together a cushion of surreal air to walk on above the trials of outside life—to make and share a place worth believing in. I can’t explain this—don’t want to, even; but it is tucked neatly in these pages which are told randomly from my memory because they are in some way memorable to me and tell of “that place.”
Not all students felt present in this “Twilight Zone.” They brought in books to read secretly in order to escape it, wrote notes to a lover or a cohort in the muck whom they could not brush off their feet at the door. They applied makeup for the “image”, unaware that the very act set them apart as non-participants in the journey. Some tried to make the journey all about themselves, and still the magic continued to happen all around them while they were unaware.
One such non-participant from whom I had been unable to pry one gram of effort and into whom I was unable to pump any discernible grain of knowledge and who would not take one sip of the cup of caring approached me, accompanied by his cohort in crimes, in the hall the following year to ask why I had “failed him”—although we both knew he did not deserve to pass. His parting shot gave me a glimmer of hope: “You know you liked us!”
Another girl, years after I taught her in a seventh-grade class that was out-of control when I arrived upon the scene, said haughtily, “I didn’t learn one thing in that class!” And it was obvious that for her life held no magic. I spoke to her pragmatic superiority when I asked, “Oh, you didn’t? I thought I gave you a spelling test every week.”
“Well, duh.”
“Didn’t I test you over every single story in your literature book?”
“Well, yes; I guess so.”
“Autobiography? Didn’t you write one? Journal—didn’t you keep one? Did you learn to recognize third person plural, present perfect passive tense, for example?”
“I hated that stuff.”
“But you passed it as I remember. Just what was it that you didn’t learn?”
. . . But, you see, she was in a different place than I was in that room, breathing air from another source of escapism, keeping a library book under her grammar text or lit book and reading in snatches about another place where she would rather have been. I’m sure she wouldn’t be one of those who sometimes say to my children in the town where I no longer live, “Your father was the best teacher I ever had.”
Once, my speech class was delivering researched speeches-to-convince on some very demanding subjects. After each I had exhausted myself to pull them into the reality of their subject as it existed within the confines of their daily lives, however sheltered that might be. One boy raised his hand and said, “Mr. Rhoades, why do you insist on talking between speeches? It’s so boring! I wish you’d just let us give our speeches without boring us to death.”
What had happened in that moment to me personally was that he had stripped the wires of my nervous system of their insulation and left me quivering from the shock. In a stunned manner, pale and perhaps shaking, I said, “How dare you say that to me? Don’t you realize how much trust it involved just now for me to bring my awareness of an abhorrent matter to your attention on such a personal level?” And, in spite of myself, my head went down on my desk at the back of the room in complete disillusionment.
The next day he came to me and begged, “Will you tell these people to just leave me alone! They won’t stop bugging me about what I said yesterday. I can’t help it if I think it’s boring.”
And I let them know in cloaked language that we were often at the mercy of those who chose to stay outside of the transformations I knew were taking place. Individuals who had seemed to have nothing in common, perhaps believed they disliked each other, and felt disassociated with each other were becoming a group of friendly faces, pulling for each other, working on projects together and looking forward to this hour each day. What they pressed upon us was allowable because it came from need and not from malice. It was not fair that we press upon them our displeasure because they were outside a window, looking another way.
A most commonplace conversation was with students from the previous semester who stopped by my room to say, “Mr. Rhoades, I miss your class. We all do. There’s something missing in every day.” I think that doesn’t last long as the new elements of magic begin to play in other classrooms.
Once, after the Rural Electric Membership Corporation (REMC) held its annual convention, its president, Fred Powers, whom I had taught at another school, stopped me outside the building. Fred was with Eli Lilly. The gist of what he said was that he felt speech had been his most important course in high school. “I don’t know how you did it, but we all got so we could stand up in front of people and not be nervous. I work with brilliant men with doctor’s degrees who can’t project an idea without projecting to a greater extent their own discomfiture. I’m so glad I don’t have that problem.
Mrs. Mary Parido, as head of the English department at Greenfield-Central once said, in voting to reject a course offering I had proposed, that she did not believe any course in her department should be fun. I was appalled. As luck would have it, the newspaper the next day carried an article in which an interviewer asked then-President George W. Bush what courses at Yale had been most beneficial to him. He named two—one was speech. He said that, first of all, it was fun. Secondly, it was valuable because he used it every day of his life. I highlighted “It was fun” and placed it in Mary’s mailbox unsigned. She never commented.
I can’t guess what anyone can read into my scattered memories. Know that I tailored with a fabric that might not be as enduring as it was beautiful. Be aware that I exposed students with many levels of brilliance to a kind of “pure air” because I believe with all my heart that purity is the greatest force of attraction between the souls and hearts of men.
