I Loved To Teach

Back to the Paddle

During my fifth and final year at Southwestern, the principal asked me to witness a spanking for him. I reluctantly agreed. Now this man was 6’ 5” or more and solid, and I feared for the boy even though he too was husky. The interview began with a talk. He told the boy that he had tried every other method of discipline to no avail. He asked him several questions about things he had said to him in warning and asked if he thought he had any recourse but the paddle. The boy meekly said, “I guess not.”

“Well, grab your ankles then.”

After he had given the boy three quite gentle whacks, the boy stood up with tears in his eyes, put things back in his pockets and returned to class.

The principal turned to me and said, “See? I’m learning, Jack. I’m learning.” Yesss! We both were.

When I reported to work at Greenfield-Central, I learned that paddling was not an option in that school.

*        *        *

The second time I had attempted to use the paddle back at Carthage, an eighth-grade boy who was bigger than I absolutely refused to allow me to spank him after an altercation in study hall.  I became aggressive and shoved him angrily toward the stairs, and to the office. The principal said repeatedly, “Now, let’s keep our voices down. There’s no need to shout.” I reminded the boy of an incident downtown at the Fall Festival parade after I had been up all night with the seniors who were building the award-winning float, Stairway to the Stars. Oh, what floats those Carthage kids built! Suddenly a voice from across Main Street had called mockingly, “Heeey, Jack! (With the accent on the ACK). It was this boy I now confronted in the principal’s inner office, and I reminded him, “I’m not Jack to you, Mick!.”

When it became obvious that I was getting nowhere and getting no support, I said, “The only reason you refuse to allow me to spank you is that you want to go back to your friends and brag that you got away with this. I like you, Mick. I like you a lot, but if I let you do this to me, I will no longer be effective in that study hall, and I can’t let you do that to me.”

From the moment the words “I like you…” left my lips, it was as if he understood that I was angry at his behavior and not because of a dislike for him, and he was ready to take his punishment. I gave him three very light whacks, because that was all that was called for by that time. And I was never to use the board again in that school, and I don’t believe I ever shoved a student again anywhere. My aggression was exacerbated by my having lost my first teaching job at Southport after a year of rude treatment, intrusion, mistrust and departmental distrust. This time I felt I had to be in control.

At Greenfield-Central High School the issue of paddling students had been dismissed by the time I got there in 1979. I should probably mention that at Southwestern, the practice was usually to give the student his choice of punishments—a three day suspension or the paddle. “Three days or three whacks?” was the question.

I came to realize that it was sometimes necessary to explain to a rowdy class that my life was not out of control. I chose to live a happy, controlled existence which they had little power to change however much they allowed themselves to lose control over their own lives.

*        *        *

I guess this incident is more about self-discipline that anything else. On one occasion at Southwestern as we were preparing for the final performance of Oliver, the cast received word that a young man’s father had passed away very suddenly of a heart attack. We began immediately to plan a replacement for him for that night’s performance, expecting to explain to the audience why we had one character with a script. Before we could put someone into his costume, the grieving son entered quietly, explaining that his father had taught him always to finish what he had started. I believe our youth have an enormous potential for strength and self-discipline, and they do remember what we say to them, especially if they can tell it is important to us and that we practice it in our own lives.

Going to the church for that funeral service with my entire cast was difficult and emotionally taxing. The organist played the toddler’s favorite tunes, and folks wept openly when she played “My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean” (O, bring back my Bonnie to me.) I was unable to console anyone, but I had schooled my young people to care about each other and to show it in actions as well as words. I always told them that drama club was a family–had to be. They were incredible! They spread warmth and affection in a way that uplifted everyone. Late that evening the teenage brother slipped into the final rehearsal in the middle of the final song in which the Von Trapp family singers were huddled together in a cemetery, squeezing each other in fear of being seen. He was able to slip into character as they climbed the mountain holding onto each other, and we knew he would be able to perform with us the next day.

I don’t mean to take credit for everything our group accomplished. One year at the drama club awards banquet, we had the seniors stand on the concrete edge of the main stage, which became a wide gray line when the elevator brought the thrust stage to the top where it was level with the main stage. This was a tradition started before I arrived on the scene, and I continued it. Although it was a bit maudlin, perhaps, I sometimes read a poem I had written at Southwestern for a wonderful group of seniors I knew I would miss terribly. It goes like this:

AT GRADUATION

I dreamed I drove along a lonely road
And came upon an upturned car
From which the single occupant had been thrown.
Climbing down, I ran to find
The one I knew was just beyond a little hill
But I knew not it was a life that had touched mine.

There only was a moment of relief in trusting eyes
When, reaching out to touch me, pleading silently,
The life was gone.Grief welled up into a pool of nausea;
Moments of shared laughter flashed by,
But tears would not come.

Disconsolate and irresolute,
I kneltAnd gripped a pulseless wrist,
And I would not let go!
It was as if, by hanging on,
I felt I could give life
To something I could not allow to die.
And that was all the dream!

It lingered, in the form of dread, for days,
Growing daily more intense,
But from the moment I awoke,
I could not remember who it was
That haunted with a moment’s silent love.

Something more tormenting than the dream
Was dread of dreaming it again,
And I did, repeatedly.In every dream,
I realized, the face was changed,
Though not the look, the death, the pain.
And every new awakening erased the memory of the face.

Soon I surveyed on every side
Students and friends in a startling light,
Trying to put them into the dream to know who was to die.
Then I knew it was not a dream of death
But of parting, having just discovered love
And having shared but a moment of knowing it.

When I knew this, the dreaming stopped.
But looking up familiar rows on this last day,
I know again the pain I knew
When I dreamed of you… and you… and you… and you…
Nothing is the same–no lonely road, no wreck, no hill,
And only this is here: I know I cannot let you go,
And that I must and will.

Anyway, with all the senior members on the line, I led the rest of the officers and the parents in going down the line giving congratulations and hugs. When I reached the end of the line and stood off to one side, Rob Eagleston’s father John, a Mormon bishop, was headed right for me. John’s older daughter, Laura was my mainstay onstage that year. But John was thinking of Rob, his small, quiet next-in-line (the rabbi’s son in Fiddler) when he said, “This is the man I want to hug. You took my son, put him on the stage and got him to sing and dance, and I don’t believe anyone else on earth could have gotten him to do it.”

“John,” I said, “I didn’t do that.”

Let me rephrase my statement then. “You created an environment in which he knew it would be safe for him to sing and dance onstage.”

“I’ll take that,” I replied as I took his bear hug—took it and shall always cherish that kind gesture. I doubt that he could have known how much I loved his children.

*        *        *

There were only a few years, and those at Southwestern, when I taught seventh grade—an age group for which I have little talent. One day I was very disappointed with a boy who was the smallest child in class. I took him out of the room and down to the office. We found the principal out and the office virtually empty. In the outer office, I got down, almost sitting on my heels, till my eyes were level with his and focused intently on them. I began by expressing why I was so angry with him, then I mellowed and began to tell him what I expected of him, asking often, “Do you understand that?” Then I stood and patted him gently on the shoulder, looked up and saw that the office had soundlessly filled with spectators and so had the hallway beyond the wall of windows. I said, “Excuse us,” and as we were leaving, I heard someone comment, “That was the most remarkable thing I’ve ever seen.” I don’t see anything remarkable about it unless it was my affection showing through my dissipating anger or that I expressed myself to him as I would have to an adult, an equal.

*        *        *

Just after our third child, Tammy, was born, things had been in a furor at Eastern because of opposition to their building project.  My wife Margaret had taken a year’s leave of absence, Lapel was nearer to Muncie where I was completing my MA degree, and they were offering $1,000 more in salary (a lot of money in 1967).  When I signed to teach at Lapel High School in a small town twenty-five minutes to the north of Greenfield, things had already been scheduled for the year ahead, so I took what was offered in the vacancy—eighth- and ninth-grade English. No speech. No duties with drama. However, Mr. Roudebush, the principal, promised me that the following year I would have older kids in English and would teach the speech and direct the plays. That didn’t happen. And in spite of the fact that those junior high kids were the brightest, most educable kids, I felt I needed to be with older ones. In my one year there, Jeannine Terhune, whom I had taught at Carthage while Margaret had taught her piano, and I decided to schedule Brigadoon, and I loved directing it with her.  Incidentally, she has carried on the program of musical theater with so much more musical talent than I ever had and brought it to incredible heights.

When contract time came the next year, I was offered the same class schedule, unaltered. Eastern Hancock was proceeding with a fine building program with an auditorium that I had fought to have included, while Lapel would continue to hold its plays in the gymnasium. The teacher who had replaced me at Eastern was not returning. I lost no time seeking an interview and signed a contract on the spot. When I returned to Lapel for classes on Monday, Mr. Roudebush sent for me. From the grapevine I had learned that the band director, who was also president of the Lapel Classroom Teachers’ Association, had resigned after twelve successful years. Asked what they could do to change his mind, he replied, “Find out what it takes to keep Jack Rhoades and get him back!” That, I suppose, was the reason things had been rearranged so that the promises that had been made to me could be kept. I thanked him kindly, but explained that I had signed with Eastern Hancock the Saturday before.

“There is nothing to force you to keep that contract, Mr. Rhoades,” he ventured.

“I understand that, Mr. Roudebush, but I gave my word.”

“Well,” he countered, “we got to have you for one year, anyway.”

Those words were to give me great comfort years later when a really vicious student started a smear campaign during my first year at Greenfield-Central. One of his rumors was that I had been fired from every teaching job I ever had. There is a spiritual principle involved in cases like this that assures Bahá’ís that they need not defend themselves against false accusations. When a person, any person, tries to create enmity against another human being, the negative energy generated is inevitably turned against the person himself. Leave it in the hands of God. If you get in there and muck up the works, the spiritual solution is weakened. One has to recognize that problems are never in and of themselves with solutions you have to formulate. You must see beyond the problem to the spiritual nature of the event for hope and courage, although that’s a really difficult test.

The Lapel fall play was a senior play with which I had nothing to do beyond creating the most elaborate scenery their audiences had seen, designed to include all the set pieces needed for Brigadoon in the spring. The seniors called upon the director to present him a gift. Mild applause here (the play was not outstanding). Then they called me up to acknowledge my efforts and present me with a gift. Here the applause was prolonged so as to be embarrassing.

During the final week of Brigadoon rehearsals, we rented a spotlight and placed it on a scaffold on the gymnasium floor. I had difficulty understanding why there was insistence from the music department that the spotlight be on the stage left side of the house. I carried the directing responsibilities, but the production belonged to the music department. I argued without success that the stage lighting would not be adequate from that vantage point (as if one spotlight could really suffice, anyway.) On opening night when the conductor came through the curtain at stage right and bowed at center stage before descending to the orchestra level, I knew immediately that lighting him had been more important than lighting the actors—to someone.

*         *        *

But wait! This chapter is about discipline. At Southwestern where the paddle was sometimes the measure of a teacher’s effectiveness, I was once asked into the principal’s office to witness a spanking by the male guidance director. The child was told to empty out his hip pockets and grab his ankles. He complied. Because he was a small boy and the swing of the paddle was swift, he was lifted off the floor and his head hit the wall. He was already crying hard, yet this was repeated twice before he was dismissed, sobbing and alternately rubbing the top of his head and the spot I am sure the paddle had left bruised. I was livid, but all I said was, “Don’t EVER ask me to be a witness again.”

I had received very high evaluation marks my first, difficult year, but on the second-year’s evaluation there was a comment indicating that I needed to use the paddle more frequently. (I hadn’t used it at all.) When, in my third year I used the paddle on one occasion, my evaluation improved. That was the year I heard a young female teacher being told by an older female teacher that the very best method of gaining control in the classroom was intimidation by humiliation, “Figure out what that student is most sensitive about and hit him with your best shot.” I stood to leave to get away from the discussion and remarked at the door, “My advice would be that a teacher NEVER humiliate a student.”

The next day working on scenery after school, Mike Yonts, the eventual valedictorian of the senior class, said that the older teacher had told his English class, “Anyone who says ‘Don’t humiliate the students’ just doesn’t know anything about teaching.” As this teacher got her pick of the best classes and students, I would guess that using this method of discipline had been considered successful for her.  I also realized that her antipathy towards me was growing.

Four other brief memories concerning that teacher, who was retained at that school more than one year only because he had a license to teach many things. I believe him to have been a once-brilliant man who had “lost it” while he was away at war— perhaps he had been too delicate emotionally for the weight of those kinds of memories. He was sitting at the large central table in the office grading papers one day. He would stare at the paper (no marks, just a grade), then write “A” and proceed to the next paper, pause, stare, and write “B” before proceeding to the next paper, upon which he placed the letter “C.” Then he would start over. No “D’s” or “F’s”. I wasn’t watching as closely as the secretary, who noticed that he had given a “C” to a senior who was in competition with his cousin Cathy for valedictorian honors. “I see David Ruby got a ‘C’ on your test,” she commented.

“He did? Oh.” Pause… shuffle papers… change grade to “A.” It was a system that worked for him.

Another time when a student’s mother had passed away after a long illness, we were discussing funeral arrangements in the office. This man said, “I don’t think I know who Sheila DeWitt is.”

I, who had walked past his basement room once, said, “Sure you do. She’s in your world history class. She sits in the fourth seat in the middle row.”

“Oh, does she?” Blank stare. End of discussion.

*     *     *

The third occasion was in the far distant art room which had belched up an awful stench that had seeped into the entire facility—two buildings joined by a hall above and a tunnel below—until it reached the office. The principal scurried down to investigate. “We think it’s the mill,” the teacher stated. (Carthage featured a large paper mill that sometimes was odiferous.

“Oh, for crying out loud, it’s not the mill! Any idiot would know it’s not the mill,” the principal grunted as he stormed in, found the stink bomb in the waste basket and held it up accusingly. This accusation was directed at the teacher as much as the students who had lit it and placed it there.

He shrugged. “We thought it was the mill,” was his only explanation.

I remember that I emceed the Carthage Talent Show both years I was there, and one of the jokes (Clara Jo Henley and I were dressed as clowns) went like this:

CLARA JO: Smell this perfume. Wow! Evening in Paris–$25 an ounce.

MR. RHOADES: That’s nothing. Smell this perfume. (Opening a gallon jug) Wild Night in Carthage—25 cents a gallon. (There was some truth to that—hence, the big laugh.)

Well, he believed that noxious odor was “the mill…”

*       *       *

His students put off a test for a week once by unscrewing a fuse to leave the classroom in darkness. The cloakroom light stayed on. When, after six day of trying, he made them crowd into the cloakroom and sit on the floor to take the test, suddenly the lights miraculously came on in the main classroom. This teacher’s contract was renewed. He was a fixture in that place for as many years as I was—two. It only seemed like a much longer period of time.

Addendum

A beloved former student who became a wonderful teacher/coach was very upset at having lost his first position over some ridiculous personality thing at just such a small school. I consoled him by saying, "Don’t be too angry. I know it hurts now, but they just did you a great favor. Now you will move, and anywhere you go from here will be a step up. He took a giant leap upward within just a few days.

Using the Board

I am sure that if a teacher did today what I did when I faced that study hall, he would be hauled into court. I might have ended my teaching days right then. However, either the parents backed me up, or more likely, the boy I paddled never told them about it. When I told his sister (a student whose sparkle and humor I remember with a great deal of pleasure) at a class reunion, she was shocked by this story. I began my first study hall period by standing on that small stage at the front and staring them down one by one, row by row. However, one medium-sized sophomore boy with a hard countenance and a mischievous look in his eyes continued to try me as if he placed me in a category with the teacher they drove out the day before. A warning was not effective; so I, paddle in hand, took him across the hall into Mrs. Lord’s empty English/Latin classroom to "do the deed."

Like many of the boys, he wore very tightly tapered jeans so that he needed little zippers at the ankles in order to get them on and off. College classes and life experiences had not prepared me for this moment. It never occurred to me that I should take a witness along as we learned to do in later years. "Grab your ankles," I commanded. He grabbed. I don’t know how hard I hit him, not, I’m sure, as hard as any of the paddling I was later to witness, but the tight jeans worked much like a drumhead, and the noise filled the small school building through the open door.

After three whacks he stood up and snarled, "That’s enough!"

"I’ll be the judge of that!" I said sternly, and I proceeded to give him, in spite of several more protests, the full ten blows I had always imagined would be administered to me if I were ever troublesome in school.

In the office the principal quizzed me, "John, was that you using the board upstairs?"

"Yes," I replied, sort of casually, "I suppose it was inevitable with that large, unruly study hall. Why?… Could you hear it clear down here?"

"How many students did you paddle, John?" (Why did principals always call me John, though everyone else called me Jack?)

"Uh… just one."

"Good grief! (This principal was also a minister, but I think that in general people’s language was considerably cleaner in 1959 than it is today.) How many times did you swat that poor boy—I hope it was a boy?"

Believe me, this ‘poor boy’ had really pushed me to the limit in front a study hall that had already run out one teacher.

“Uh…ten times, I guess. I thought…"

"Ten!” astonished, unbelieving… “John…"

"Well, he wouldn’t stop arguing with me to stop. I’ve never paddled or seen anyone paddled before, and I really didn’t think I ever would. …Uhm… How many is usual?"

"Three, John, just three. Never—let me repeat that—never more than three."

However, my reputation was so firmly established by this act that I was rarely even gently nudged by a student, much less tested, even though my classroom disposition was very gentle. I always claimed to be a ‘gentleman’ and a ‘gentle man’ (and my swinging arm was pretty weak, too).

*        *        *

I was never to have that boy in the English classroom, but I believe my ability to inspire him would have been severely impaired. I personally believe that spanking is not a very effective way to change a child’s mindset. Margaret sometimes used the technique very gently on her first-graders when the naughty chair proved ineffectual. I sometimes found that eight to ten years later when they got to my classes, what those who had been paddled remembered best about Mrs. Rhoades’ class was that they had received a punishment they felt they had not deserved.

I eventually found that the most effective thing for me was to send the child out into the hall to contemplate for about five minutes while I continued class as if he or she did not exist, then I would join him for a talk, one on one, not in a scolding manner, but in a disarming way, looking him straight in the eyes and asking him, not in so many words, “Who are you?” and “What do you intend to become?” and “What do you hope to gain from me and the class I am trying to teach?” I would admit that he is really a likable person and give him the opportunity to admit that he doesn’t really hate me. Then I’d explain the positive expectations I had for him and the potential I saw there. Does he feel there is an acceptable penalty for the kind of infraction he is guilty of? What would that be? Does he realize that he enjoys the friendship of the other members of the class? It’s a kind of popularity in itself.

In this conversation there is no anger, no bitterness, no lack of control, but you are the adult; he is the child; you have more wisdom than he has given you credit for. If you can think of a suitable one, send him on an errand to show you trust him; and ask as you start into the room so the class can hear. It will allow him to reenter the room in a helpful, non-distracting manner void of defiance after you have resumed your lesson.

Of course he will ask friends later if you talked about him while he was gone, and as you will not have, the next such discussion will be easier and even more successful. That’s about it. It was gentle; it was friendly. It was just. Be just—teens have strong feelings about injustices against them. And don’t be selfish. Put student interests ahead of your own. That was usually enough, though such measures were not needed in most of my classes and only in very rare situations administered to a girl, in which case it was equally effective.

Addendum

I once had a very outspoken girl in English class. I reminded her daily about her flamboyant socializing and her attempts to derail the assigned work I had in mind. I believe Hillaire was barely passing my class. I stood in front of that class when I received a memo containing the news of the death of a toddler who had been hanging onto life for several months. His brother was in my play. Everyone in the cast would be devastated, I knew, and the play was to open on Friday night. It stunned me, and I lost emotional control in front of the class. I stepped into the hall to sob and regain control. In seconds that “inconsiderate” girl was there with comforting arms around me, consoling me in a very personal, caring way, discerning in a very adult manner what was the source of my grief and helping me regain control. As she took hold of my shoulders, she pleaded, “Mr. Rhoades, what’s the matter?” Then we cried together and I consoled her in turn. She slipped back into her seat and waited for me to reenter the classroom and continue as the teacher, and left it for me to explain to her classmates this tragedy that would affect some of them as well.

I saw her with completely different eyes after that. I realize that it was a moment that changed our impersonal, indifferent relationship. She began to behave as a student should, and she did well in my class because it had become important to her that I not think ill of her. Does that tell you anything about teenagers? About teaching?