"I am more happy than any of you can possibly understand because of what has just happened. You have seen a boy make a glorious victory out of what might have been a miserable failure.
"Jimmie had his chance to quit. To have quit would have been easy. But to finish the job even in the face of 200 people required the highest kind of bravery and courage I know.
"You may someday hear a better oratorical effect, but I am confident that you will never see a finer demonstration of the spirit of our troop than Jimmie has just given youto play the game even under difficulties!"
The people thundered their applause now. Jimmie's mother sat straight and proud. The old look of assurance was back on the face of the boy's father. The entire group was enthusiastic again and Jimmie, with a lump in his throat, said something to the friend beside him that sounded like, "Gee, if I can be that kind of a scoutmaster someday."
Walter MacPeek
Submitted by Martin Louw
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What's Happening with Today's Youth?
If you treat an individual . . . as if be were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.
Goethe
Our young people are growing up much faster today. They need our help.
But what could I do?
My inner voice questioned me as to why I wasn't a role model for today's generation of young people. No, I couldn't do that. I wasn't a psychologist and I sure didn't have the type of influence to create massive change like a politician.
I'm an engineer. I obtained my degree in electrical engineering from the University of Virginia. Now I work for Hewlett-Packard.
But the thought wouldn't leave me.
So finally, I decided to do something. That morning, I called up the local neighborhood high school. I spoke to the principal, sharing my desire to help. He was thrilled and invited me to come down during lunch. I agreed.
At noon, I drove to the school. Many thoughts bombarded my mind: "Can I relate to them? Do
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students want to talk to an outsider?"
I hadn't been on a high school campus for quite a few years. As I walked down the hallway, students were buzzing with excitement. It was crowded. Students looked much older to me. Most of them were wearing baggy clothes.
Finally, I made it to the classroom, Room 103, where I was to share some insight with the students. I took a deep breath and opened the door. There, I found 32 students chit-chatting. As I walked in, everything stopped. All eyes were on me. "Hi, I'm Marlon."
"Hey, Marlon, come on in." SHOOOOOOO, a moment of relief came over me. They accepted me.
During that one-hour session, we had fun talking about goal-setting, the importance of school, and conflict resolution without violence. When the bell rang signaling time for the next class, I didn't want it to end. Time just flew by and before we knew it, it was already time for me to return to work. I couldn't believe how much fun I had. I went back to work pumped up.
This continued for months. I developed many relationships at the school. Most students bonded to me. But not all the students were excited about my coming.
In fact, there was Paul.
I'll never forget Paul. He was a real tough-looking guy, about 6'2", 220 lbs. He had just transferred to this school. Rumor had it that he had been in and out of many juvenile detention centers. In fact, the teachers were scared of him. And why not? Two years ago, he had been sentenced for stabbing his English teacher in the chest during an argument. Everyone let him do what he wanted. He strolled to class late. Never carried a book in hand because he was just too cool for school.
From time to time, he sat in on my lunch sessions but never said anything. I think the only reason he came was to "check out the babes."
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Whenever I tried to get him involved, he just stared at me with his piercing eyes. He intimidated me. He was like a bomb just waiting to explode. But I wasn't going to give up on him. Every time he came, I tried to engage him in the discussion, but he wasn't interested.
One day, I had enough and the bomb exploded.
During this particular session, we were developing our '"goals collage." Students were cutting out pictures of their goals from magazines and pasting them onto a poster board. We were 20 minutes into the session when Paul strolled in.
I asked for a volunteer to share his or her goals collage with the rest of the class. Julie, a petite girl, stood up and began sharing her dreams. I was happy to see Julie stand up because, when I first met her, she was so shy.
"I'm going to go to medical school to become a doctor."
All of a sudden, laughter broke out from the back of the room.
"Please. You, a doctor? Be for real. You ain't gonna be anybody."
All heads turned to the back of the room. Paul was laughing at his statement.
I was shocked. I couldn't believe what just took place. There was complete silence. What should I do? My adrenaline was flowing strong.
"Paul, that's not right. Who are you to put somebody else down?"
"Yo, teach, you dissin' me? Are you disrespecting me? Do you know who I am? Look man, I'm an O.G., Original Gangster. Don't mess with me; you'll get hurt."
He started walking toward the door.
"No, Paul, that doesn't fly. You have no right to put somebody else down. Enough is enough. You don't have to be here. Either you're part of the group or
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you're not. We've got a team here that supports one another. And, Paul, you have so much potential. We want your participation. You have so much to offer the group. I care about you and this entire group. That's why I'm here. Are you going to be a team player?"
Paul looked over his shoulder and gave me a stare of terror. He opened the door and walked out, slamming the door behind him.
The class was shaken by this drama, and so was I.
After class, I packed up my materials and started making my way to the parking lot. As I approached my car, someone called out to me.
I turned around and to my surprise, it was Paul. He was walking quickly toward me. A state of fear came over me. Part of me wanted to get help, but it happened so fast that I couldn't move.
"Mr. Smith, you remember what you said to me?"
"Yeah, Paul."
"Did you mean what you said about caring for me and wanting me to be part of the team?"
"Yeah, of course, Paul."
'Well, no one has ever in my life told me that they care for me. You are the first person to ever say that. I want to be part of the team. Thanks for caring enough to stand up to me. I'll apologize to Julie tomorrow in front of the entire class."
I couldn't believe my ears. I was in shock. I could hardly speak.
As he walked away, tears of joy swelled up in my eyes and started rolling down my face. I had been truly touched for life. That day I decided to commit my life to empowering our young people to realize their true potential.
Marlon Smith
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Cipher in the Snow
It started with tragedy on a biting cold February morning. I was driving behind the Milford Corners bus as I did most snowy mornings on my way to school. It veered and stopped short at the hotel, which it had no business doing, and I was annoyed as I had to come to an unexpected stop. A boy lurched out of the bus, reeled, stumbled and collapsed on the snow bank at the curb. The bus driver and I reached him at the same moment. His thin, hollow face was white even against the snow.
"He's dead," the driver whispered.
It didn't register for a minute. I glanced quickly at the scared young faces staring down at us from the school bus. "A doctor! Quick! I'll phone from the hotel."
"No use. I tell you, he's dead." The driver looked down at the boy's still form. "He never even said he felt bad," he muttered, "just tapped me on the shoulder and said, real quiet, 'I'm sorry. I have to get off at the hotel.' That's all. Polite and apologizing like."
At sc
hool, the giggling, shuffling morning noise quieted as the news went down the halls. I passed a huddle of girls. "Who was it? Who dropped dead on the way to school?" I heard one of them half whisper.
"Don't know his name; some kid from Milford Corners," was the reply.
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It was like that in the faculty room and the principal's office. ''I'd appreciate you going out to tell the parents," the principal told me. "They haven't a phone, and anyway, somebody from school should go there in person. I'll cover your classes."
"Why me?" I asked. "Wouldn't it be better if you did it?"
"I didn't know the boy," the principal admitted levelly. "And in last year's sophomore personalities column I noticed that you were listed as his favorite teacher."
I drove through the snow and cold down the bad canyon road to the Evans' place and thought about the boy, Cliff Evans. His favorite teacher! Why, he hadn't spoken two words to me in two years! I could see him in my mind's eye all right, sitting back there in the last seat in my afternoon literature class. He came in the room by himself and left by himself. "Cliff Evans," I muttered to myself, "a boy who never smiled. I never saw him smile once."
The big ranch kitchen was clean and warm. I blurted out my news somehow. Mrs. Evans reached blindly for a chair. "He never said anything about bein' ailing."
His stepfather snorted. "He ain't said nothin' about anything since I moved in here."
Mrs. Evans got up, pushed a pan to the back of the stove and began to untie her apron. "Now hold on," her husband snapped. "I got to have breakfast before I go to town. Nothin' we can do now anyway. If Cliff hadn't been so dumb, he'd have told us he didn't feel good."
After school I sat in the office and stared bleakly at the records spread out before me. I was to close the boy's file and write his obituary for the school paper. The almost bare sheets mocked the effort. "Cliff Evans, white, never legally adopted by stepfather, five half-brothers and sisters." These meager strands
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of information and the list of D grades were about all the records had to offer.
Cliff Evans had silently come in the school door in the mornings and gone out the school door in the evenings, and that was all. He had never belonged to a club. He had never played on a team. He had never held an office. As far as I could tell, he had never done one happy, noisy kid thing. He had never been anybody at all.
How do you go about making a boy into a zero? The grade-school records showed me much of the answer. The first- and second-grade teachers' annotations read "sweet, shy child; timid but eager." Then the third grade note had opened the attack. Some teacher had written in a good, firm hand, "Cliff won't talk. Uncooperative. Slow learner." The other academic sheep had followed with "dull," "slow-witted,'' "low IQ." They became correct. The boy's IQ score in the ninth grade listed at 83. But his IQ in the third grade had been 106. The score didn't go under 100 until the seventh grade. Even timid, sweet children have resilience. It takes time to break them.
I stomped to the typewriter and wrote a savage report pointing out what education had done to Cliff Evans. I slapped a copy on the principal's desk and another in the sad, dog-eared file, slammed the file and crashed the office door shut as I left for home. But I didn't feel much better. A little boy kept walking after me, a boy with a peaked face, a skinny body in faded jeans, and big eyes that had searched for a long time and then had become veiled.
I could guess how many times he'd been chosen last to be on a team, how many whispered child conversations had excluded him. I could see the faces and hear the voices that said over and over, "You're dumb. You're dumb. You're just a nothing, Cliff Evans."
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A child is a believing creature. Cliff undoubtedly believed them. Suddenly it seemed clear to me: When finally there was nothing left at all for Cliff Evans, he collapsed on a snow bank and went away. The doctor might list "heart failure" as the cause of death, but that wouldn't change my mind.
Jean Tod Hunter
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A Simple Touch
My friend Charlie let himself in, back door slamming. He made a beeline for my refrigerator, searched out a Budweiser and slid into a kitchen chair. I regarded him with interest.
He had that shaken, bewildered look of someone who had just seen a ghost or maybe had confronted his own mortality. His eyes were rimmed with darkness and he kept waving his head from side to side as if carrying on a conversation inside himself. Finally he took a long swig of the beer and made eye contact.
I told him he looked pretty awful. He acknowledged that, adding that he felt even worse, shaken. Then he told me his remarkable story.
Charlie is an art teacher at a local high school. He has been there for many years and enjoys the envied reputation of one who is respected by colleagues and sought out by students. It seems that on this particular day he had been visited by a former student, returning after four or five years to show off her wedding ring, her new baby and her budding career.
Charlie stopped talking long enough to taste his beer. So, that was it, I thought. He had confronted his own mortality. The years fly past for a teacher and it is always disconcerting to blink and find a woman where only yesterday there had been a child.
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"No, that wasn't it, exactly," Charlie informed me. "Not a lesson in mortality. Not a ghost." It had been a lesson, he explained, in humility.
The visitor, Angela, had been a semi-serious art student nearly five years earlier. Charlie remembered her as a quiet, plain girl who mostly kept to herself, but who welcomed friendly overtures with shy smiles.
Now she was a confident young woman, a mother, who initiated conversations instead of responding to them. She had come to see her former art teacher and she had an agenda. She began after only a few preliminary amenities.
"When I was in high school," she explained, "my stepfather abused me. He hit me and he came into my bed at night. It was horrible. I was deeply ashamed. I told no one. No one knew.
"Finally, during my junior year, my parents went away for the weekend, leaving me home alone for the first time. I planned my escape.
"They left on Thursday evening, so I spent the entire night preparing. I did my homework, wrote a long letter to my mother, and organized my belongings. I purchased a roll of wide plastic tape and spent an hour taping all the outside doors and windows of the garage from the inside. I put the keys in the ignition of my mother's car, put my teddy bear on the passenger's seat and then went up to bed.
"My plan was to go to school as usual on Friday and ride the bus home, as usual. I would wait at home until my parents called, talk to them, then go to the garage and start the engine. I figured nobody would find me until Sunday afternoon when my parents returned. I would be dead. I would be free."
Angela had held to her plan until eighth-period art class, when Charlie, her art teacher, perched on the stool next to her, examined her artwork and slipped an
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arm around her shoulder. He made small talk, listened to the answer, squeezed her lightly and moved on.
Angela had gone home that Friday afternoon and written a second, different letter of good-bye to her mother. She removed the tape from the garage and packed her teddy bear with the rest of her belongings. Then she called her minister, who immediately came for her. She left her parents' home and never went back. She flourished and she gave Charlie the credit.