The story nearing its end, Charlie and I shared some quiet conversation about schools that warn teachers not to touch students, about the philosophy that social time in schools is wasted time, about how sheer numbers of students sometimes preclude this type of encounter. How many times, we wondered, had we flippantly related to students in need? We sat in silence then, soaking up the intensity and implications of such a story. This type of encounter must happen thousands of times in schools and churches and shopping malls every day. It was nothing special. Adults like Charlie do it naturally, without thinking.
Then Charlie gave his interpretation. Angela had decided in that moment, in that art class, that if a casually friendly teacher cared enough about her to take the time to stop, make contact, look at her and listen to her, then there must be other people who cared about her, too. She could find them.
Charlie put his head in his hands while I rubbed the gooseflesh from my arms. He looked up at me, armed with his new lesson in humility. "Nancy," he said very quietly, very emphatically, "what humbles me the most is that I don't even remember the incident!"
And all these years later, she had come back to tell him that she credited him with saving her life.
Nancy Moorman
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Adam
While recuperating from her second open heart surgery at Children's Hospital of Western Ontario, my six-year-old daughter Kelley was moved from the intensive care unit to the floor with the other children. Because a section of the floor was closed, Kelley was put in the wing reserved for cancer patients.
In the adjacent room, a six-year-old boy named Adam was fighting a battle with leukemia. Adam stayed at the hospital for a portion of each month while receiving chemotherapy treatments. Every day Adam sauntered into Kelley's room to visit, pushing the pole that held his chemotherapy bag. Despite the discomfort of the treatments, Adam was always smiling and cheerful. He entertained us for hours with his many stories. Adam had a way of finding the positive and the humor in any situation, however difficult.
One particular day, I was feeling tired and anxious for Kelley's release from the hospital. The gray, gloomy day outside only fueled my poor mood. While I stood at the window looking at the rainy sky, Adam came in for his daily visit. I commented to him on what a depressing day it was. With his ever-present smile, Adam turned to me and cheerily replied, "Every day is beautiful for me."
From that day on I have never had a gloomy day. Even the grayest days bring a feeling of joy as I remember with gratitude the words of wisdom spoken by a very brave six-year-old boy named Adam.
Patty Merritt
Reprinted by permission of Patty Merritt. © 1995 Patty Merritt.
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Miss Hardy
There comes that mysterious meeting in life when someone acknowledges who we are and what we can be, igniting the circuits of our highest potential.
Rusty Berkus
I began life as a learning-disabled child. I had a distortion of vision called dyslexia. Dyslexic children often learn words quickly, but don't know they don't see them the way other people do. I perceived my world as a wonderful place filled with these shapes called words and developed a rather extensive sight vocabulary that made my parents quite optimistic about my ability to learn. To my horror, I discovered in the first grade that letters were more important than words. Dyslexic children make them upside down and backwards, and don't even arrange them in the same order as everybody else. So my first-grade teacher called me learning-disabled.
She wrote down her observations and passed them on to my second-grade teacher over the summer so she could develop an appropriate bias against me before I arrived. I entered the second grade able to see the answers to math problems but having no idea what the busy work was to reach them, and discovered that the
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busy work was more important than the answer. Now I was totally intimidated by the learning process, so I developed a stutter. Being unable to speak up assertively, unable to perform normal math functions and arranging letters inappropriately, I was a complete disaster. I developed the strategy of moving to the back of each class, staying out of sight and, when apprehended and called upon, muttering or mumbling, "I d-d-don't kn-kn-know." That sealed my fate.
My third-grade teacher knew before I arrived that I couldn't speak, write, read or do mathematics, so she had no real optimism toward dealing with me. I discovered malingering as a basic tool to get through school. This allowed me to spend more time with the school nurse than the teacher or find vague reasons to stay home or be sent home. That was my strategy in the third and fourth grades.
Just as I was about to die intellectually, I entered the fifth grade and God placed me under the tutelage of the awesome Miss Hardy, known in the western United States as one of the most formidable elementary school teachers ever to walk the Rocky Mountains. This incredible woman, whose six-foot-frame towered above me, put her arms around me and said, "He's not learning-disabled, he's eccentric."
Now, people view the potential of an eccentric child far more optimistically than a plain old disabled one. But she didn't leave it there. She said, 'I've talked with your mother and she says when she reads something to you, you remember it almost photographically. You just don't do it well when you're asked to assemble all the words and pieces. And reading out loud appears to be a problem, so when I'm going to call on you to read in my class, I'll let you know in advance so you can go home and memorize it the night before, then we'll fake it in front of the other
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kids. Also, Mom says when you look something over, you can talk about it with great understanding, but when she asks you to read it word for word and even write something about it, you appear to get hung up in the letters and stuff and lose the meaning. So, when the other kids are asked to read and write those work-sheets I give them, you can go home and under less pressure on your own time do them and bring them back to me the next day."
She also said, "I notice you appear to be hesitant and fearful to express your thoughts and I believe that any idea a person has is worth considering. I've looked into this and I'm not sure it will work, but it helped a man named Demosthenescan you say Demosthenes?"
"D-d-d-d . . ."
She said, "Well, you will be able to. He had an unruly tongue, so he put stones in his mouth and practiced until he got control of it. So I've got a couple of marbles, too big for you to swallow, that I've washed off. From now on when I call on you, I'd like you to put them in your mouth and stand up and speak up until I can hear and understand you." And, of course, supported by her manifest belief in and understanding of me I took the risk, tamed my tongue, and was able to speak.
The next year I went on to the sixth grade, and to my delight, so did Miss Hardy. So I had the opportunity to spend two full years under her tutelage.
I kept track of Miss Hardy over the years and learned a few years ago that she was terminally ill with cancer. Knowing how lonely she would be with her only special student over 1,000 miles away, I naively bought a plane ticket and traveled all that distance to stand in line (at least figuratively) behind several hundred other of her special studentspeople who had
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also kept track of her and had made a pilgrimage to renew their association and share their affection for her in the latter period of her life. The group was a very interesting mix of people3 U.S. Senators, 12 state legislators and a number of chief executive officers of corporations and businesses.
The interesting thing, in comparing notes, is that three-fourths of us went into the fifth grade quite intimidated by the educational process, believing we were incapable, insignificant and at the mercy of fate or luck. We emerged from our contact with Miss Hardy believing we were capable, significant, influential people who had the capacity to make a difference in life if we would try.
H. Stephen Glenn
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Three Letters from Teddy
Teddy Stallard c
ertainly qualified as ''one of the least': disinterested in school; musty, wrinkled clothes; hair never combed; one of those kids in school with a deadpan face; an expressionless, glassy, unfocused stare. When Miss Thompson spoke to Teddy he always answered in monosyllables. Unattractive, unmotivated, and distant, he was just plain hard to like.
Even though his teacher said she loved all in her class the same, down inside she wasn't being completely truthful. Whenever she marked Teddy's papers, she got a certain perverse pleasure out of putting Xs next to the wrong answers, and when she put the Fs at the top of the papers, she always did it with a flair. She should have known better; she had Teddy's records and she knew more about him than she wanted to admit. The records read:
1st Grade: Teddy shows promise with his work and
attitude, but poor home situation.
2nd Grade: Teddy could do better. Mother is seriously
ill. He receives little help at home.
3rd Grade: Teddy is a good boy but too serious. He is a
slow learner. His mother died this year.
4th Grade: Teddy is very slow, but well-behaved. His
father shows no interest.
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Christmas came and the boys and girls in Miss Thompson's class brought her Christmas presents. They piled their presents on her desk and crowded around to watch her open them. Among the presents there was one from Teddy Stallard. She was surprised that he had brought her a gift, but he had. Teddy's gift was wrapped in brown paper and was held together with Scotch tape. On the paper were written the simple words, "For Miss Thompson from Teddy." When she opened Teddy's present, out fell a gaudy rhinestone bracelet, with half the stones missing, and a bottle of cheap perfume.
The other boys and girls began to giggle and smirk over Teddy's gifts, but Miss Thompson at least had enough sense to silence them by immediately putting on the bracelet and putting some of the perfume on her wrist. Holding her wrist up for the other children to smell, she said, "Doesn't it smell lovely?" And the children, taking their cues from the teacher, readily agreed with "oohs" and "aahs."
At the end of the day, when school was over and the other children had left, Teddy lingered behind. He slowly came over to her desk and said softly, "Miss Thompson . . . Miss Thompson, you smell just like my mother . . . and her bracelet looks real pretty on you, too. I'm glad you liked my presents." When Teddy left, Miss Thompson got down on her knees and asked God to forgive her.
The next day when the children came to school, they were welcomed by a new teacher. Miss Thompson had become a different person. She was no longer just a teacher; she had become an agent of God. She was now a person committed to loving her children and doing things for them that would live on after her. She helped all the children, but especially the slow ones, and especially Teddy Stallard. By the
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end of that school year, Teddy showed dramatic improvement. He had caught up with most of the students and was even ahead of some.
She didn't hear from Teddy for a long time. Then one day, she received a note that read:
Dear Miss Thompson:
I wanted you to be the first to know. I will be graduating second in my class.
Love, Teddy Stallard
Four years later, another note came:
Dear Miss Thompson:
They just told me I will be graduating first in my class. I wanted you to be the first to know. The university has not been easy, but I liked it.
Love, Teddy Stallard
And four years later:
Dear Miss Thompson:
As of today, I am Theodore Stallard, M.D. How about that? I wanted you to be the first to know I am getting married next month, the 27th to be exact. I want you to come and sit where my mother would sit if she were alive. You are the only family I have now; Dad died last year.
Love, Teddy Stallard
Miss Thompson went to that wedding and sat where Teddy's mother would have sat. She deserved to sit there; she had done something for Teddy that he could never forget.
Elizabeth Silance Ballard
From Home life, March 1976.
© The Sunday School Board of the Southern
Baptist Convention. All rights reserved.
Used by permission of the author.
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A Pearl of Great Value
A professor can never better distinguish himself in his work than by encouraging a clever pupil, for the true discoverers are among them, as comets amongst the stars.
Linnaeus
During my high school graduation week, 20 of us seniors were summoned by Mr. York, our science teacher, to a mysterious meeting. Why us? we wondered.
Mr. York, wearing his signature bow tie and horn-rimmed glasses, handed each of us a small white box.
"Inside," he said smiling, "you'll find a charm or a tie tack decorated with a seed pearl. Boys and girls, that pearl stands for your potentialthe things you have going for you. Just as a seed placed inside an oyster can grow into a pearl of great value, so each of you has a seed of greatness within."
I bit my lip to hold back tears as I stared at the tiny pearl set in a silver charm. How much those words would have meant a day earlier, before I'd learned I was pregnant. The news spelled the end of a dreammy own and my mother's.
As long as I could remember, Mother had set aside a few dollars each week toward college for my sister,
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Marianne, and me. Education, she told us, was the way to escape the life of the coal mines in our town of Coaldale, Pennsylvania.
I was three when my father entered the sanitarium with tuberculosis. Even after he was released a few years later, Mother's wages from the corner grocery store often fed the family. From hardship was born her dream that one day Marianne and I would change the pattern.
Now, instead of pride, I'd brought shame on the family. In our close-knit Ukranian Orthodox community, premarital sex was a scandal.
Though we'd wanted to finish college first, Dan and I married after my high school graduation. By the time Dan graduated from college, a second child had arrived. With a growing family to support, Dan joined the Army. We were moved from base to base, and another child was born. All the while, I'd look at the charm dangling from my wrist and wonder what "greatness" Mr. York had seen in me. Finally, I tucked the bracelet away in a drawer.
After seven years, Dan took a civilian job near Coaldale. Now that our youngest child was in school, I threw myself into volunteer projects. When the restlessness continued, I tried various jobsstore clerk, aerobics instructor.
I was busy, I was helping others, I was adding to the family income, and still, I'd open that drawer, look at the bracelet and think: Are you building on that little seed Mr. York saw? You have potential. Find it! Use it! At night, while everyone slept, the old goal of college would keep me awake. But then I'd think, I'm 35 years old!
My mother must have guessed at my turmoil, because one day on the phone she said, "Remember the college money I saved? It's still there."
I could only stare at the receiver in my hand.
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Seventeen years had not been enough to blunt Mother's dream. When Mr. York had spoken of "things going for you," I couldn't name one. But now they were everywhere! Faith in God. A mother's dream. A husband's encouragement.
It took me six more months to work up the courage, but in September 1985 I enrolled at Kutztown University. When my aptitude tests pointed to a career in teaching, I was incredulous. Teachers were confident people like Mr. York. But the tests were so definite that I entered the teacher-training program. Going back to school was more difficult than I had feared, however. I was competing with people half my age and feeding my family packaged meals in a dusty house.
One May afternoon that freshman year, after a particularly stressful class, I drove home in tears, wondering if I really belonged back in school. For self-doubters, quitting always seems the sensible thing. Our older daughter would be
entering college in the fall. Instead of straining the family budget, I thought, I should be earning money for Kerry's education.