The
Monkey-Rope
By Barney Morgan
IPS Features

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IPS Features Staff

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Ichabod Crane or Socrates? 

People often speak of remembering a school teacher who made a memorable impression on them. As a former teacher myself, I suspect that students embarrassingly often remember many of us who taught them as being more like Ichabod Crane than Socrates. More foolish than wise. And I know that the memorable thing works both ways. One of my many memorable students was a very ordinary looking boy named Sam.

The first day 14-year-old Sam came into my ninth-grade English class, he happened to be the first student there. I couldn't help but notice that he went directly to the row of desks by the windows, and on to the last desk at the back of the row. After sitting down, he turned to squarely face the window closest to him. Somehow I wasn't very surprised when he stayed in that position after the bell rang for class to begin.

I never liked to embarrass a student. That's a motivation killer. Rather than giving Sam the standard classroom command to "turn around and pay attention," I decided to make a point of often asking him questions. Since he obviously wasn't paying attention, he wouldn't be able to answer correctly, and after a few admissions of ignorance, he surely would get the idea and pay attention.

It didn't take long for Sam to teach me that I didn't know as much about adolescent psychology as I thought I did. The first time I asked him a question and he shot the correct answer back without hesitation, it really surprised me. After that, I pretty much expected correct answers, and he gave them to me. Meanwhile, he continued to sit in the back row and face the windows.

As late summer drifted into early autumn, Sam and I began to get acquainted. He stopped by my desk almost every day to chat a minute, and he sometimes dropped by during lunch break. I finally asked him about his peculiar habit of always facing the windows. He said he had learned that if he sat in a position so he could see what was going on in the room, he got distracted. But if he faced the windows he could listen to what was said, and he could remember it better that way. I had no quarrel with his method. I had seen that it worked. I think I was quite proud of myself for never having asked him to turn around and pay attention.

Not long after the Christmas holidays, Sam got into trouble with the school principal. Someone broke a window pane in the boys' restroom, and the principal thought Sam did it. Sam said he didn't. The principal said Sam would either have to take the punishment, a paddling, or be expelled. And if he chose to be expelled, the principal said, Sam would still have to take a paddling to get back into school.

I didn't find out about the problem until the next day when Sam didn't come to my class and the students told me why. As soon as I got a chance I went to see the principal.

I should say first that I liked and respected the principal. What's more, I knew that he liked and respected me. I had asked him for several favors, including some pretty big ones, and he had never turned me down. For example, I once had a notion of giving all my students an "A" on their report cards to demonstrate that if everybody got one they were all worthless. The only person I mentioned it to was the principal. He said, "Try it and let's see what happens." As schools are structured nowadays, no principal would dare allow a teacher to do that. Both of them probably would get fired.

So, I asked the principal to give Sam a break. I told him I thought I had got to know Sam pretty well, and that if he said he didn't do it, he didn't do it. I also predicted that if Sam had to take a paddling to get to come back to school, he would never come back. Begging has always been very distasteful to me, but I think I came close in that case. But the principal turned me down. He was as convinced that Sam was guilty as I was that he was innocent.

I kept track of Sam for a couple of years through his friends at school. The last I had heard of him he was working in the orange groves in Florida. Then I lost track of him.

A few years later the muffler on my car wore out and I took it to a muffler shop in Chattanooga. The guy who came out to work on it was Sam. I was really glad to see him. We chatted for a few minutes and then he turned to go do his job. Although it's not the kind of thing you expect to see in the back pocket of a muffler mechanic, somehow I wasn't surprised to see the book.

I clearly remember thinking, "He never stopped learning. He just stopped going to school."