Teachers, Destiny, and Helping

            Elizabeth Ballard, published a story in Home Life magazine in 1976. The story is fiction, but it rings so true because many people could relate such a story of how one person influences another, of how people can rise from such humble beginnings, and even the matter of human destiny.

According to the fictional, yet so true, story, Jean Thompson was a teacher who had a fifth grade boy in her classroom, Teddy Stallard:

On the first day of school, Jean Thompson told her students, "Boys and girls, I love you all the same."  Teachers lie.  Little Teddy Stallard was a boy Jean Thompson did not like.  He slouched in his chair, did not pay attention, his mouth hung open in a stupor, his eyes were always unfocused, his clothes were mussed, his hair unkempt, and he smelled.  He was an unattractive boy and Jean Thompson did not like him. Through school records, the teacher learned that Teddy's mother had died a year ago and his father showed no interest.  A previous teacher's note had read: "Teddy is in deep waters; he's totally withdrawn."

Christmas came, and the boys and girls brought their presents and piled them on her desk.  They were all in brightly colored paper except for Teddy's.  He wrapped his present in brown paper and held it together with a string.  Scribbled on it were the words, "For Miss Thompson from Teddy."  She tore open the paper and out fell a rhinestone bracelet with most of the stones missing and a bottle of cheap perfume, almost empty.  When the other boys and girls started to giggle, she had enough sense to put some of the perfume on her wrist, put on the bracelet, hold her wrist up to the class and say, "Doesn't it smell lovely?  Isn't the bracelet pretty?"  Taking their cue from the teacher, they all agreed.  

At the end of the day, when all the children had left, Teddy lingered, came over to her desk and said, "Miss Thompson, all day long you smelled just like my mother.  Her bracelet, that is her bracelet, it looks real nice on you, too.  I'm really glad you like my presents."  When he left, she got down on her knees and buried her head in her chair, and she begged God to forgive her.  From then on, she was a different teacher.  She tutored Teddy and put herself out for him.  By the end of the year, Teddy had caught up with some of the children. He was even ahead of some. 

Several years later, Jean Thompson got this note:    Dear Miss Thompson:  I'm graduating and I'm second in my high school class.  I wanted you to be the first to know.  Love, Teddy.   

Four years later she got another note:  Dear Miss Thompson:  I wanted you to be the first to know.  The university has not been easy, but I like it.  Love, Teddy Stallard.    

Four years later, another note:  Dear Miss Thompson:  As of today, I am Theodore J. Stallard, M.D.  How about that?  I wanted you to be the first to know.  I am going to be married in July.  I want you to come and sit where my mother would have sat, because you're the only family I have.  Dad died last year.  She went and she sat where his mother should have sat because she deserved to be there.

Was Teddy predestined to become a doctor?  Was it his destiny? Who can say?  We do know that he would not have without an assist from a teacher who, through her, became a decent human being.

Maybe we need to pay attention to those in our lives who may seem hopeless. It just might be that we will have in us the gifts needed to turn the life of that person around.

I know, it would be wonderful if this story actually happened. Yet, good fiction is true in deep ways. This type of fiction speaks to our hopes and dreams of what humanity can be, maybe even ought to be.