The Longest Ride(99)

She looks at me, her eyebrow raised. “And how would you know this?”



“Because,” I say, “you told me.”





Ruth was a third-grade teacher, and to her, it was one of the key educational periods in a student’s life. Most of the students were eight or nine years old, an age she always considered an educational turning point. At that age, students are old enough to understand concepts that would have been foreign to them only a year earlier, but they are still young enough to accept guidance from adults with a near-unquestioning trust.



It was also, in Ruth’s opinion, the first year in which students really began to differentiate academically. Some students began to excel while others fell behind; although there were countless reasons for this, in that particular school, in that era, many of her students – and their parents – simply didn’t care. The students would attend school until the eighth or ninth grade, then drop out to work on the farm full-time. Even for Ruth, this was a challenge that was difficult to overcome. These were the kids that kept Ruth awake at night, the ones she worried endlessly about, and she tinkered with her lesson plan for years, searching for ways to get through to them and their parents. She would have them plant seeds in Dixie cups and label them in an effort to encourage them to read; she would have the students catch bugs and name those as well, hoping to spark intellectual curiosity about the natural world. Tests in mathematics always included something about the farm or money: If Joe gathered four baskets of peaches from each tree, and there were five trees in each of the six rows, how many baskets of peaches will Joe be able to sell? Or: If you have $200 and you buy seed that costs $120, how much money do you have left? This was a world the students understood to be important – and more often than not, she got through to them. While some still ended up dropping out, they would sometimes come to visit her in later years, to thank her for teaching them how to read and write and perform the basic math necessary to figure out their purchases at the store.



She was proud of this – and proud of the students who eventually ended up graduating and going to college, of course. But every now and then, she had a student who made her realize again why she’d wanted to be a teacher in the first place. And that brings me to the painting above the fireplace.





“You are thinking about Daniel McCallum,” she says to me.



“Yes,” I say. “Your favorite student.”



Her expression is animated, and I know her image of him is as vivid as the day she first met him. At the time, she’d been teaching for fifteen years. “He was very difficult.”



“That’s what you told me.”



“He was very wild when he first arrived. His overalls were dirty all the time and he could never sit still. I scolded him every day.”



“But you taught him to read.”



“I taught them all to read.”



“He was different, though.”



“Yes,” she says. “He was bigger than the other boys and he would punch the other students in the arm at recess, leaving bruises. It is because of Daniel McCallum that my hair began to turn gray.”



To this day, I can remember her complaints about him, but her words, as they are now, had always been tinged with affection.



“He’d never been to school before. He didn’t understand the rules.”



“He knew the rules. But at first, he did not care. He sat behind a pretty young girl named Abigail, and would constantly pull her hair. I would say to him, ‘You must not do this,’ but he would do it anyway. I finally had to seat him in the front row where I could keep my eye on him.”



“And it was then that you learned he couldn’t read or write.”



“Yes.” Even now, her voice is grim.



“And when you went to talk to his parents, you discovered they’d passed away. It turned out that Daniel was being raised by an older stepbrother and his wife, neither of whom wanted him to attend school at all. And you saw that the three of them were living in what was essentially a shack.”



“You know this because you went with me that day to the place he lived.”



I nod. “You were so quiet on the drive home.”



“It bothered me to think that in this rich country, there were people who still lived as they did. And it bothered me that he had no one in his life who seemed to care about him.”



“So you decided not only to teach him, but to tutor him as well. Both before and after school.”



“He sat in the front row,” she says. “I would not be a good teacher if he learned nothing at all.”