Beau
By Rev. Lonnie C. Crowe
A
serendipitous reward of my teaching career has been the opportunity to teach
remedial English. The eagerness to learn
and outspoken honesty of those students is often absent in the grade
mongers. The greatest moments come when
the students gain enough self esteem to accept themselves and one another.
Beau
taught us some good lessons on self-acceptance.
He was unforgettable, large, uncouth, nearly illiterate and happy to be
in school. The desire of my teacher’s
heart was for Beau to read. It seemed
that previous teachers had instilled in him all the necessary decoding
skills. Although I had no academic
expertise in teaching reading, I felt that Beau needed only an opportunity to
practice those skills. He had been mainstreamed
from a special education class where the teacher had read to him, but had given
him little or no chance to read for himself.
Beau
deserved literacy, and I was determined that he achieve it. First, I felt, he needed to see an adult
enjoying the printed page. I become
Beau’s role model. I was fortunate that
he was in both my remedial English and in my study hall. The study hall met in the library where the
students sat around tables in an atmosphere more informal than that of a
regular classroom. Because of the
informality, some students occasionally displayed difficulty keeping on
task. Beau, a stickler for protocol,
quickly squelched any chattering. Soon
we all sat quietly doing our work so we would not antagonize Beau. The quiet time was perfect for Beau to
practice his reading skills.
As I
became his reading role-model, I shared Beau’s table. Giving him the western classic Thunderhead by Mary O’Hara, I said,
“Beau, every day during this hour, you and I are going to read. While you silently read Thunderhead, I will silently read a book of my choice.”
Beau
accepted the assignment. Because he
liked school, he was always willing to try.
He read, and I read and watched Beau read. On a good day, Beau could read a page in ten
or fifteen minutes. Most days were not
that good.
School
had started in August. The temperature
was nearly one hundred degrees every afternoon.
The building had no air conditioning.
As Beau read, laboriously mouthing every word, pausing often to ask me
for a pronunciation or a definition, sweat dampened his face and his
shirt. He smudged the pages and the
table top. I had had no idea that
reading could be such hard work. My
sympathies grew as Beau struggled and sweat.
After eight days, Beau was on page eighteen. I could no longer watch the struggle. I repented.
I would read that book to him. No
one should have to struggle that hard.
Beau
saved me. As if he sensed my uneasiness,
he looked up from Thunderhead, smiled
and announced, “This here is the best book I ever read.”
We were
in a small school, and, soon, the entire school became involved in Beau’s
reading. When he confronted an
unfamiliar word, he grabbed the nearest person and demanded an answer. Timid freshmen shook when Beau collared
them. “What’s this here word? What does it mean?”
Reading
at least forty minutes a day, Beau spent the entire first quarter reading Thunderhead. We all celebrated when he
finished.
He had
started Wilson Rawls’ Where the Red Fern
Grows when a snowstorm stranded him at a relative’s home for several days
after Thanksgiving vacation. When he
returned, Beau proudly announced, “I finished reading that dog book. I ‘bout cried when they died.”
I ‘bout
cried to learn that he had taken a book with him on vacation. To think that he had read it was
overwhelming.
Beau
needed another book. Our local rural
Wyoming school system had a unique arrangement.
The elementary and high schools were in the same town. The middle school was ten miles to the
west. Because he had enjoyed Red Fern so much, I suggested that Beau
read Old Yeller by Fred Gipson. A copy was not on the shelf of the high
school library. I knew the elementary
library, just across the parking lot had a copy. However, I did not want to embarrass Beau by
giving him a book from the “little kid’s library.”
“Beau,
I’m sure the middle school has a copy of Old
Yeller, “I said. “I’ll call
them. We can have it here in the
morning.”
“If I
kin read that book, them little kids kin read it. It’s probably in the grade school
library. I’ll go get it.”
The
elementary library was a veritable candy store of literature for Beau. He, unabashedly, read book after book—Old Yeller, the Black Stallion series,
Garfield comics and the ultimate Smoky,
the Cow Horse by Will James.
The
other students were supportive. “Hey,
Beau, what are you reading?” “How many
books have you read, Beau?”
As Beau
learned to read, he learned to write as well.
At first he wrote lists of seemingly disconnected ideas. Then rudimentary sentences came forth. Our culminating writing activity that year
was a four chapter autobiography. I
encouraged the students by telling them that each person is important enough to
be the subject of a piece of writing, that each student has interesting stories
to tell and that the autobiography would provide a piece of family history.
It was
then spring. The weather was warm
again. Beau toiled, sweat and left
smudges on the pages and the desk top.
But Beau wrote. He slowly
produced page after page. He wrote about
the pain when his parents divorced. He
wrote about his pet cow that he and the other children used to saddle and
ride. He wrote about school and how much
he loved football.
When
the time for editing finally came, I told the class that their work was worthy
of correct grammar, punctuation and spelling, that each red mark signaled that
the work deserved the best in mechanics.
Beau,
however, needed no encouragement. He
knew his story was good. When he
received his draft, he squirmed in his chair, pushed up his sleeves, wiped the
sweat from his brow and set to work.
When I walked by him, he nearly crushed my wrist in a sticky grip and
demanded, “Hey, Teacher, how do you spell capital F?”
