Mrs. Rhodes Finds A Hobbit, doodle © 2007 by ybonesy. All rights reserved.
Mrs. Rhodes was my tenth grade English teacher at Valley High School. She was petite, with small ears, and she wore her long graying hair swooped up, often in a giant bun or thick braid.
In my mind I see her at the front of the class wearing a crisp white cotton shirt and a long denim skirt. She doesn’t sit at her desk so much as stands in front of it, stands with leather moccasin loafers and talks with arms flying in the air. She speaks of the genius of the written word. Then she says, “Class…,” says it in a nasally voice that draws out the word, “Claaasss…, it’s time to open our books and read.”
She walks in fast steps around her desk, pulls out the chair and drags it in front where she’s been standing. Sits down, opens her book to the page where we left off last session, and begins reading. Out loud, as if we are first graders.
The funny thing is, I remember nothing about The Hobbit. That’s the book she read out loud to us. I can’t remember if she assigned or read any other book. The only memory I have of Mrs. Rhodes is her reading The Hobbit, and the only memory I have of The Hobbit is Mrs. Rhodes reading it.
We open our books to the page she tells us. We cradle our copies with our arms, drop our heads inside our cradles, then sneak glances at one another. We know what’s coming. She starts reading. Her voice gets small and childlike. She reads slowly, much more slowly than we track in the page. For this reason I close my eyes and listen only to her voice. It floats in the space around us, but not loose and unanchored. It fills the room. There is depth in that voice. There is history and generations. She’s carrying something forward, passing it on. All this I detect in the stillness of the room, silent except for Mrs. Rhodes’ small singular voice.
And this is what I remember most. Always, the voice cracks. It wobbles and weaves, eventually stopping altogether. I don’t want to open my eyes. I beg in my head, Keep going, just keep going. Silence. A classroom full of 15-year-olds, some giggly and high, some asleep, most shuffling, moving waffle-stompered feet on the dirty linoleum. I look up. Mrs. Rhodes is fixated on the page, tears falling now. She doesn’t look at any of us. I can tell she is composing herself. She takes a wadded Kleenex and dabs her nose. Then she continues.
I want to recall what happened to the hobbits that made Mrs. Rhodes weep. Did someone die? Were they tortured? I tell myself I will re-read the book, perhaps read it out loud to Dee. Maybe I’ll cry, too. I cried at the end of Watership Down when Hazel was old and slipped away to the heavens. The emotion welled up from nowhere, it seemed, and I tried to keep it in, but in my trying it became big and full and caused me to tremble so much that Dee lifted herself from my side so she could turn and look at me. Was it the same for Mrs. Rhodes? Did she fall so headlong into the story that she couldn’t help but cry when the characters she loved slipped away?
She always made it through the crying; it never lasted long. Then she’d get to an exciting section. Here her voice drops to a whisper, as if we’re alongside the hobbits in the woods, crouching under bushes. If she speaks too loudly she’ll give away our position. Someone in the class snickers, one of the vatos who’s had enough. She immediately stops, snaps her head up to see who’s making fun.
“What is it?” she asks. He shakes his head, says nothing.
“Don’t you believe? They’re real, you know.”
She looks from him to each one of us, looks deeply with her blue eyes, imploring. You can tell she’s pleading, You believe, don’t you?? There is desperation in that room, in that teacher. Each person she looks at in turn looks down.
She wants us to believe the hobbits are real, like fairies or spirits. Real like this moment. This life. We are not in Literature. This is religion, spirituality. We’re either believers or we’re not. When she gets to me I hold her gaze. Not because I’m a believer. I don’t know what I am. I’m lost, but I’m not about to let this poor woman be alone in the world.
Where are you, Mrs. Rhodes? What ever happened to you? I know nothing about the book you had us read, nothing except this recollection of you and me and the class. Why didn’t it dawn on me before what you gave to us? I thought you were crazy. Maybe you were. But you believed with all your heart in something at a time when I believed in nothing and no one. You touched me, left me with one of the few imprints I have from that time of walking through halls stoned and apathetic.
Thank you, Mrs. Rhodes, for leaving me with faith.
[…] Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. Tenth grade, Mrs. Rhodes, Valley High School. She cried through most of it, insisted the hobbits were real (can’t you see them?!?), and […]
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You have described the thing that makes being an English teacher a blessing and a curse: those of us who are English Teachers believe in Hobbits, and bools, and a room of our own, and a path with a fork in it that will change a life.
We become English teachers because we remember the moment at which we understood the depths of a piece of writing for the first time: the stuff beneath the surface that makes a great book (or story or poem or essay) resonate. It colors the world in a way that, for us, will never be undone.
We get teary-eyed and starry-eyed and mesmerized by the ability of another human being to group words together and make something wonderful happen.
Eventually, most of us try to make our own magic with words, and at some point, we do—even if no one else ever sees our creation.
We haplessly take these emotions into a classroom believing our students will be open to the experience—especially if we deliver it with the passion we feel.
In a time that is altogether too short, we learn few students care or feel or get what we do.
We realize we cry and laugh and ponder when others do not, and for a time, it makes the world a hard place to be, and it makes being an English teacher a hard thing to accept.
Few of us ever know when (of if) we are recalled—we take it on faith that we are, but. . .
I can’t tell you where Mrs. Rhodes is, but I can tell you, it’s good to know there is at least one student thinking about her English teacher and acknowledging she did get part of the message.
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Thanks, Shawn, for helping me understand Mrs. Rhodes even better.
I honestly didn’t realize what a gift she was in my life until I got to the end of that piece.
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y,
Thanks right back at you.
Valley High School in Sacramento?
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No. ALBU-QUER-QUE Hey!
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LOL
I almost went to Babel Fish to translate.
Obviously, it’s time for me to stop for the night!
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I just remembered it was Barbara Rick from another post (On Candy?) who talked about learning how to spell the names of cities/states through chants. I thought it had been you. Well, I’m sure there’s a version for Sacramento. Not like that one’s so easy to spell 🙂
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ybonesy…
I like spelling Albuquerque. Its almost like spelling Mississippi.
Saturday, we had this informal water rocket competition with another international school 100 km to the south. This took place during the lunch break at a track meet. After about 4 or 5 launches, the students were bored of rockets. The only people still having fun and wanting to launch more where us teachers and the dads who were there (we kept wanting to put more and more pressure into the rockets to see how high we could get them).
So its not just English that the students tune out, its everything…
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Yeah, there’s a lot going on in the heads of young people. I notice it with Dee. She’s preoccupied.
But what I wanted to say, MM, is that knowing you as I do, I think you’re the Science teacher version of Mrs. Rhodes. You are so into your subject and teaching it and being passionate about it. I can just see you not wanting to stop launching your water rockets even after all the kids had moved on to other things.
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Unfortunately, the curriculum forces us to move constantly. I used to be able to dwell on neat stuff, but with the new owners that no longer applies. Hit a subject briefly and move on.
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Ybonesy, can I ask what grade you were in for this? And, without getting too personal, generally when this was?
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Tenth grade, I believe, although my friend Denise recalls we had Miss Castoria for tenth, but I think she was 11th. That would have been in 1977. Why? Do you think you might have been there, too?
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[…] nor age-appropriate for a nine-year-old, but hey, it took us more than three months to finish The Hobbit last year, and already in four nights we’re one-fourth of the way […]
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I am just a stray wanderer that came across this page on a Google search for hobbits, and it made my day.
The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and really all of Tolkien’s books, have had the same impact on me as they did on Mrs. Rhodes. I’ve thought of becoming a teacher, and if I were then I would be just like Mrs. Rhodes. My niece and nephew already know what a hobbit is, and they’re only 3 and 4 years old.
I appreciate that you appreciate her. And if you ever get a moment to sit down and read, I think you might grow to love Middle Earth as well.
Peace and love.
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Oh, thank you for stopping by. Your comment made my day. 8)
I actually did re-read The Hobbit. My older daughter had it assigned last year, in sixth grade. And since she read it, I decided to read it outloud to my youngest, age nine.
It took us a while, but we finished it on Dec 31, because we wanted to finish it by the end of the year. It was really fun. I so loved Bilbo and the way his gifts were revealed, slowly, to the dwarves and to the readers. And Gandalf’s wisdom. And all the details, the magic, the animals and forests and different types of beings.
Last year we also all watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy on DVD. For some reason we’d not seen the final. It was so fun to get all three and watch them pretty much in succession. My oldest and I even re-watched the second one twice in one day. Just so we could catch details that we missed the first time.
They are wonderous books. The language can be a bit hard for young folks—for me, too. But the imagination it took to create the Middle Earth—amazing.
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yb, I see you answered me — and you had mentioned the grade you were in in the post itself, which I somehow missed. I think I was just amazed at the choice of reading material, so wondered when it was.
And the whole notion of reading aloud to 10th graders is amazing, too.
I read the books in high school — The Hobbit was my favorite. I think it helps to know Tolkien wrote the trilogy during world war 2, while his son fought in north Africa. It’s so focused on good vs. evil — with the backdrop of the Norse or Icelandic sagas, which it’s all based on. 🙂
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I was surprised that The Hobbit was my daughter’s first assigned book in middle school, yet we read it in high school. I wonder if that’s kind of universal or just something about her school.
Your mention of the Norse and Icelandic sagas makes me wonder just how much research into those sagas Tolkien did in preparation for writing the book. As I read the book to my youngest daughter end of last year, I oftened wondered how Tolkien came up with all of it. It’s just so very rich in detail.
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Twenty years ago I worked with a paralegal who had studied Old Norse and had read the sagas; she told me that Tolkien’s trilogy was based on them.
Out of curiosity I just looked it up; and found that Tolkien was close friends with C.S. Lewis, and his wikipedia page includes this:
“… They had a shared affection for good talk, laughter and beer, and in May 1927 Tolkien enrolled Lewis in the Coalbiters club, which read Icelandic sagas in the original Old Norse …”
Tolkien also wrote an influential essay in the 30s raising the critical opinion of Beowulf, which had been deprecated until then.
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Great renewed conversation here. Like the tidbit about Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. I had to go look at the Wiki site myself to refresh my memory. I don’t remember reading The Hobbit or The Lord Of The Rings trilogy that came after it. (I did just read that Tolkien meant Lord of the Rings to be one single volume with a sequel, but it got broken up into 3 to be published.)
But I had a college friend in the early 70’s who was a Lord Of The Rings fanatic and loved The Hobbit, too. She was really into dissecting everything and assigning meaning.
Something else interesting I just read in Wikipedia, about how Tolkien was highly involved in his art work for the covers of his books, and the designs (which BTW, GREAT illustration for this post, ybonesy!). You can see the original covers there at The Lord of the Rings (LINK).
The other tidbit that drew me was how he assigned his own letter values to the Runes (there’s a little map in Wiki at The Hobbit (LINK). I used to use the Runes as an Oracle and actually created a set out of clay. I don’t know off the top of my head if his values are the same letters that were assigned by the Anglo-Saxons or Scandinavians.
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[…] wore her ginger-colored hair in a tight flip, walked us through the ins and outs of the paragraph. Mrs. Rhodes cried in class while reading The Hobbit out loud to us. But somehow I managed to get through twelve years without […]
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