Posted by:
scmd1
(
)
Date: September 18, 2018 03:13AM
My wife and mom both taught in public schools, though my wife did so for only three years. They both heard at teacher-motivating inservices the story [that probably every teacher in the U.S. has heard or read at some point] of a fifth-grade boy whose mom had died and who was falling deeply into the cracks, but fortunately was rescued by his fifth-grade teacher once she got her head out of her @$$ and started to treat him decently. I won't go into the details of the story, but it supposedly often left teachers in both tears and goosebump upon hearing it for the first time. The story is sappy, but my wife heard it for the first time when she was both hormonal and exhausted from the rigors of teaching kindergarten full-time while attending law school full-time. I remember that she came home crying, then could barely get through the story because she cried so much in retelling it to me over a ten o'clock dinner that night.
It's a great story, and it SHOULD be true, but it is, unfortunately, fiction. Snopes.com even has an entry refuting the story's authenticity.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/teddy-bared/ In a televised sermon, The Reverend Robert Schuller passed the story off as his own, telling it as though someone in his family was the teacher, Paul Harvey reportedly told the story in one of his broadcasts as well. Others told the story with their own variations. In a postscript to a particular version of the story, Dr. Theodore Stoddard, the grown-up Teddy, is wrongly identified as an oncologist for whom the Stoddard Cancer Center at Iowa Methodist Hospital is named. (Snopes says the center is actually named for an engineer named John Stoddard. No doctor with the name of Theodore Stoddard is on record as ever having practiced medicine at Iowa Methodist Hospital.) The actual author was a woman named Elizabeth Silance Ballard Ungar, who wrote it for a Baptist publication. Silance said the only factual basis to the story was that someone she knew who taught Sunday School was given a half-used bottle of perfume and a piece of costume jewelry that had belonged to his mother by a little boy in her Sunday School class who had recently lost his mother.
The Holy Ghost doesn't hold any sort of a monopoly on goosebump production. A good story will always be a good story. Paul H. Dunn could have made a few minor adjustments and could have done great things with the Teddy Stoddard story, which would have allowed even more people to feel burning in their respective bosoms and to gain testimonies of Paul H. Dunn.