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# I was standing there when it did
- URL: https://www.rubyskitchentable.com/i-was-standing-there-when-it-did/
- Published: 2026-09-21T10:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-21T10:00:00.000Z
- Author: Ruby Hayes

*"Train children in the right way, and when old, they will not stray." — Proverbs 22:6*

I taught third grade at Lexington Elementary for five years before I stopped to have babies, and in the fall of 1975 there was a boy in my class named Curtis who did not talk.

Not a word. Not to me, not to the other children, not when he was called on. He would look up when you said his name. He did the work and the work was fine, better than fine at arithmetic. But he did not speak, and I was twenty-six years old with twenty-eight children in that room and no idea on earth what to do with him.

I tried what a young teacher tries. I called on him gently. I stopped calling on him. I kept him after and asked questions with easy answers. I sent a note home and got one back saying he talks at home, which I did not believe and which turned out to be perfectly true.

By February I had decided I was failing him. That is the honest word for it. I lay in the dark and went back over the day and counted the things I had done wrong.

Then one Tuesday in March we were doing a lesson on the weather and I said something incorrect about frost — I have never been able to remember what — and a voice from the third row said, *That's not right.*

That was the whole of it. He talked from then on. Not a great deal. Like anybody.

I have carried Curtis around for fifty-one years and I do not know what happened. Whether it was March. Whether it was me at all. Whether he would have started talking in that room or in any room, that month or the next one, with me or with a teacher who did every single thing differently. There is no way to know and there never will be.

Here is what I have come to, and it took most of a life.

I wanted it to have been me. For years I told that story as a story about a patient young teacher and how it worked, and that is not a lie exactly, but it is a shape I pressed onto it afterward, and the shape flatters me.

What actually happened is that I came into that room every morning of a school year and did the ordinary things, and something moved, and I was standing there when it did.

That is nearly the whole job. Not only that job. You do the ordinary thing on the ordinary morning. You do it again the next morning. Nobody tells you what is working. Nobody tells you almost ever.

Proverbs says train up a child and when he is old he will not depart from it. People take that for a guarantee and are wrecked when it does not hold. I have stopped reading it that way. I think it is a description of how slow the work is — you are training toward *when he is old*, which is to say toward a day you will most likely not be alive to see.

Curtis would be about fifty-nine now. Somewhere. Talking.

*Lord, I did the ordinary things. You do what you are going to do with them.*