Free The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life by Rod Dreher

kids from a small town.”
    During my sporadic visits home from Washington, I was struck by my sister’s deep empathy for her students. One night, sitting at her kitchen table, I helped Ruthie grade papers. The kids in her class seemed to miss easy questions. As we sat at her kitchen table, I asked my sister what was wrong with them.
    “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with them,” she said. “See this worksheet? This little boy’s mother dropped him off one Christmas Eve on his grandmother’s doorstep, and disappeared. Pick out a bad worksheet, and I can tell you something terrible going on. You can hardly imagine how hard some of these kids have it.”
    The hard cases among her students held a special place in her heart. It became a running joke among her fellow teachers that when they would get together to confront a student with a disciplinary problem that Ruthie would always take the student’s side. Her fellow teachers would be ready to come down hard on the errant kid, when my sister, by no means a bleeding heart, would chime in, “Sweet baby, what can we do to help you?” She always called them “sweet baby.”
    And then when the team meeting was over she would ask the chastened child, “Now, how’s your mama and them? Is your baby sister feeling better?”
    Ruthie’s teaching day consisted mostly of standing in front of twenty or more students and lecturing at a blackboard, the old-fashioned way. At first she taught her classes nearly all their subjects. Later in her career, when she was moved to the newly built West Feliciana Middle School, she specialized in math. One of her techniquesbecame something of a signature. When a student had trouble with a math concept, Ruthie would go to the student, kneel by his desk, and, side by side, help the child work through his difficulty. The emotional intimacy and humility of that physical gesture touched them.
    There was little Ruthie wouldn’t endure to fulfill her duty to the kids in her classroom. Early in her teaching career, she had intense pain in her abdomen. She ignored it for days, but the pain only got worse. Finally Mike forced her to go to the doctor, who sent her straight to the hospital for emergency surgery. Ruthie had an ectopic pregnancy, which caused one of her Fallopian tubes to burst. She could have died from internal bleeding. Ruthie’s doctor told Mike he had no idea how Ruthie even stood at the chalkboard.
    That was Ruthie, though. She never thought of herself, only of others, and what she could do for them. Many of Ruthie’s former students have stories of how Ruthie made them better students and better people. Given the widespread poverty and chaotic family life among some communities in West Feliciana, no small number of Ruthie’s students came to school undisciplined and unprepared to learn, to put it charitably.
    And yet Ruthie abided with them. Her former students remember her as calm and soft-spoken, the kind of teacher who did not have to threaten, or even raise her voice, to establish authority.
    “Children had a love and respect for her because we knew she loved and respected us,” says Ashley Jones, who was a student in one of Ruthie’s first classes. “Ruthie wasn’t there for the paycheck. She was there because she saw this as her calling in life. That is why she had the effect she had on us kids.”
    Years later Ashley spent time as a substitute teacher at West Feliciana Middle School where Ruthie was then teaching. She was astonished to see that Ruthie was the same patient, tender teacher that she had known as a child.
    “I’m thinking, twenty years she’s been in this school system, andthey’ve never gotten to her,” Ashley says. “They’re wild and disruptive, and ADD, and ADHD, and everything else they diagnose kids with these days. And this tiny lady came in with the softest voice, and put them all in line. It was the craziest thing to see.”
    Kendrick Mitchell, another of Ruthie’s early students, came