Putting Some Jam on the Bread

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Andy (Andy Griffith): They fired the gun, and the shot was so loud it was heard clear around the world.

Barney (Don Knotts): Oh, get out.

Andy: It's a fact. That's the way this country started. You read the book.

Barney: What book?

Opie (Ron Howard): Yeah, what book? Where'd you get that story, Pa?

Andy: Oh, your history book.

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Coming from a family of teachers as I did (and having done some teaching myself), I always appreciated the episode of the Andy Griffith Show that first aired on this night in 1963, "Andy Discovers America."

I enjoyed it for the same reason I enjoy any segment of a TV program or a movie that demonstrates the great creativity that is required to be a successful teacher.

Most teachers don't measure success the way people in other professions do. For them success is measured by how many students absorb the knowledge they have to give, not by how much money they make.

For example, I always enjoy an episode of WKRP in Cincinnati in which disc jockey Venus Flytrap, whose background was always a little murky and who was said to have been a teacher at one time in his life, offered to talk to the son of the radio station's cleaning woman. This young man, who was making a lot of money with a street gang, was thinking of quitting school, and Venus had to convince him that education was worthwhile.

Venus concluded the young man felt that school had conquered him and that he craved the feeling he got from conquest outside the classroom. Venus' challenge was to make the young man believe he could master education. They made a deal — if Venus could convince him in two minutes that he could conquer school instead of believing it had conquered him, he wouldn't quit. Venus proceeded to explain the atom to the young man in terms he could understand, and he stayed in school.

Andy's challenge in "Andy Discovers America" wasn't exactly like Venus', but it required the same kind of outside–the–box creativity.

Opie (Ron Howard) and his buddies were rebelling against their new teacher, Old Lady Crump, and her history assignments, and Andy commiserated with them, but there was a misunderstanding. Opie and the boys thought he was giving them permission to not study history, and that led to a classroom confrontation in which Miss Crump (the first of many appearances on the show by Aneta Corsaut) doubled the boys' homework.

In retaliation they pledged not to do it.

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She and Andy met for the first time when Miss Crump came to the sheriff's office to complain that his comments, however misunderstood, had set her back. When she took the job, she had found her new students to be woefully behind where they should be, and she had attempted to bring them up to speed by applying a little extra pressure. Her efforts had been showing some positive movement when this had come up.

Not long after, the boys told Andy that it appeared Miss Crump would be leaving, perhaps before the next week began.

Andy realized what he had done, and it was clear he was looking for a solution to the problem. Then it came to him. He told the boys he was glad they wouldn't have to learn "all that dull stuff about Indians and redcoats and cannons and guns and muskets and stuff."

That didn't sound like history to the boys. It sounded like adventure stories.

And Andy got the hook in them when he mentioned the gun that fired a shot heard around the world.

He got the boys back on track, to Miss Crump's great surprise when she convened what she believed would be her last class day. After the class had said the Pledge of Allegiance, she asked the boys if they ever heard those words or knew how the country began — and she was pleasantly shocked when the boys knew what to say.

And she made a return trip to the sheriff's office to express her gratitude — and to find out what he had told the boys.

Andy confessed that he didn't know what to tell them, and he didn't think what he said would hold up under scrutiny in court. He said he just told them a story and put "a little extra jam on the bread."

That, it seems to me, is the essence of great teaching — putting a little extra jam on the bread.

Those who are great teachers, like those who are great at anything, can make it look effortless. But appearances can be deceptive.

It reminds me of a story about Johnny Carson, who believed so strongly that the audience deserved fresh material each and every day that he arranged for guest hosts to take over his late–night program when he went on vacation rather than run previous programs. Few, if any, late–night hosts have had the courage to do that.

On one such occasion, Carson arranged for a new guest host to fill in for him when he was out for a day or two. During his absence, he watched the program. The new guest host had not prepared adequately, thinking it would be a breeze, and he bombed.

Afterward, Carson called the guest host and gently observed, "It ain't as easy as it looks, is it, kid?"

Teaching definitely isn't as easy as it looks, but I always thought Andy would have been a great teacher. Jam can make even stale bread taste good.

He That Troubleth His Own House ...

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Matthew Harrison Brady (Fredric March): I do not think about things I do not think about.

Henry Drummond (Spencer Tracy): Do you ever think about things that you do think about?

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I remember one Christmas when I was maybe 14 or 15, and my mother gave me a copy of Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee's acclaimed stage script for the play, "Inherit the Wind," which was made into a movie that premiered on this day in 1960.

Mom frequently gave me books that she thought I would like, even if most people thought the books were beyond my years. They probably would have been right, too, if the subject had been anyone other than myself, but I was always reading things that, in most cases, would have been more appropriate for someone a few years older. Mom knew that, and she encouraged me to read things that I might not fully comprehend, that I might need to ask questions about — knowing that I would probably comprehend most, if not all, of it. And she was usually right about that.

Besides, "Inherit the Wind" was based on the famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) Scopes monkey trial that took place 90 years ago, in July 1925, and Mom knew I was always a history buff. She knew I had read about the Scopes trial before. I don't think we had studied it in school yet, though, so she knew there was a chance I might need to know a few things to fill in the gaps in my mind.

The trial — in a case that challenged a law that prohibited the teaching of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution in a state–funded school — drew three–time presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan and famed trial lawyer Clarence Darrow to Dayton, Tennessee, to serve as the legal counsel for the two sides. With oratorical firepower like that in town, the press of the day was there as well. It was the Trial of the Century — or, at least, the First Quarter of a Century.

(Did I say it was based on the trial? That's an understatement. It was practically a transcript of the trial, with the debates between Bryan and Darrow picked up virtually word for word.)

All that activity must have been unsettling for Dayton. In the most recent census, its population was slightly more than 7,000. I'm guessing it was considerably smaller in 1925.

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The town's name was changed in the play — to Hillsboro, Tennessee — referred to as "Heavenly Hillsboro" by the press in the story.

The Bryan character was seen locally as the defender of traditional beliefs and values; in the movie, his character was played by Frederic March, and he received a hero's welcome when he and his wife arrived in town.

An equal and opposite reaction was given to the Darrow character, who was perceived as a threat to those beliefs and values. He was played by Spencer Tracy.

You don't have to watch much of "Inherit the Wind" to see clear parallels between the conflict portrayed in the movie and the many social conflicts that permeate our politics today.

"The movie casts the battle as a struggle between the followers of a fundamentalist preacher ... and the snowy–haired agnostic ... who believes Darwinism is as 'incontrovertible as geometry,' as indeed it seems to well over 99 percent of the world's scientists," wrote film critic Roger Ebert.

(Actually, Ebert could have been describing both sides in just about any modern debate, it seems to me.)

In fact, the play does seem to have accurately forecast 21st–century attitudes. The fundamentalists were ridiculed, as they are today, as being hopelessly out of step with modern thinking.

Thinking? The movie was about the right to think, and Gene Kelly's character believed it was in great jeopardy. "There's only one man in the whole town who thinks," he complained, "and he's in jail."

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There were others in the cast, of course, including a character who served as the defendant (in the movie, that was Dick York) and Kelly as a reporter for a fictional newspaper, the Baltimore Herald, based on the very real H.L. Mencken and the newspaper that employed him, the Baltimore Sun, which provided financial support for the defense. Harry Morgan played the presiding judge, and there were some witnesses. Nearly all the witnesses testified for the prosecution. The judge ruled that testimony from the defense's academic witnesses was irrelevant, and the defense's only witness was the prosecuting attorney himself.

For the most part, the movie was a two–man show, and you couldn't have asked for two better actors to represent their generation. Tracy received an Oscar nomination for Best Actor; March didn't get a nomination but deserved one as well. (He enjoyed his share of Oscar success, though, receiving five Best Actor nominations in his career — and winning twice.)

("Inherit the Wind" received three other Oscar nominations. Nedrick Young and Harold Jacob Smith were nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, Ernest Laszlo was nominated for Best Black and White Cinematography, and Frederic Knudtson was nominated for Best Film Editing.)

Writing a few months after a similar court trial in Dover, Pennsylvania, Ebert observed that the movie was "a film that rebukes the past when it might also have feared the future. Beliefs that seemed like ancient history to [director Stanley] Kramer have had a surprising resiliency; two recent polls show that 38 percent of American teenagers believe 'God created humans pretty much in their present form within the last 10,000 years or so,' and 54 percent of American adults doubt that man evolved from earlier species. There is hardly a politician in the land with courage enough to state that they are wrong."

Ebert wrote that in 2006. The public's conclusions may or may not have changed in that time — but my guess is that there are quite a few politicians who would be willing to challenge the validity of those conclusions today.

Some might take a page from Spencer Tracy's dialogue in the movie. "The Bible is a book," he asserted at one point. "It's a good book, but it is not the only book."