Tonight, during the Huckster's speech, he told the following story:
In September of 2005, a social studies schoolteacher from Arkansas did something not to be forgotten. On the first day of school, with permission of the school superintendent, the principal, and the building supervisor, she took all of the desks out of the classroom. The kids came into first period, they walked in; there were no desks. They obviously looked around and said, "Where's our desks?"
The teacher said, "You can't have a desk until you tell me how you earn them."
They thought, "Well, maybe it's our grades."
"No," she said.
"Maybe it's our behavior."
And she told them, "No, it's not even your behavior."
And so they came and went in the first period, still no desks in the classroom. Second period, same thing. Third period. By early afternoon television news crews had gathered in the class to find out about this crazy teacher who had taken all the desks out of the classroom. The last period of the day, the instructor gathered her class.
They were at this time sitting on the floor around the sides of the room. She said, "Throughout the day no one has really understood how you earn the desks that sit in this classroom ordinarily. Now I'm going to tell you."
She went over to the door of her classroom and opened it, and as she did 27 U.S. veterans, wearing their uniforms, walked into that classroom, each one carrying a school desk. And they placed those school desks in rows, and then they stood along the wall. By the time they had finished placing the desks, those kids for the first time I think perhaps in their lives understood how they earned those desks.
Their teacher said, "You don't have to earn those desks. These guys did it for you. They put them out there for you, but it's up to you to sit here responsibly, to learn, to be good students and good citizens, because they paid a price for you to have that desk, and don't ever forget it."
Huckabee originally told this story at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C. on March 2, 2007. It is supposed to reference an incident that happened in Ms. Cothren's military history class. The only difference that I saw tonight was that he added that, while all of this was happening, the students got on their cell phones and called their parents who then showed up with the media to find out what was going on.
Being the cynic that I am, when I heard the part about the cell phones I went "Huh?". I know, from experience, that students are not allowed to use their cell phones at school. But of course they do, so it could still be possible that the story was true.
The other part of the story that caught my attention was that even though parents had been called and the media appeared no one complained about the fact that that their children had to either stand throughout the class or sit on the floor instead. I know, that's no great hardship, but that never stopped parents from being irate that their child was being inconvenienced, or that they had a child that was unable or unwilling to stand through their class that day. And is there really a high school that has a full day's worth of military history classes?
Since it's too late to call the Joe T. Robinson High School in Little Rock to find out whether the story is true, or if they have a teacher that works in the Pulaski School District of that name. So, of course, I Googled it.
The high school does not have a web site, but the school district does, and they have no teacher of that name listed. They have a computer guy named Mike Cothren, but no Martha.
Next, I tried Snopes and TruthorFiction, and they both said the story is true. But neither one of them has any sort of information to back that up besides the fact that Huckster told the story in 2007.
I next tried searching Little Rock for anything about Martha, but, once again, nothing except links to righty blogs reprinting the story ("This story's true. Really"), though I did find a person of that name in the WhitePages, and I did find her on a list of VFW teachers of the year for 2006 - 2007, though there is no indication when the list was made or on what basis the teachers were chosen, other than that they teach citizenship education topics regularly, and that fellow teachers, supervisors or other interested individuals can submit nominations.
Yes, I could very well be wrong. I am certainly not a professional researcher or anything, and a few well-placed phone calls could clear the whole thing up. But, unfortunately, these things sometimes take on a life of their own, and it is so easy for people to just say, "Oh, sure that's true!" even though they know otherwise, because they feel that it puts their school, state, etc. in a positive light and that a false confirmation won't really hurt anybody.
What I find really interesting though is that even though the media was on-sight for this story I can't find any reference to it except at a CO TV station KKTV (where it was on an English only Prop 6 thread and the comment ended, "By the way, this is a true story If you can read this, thank a teacher. Since you read it in English, thank a soldier."), Sean Hannity's WOKV site, and an Idaho newspaper - and they both have it posted in their blogs as either comments or as "we got this in our email and we think its cute but we can't verify" section.
All I know is, that if it seems too good to be true - it is.
And if seems like a right-wing email swarm - it is