RESPONSIBILITY - STORIES and FOLKLORE
(excerpts from posts)
(If you want to retell any of the stories listed below, be sure to obtain permission from the copyright holder if the material is not in the public domain)

1) There is a story about a drop of honey that I think is very good for this. It's in Margaret Read MacDonald's Peace Tales, Not Our Problem.The bones of the story is that a drop of honey falls and no one thinks it's their responsibility to clean it up. Problems caused by the honey get bigger and bigger and lead to the overthrow of the kingdom.

Added comment: I recently found another version entitled A Drop of Honey in Three Apples Fell From Heaven by Mischa Kudian, 1964, a collection of Armenian folk tales. A peasant buys some honey, a drop spills onto the floor of the shop, a fly alights upon it, the shopkeeper's cat strikes the fly dead with its paw, the peasant's dog strangles the cat, the shopkeeper bops the dog with his honey-ladle killing the dog, the peasant swings his staff on the shopkeeper's head killing him, a passer-by yells out about what happened, the villagers pounce upon the peasant rendering him lifeless, the inhabitants of the peasant's village come a-fighting, and everyone goes down. Each village, although geographically close to one another, is under the rule of a different king. The kings make war, and mayhem ensues. After the war, a survivor asks: How did this come about? What caused this monstrous disaster?

2) A couple of quick suggestions. Why Koala Has No Tail and Turkey Girl, both to be found in Margaret Read MacDonald's collection Look Back and See, Gentle tales for lively tellers. Also the book by Bobby & Sherry Norfolk called The Moral of the Story, folk tales for character education has some good tales centered on responsibility.

3) Because of the nail, the shoe was lost.
Because of the shoe, the horse was lost
Because of the horse, the rider was lost
Because of the rider, the battle was lost
Because of the battle, the kingdom was lost
And all because of a horseshoe nail

According to the 'net, this is an old folk saying going back to the 15th century, if not earlier, attributed to George Herbert, an English churchman and a sometime poet. His works were published shortly after his death in 1633 I'm sure I heard or read once that it referred to the Battle of Bosworth, 1485, which effectively ended the Wars of the Roses - Richard III was killed and Henry VII seized the crown. But that association seems apocryphal (i.e. not true but a good story worth repeating). From The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes: "Thomas Adam, in one of his Sermons (collected 1629), said 'The Frenchmen have a military proverb: "The loss of a nail, the loss of an army" ', and continued 'The want of a nail loseth the shoe, the loss of a shoe troubles the horse, the horse endangereth the rider, the rider breaking his rank molests the company so far as to hazard the whole army'. By 1640, when Herbert's Outlandish Proverbs was published, the sentiment had become formalized"; it then quotes the first three lines, the rest being more recent. Since Herbert's proverbs were translations of foreign (outlandish ) proverbs, a French origin seems likely.

4) The story is "Teacher's Underwear," from a Lawrence Yep collection. The slogan is "A scholar without Books is like a Dragon without Teeth." I've only had the occasion to tell it a couple of times, but think I'll have to find more occasions for it.
Sent by Judy Schmidt in 1996:
This is perhaps not quite on the mark of what you're looking for, but close One summer when I was doing a teacher's guide for Laurence Yep's Child of the Owl, I came across two collections of tales edited by Yep, The Rainbow People and Tongues of Jade. Both of the collections were based on stories collected from Chinese immigrants in the 19309 as part of a Works Progress Administration project in Oakland elsewhere along the west coast. The Teacher's Underwear was one of the stories inllTongues of Ja~e~'and as soon a I read it I knew it was one I would have to tei~T-~S;I-d~l~ to ten groups o 7th graders on their first visit to the Library that fall.

It's the story of a poor but scholarly and somewhat forgetful Teacher, fittingly called Patience, who is invited, one holiday, to the wedding of the oldest son of the richest man in the dan. Patience, who lives in a side room of the temple dedicated to the dan's ancestors and who spends all his money on books, has justwashed his one pair of underpants and hung them on the line to dry. In the meantime he has settled back to meditate on a proverb he has just come across while leafing through one of the b~o)us in the library. The proverb is: Pride harvests disaster; humility gathers the reward. When he receives the invitation from Evergreen, a younger son of the rich man, he refuses at first to go because he doesn't want to go without underwear, much as he is tempted by the thought of the delicious wedding feast. Pride prevents him from telling Evergreen the true reason, so he invents an excuse: "I have too many papers to correct." Evergreen returns again, however, with what amounts to an offer that Patience cannot refuse. The dan elders, all of whom are at the wedding, tell him to put aside his work for one day and join the wedding party. So, he goes to the wedding party without any underwear on underneath his robe. Once there he's plied with rice wine until he's quite tipsy. When he gets up to recite he gets his poems all muddled up, but the dan, fond of their muddleheaded scholar, thanks him anyway.

After a while, people begin to play the usual jokes and games. Evergreen a his friends decide to join the fun. They take a jade bracelet from the pile of presents and hide it outside in a hollow tree. Then they return to the party to see what will happen. Very soon a servant notices the bracelet is gone and informs Evergreen's father. A dan elder sitting nearby overhears and announces that the bracelet is missing and everyone will have to be searched until the guilty person is discovered and punished. This announcement puts Patience into a tizzy. He knows if he is searched the whole village will soon know that he wore no underwear to the party. He contrives to get into the end of the line of people being searched, hoping desperately that the bracelet will be found before they get to him. more agitated and distressed. VVneu 1~ Is nis LL his hands at them and says, "This is impossible! gentleman and a scholar." As the elders move down the line he becomes When it is his turn to be searched he flaps You can't search me - I'm

The elders insist that everyone must be searched and when a gossip says aloud that Patience must be guilty, the teacher loses his cool and flees. He run back to his room in the temple with the entire wedding party behind him, slams the door and locks it, grabs his underpants from the line and then opens the door and, with all the dignity he can muster, announces that he is now willing to be searched. They do search and, of course, find nothing, but the damage has been done.

The next day, a school day, none of the children show up. The villagers believe he hid the bracelet somehow in his flight and none of them want the children taught by a thief. This goes on for months until Patience is forced to sell his beloved books one by one in order to buy rice. When all of the books are sold and all of the rice eaten, he finally sets out in the middle of the night with a bowl and a stick. He does not, however, become a beggar. Instead he wanders from town to tow standing in the market place of each new village, reciting what fragments of poems and history he can remember from his beloved and now lost library in return for whatever coins his listeners care to contribute. This~ style of living goes on for years until his robe is nothing but tatters and the fragments become a kind of poetical stew.

One day when he sets up in the market place of a new town, a young man stop to listen and after the recital asks how it has come to pass that a man of such obvious learning has to earn his living this way. Patience tells him the story. The young man turns out to be Evergreen and he admits, with bow head, that he and his friends took the bracelet. When events got out of ha they were too frightened to speak up and by time they worked up the nerve, Patience had vanished.

When Patience hears this, he insists on going back immediately to clear his name. They return to their village find the bracelet and take it to the elders. The elders hear the story from Evergreen and his friends and apologize to Patience. To make amends they offer to fulfill whatever request Patience has. Humbly, he asks for his school back, a new robe and, "because prudence is also a virtue" TWO pairs of underpants.

The elders feeling this is insufficient for his years of hardship, restore his library, protesting that: "A Scholar Without Books is Like a Dragon Without Teeth." So, Patience ends his days happily, busy with the school a with his studies. Nor does he ever have to do his laundry again. As a penance, the dan elders order the pranksters to take turns washing their teacher's underwear! You can imagine how middle schoolers groan at that ending! Now for the "classroom lesson" part. Though the main moral of this story is obviously the pride tagline, as a librarian, I lived by the second proverb.

I made a computer banner with "A Scholar without Books is Like a Dragon Without Teeth" and posted it on the high bulletin board above the library office and right in front of my teaching area. Every once in a while it came up and someone would point it out as appropriate to a discussion at hand.

(This web page updated 4/1/04)