Baylor prof: ‘I became a teacher on 9/11’

Twenty-five years after watching the Twin Towers fall, Dr. Marilyn Rhames, a Hankamer School of Business professor, traces how God’s calling led her out of a New York City reporting career and into teaching in Chicago public schools, a faith-based teaching movement, two White House visits — and now to a Baylor podium teaching storytelling.

On the morning of Sept. 10, 2001, Marilyn Rhames was flying home to New York after a baby shower in Chicago, seven months pregnant, when her plane descended past the World Trade Center on its approach to LaGuardia Airport. Her then-husband, staring out the window, said the towers looked eerie. Rhames, a young reporter who considered the Trade Center her favorite spot in the city, disagreed. She remembers arguing with him three times over it, insisting the sun glinting off the towers made them beautiful.

The next morning, an editor’s phone call woke her. “Turn the TV on,” he said, and hung up.

Now a lecturer in business communications at Baylor’s Hankamer School of Business, Rhames traces her entire career — one that has carried her from a New York newsroom to a Chicago elementary classroom to speaking in the Oval Office and finally to Waco — back to that single day: September 11, 2001.

Rhames watched the towers fall from bed, unable to reach her husband, who worked in Manhattan. She drove as close to the city as she could, to the Third Avenue Bridge at the northern tip of Manhattan, and waited for hours as thousands of ash-covered survivors streamed across it on foot. Eventually she spotted him. He collapsed into her arms, exhausted, and rubbed her belly.

But what has stayed with her for 25 years, she says, is what happened after: driving home with an empty back seat when she could have offered a stranger a ride. “I just took him home,” Rhames recalls. “And as I was driving back to our apartment, I looked in the back seat, and it was empty. I could have offered somebody a ride.”

She has come to see that moment as the product of her journalism training, which taught her to observe tragedy rather than step into it. “You’re trained not to get involved in the story,” she says. “You’re trained to be an observer… not to get too close to the subject.” That tension, between telling stories and actually helping people, is what ultimately pushed her out of the newsroom.

Rhames continued reporting for months after 9/11, gathering details from grieving families and reporting from first responder funerals, even as she carried her own grief through what should have been a joyful pregnancy. By the time her daughter was born that December, she had already decided: she was going to become a teacher.

The decision baffled the people closest to her. Her journalism professor at Columbia, who had helped launch her career, accused her of suffering postpartum depression and refused to write her a letter of recommendation for a graduate program in education. Family members in Chicago asked why she’d walk away from a career she’d worked so hard to build. Rhames moved to Chicago anyway, earned a master’s degree in teaching, and spent the next 14 years teaching elementary and middle school students in Chicago Public Schools, much of it on the city’s South and West Sides.

The classroom tested her faith in the decision almost immediately. As a public school teacher, she was expected to avoid discussing spirituality and Christian faith with colleagues, a restriction that collided hard with what she felt was necessary to do such a difficult job well. Rhames adds, “I knew I couldn’t talk about Christianity with public school students, but I had not imagined that Christian teachers would be so scared to share their faith among each other at work.”

Facing a difficult school environment, she remembers telling herself she had three options: 1) quit and go back to journalism, 2) write an exposé and get fired, or 3) stay in the classroom and pray her way through it. She chose to stay, and in 2011 turned that choice into Teachers Who Pray, a nonprofit that supported educators across dozens of states.

That work led to two TEDx talks, an award-winning education blog, a book on the pedagogy of Jesus, and an invitation to help design Harvard University’s Leadership Institute for Faith and Education. It also led back to the public stage.

Rhames has spoken at the White House two times, under both the Obama and Trump administrations, about the spiritual demands of teaching and policies she believes could support educators better.

Now, with a Ph.D. in hand, Rhames teaches business students at Baylor how to tell a good story, the same craft her journalism professor once tried to talk her out of leaving behind. “Nothing’s wasted in God’s economy,” she says, “not even the suffering and the pain.”

Asked what she would tell the version of herself sitting on that plane 25 years ago, unsure whether to trust the call she felt toward teaching, Rhames didn’t hesitate: Respect the time you’ve been given, have courage, and don’t wait for a more convenient season.

“If not now, when?” she says. “Because tomorrow’s not promised to us.”

Sic ’em, Dr. Rhames!