In the Classroom at Cabrini School

They will study the character of their students and will try to understand them and win their confidence so that they may be better able to help them….Each teacher will be allowed full initiative to choose the means most apt to encourage joyful effort among the pupils in her classroom….A Religious who has a truly supernatural outlook knows how to permeate all her teaching with the profound convictions she draws from the careful meditation on the Gospel; her lessons and her personal example are for her students, even though they may be unaware of it, a continuous religious instruction.

—“Sisters Engaged in Teaching,”

Rules and Directory of the Sisters of St. Joseph

At last I stand before them, my very first class—eighth-grade girls and boys at St. Frances Cabrini School in New Orleans. The girls in white blouses and blue pleated skirts (like I used to wear), and I in my respectable black widow’s garb of the seventeenth century (a tried-and-true authority prop for any greenhorn teacher in a Catholic school).

My arrival caused something of a stir, not because anyone knew who I was but simply because I was a newcomer nun on the Cabrini faculty scene. Fresh out of Mass on a Sunday in late August, parents and kids strain to read the posted list of classes and teachers for the 1962–63 school year. Who’s the new nun? Sister Louis Augustine? Hope she ain’t Sister Louis Disgustin’. (Squeals of laughter). Hope she doesn’t give tons of homework….

I’m assigned to teach religion and English to seventh and eighth graders.

I had hoped to teach high school. More than hoped—it was my life dream. “Missioning Day” laid me low. There we all were, after Mass, waiting silently in the chapel as Mother Anthelma and her assistants glided softly to hand each of us our assignments for the year, the vow of obedience kicking in big-time now, the dizzying suspense of it, praying, beseeching Thy will be done, O Lord….Grace, give me grace to accept thy holy will….Then the dull, aching thud as I read the small white slip of paper.

Sister Louis Augustine,

It is the will of God for you

to teach at St. Frances Cabrini School.

Junior high? What am I lacking? What didn’t the superiors see in me that I wasn’t selected to teach high school? Hadn’t I been chosen as one of the first to attend Dominican College to get my bachelor’s degree before going into the classroom—one of the first ever? Most Sisters started teaching right out of the novitiate and had to inch their way toward a college degree by attending ten to fifteen years of summer school. Clearly the superiors had believed in my abilities enough to send me to college. They must have thought I had a decent enough intellect. Our congregation doesn’t have colleges, so high school teachers are considered our top-notch educators.

They don’t think I’m mature enough.

What a blow! My first experience of the costliness of giving over agency of my life to others—exactly the opposite of a self-directed life. Obedience, as I am finding out, does more to suppress the ego in one fell swoop than a thousand practices of humility. What is required of me is to obey blindly and to trust God’s providence—God, who can “write straight with crooked lines.”

Yeah, right. I’m terribly off stride. I’m used to achieving what I set out to do.

After the missioning ceremony, everyone is in the lobby talking excitedly about who is going where, and I can’t be more upbeat: “I’m going to Cabrini, a great school. Sister George is principal; I hear she’s the best!”

I want to teach high school so badly I can taste it.

What makes it harder to take is that two of my peers who attended college with me were chosen to teach high school. Obviously they were deemed more mature than I am. I was so used to being a leader in high school, so used to being the best.

Under the tutelage of the nuns in my high school years, I almost exploded with all I was learning and the gifts of my personality that were coming alive. What big business deal or scientific discovery or clever invention could possibly compare to the satisfaction, the joy, of opening the minds and hearts of young women? Chaucer knew the power. In the Canterbury Tales he says of the Teacher: “Gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche.”

Chaucer knew that knowledge is power, and that teaching others means that you’ll always be digging for more knowledge. If you’re teaching, you’re learning. (Although I must confess that I was only just beginning to taste the joy of learning for its own sake; I was too caught up in trying to make top-notch grades to please others, too bent on proving myself. I treated “secular” studies—everything except theology—as second-best, inferior, worldly.) I’m sure I thought that teaching high school was the most exalted profession because of what I had experienced at St. Joseph Academy.

The nuns in my high school had what I wanted: spiritual power. They had the power to change our consciousness, to open realms of truth and possibilities that we never knew existed. They welcomed questioning and debate. They taught us to think critically (except when it came to the teachings of Holy Mother Church). They urged us to be kind to everyone, even those we didn’t like. They were a force. Their presence filled the room.

But it was their humanness that drew us most of all, and we loved any glimpse of it we could get. If we saw a wisp of hair emerge through the face linens, we’d whisper and point, or when gusty winds blew long black veils aside, we craned our necks to catch sight of close-cropped hair. Hey, she’s a blonde! Or, It’s jet black!

“Do nuns shave their heads?” “Do nuns have menstrual periods?” “Do nuns drink beer?” “Do nuns like rock and roll?” (Elvis was making his mark.) “Do nuns play poker?” Our curiosity was endless. And because it was an all-girls school, we were like family—playful, teasing, blurting out one-liners, performing practical jokes. Like hanging Sister Alice Marie’s chalk holder from the ceiling light or hiding in the storage room behind the chemistry lab, all smashed together, giggling, anticipating the moment of the great discovery of the student-less classroom. And like the time Sister Mary Veronica, our seventy-five-year-old Latin teacher, stood en garde by the window as the Catholic High guys cruised by and honked: “You keep writing, girls,” she said. “I’ll wave.”

“You just know the nun’s wave for the guys had to be the thrill of a lifetime,” said Renee McGuiness, our class wit.

Our nuns were fun. Their affection for us was tangible. They challenged our minds, taught us how to read critically, savor good literature, argue logically, work algebraic equations, write cohesively, give a persuasive speech. They told us stories of funny things that happened in the convent, cracked jokes, and wrote spiritual or witty sayings on the chalkboard. I still remember one: “Some of the biggest imprints in the sands of time have been made by heels.” Not exactly a showstopper, but strong enough to imprint itself on my brain cells to this day.

Our nuns coached our sports and rode with us in Beetlebum, our school bus, to basketball games, and we’d sing fun songs such as “Bill Grogan’s Goat” and “Sippin’ Cider Through a Straw,” and if it was a night game and coming home the nuns needed quiet time for their evening meditation, we’d all be quiet or sing Palestrina’s O Sacrum Convivium and Ave Maria and other hymns to put them in the mood to commune with God. And there in the quiet dark, I’d try to pray, too, the most basic of prayers: God, puleeeze let us win this game, and maybe, when you boil it down, that is the rock-bottom foundational prayer, which in times of crisis never really leaves us: Please, God, just this once, stretch the rules of the universe for me—do this one miracle for me.

And at basketball games in our gymnasium, when we all stood up to sing our alma mater, a hush would descend on the crowd, even on unbelievers there just for the game—even they could sense our rapt attention and devotion as we sang:

Lift up your voices to our alma mater,

pledge her your loyalty as long as you shall live.

always remember the spirit and the way

of sanctity, joy, and action, dearest SJA.

We weren’t just a school—we were a family.

Our Sisters gave us such freedom to be ourselves that I tried my first curse words out loud during an exam in Sister Alice Marie’s geometry class. I got a “D” in conduct because of it and voluntarily resigned from the student council for the rest of the semester (better to resign and look virtuous than to be kicked out). I knew I was way out of line, that I got what I deserved, but I could also feel the love that informed the discipline. (This was in the fifties, when genteel Southern ladies refrained from even uttering a “darn” or the scrubbed “Got-dog-it” in place of a bona fide curse. I suspect the “Got-dog-it” may be confined to the Deep South. I’ve never heard it outside Louisiana.)

In my high school years I prospered. I ran for student body president and won, and I started making my mark in oratorical contests when I was only a freshman. With coaching from my lawyer daddy, I led our student council in teaching the rules of parliamentary procedure to the entire student body (about 250 students and 20 faculty members), then had a practice session in the gym. When I stood at the podium before my peers, I knew to wait for their respectful silence before I spoke. I never doubted that I would command obedience and respect in a classroom. It’s one of the reasons I knew I’d be a good high school teacher.

Then came the mission assignment.

Twelve- and thirteen-year-olds? Anybody could teach little kids.

Alone in prayer I come to grips with my crushing assignment. I tuck in my soul and do my utmost to shoulder the rejection. Only then can I open a space in my soul to love the kids entrusted to me. “It doesn’t matter where you start out,” the voice whispers. “Just be a good teacher.”

Now, here I am at St. Frances Cabrini facing twenty-five middle schoolers. Despite the initial disappointment with my assignment, it doesn’t take long to get hooked. What’s not to love? All these fresh, young faces looking up at me. “Don’t smile until Christmas,” veteran teachers counsel new teachers. “Let them know right off who’s in charge; don’t get friendly too soon.”

I introduce myself.

“Good morning, class, I’m Sister Louis Augustine,” and I write my name on the chalkboard, right under the bulletin board, where I had posted in large red block letters: “Come, Holy Spirit.” Invoking the help of the Holy Spirit is the staple prayer of Catholic schools, the prayer par excellence for school openings and before taking tests. At my elementary school of Sacred Heart, in Baton Rouge, we began every school day, unless it rained, lined up by class on the blacktop singing, “Come Holy Spirit, Creator blest…”

And I love my students, love them the way Sister Mary Mark loved us when I was in eighth grade. And I love preparing my English and religion lessons in the dormitory at my student desk (the kind you have to slide in from the side to sit down in) next to my bed, the white curtain pulled around to form my six by eight feet of privacy. I have everything I need: religion text and Voyages in English (the staple English grammar book in Catholic schools), a stack of papers to correct, and my lesson-planning book. I lay books and papers out across the white bedspread and open the planning book and outline the lessons carefully, detailing exactly what I’ll cover in the class and what the assignments will be. I use a ruler and red pen to draw columns to separate one section from another—all very organized, very neat in my lesson-planning book, which I show to my principal, Sister George, every Sunday night.

I plan exact steps to help my students learn nouns and verbs, gerunds and participles, tenses of verbs, how to diagram sentences, give a speech, write a good essay. I explain to them how a “soul journal” differs from a diary. I open up new ways for them to be creative in their journals, freely expressing their private thoughts and feelings in poems or doodles—whatever, which I promise not to read unless they want me to. Day by day I take them through English grammar thoroughly and solidly, and, in the process, learn it myself, which has served me well in my own life—even to this very sentence.

I gradually recognize that the quiet place I inhabit in the dormitory as I plan my lessons is akin to the quiet place in chapel. It is filled with the sense that I have all the time I need to perform the task before me now, which frees me to give myself to it completely, as if nothing else in the world exists. And I taste how very good it is to have this work to do.

And what a clean, good, satisfying feeling on Monday morning to put all the prepared lessons into my book sack and set off for school with a bounce in my step like Pippa Passes (“God’s in His heaven, all’s right with the world”). Come Monday, I know I’m stepping on the first of the moving plates of a teaching week, which won’t stop until Friday afternoon at three o’clock. Often enough my work doesn’t end right on the dot at 3:00 P.M., because there’s volleyball practice or a meeting of the student council (which Sister Mary John and I inaugurated in the school to promote leadership) or the Borromeo Club (to promote religious vocations) or the Sodality (for girls, dedicated to the Blessed Mother to foster piety, purity, and charitable works) or practice for the eighth-grade play—a real hoot and hardly worthy of the name “drama,” so padded is the production with dances of maids and butlers, singing gardeners, and angel choirs, all to maximize inclusion of every single kid (savvy as we are that school productions are as much about pleasing parents as they are about developing talent in kids).

I like teaching boys and girls, love the mix, revel in the differences. I talk to my girls after class, coach their sports, listen to their problems, soothe their hearts when they are anguished by a boy’s rejection or the treacherous gossip of girlfriends. In class boys exhibit more spontaneous humor in the give-and-take of discussion, and their skits are invariably less polished than the girls’ and more outrageously funny—although, in one respect, utterly predictable.

Whatever the subject matter, whatever the theme, I absolutely know we’ll be treated at least once to a skit in which one of the guys, dressed like a little old lady, will, in the course of events, proceed to beat the tar out of somebody with a purse. You can count on it. And, although we do make a point of teaching nonviolence in Christianity, an exception always has to be made for the purse-pummeling scene.

I don’t run a terribly tight ship, and there’s always a lot of teasing, a lot of allowance for repartee. I enjoy the buzz, the live energy, though when the chips are down, they know who’s boss. I remember my own sixth grade with a very strict teacher, Sister Emmanuel, and deciding right then and there, in that cut-and-dried, no-nonsense environment, that one bright and shining day when I would become a teacher, learning would be fun and full of surprises and nothing would be predictable and boring and sad.

The rascals size you up quickly. It doesn’t take them long to know that I have a soft spot for humor, but they quickly catch my serious side, too. When I invoke my stern voice, one of them intones: She’s ser-i-ous. Tha—a-at’s all, folks. Whenever I have to fuss at them, I never yell—I’m always aware of willing the correction, that it comes from a center of calm inside where I’m not really angry, but I have to make my voice sound angry or disappointed and serious. I have learned from veteran teachers that good teachers never raise their voices, and it doesn’t take long to predict that the teacher down the hall who is screaming her head off at the kids or pounding the desk or sending kids to the principal’s office is not going to make it for long in Middle Hall at St. Frances Cabrini.

As I go about teaching vocabulary, I know the kids have an almost infinite capacity to learn and assimilate words, so, along with the regular vocabulary words, I throw in supercilious and lugubrious, perspicacity and lethargic—and why not? The kids love the challenge and gobble up the words, and then I get the treat of the words turning up in essays or class discussions—sometimes with hilarious results, and all in the tone of: Hey, Sister, watch me try out my new hundred-dollar words!

“Isn’t this all rather lagubrious [sic]?”

(They love using sic—probably misspelling words just to get sic in there.)

“Fair greetings from your locquatious [sic], brilliant student, Frank Silvestri.”

Putting new vocabulary into practice leads to interesting exchanges.

Me: “How did you arrive at that interesting insight, Mike Russo?”

Russo: “Perspicacity, Sister—sheer perspicacity.”

It is a formidable challenge to teach English grammar to twelve- and thirteen-year-old boys (it seems to come more naturally to girls). I find myself talking to other teachers to marshal up every game I can find to whiz up syntax, punctuation, and sentence structure. So we have baseball grammar, Whiz Kids grammar bowls, vocabulary and spelling bees, and bonus and sweepstakes questions on daily quizzes. At first, I don’t realize that I’m teaching gambling skills with the sweepstakes questions, the only way to recover lost points in a grading period. I give daily quizzes to keep them on their toes, and this causes some tension in their young lives.

The way the grading system works, each student begins the six-week period with a hundred points, and the idea is to keep as many of those points as possible. Naturally, attrition happens in tests and quizzes, so questions that offer extra points provide a way to replenish lost points. Bonus questions are best, since they offer extra points without the risk of losing points for a wrong answer. But sweepstakes questions involve bona fide risk: two points won for correct answers but two points lost for wrong answers.

Oh, the angst, the agony of the decision-making process. The kids know that the sweepstakes questions are optional, which is where the gambling comes in. I watch them knit their brows, groan and pray, throw their heads back, cover their eyes, struggle out loud, saying, “Yeah, yeah—what the heck,” then erasing furiously, then writing again. I let them struggle. It’s good to struggle over the little stuff—it helps strengthen prudential judgment (a virtue of the practical intellect, says Thomas Aquinas). Maybe it’ll come in handy one day when they choose a mate or weigh the pros and cons of a business deal—or consider making a flying leap from a predictable, banal, boring life to a life bristling with risk and immense happiness.

Or not.

You never know.