…to Catholic Schools Week, which I have seen fit not to mention once.

I guess maybe after almost twenty years of dealing with them as parent and teacher , my eyes glaze over at commercials blanketing our airwaves this week, filled with cheery wee ones in uniforms featuring the probably only nun involved in a Catholic school in this town, and maybe she was even bussed in from somewhere else.

Oh, and the fitting end: While we know that the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas (the 28th) marks Catholic Schools Week, this year, it ends with the memorial of Saint Mutien-Marie:

After two years, teaching elementary classes, Brother Mutien was assigned to the boarding school at Malonne where he would spend the next fifty-eight years. He had difficulties at first coping with the demands of both teaching and prefecting. He was rescued by the Brother in charge of the courses in music and art, at the time an important feature of the curriculum. From then on Brother Mutien was not only an effective teacher of those subjects, a vigilant prefect in the school yard, and a catechist in the nearby parish, but a tremendous influence on the students by his patience and evident piety.

Or, as another site I read said more directly – he had trouble controlling his classes, so they put him with small groups! Hope for troubled teachers everywhere!

Pray for teachers today…all of them, and thank God for them. There a mixed group like any other, but until you’ve been in a classroom, you really don’t know how difficult it is to teach these days. The pressures from all sides are immense. Several years ago, I spoke with a man in my parish who was getting ready to retire from teaching at the earliest time possible. He’d been in the classroom for over twenty years, and said that students had changed so much – given the impact of media and family situations – that teaching was no longer a pleasure.

He taught third grade.

And if you like, comment here about your best teachers – in Catholic schools, or not – and what made them great.

I had two religion teachers in high school, both excellent, in quite different ways, who bracketed my time there – one in 9th grade, and one in 12th. The 9th grade religion teacher was a very strict laywoman whom hardly anyone (including me) liked on a personal level. But boy, did she teach, and she taught substance. I was at an age in which I was feeling my ignorance very keenly (living with two smart people will do that to you), and I was determined to catch up. I drank up that class like water.

Then, on the other end was Sister Rose, who was a young nun, who taught us welll, but who emphasized forming us in faith – she was kind, loving, and she taught me a lot simply in the way she stood gracefully at the head of class and talked to us about how important her own faith was to her.

(Although, in the spirit of ’78, she did give us a lame project – match up the words of “The Impossible Dream” along with the Beatitudes and makes some kind of illustrated folder. Believe it or not, I still have it – I never could throw things that I’d worked hard on away. I drew a great picture of a lobster in 5th grade, and I know I still have that somewhere, too. So yeah, that was kind of silly. But I survived.)

I’ll just add one other story, not about great teachers, but, in honor of St. Mutien-Marie, about teachers with troubling classes. For some reason, I thought about this the other night, and mentally awarded it the prize of best/worst prank ever played on a teacher.

It was in the school I taught at in Florida. This poor, well-meaning, doughy-looking fellow had been hired to teach history, government and economics. Single. In my experience, single men are always a particular target for high school kids, unless they are coaches, of course. It’s like some kind of Darwinian struggle that breaks out, right there under the fluorescent lights and between cinderblock walls.

Anyway, in our parking lot, the places were numbered, and we all had our assigned spots. A couple of senior boys actually placed an ad in the classifieds, offering up this teacher’s car for sale, directing potential buyers to his parking space in the school lot, which was visible from his classroom window. Imagine his surprise and puzzlement when he looked out and saw a curious couple walking around his car, checking the tires, and peering inside.

I recently emailed one of the students in that class (not involved in the prank!) to congratulate her on the recent birth of her first child, but also to ask her, while I was thinking about it, that teacher’s name. For the life of me, I couldn’t remember his name or his face, and it was driving me crazy. Well, she wrote me back with the name, which instantly brought back the face. Poor guy. And then she wrote , “Oh, we were horrible people. I must still be horrible, though, because I’m sitting here thinking about it, and I can’t stop laughing.”

Actually, neither can I. I know.

Maybe he’ll be a saint someday, too. Long before me, that’s for sure.

So yeah…happy Catholic Schools Week!