subject: Chapter 11: Teacher: My Highest Potential [print this page] Chapter 11: Teacher: My Highest Potential
Chapter 11: Teacher: My Highest Potential
From a very early age I loved to teach and so it was with great joy that I received my first mission to teach grade six at St. James school in Toledo. It was a wonderful teaching experience, full of growth for me and hopefully for the students. I especially remember Jerry, a freckled face red head with mischief on his mind. He never ceased to make me laugh with his jokes and pranks. One day while I was explaining how in an orchestra every instrument has its part to speak, Jerry whispered to his neighbor: "If words were music, Sister would be a brass band." Actually this was quite accurate as I loved to tell stories.
Once for art class, we made paper bag puppets. As I used an elephant for an example, half the class chose to make elephants. Wanting to show them how creatively these puppets could be used, I produced a one man play about a sailor who after drinking pink lemonade began to see everyone and everything he met turn into an elephant. As I held up elephant after elephant in my little skit, the children were screaming with laughter. Finally my helping teacher came down from upstairs to see what all the commotion was about.
Story after story could be told about my first eight years of teaching elementary school. Since we taught all subjects, it was a great opportunity for creativity. I was queen of the classroom, but then I returned to the convent where I seemed to be another person, trying to keep the rule to perfection. It was like a dual existence and somehow I fofund energy in the classroom to endure the blandness of community life.
Two of my favorite years were teaching seventh grade boys at St. Joseph, Maumee. When teaching all boys you can call a spade a spade and no one gets bent out of shape. So it was that my outgoing, openly honest and somewhat humorous personality thrived in that environment.
The last of my eight years in grade shcool were spent with eighth grade girls at St. Joseph in Fremont. Here I managed to attract about nine girls to enter our aspirancy which was open to boarding hight school students at Notre Dame Academy.By that time I had graduated from college by bits and pieces of courses taken during the summer, on Saturdays or after school. I had also received a grant to study math at Dayton University and it was thus that I was transsferred to high school at Notre Dame Academy as math and religion teacher.
Knowing that I always enjoyed my teaching experience, I was not surprised when years later, after reading Sacred Contract by Carolyn Myss, that the teacher archetype landed in my tenth house as guardian of my highest potential.
