MEMORIES OF MY HOME TOWN, LOREAUVILLE, LA
Few people I have met over the years have had the privilege of growing up in a village as wonderful and nurturing as Loreauville. During my forty year career as an educator in three states and twelve schools, I introduced myself to my new students on that first day of class by relating some of the following vignettes of my years growing up in Loreauville.
They were spellbound by my heartfelt stories about
• amazing teachers, nuns and priests who guided our social and religious development
• the anomaly of being served delectable cafeteria food
• being taught to drive by my paternal grandfather who propped me up on a huge road grader
• convincing the principal to let me drop a physical education class so I could take an additional academic class
• wading in knee deep water on Main street after a torrential rain
• being enveloped in insecticide as we chased those “mosquito-spraying” trucks
• eating organic food [fresh vegetables, fresh milk, and all manner of meat and fish] dad obtained bartering with customers
• plucking kumquats and mandarin oranges from a friend's yard
• playing marbles and handling snakes
• collecting flattened pennies from the railroad track
• shopping for school clothes at my grandfather's General Merchandise Store,
• keeping track of the summer reading books I checked out from the public library
• being taught to dance by our household help
• riding horses
• skiing at Lake Dauterieve
• jitterbugging
• driving my granddad's black Bat mobile recklessly around town with my friends as they recited Hail Marys in the back seat
• wearing couture dresses fashioned by my artistic, talented grandmother to prom
• sitting on the porch swing at my best friend's house, pretending we were famous actresses
• checking the cash register at my dad's business to figure out how much his other daughters were extracting from the till
• being mentored in flute and piccolo by the principal's son
• wearing hats and gloves to Sunday mass
• drinking cokes with our family at a neighborhood bar after mass
• eating lunch at Masso’s
• sitting on bar stools watching Mr. C cook hamburgers
• watching Mrs. C painstakingly repair rosaries
• dancing to the jukebox
• speeding away from our only policeman as he tried to hunt me down for any manner of traffic violations
• riding the bus to school so I could socialize with friends
• dating my first love
• laughing at Robbie’s jokes as we commuted to USL for summer sessions
• watching my great uncle repair horseshoes in his metal shop
• enjoying the scented smoke from uncle's cigars
• tasting a slice of ham from my grandfather's meat deli
• being awakened by the scent of gardenias wafting up to my bedroom window
• hanging freshly-laundered clothes on clotheslines in the back yard
• singing “Lullaby and Good Night” to my baby brother as I rocked him to sleep
• watching my youngest sister chomp on newly-purchased tube of lipstick
• drinking fresh rain water from grandmother's cistern
• acting as an angel in the May religious observance of the Holy Mother
• serving as a Hail Mary rosary bead on the football field as our pastor recited the rosary
• sitting on my godmother's porch poring over beautiful clothing from Spiegel’s
• listening to my Catholic mother remind me that Jesus or the Kennedys might visit so I would clean the house extra well
• listening to our talented neighbor play a rousing ragtime rendition on her piano
• participating in a minstrel at the church hall
• being scared stiff by grandmother as she navigated Main Street by driving on the sidewalk to buy fabric at a local store
• listening to a town character talk about myriad subjects and watching him drive away on his brightly festooned bike
• spending the night at a classmates' house at a nearby lake
• cramming for tests in the First Aid room near the stage during recess and lunch
• being anesthetized by the smell of the oil-mopped floors at our high school
• tasting succulent sugar cane stalks plucked from a cane field
• picking pecans in the fall
• being assaulted by flit can spray during mosquito season
• and my most-treasured memory, being nestled in a cocoon of safety, warmth, support, and encouragement by my village family and friends
My students were instantly mesmerized as I recalled memories of my growing up years, and thanked God that this was going to be an easy class, not so. I taught a World Religions Gifted Honors class: holy books and epics on a worldwide scale--Old and New Testament studies, Sumerian and Egyptian literature, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Zoroastrianism, Persian-Arabic, and Chinese-Japanese studies.
My challenge was to engage and excite these students to reach beyond their comfort zones, to obtain an understanding of the importance of religion and history on a global scale, and to inspire them to love learning. And so, I told them specifically how my small town education had inspired and motivated me to life-long learning.
I recollected for them how my educational life was framed by my nurturing and sometimes excitingly eccentric teachers:
• Mrs. Gonsoulin, who in first grade, taught memorization with her piano playing sing- alongs and read memorable stories.
• the spinster Boutte sisters: dark-haired, stout Antoinette, who taught students to memorize and recite history passages,
• and her gray-haired sister Camille, who began every class with a dose of powdered B.C. powder poured into a coke bottle. One day we noticed she skipped the medication and promptly snipped off, with scissors, a peeking slip strap that refused to stay inside her dress. She was a solemn woman who loved us and taught us to love reading.
• Mrs. Segura, a perpetual dieter, ate boiled eggs every day, and to this day, I loathe the smell of eggs. A fantastic teacher, she taught learning strategies, organizational skills, and self-esteem through her lessons on the importance of note-taking, organizing notebooks, and individual student presentations. I still have the family history project she assigned.
• Mr. Dressel, affectionately labeled Mr. D, taught me that good teaching involved knowing students’ learning styles. I developed a subdued interest in science, and I studied relentlessly, so I could make A’s in biology and chemistry, because I knew those classes were important. My forte was always English classes. And to this day, I realize how much content I remember from his classes, and how his unique teaching ability to create camaraderie among students helped us to work together as a class and helped me to realize the importance of knowing my students.
• Mrs. Gerhardt appeared later in my high school career. As Mom Wick would have noted, “She is an Ah-mer-ee-kan [sic], ” meaning that she was not a resident of Loreauville, an outsider. But what an amazingly mature climate she created in our English classroom! I had always loved reading, but she was able to inspire me to appreciate the nuances of literature that most students would not be able to discern. I realized later how she created an atmosphere of mutual respect between student and teacher.
• Mrs. Lalonde, my Home Economics teacher, taught us civility, femininity, style, modesty, moderation and sewing, and cooking in her Home Economics classes. I made a lined wool suit as my senior project. When I first married I sewed all my clothes, my children’s clothing, and created all the window treatments for our many homes. Today Home Economics teachers are seldom part of the curriculum in large schools. What a treasure she was! She administered essay tests on home economics content [writing], showed us how to follow recipes [math], taught us how substitute ingredients [science], how to hide figure flaws [remember her postage stamp girdle? I always envied her tiny frame], taught us how to set a formal table, encouraged us to enter sewing and cooking competitions, and to use fresh ingredients in recipes. I still use my Home Economics book to this day. She asked me to study for district Rally competition at USL. I escaped to Mom Wick’s house, locked myself in her guest bedroom for an entire month one summer, and studied for months, pouring over lecture notes, books, and demonstration notes. I won first place at USL, then first place at State completion, and was awarded the Betty Crocker Homemaker Award my senior year. Mrs. Lalonde taught Home Economics 1-4 in a four-room white cottage attached to the school by a walkway.
• Mr. Lissard was a phenomenal math teacher. As a particularly right-brained learner, I struggled in math classes and had to work particularly hard to rise to the challenge. He gave good explanations to those of us who may not have caught on immediately to a math concept. He taught me that not all students learn the same way. It was the first exceptional challenge I had in my entire high school career. And, he drew football plays on the board; football players in his classes must have served as a particular challenge to him since he was head Coach for many years. I had the privilege of learning football concepts as well. Today educators use the term multi-dimensional learning to describe a class such as this.
• Mrs. Olive Shaw,our British Literature teacher, loved Shakespeare. I remember reading Macbeth, unedited and unadapted, in our senior year. Many years later when I taught British Literature to my students, I told them how I struggled with Shakespeare’s language in high school but came to appreciate the mastery of his language later in life as I poured over all 37 plays during my teaching career. I showed them my high school English textbook, and they wanted to know why there were no pictures. Mrs. Shaw had us recite lines, broke the play down into segments [today called chunking], and assigned lines that we had to explain in front of the class. She expected us all to read the play and come to class prepared. Some students, thinking she would not notice, read the comic book or Cliff Notes versions of Macbeth. From her class, I learned to inspire students to challenges and to eviscerate a student verbally in a nicely-worded manner.
• Ms. Breaux, the LHS librarian, was an enormously powerful force in the Loreauville community. As the public school librarian and community activist, she knew all of us, or parents, our friends, and our acquaintances, much more than we expected anyone to know about us. She was omnipresent—we couldn’t escape her. She attended meetings, church events, hunted us down in classes, followed our extra curricular school activities and served as a prototype of the Renaissance man. Encouraging us to read and learn was her forte. She brought the outside world into our lives by suggesting reading titles and scheduling slide show presentations at the church hall from her world travels. I marveled at her ability to use media other than books and pictures at a time when media presentations were not the norm. She kept us on task when we used resources in the school library and prevented any sort of shenanigans students had in mind. She taught me about classifying books by explaining the Dewey Decimal System. I had three majors in college: English, French, and Media, at a time in the sixties before the arrival of the Information age. She encouraged, motivated, and cajoled me to learn beyond my greatest expectations. I often wondered how she maintained such a vigorous, healthy lifestyle and an amazing physique. She was at the forefront in our town in terms of meditation, travel, gardening, reading, and learning. I marveled at her quest for knowledge. She wanted to master everything she learned. I recall her asking my grandmother, an expert seamstress, to help her learn to sew. She took canning classes at the school cafeteria and showed us how to pray to specific saints for important causes. She was not subtle; she did not mince words, and although her strong personality may have offended some people, I loved her the way a child loves a mentor. All of my teachers inspired me, but she is the reason I chose teaching as my lifelong profession.
Few people I have met over the years have had the privilege of growing up in a village as wonderful and nurturing as Loreauville. During my forty year career as an educator in three states and twelve schools, I introduced myself to my new students on that first day of class by relating some of the following vignettes of my years growing up in Loreauville.
They were spellbound by my heartfelt stories about
• amazing teachers, nuns and priests who guided our social and religious development
• the anomaly of being served delectable cafeteria food
• being taught to drive by my paternal grandfather who propped me up on a huge road grader
• convincing the principal to let me drop a physical education class so I could take an additional academic class
• wading in knee deep water on Main street after a torrential rain
• being enveloped in insecticide as we chased those “mosquito-spraying” trucks
• eating organic food [fresh vegetables, fresh milk, and all manner of meat and fish] dad obtained bartering with customers
• plucking kumquats and mandarin oranges from a friend's yard
• playing marbles and handling snakes
• collecting flattened pennies from the railroad track
• shopping for school clothes at my grandfather's General Merchandise Store,
• keeping track of the summer reading books I checked out from the public library
• being taught to dance by our household help
• riding horses
• skiing at Lake Dauterieve
• jitterbugging
• driving my granddad's black Bat mobile recklessly around town with my friends as they recited Hail Marys in the back seat
• wearing couture dresses fashioned by my artistic, talented grandmother to prom
• sitting on the porch swing at my best friend's house, pretending we were famous actresses
• checking the cash register at my dad's business to figure out how much his other daughters were extracting from the till
• being mentored in flute and piccolo by the principal's son
• wearing hats and gloves to Sunday mass
• drinking cokes with our family at a neighborhood bar after mass
• eating lunch at Masso’s
• sitting on bar stools watching Mr. C cook hamburgers
• watching Mrs. C painstakingly repair rosaries
• dancing to the jukebox
• speeding away from our only policeman as he tried to hunt me down for any manner of traffic violations
• riding the bus to school so I could socialize with friends
• dating my first love
• laughing at Robbie’s jokes as we commuted to USL for summer sessions
• watching my great uncle repair horseshoes in his metal shop
• enjoying the scented smoke from uncle's cigars
• tasting a slice of ham from my grandfather's meat deli
• being awakened by the scent of gardenias wafting up to my bedroom window
• hanging freshly-laundered clothes on clotheslines in the back yard
• singing “Lullaby and Good Night” to my baby brother as I rocked him to sleep
• watching my youngest sister chomp on newly-purchased tube of lipstick
• drinking fresh rain water from grandmother's cistern
• acting as an angel in the May religious observance of the Holy Mother
• serving as a Hail Mary rosary bead on the football field as our pastor recited the rosary
• sitting on my godmother's porch poring over beautiful clothing from Spiegel’s
• listening to my Catholic mother remind me that Jesus or the Kennedys might visit so I would clean the house extra well
• listening to our talented neighbor play a rousing ragtime rendition on her piano
• participating in a minstrel at the church hall
• being scared stiff by grandmother as she navigated Main Street by driving on the sidewalk to buy fabric at a local store
• listening to a town character talk about myriad subjects and watching him drive away on his brightly festooned bike
• spending the night at a classmates' house at a nearby lake
• cramming for tests in the First Aid room near the stage during recess and lunch
• being anesthetized by the smell of the oil-mopped floors at our high school
• tasting succulent sugar cane stalks plucked from a cane field
• picking pecans in the fall
• being assaulted by flit can spray during mosquito season
• and my most-treasured memory, being nestled in a cocoon of safety, warmth, support, and encouragement by my village family and friends
My students were instantly mesmerized as I recalled memories of my growing up years, and thanked God that this was going to be an easy class, not so. I taught a World Religions Gifted Honors class: holy books and epics on a worldwide scale--Old and New Testament studies, Sumerian and Egyptian literature, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Zoroastrianism, Persian-Arabic, and Chinese-Japanese studies.
My challenge was to engage and excite these students to reach beyond their comfort zones, to obtain an understanding of the importance of religion and history on a global scale, and to inspire them to love learning. And so, I told them specifically how my small town education had inspired and motivated me to life-long learning.
I recollected for them how my educational life was framed by my nurturing and sometimes excitingly eccentric teachers:
• Mrs. Gonsoulin, who in first grade, taught memorization with her piano playing sing- alongs and read memorable stories.
• the spinster Boutte sisters: dark-haired, stout Antoinette, who taught students to memorize and recite history passages,
• and her gray-haired sister Camille, who began every class with a dose of powdered B.C. powder poured into a coke bottle. One day we noticed she skipped the medication and promptly snipped off, with scissors, a peeking slip strap that refused to stay inside her dress. She was a solemn woman who loved us and taught us to love reading.
• Mrs. Segura, a perpetual dieter, ate boiled eggs every day, and to this day, I loathe the smell of eggs. A fantastic teacher, she taught learning strategies, organizational skills, and self-esteem through her lessons on the importance of note-taking, organizing notebooks, and individual student presentations. I still have the family history project she assigned.
• Mr. Dressel, affectionately labeled Mr. D, taught me that good teaching involved knowing students’ learning styles. I developed a subdued interest in science, and I studied relentlessly, so I could make A’s in biology and chemistry, because I knew those classes were important. My forte was always English classes. And to this day, I realize how much content I remember from his classes, and how his unique teaching ability to create camaraderie among students helped us to work together as a class and helped me to realize the importance of knowing my students.
• Mrs. Gerhardt appeared later in my high school career. As Mom Wick would have noted, “She is an Ah-mer-ee-kan [sic], ” meaning that she was not a resident of Loreauville, an outsider. But what an amazingly mature climate she created in our English classroom! I had always loved reading, but she was able to inspire me to appreciate the nuances of literature that most students would not be able to discern. I realized later how she created an atmosphere of mutual respect between student and teacher.
• Mrs. Lalonde, my Home Economics teacher, taught us civility, femininity, style, modesty, moderation and sewing, and cooking in her Home Economics classes. I made a lined wool suit as my senior project. When I first married I sewed all my clothes, my children’s clothing, and created all the window treatments for our many homes. Today Home Economics teachers are seldom part of the curriculum in large schools. What a treasure she was! She administered essay tests on home economics content [writing], showed us how to follow recipes [math], taught us how substitute ingredients [science], how to hide figure flaws [remember her postage stamp girdle? I always envied her tiny frame], taught us how to set a formal table, encouraged us to enter sewing and cooking competitions, and to use fresh ingredients in recipes. I still use my Home Economics book to this day. She asked me to study for district Rally competition at USL. I escaped to Mom Wick’s house, locked myself in her guest bedroom for an entire month one summer, and studied for months, pouring over lecture notes, books, and demonstration notes. I won first place at USL, then first place at State completion, and was awarded the Betty Crocker Homemaker Award my senior year. Mrs. Lalonde taught Home Economics 1-4 in a four-room white cottage attached to the school by a walkway.
• Mr. Lissard was a phenomenal math teacher. As a particularly right-brained learner, I struggled in math classes and had to work particularly hard to rise to the challenge. He gave good explanations to those of us who may not have caught on immediately to a math concept. He taught me that not all students learn the same way. It was the first exceptional challenge I had in my entire high school career. And, he drew football plays on the board; football players in his classes must have served as a particular challenge to him since he was head Coach for many years. I had the privilege of learning football concepts as well. Today educators use the term multi-dimensional learning to describe a class such as this.
• Mrs. Olive Shaw,our British Literature teacher, loved Shakespeare. I remember reading Macbeth, unedited and unadapted, in our senior year. Many years later when I taught British Literature to my students, I told them how I struggled with Shakespeare’s language in high school but came to appreciate the mastery of his language later in life as I poured over all 37 plays during my teaching career. I showed them my high school English textbook, and they wanted to know why there were no pictures. Mrs. Shaw had us recite lines, broke the play down into segments [today called chunking], and assigned lines that we had to explain in front of the class. She expected us all to read the play and come to class prepared. Some students, thinking she would not notice, read the comic book or Cliff Notes versions of Macbeth. From her class, I learned to inspire students to challenges and to eviscerate a student verbally in a nicely-worded manner.
• Ms. Breaux, the LHS librarian, was an enormously powerful force in the Loreauville community. As the public school librarian and community activist, she knew all of us, or parents, our friends, and our acquaintances, much more than we expected anyone to know about us. She was omnipresent—we couldn’t escape her. She attended meetings, church events, hunted us down in classes, followed our extra curricular school activities and served as a prototype of the Renaissance man. Encouraging us to read and learn was her forte. She brought the outside world into our lives by suggesting reading titles and scheduling slide show presentations at the church hall from her world travels. I marveled at her ability to use media other than books and pictures at a time when media presentations were not the norm. She kept us on task when we used resources in the school library and prevented any sort of shenanigans students had in mind. She taught me about classifying books by explaining the Dewey Decimal System. I had three majors in college: English, French, and Media, at a time in the sixties before the arrival of the Information age. She encouraged, motivated, and cajoled me to learn beyond my greatest expectations. I often wondered how she maintained such a vigorous, healthy lifestyle and an amazing physique. She was at the forefront in our town in terms of meditation, travel, gardening, reading, and learning. I marveled at her quest for knowledge. She wanted to master everything she learned. I recall her asking my grandmother, an expert seamstress, to help her learn to sew. She took canning classes at the school cafeteria and showed us how to pray to specific saints for important causes. She was not subtle; she did not mince words, and although her strong personality may have offended some people, I loved her the way a child loves a mentor. All of my teachers inspired me, but she is the reason I chose teaching as my lifelong profession.
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