The spirit of Venantia

...She was inventive...

...they have gone on to other things...

...nor what scholastic fame . . . No failure mars this school's lexicon . . . The spirit of Venantia lives on...

...This year my own memories are laced with the half-remembered lines of an old verse...

...When we could write words we were rewarded by being able to draw practice paper from the' 'paper box'' in the back of the room, a carton she had filled with wonderful shiny paper she had salvaged from the high school whose students used only one side for their assignments...

...They publish in local and regional newspapers, trade journals, and club bulletins and bring out an occasional thin volume...

...She had come with three other sisters when our town was young and founded its parochial school...

...Sometimes it gets a little lonely-this being a Catholic writer who does not remember the teaching sisters of my childhood as either blighted or blighting...

...In writing of her Londroche was, like a bal-ladeer, expressing a common emotion: the spirit of Venantia lived on...

...The males in our class room were no mystery to the sisters who taught them or to us...

...Son of a famed steamboat pilot, Phil Londroche knew all the stories and the personalities of our valley...

...Real villains got low marks in "deportment" and faced the roars of the pastor and the wrath and shame of their parents on report card day...

...It is something of a comfort to know that Anthony Philip Londroche, who wrote those lines, didn't either...

...Everybody in our town knew of Sister Venantia...

...It goes like this: Venantia (and some words here are gone) came To teach the children of the pioneers...

...Life had altered and softened in the valley by the time it was my turn to go to school, but the sisters who taught me were the true daughters of Venantia...

...We knew we were sure what life was like and thought a little patronizingly of the sisters' idealism, if we gave it much attention at all...

...The spirit of Venantia lives on now in their work in prisons, in inner cities, in Latin America...

...Our expectations of the world of learning were shaped by Sister Anastasia who taught both first and second grades in a big square classroom which was sunny in the morning...

...Our schools, even at the secondary level, were co-educational...

...Not great verse, but to me, justifying...

...I don't think we should begrudge them this change...

...Of several minds: Abigail McCarthy THE SPIRIT OF VENANTIA WHAT SISTER REALLY SAID SCHOOL HAS started once again and most of us, seeing the brightly clad young go by, experience moments of fleeting nostalgia for the schoolroom...

...They were excited by the revival of Gregorian music, I recall, and by the nascent liturgical movement...

...The sisters are fewer now...

...Good solid teaching was the hallmark of their community-not for nothing called the School Sisters of Notre Dame-and they were enthusiastic teachers...

...Order was necessary for learning and they maintained it, but not once in twelve years did I see one of them resort to corporal punishment to do so...

...She set its traditions...

...The more obstreperous were summoned to sit on Sister's platform or were banished to the cloakroom...

...Somehow she made us feel that our learning was important to her and all the sisters...

...While she taught the second grade arithmetic we were set to outlining the "big A" and "little a" she had inscribed on our desks, with rows of corn kernels or watermelon seeds...

...Perhaps it was because we were so sure that their lives centered on teaching us that we didn't think of them as repressed or sex-starved...

...She little knew what anguish and what tears Would be their lot...

...I remember Sister Hildegarde balancing in her heavy habit on a log at river's edge trying to find and catch "specimens" for her biology class, Sister Francis Borgia rejoicing when we made it safely past the "pons asinorum" theorem in geometry, Sister Rudolphia's brown eyes glowing with pleasure when we could recite the first lines of Vergil...

...High schools like mine have disappeared one by one...

...It isn't that I don't believe those stories of vengeful nuns wielding rulers, it's just that they are only that to me-stories...

...Our wrong-doers stayed after school, did extra homework, or wrote I-must-not-this-or-that fifty or one hundred times...

...To him, and to me, the name Venantia was a name of legend...

...If, in our Catholic training, there was undue emphasis on modesty, virginity, and guilt, it didn't seem much different from the emphasis of our Lutheran and Congregationalist neighbors-and we had powerful correctives in the movies and the knowledgeable realities of small town gossip...

...Parochial schools are largely lay-staffed...

...That feeling persisted through our school years, reinforced by experience...

...She switched classes at fifteen-minute intervals, taught us games at recess time, prayed with us, played the piano-every classroom had one-and sang with us...

...They gave us a hint of the world institution which had concerns which went far beyond those of our local parish...

...The sisters brought back to us from retreats and from summer schools a larger sense of the church...

...Looking back I see now that social pressure was the key to order, and that the social climate had been created by Sister Venantia, a true woman of the pioneers...

...Her influence lingered...

...Strong, severe, devout, she put the fear of God into the rough and rowdy frontier children who filtered into school from the bluffs and coulees back from the river, and gave them a respect for learning...

...I remember Sister Mary Stephen, teacher of high school chemistry and physics, exclaiming when the school finally got a real laboratory with test tubes, Bunsen burners, and lab tables, "Just look, now you can really learn and, who knows, one of you may discover something wonderful...

...She led us in chanting the tables as we filed back and forth to the cloakroom, "Two times two is fo-ur, two times three is si-ix...

...She had taught both the generation of my grandparents and my parents...

...She taught phonics with verve, investing the old stories with such drama that to this day I feel for the boy who had the fishbone in his throat and said "cu, cu, cu,"-the sound of "c" at the beginning of a word-and the lost little lamb bleating "a-a-a--a...

...He was one of that legion of writers-strangers to the publishing world of the sophisticated-who celebrate America out there beyond the Hudson and the Potomac...

...But in this season of fantasies like Sister Mary Ignatius and Agnes of God on the New York stage, it seems a good time to pay tribute to the different, and real, sisters of my memory...

...Without them local lore would disappear...

...They enjoy local fame...

...A. Phil Londroche, as he preferred to be known, was a volunteer poet laureate of the upper Mississippi valley...

...Perhaps it was because in a little town we could compare them so readily-and whatever eccentricities they had-with those of the public school teachers who were endlessly discussed by their students, our friends...