Laughing While You Learn: My Dominican Education While the Visitation Nuns shaped the first century of Mount de Sales history, the Dominican Sisters steered the school during my student years in the early 2000s.
But you know what I realized. It’s really hard to be joyful, intelligent, and interested every day. Teaching feels like performing a stand-up routine for a bleary-eyed 8 a.m. audience and then asking your listeners to achieve high scores on the SATs.
As a student, I often heard that we would appreciate our Dominican education once we left Mount de Sales—our professors “And our Sisters would faint in awe at our cheerfully throw writing, our employers would marvel at our work themselves into ethic, and our new friends that seemingly would be slightly confused impossible when we waxed and task morning waned about a high school after morning with no air conditioning, a for decades of haunted fourth floor, and, their lives. They lo and behold, Sisters who radiate happiness were nice! That all seemed lovely, but when I graduated in 2006, I could not yet recognize the deeper anchor set in my heart.
and share their academic expertise with faculty, staff, students, and parents.”
During my first teaching assignment a few years later, I needed to figure out this new persona of “Ms. O’Friel.” Thankfully, I had inklings of my educational vocation as a student years before and had carefully watched my high school teachers. I copied what I remembered from the Dominican and lay faculty at Mount de Sales. They were joyful, intelligent, and always interested in our lives. I tried to carry those practices into my own classroom.
8 Dominican Difference
Top: Laura teaches in her classroom. Middle: Laura at her 2006 graduation Bottom: Laura and her mother, Jennie O’Friel, at the Mother-Daughter Tea.
And our Sisters cheerfully throw themselves into that seemingly impossible task morning after morning for decades of their lives. They radiate happiness and share their academic expertise with faculty, staff, students, and parents. When I walk through the building now and hear laughter rolling out from classrooms, I remember how much I smiled while I learned. Mount de Sales teachers make joyful classroom experiences normal, not impossible.
In times of trouble, we need to know our faith and look to role models who live out their beliefs. The Sisters trained us to be both walking catechists and women of compassion. Thought and action, reason and love. For any alumnae or current students reading this, I am sure you can call to mind a particular Dominican Sister who sacrificed her grading time to help you review for a test or counseled you in a moment
