Laughing While You Learn: My Dominican Education

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

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.

of worry. The Sisters showed us

how to reach out with mercy and without judgment.

By 2018 my career path led me back home. In a moment of great delight, I accepted a job in the Social Sciences Department at Mount de Sales. That summer, stepping onto the cobblestones on a humid August day, I had one of those nostalgic Hallmark movie moments where I imagined running up the stairs and hugging a white column. Instead, in true MDSA form, I fell up the stone steps and sprawled on the highest point of land in Baltimore County. It was a fitting homecoming—four years at

Mount de Sales under Dominican training taught me that while I am imperfect, God is loving, merciful, understanding…and has a very good sense of humor.

The school looked both the same and different from my era. My beloved 19th-century high school was still creaky, but had become a technological marvel with projectors, high-speed internet, 1:1 devices, and digital platforms that supported classroom activities. I would learn that the administrators and faculty carefully balanced that change by continuing to foster relationships among students. That

steadiness of purpose and emphasis on the importance of the human person transfers Dominican values across generations.

I, like over a dozen other staff and faculty alumnae at Mount de Sales, am a product of Dominican (and some Visitation) education. Though we may have tried to push the envelope with uniform adherence or sat in detention on occasion as teenagers, our eager return to climb these MDSA stairs is the sincerest way we can say, “We get it.” To all the Mount de Sales

Dominicans, past and present, thank you for guiding us, thank you for praying for us, and thank you for anchoring our hearts.

By: Ms. Laura O’Friel ’06 Director of Professional Development & Social Sciences Teacher