- Community
- Culture
- Formation
When I came to work at the Saint Constantine School and started wandering the halls, many of my new coworkers met my presence with a wink and a smile.
“Good morning, Ms. Robleto,” they would say, as though the honorific were an inside joke. It almost was. Many of those new coworkers knew very well – perhaps too well – who I was. I graduated from the school in May 2020, and many of my new coworkers had, not so very long ago, been my teachers.
One afternoon in late August, my prior knowledge came in very handy. I was substituting for a second-grade class and, while trying to calm a slow-forming line of eager children waiting for recess, regaled them with information and a tale from my days as a student. I tried to tell them about the time I was handed a sword cane with which to hit a piñata. Before I could explain that I had no idea it was a sword cane and that, as I swung, the hidden blade leaped from its sheath at lightning speed and dented the opposite wall, I had to explain a good portion of the Reynolds family tree. The students, you see, had just had P.E. with young Mr. Reynolds and were confused as to why he had a sword cane – which granted me the privilege of explaining that it was actually young Mr. Reynolds’s father, Dr. Reynolds, to whom the sword cane belonged.
Piñatas and sword canes aside – for many people, that first job after undergrad is a plunge into utterly unknown waters. It is a full emergence into the adult world – no more parents holding your hand and telling you what to do unless you reach out and ask, no old friends haunting or blessing your steps. My experience has been immensely different. My first job after college has felt, to a large degree, like coming home.
I was fortunate enough to be on North Campus on a Tuesday morning. I could hear my brothers, both high school students, playing the piano in the distance. Music has always been welcome here – I remember singing to kindergartners as a friend played ukelele during lunch breaks – and our choirs grow stronger each year. How beautiful is that – to work at a place where music is welcome?
Many families, including my own, support this school and are supported in turn. The presence of many married couples who each teach attests to the importance of family to our community. It also means that there are many babies on campus – and how beautiful is that, to work in a place where babies are welcome?
Something I remember from high school retreats that returned during faculty colloquium is the hope and belief that a good culture can exist, and that efforts to create it are never in vain. Something I have absorbed by osmosis – a theory I will be testing as I continue wandering through my life – is that a healthy community welcomes music and babies.
A healthy community must also be able to accommodate meaningful discussion. As a student, I learned there was such a thing as objective truth and that to pursue that truth was of paramount importance – life-or-death, heaven-or-hell importance. Simultaneously, however, I learned that a human person is far more than their thoughts and beliefs. The dialectic needs both things to exist – hope that truth may be found and love of one’s fellow-travelers along the road.
A student rarely returns to a school they did not love. I have said many things implicitly in my decision to try to teach at the school that taught me. I am saying that I believe that what I received has worked for me, that it was worth receiving – and, furthermore, that I am both called and uniquely suited to hand on the gifts I was given here.