After 43 years of teaching, last day of school nears

It's 3 p.m., and children are pouring down the halls of Blessed Sacrament School in Albany. A giggling gaggle pauses outside Maryann Thouin's third-grade classroom to discuss the merits of Jolly Rancher candies.

"Oh, these students are wound up today!" Ms. Thouin exclaims, returning from dismissal to a classroom still musty from being closed in all day. Ever since pit bulls were spotted in nearby Colby Park, students have been forced to spend recess indoors.

After 43 years of teaching, even attack dogs don't surprise Ms. Thouin. She's poured purple ink into mimeograph machines and attended long-ago teaching conferences where nuns in full habit vastly outnumbered lay teachers. She's seen the advent of TVs in the classroom and computers that help students do homework, as well as "broken homes" becoming nearly the norm.

Amazingly, she's observed all of that from the same school, teaching the same grade, since she graduated from The College of Saint Rose in Albany in 1961. And at the end of the school year, she'll be retiring.

Life of class

"I never thought I'd be going to college," mused the native of St. Helen's parish in Niskayuna. With five children in her family, her parents had no money to send her, so she took a business course in high school and assumed she'd work in an office.

Then one of the sisters who taught her told her about the Bishop's Scholarship Fund: Five girls from her class would be chosen to receive full college tuition if they agreed to teach in a Catholic school for two years.

Ms. Thouin was one of the winners. As soon as she completed college, she flipped through the phone book and called all the Catholic schools she found, quickly landing an interview for a teaching position at Blessed Sacrament.

There was only one hitch: When she arrived for her interview with Msgr. John Forman (since deceased), "he wasn't even here. He had forgotten I was coming!"

Luckily, being a CSR graduate earned Ms. Thouin the job anyway.

Blessed beginning

Blessed Sacrament was located in another building back then and later used two buildings before settling into its current home on Central Avenue. Ms. Thouin calculated that she's been around through four pastors, six principals, 1,200 students -- and about the same number of gerbils.

Gerbils are what she's become famous for. Every year, she buys a pair of gerbils for her classroom, which have babies every six weeks or so. Her third-graders learn about caring for pets and observe how gerbils take care of their offspring, and then she gives the baby gerbils to pet stores or students.

Age of innocence

As much as children have changed over the years, Ms. Thouin noted wryly that even gerbil births don't cause the third-graders to ask questions about the facts of life: They're still too young.

"This is a great age," she said of her students. "This is the age where they're beyond being babies and are getting independent, but they're not thinking about boys. They have interest in everything. I love to put on plays, and third-graders love things like that."

Some things have changed in four decades. Ms. Thouin mourns the fact that computers help students do so much -- even games instruct them in what to do -- that they sometimes have trouble thinking for themselves.

"To sit down and write a story, to use their imagination, is very hard," she said.

Changes along the way

Kids don't have the amount of free time their teacher remembers having as a child, either. When Ms. Thouin started teaching, most of her students went home for lunch; now, none does.

Without recess, the kids sit on the classroom floor and play with wildly-popular Beyblades tops or Bratz dolls.

On the other hand, the teacher has gone from having to cover all subjects to having separate teachers for Spanish, music and gym. CSR student teachers also pitch in for art classes; and remedial reading and math aid are available so students don't have to be split into "fast" and "slow" reading groups as they once were.

"That's a big help!" Ms. Thouin said.

Diversity

Tolerance has vastly improved since Ms. Thouin's teaching career began. She recalled being horrified when a student responded to Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1968 assassination with, "My father says it's about time."

Now, "kids are much more able to accept people who are different," she stated. From race to not laughing at wrong answers from their peers, Ms. Thouin said that "Christian attitudes" are universal in her racially diverse class.

"Kids are always so `up,'" she added. "Even when they have their own problems, they don't think about them all day long. In the beginning, I was more impatient, but they teach you patience. And kids never carry a grudge -- they teach you to forgive and forget."

Time to stop

At the beginning of this school year, Ms. Thouin thought she'd keep her decision to retire quiet for a while. But some of her students' mothers knew, so the children quickly found out.

Ever since, "all I've heard all year is, `Oh, Miss Thouin, why do you have to retire?'" she said.

But the time has come. Ms. Thouin has arthritis and her knees bother her, so she has to spend more time sitting down while teaching, which isn't a good idea with active youngsters. She'll also turn 65 this year -- and the thought of teaching the grandchildren of her original classes is startling.

"I'll miss teaching. I don't know what I'm going to do," she noted. "But relaxing is going to be part of it!"

Inheritance

As her final class takes spelling tests, studies Nobel Prize winners Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat, and earns plastic daisies for good behavior, Ms. Thouin is cleaning out closets packed with decades of accumulated teaching materials.

"The kindergarten teacher's daughter is going to be a teacher, so I'm `willing' her a lot of my decorations," she explained. "I can't believe it's been 43 years."

Several decades ago, Ms. Thouin's family asked if she wanted to teach at a public school, where her salary would be higher. If she had said yes, she admitted, "I'd probably be making twice as much as I am now." But she thinks of Blessed Sacrament as a second home.

"Let's face it: None of the teachers are here for the money," she stated. "It must be because they have an interest in the Catholic faith. We can talk about religion openly."

Personally, she said, "I can't imagine going through the Christmas season without talking about Jesus."

(1/22/04)