Long Experiment

In the spring of his second year, a novice will spend a semester at some Jesuit ministry away from the Novitiate, working full-time and living in a community of Jesuits of multiple generations. We call this the Long Experiment, because it is the longest single period a novice will spend away from the Novitiate. For my Long Experiment, I travelled to Creighton Prep, the Jesuit high school in Omaha, Nebraska.

My schedule at the school developed in time to be a little more open-ended than I would like. I would up teaching three math classes: two Sophomore Geometries and one Senior Trigonometry. The rest of my day was constructed according to my own planning. I hung out in the Campus Ministry office every day for about an hour, only heading elsewhere to plan for my next math class.

I had no experience teaching a class before and I was terrified. After two weeks of observation in my Trig class, I was thrust in front of the class to teach the next lesson, and I felt uncertain that I belonged there. In the first day, I talked to the board, not loudly enough to be heard in the back, and also over my students’ heads. I felt so embarrassed afterwards, but I slowly began to understand how things would work in the school.

I had a little bit longer to prepare for the Geometry classes, and I used the time learning from Trigonometry to better handle those two classes. For whatever reason, I felt more comfortable with the Geometry teacher than the Trigonometry one. And, by the end of the semester, both men trusted me enough to let me handle the class by myself. They guided a rookie teacher without any experience through the process of learning on the job.

In Campus Ministry, I worked a good deal with the liturgical team, helping to organize roughly 10 Masses, ranging in size from 200-1000 students, dealing with any number in between. I had some training in organizing liturgies from my undergraduate days at Loyola Chicago as well as from my time in the Novitiate. I felt comfortable and competent from the very beginning there.

My other main role involved helping with retreats. For the most part, I did not know what exactly I had been doing and I was constantly adjusting how I reacted around students who were minors. This was the first time that I had ever been the “adult leader” on any of these retreats. I had filled the role of a student leader before in structured retreats, but I had never attempted to figure it all out on my own before.

There naturally were some learning curves that I hit in both the classroom and in learning how to be comfortable with the students. I often felt like I left so much out on the table for my students to work through and gave them too much time in which to do it. This is the downside to attempting to teach on a block schedule. I simply followed the lead that the other teachers had laid out for me.

And yet, by the end I felt I had made a difference. I had been challenged to develop as a teacher in a discipline I knew well. I developed good relationships with a number of my students and I hoped to develop relationships with some of the teachers. It was also a bit of a challenge learning how to live in a small community of people who were all 20-50 years older than me, but I adapted. Some of the men I met there left an indelible mark on my heart and I feel so honored to have known them.

While my time at Creighton Prep was not always easy, it is a time that I continue to treasure, because I emerged from that environment still certain that I wanted to be a Jesuit for the rest of my life. I worked fine in active ministry and I would learn how to develop both in community and in the workplace. I have the rest of my (Jesuit) life to figure that out more fully.

Cover Image Omaha Skyline at Sunset, June 2010 by Flickr User Joe Wolf, via Flickr Creative Commons, available here.