The ACE Post

When prompted to “share a recap of ACE summer” for this blog post, the repressed theatre kid inside me instinctively started singing “Seasons of Love” from the musical Rent:

A huge lesson I learned from both the ACE Ambassador program and my first year of teaching at Little Flower School in Mobile is that the following prayer, written in honor of St. Oscar Romero, an archbishop and martyr of the Church, is frustratingly true:

The past two weeks, the ACE community has celebrated a joyous return to one of the traditions that marks the ACE experience: community retreat.

Since March 2020, the pieces of our community have been scattered across the country. Retreats that defined the major moments in an ACE teacher’s journey - whether in April, June or December - had been hosted virtually or in a hybrid setting. But starting with the arrival of ACE 28 on Memorial Day weekend the ACE community became whole again. Joy and gratitude permeates Dillon Hall, ACE teachers’ home for the summer.

I love acting like a child. If one of the love languages was goofing around, playing pretend, and making funny faces, that would be mine. Not a day goes by when I don’t think back on how careless and fun my childhood was. Especially now, as a middle school teacher, I am constantly bringing back memories from my own eighth-grade experience to help me relate to my students better. However, I knew when I joined ACE that I wouldn’t be acting like a child in class. One of the pillars of ACE is professionalism, and besides that, I was now responsible for someone’s child for the majority of the week. There is a time for the child-like goofiness, and a time for professionalism and responsibility.

The people make the place and ACE Jacksonville has a lot of sacred spaces for me. When moving to an unfamiliar place with unfamiliar folks, we create safe havens together that sustain joy. Take a peak at five places that harbor ACE JAX community life.

“Catch only what you’ve thrown yourself,
all is mere skill and little gain;
but when you’re suddenly the catcher of a ball
thrown by an eternal partner
with accurate and measured swing
towards you, to your center, in an arch
from the great bridgebuilding of God:
why catching then becomes a power—
not yours, a world’s.”

Besides providing a convenient title for this post, Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem extends a not-so-convenient invitation – the same invitation that Jesus extends to us – “step outside your comfort zone, and follow me.” To every person that says “YES” to teaching in Catholic schools around the country, ACE extends this very same invitation. In this way, ACE is fundamentally an invitation to participate in bridgebuilding. All too often, however, we believe that we are the only ones building the bridges.

Weston is a current Notre Dame senior who will be serving as a member of ACE 28 in Tampa, Florida. The following reflection was recently published in The Observer.

I came to Notre Dame as a nondenominational Protestant. My parents raised my brothers and me in a Christian home in the southwest suburbs of Chicago. Throughout my childhood, we attended Sunday services semi-regularly at a nearby nondenominational church that drew heavily on evangelical teaching. During my high school years, I became very involved in the church’s youth group, participating in service and gaining a better understanding of the Gospel. My Christian faith played an important role in my life at that time, and I considered it a critical part of my identity.

“I watch what I do to see what I believe.”
- Sr. Helen Prejean, CSJ

There’s a fine line between being “hungry” and being an obsessive sourpuss. Until very recently, I had no real appreciation of the contours of that line. In fact, it was just two years ago – at the tail end of a visit that Sr. Helen Prejean, CSJ made to the ACE community. 

For those who may be unfamiliar with Sr. Helen, she is perhaps best known as the author of Dead Man Walking, an acclaimed account of her work with two death row prisoners at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, which ignited a national conversation about the death penalty. She has spent more than 40 years fighting for the abolition of capital punishment, working tirelessly with policy makers, law enforcement officials, and Church leaders – and accompanying death row inmates in their final hours.

Of all of the delightful moments during her time with the ACE community, the one that resonated most deeply with me occurred at the end of her trip. After dropping her off at the airport - just as I got back to campus - I got a call from Sr. Helen. “John-boy!”, she said, “It’s Sr. Helen. I left my computer at the hotel!”

I raced to the hotel, retrieved the computer, and tried to observe as many traffic laws as possible on the return trip. As I pulled up, Sr. Helen was standing at the curb with a huge smile. We chatted for a bit and got ready to part. Just as she was about to head to her flight, she put her hand on my shoulder and said 

“Don’t you forget – God made you to do great things. Don’t waste time trying to figure it out. Give God permission to move you.”

Each of you was made for greatness. So, too, was each of your students. The hunger you are called to embody is about much more than ambition. It is a function of what Martin Luther King, Jr. called “divine dissatisfaction.” You set high expectations for your students – not because it is what your school demands – but rather because it is what your students deserve. You persist in the more frustrating dimensions of teaching – not because that is what successful people do – but because you love your students so much that you put their success ahead of your own. You know that the clearest indication of what you believe isn’t what you say or how you feel. It is what you actually do. “I came so that they might have life,” says Jesus, “and have it more abundantly.” You have an incredible opportunity to help your students live life more abundantly. I pray that you’ll give God permission to move you to do so. It took a curbside conversation with a firecracker Cajun nun for me to figure that out. For that, I will be eternally grateful.Give God permission to move you.

Loving God, I recognize you are always with me and your movements are in everything I do. Help me see you reflected in the person I am becoming and in my daily work. Amen.

It is five minutes past the first bell, and a timid freshman peeks with her usual hesitancy into my classroom. Her tears show that she’s upset, although I do not need so see them to know it. Lilah usually does not conceal her feelings. She is also readily trusting, without protective barriers that make her wary about telling me the cause of her crying. I stand by; I am beside her. I am not immediately convinced that I’m doing enough, but I am committed to remaining present to her.

Jess Zlaket (Fort Worth) and Peter Spalitto (Atlanta) are finishing their second years as ACE teachers as they transition to become part of the Teaching Fellows’ pastoral team. They joined ACE 28, the newest members of ACE Teaching Fellows, on their annual April Retreat and reflected on both sides of their journey.

My alarm clock is set to the same time this year as it has been for the past four years -- 5:30 AM. Walking into my dark classroom at Cristo Rey Dallas is a lot like walking into the dark locker room to get ready for morning practice. Similar to my years as a college athlete, most days I find myself taking a deep breath, having a sip of coffee, and saying a quick prayer before I turn on my classroom lights and say yes to the grind of the day ahead. When I chose to swim at Notre Dame, a lot of people told me that being a college athlete would be the hardest thing I would ever do. They were right! When I chose to do ACE, move to Dallas, and teach high schoolers for the next two years, several others told me being a first-year teacher would be the hardest thing I would ever do. They were right, too!

I always thought that a teacher’s job began and ended with the school day. They wake up around 6, get to school by 7, teach back-to-back classes until the final bell at 2:30 in the afternoon, go home after an hour of grading or a faculty meeting, and then spend the rest of their evenings how any other person would – perhaps a workout, a nap, family time, or TV time. 

With nearly one full academic year of teaching under my belt (ahh!), I can easily confirm that a teacher’s job does not exist exclusively between the hours of 7 a.m. and 3 p.m. The daily logistics (planning, grading, meetings), ever-expanding to-do lists (emails, class newsletter creation, more emails), and emotions (joyous celebrations, occasional heavy-heartedness, and, this year, frequent Zoom fatigue) that characterize the beautiful busyness of education cannot be confined to eight hours each day. 

My freshman year, I became a founding member of a baseball analytics team here at Notre Dame. Although I’ve never played baseball, it has always been my favorite sport, so I was enamored with the opportunity to “play” baseball with analytics. Led by a couple of juniors, we focused on researching college baseball, and then we worked with the varsity team to provide them with data-driven insights for practices and games. I was brand new to the technical aspects of our work and strived to be a diligent student learning from these juniors.

On my way to proctor breakfast duty, I think about the four minutes following our morning bell. Soon, at 9:15 a.m., the first bell will ring, giving students four minutes to head from breakfast to homeroom and granting me those same, precious four minutes to print the eighth-grade religion worksheets, send a student to the office for morning announcements, stick an IEP form in a colleague’s mailbox, and if all goes according to plan, grab a cup of coffee in stride to class.

“But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him.”  - Luke 15:19

Sometime last year, in the space between the New Year and the start of Lent, Kalie Paranzino led our Sacramento community in a beautiful prayer centered on finding and painting our “word” of the year that could become an easily-repeated meditative prayer mantra. When we hung up our five words in our dining room, we did not know what this year would hold or what those words could come to mean.