One of my biggest influences as a reader, a writer, and as a
person recently died after a long illness.
Sister
Mona Hecker was my English teacher in parochial school from grades five
through eight, which is a very critical period in one’s life in many regards. It’s during those years that we decide a lot
of things, including if reading and writing are things we do for pleasure, or
become merely functions that must be undertaken to get by in day-to-day
life. Sister Mona seemed to make it her
mission that her students would choose the former over the latter. She was passionate about life, her students,
and literacy, and it was easy for us as kids to see that.
Sister Mona Hecker, with that same smile I knew 30+ years ago.
Photo from the Lewiston Sun-Journal
The first thing that pops into my head when I think of
Sister Mona is that she was the first teacher who read great books aloud to my
classmates and I on a daily basis. And
by “great books”, I mean books of high quality yet also appealing to kids the
age my classmates and I were. She
introduced us to a boy who adopted a baby raccoon in Sterling North’s Rascal, and to a girl facing many of the
same adolescent trials and tribulations as us in Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh.
Every year around Halloween, she read something from Edgar Allen Poe to
us, and with great feeling. “The
Tell-Tale Heart” blew our young minds the year she shared it with us. I still hear it in Sister Mona’s voice when I
read the lines where the murderer confesses his horrible deed.
She of course insisted that we be readers ourselves, and
showed us that being a real reader and being a student in reading class were
two different things. Up until I was in
Sister Mona’s class, “reading” in school was made up entirely of going over
short, mind-numbingly dull passages in dusty old textbooks, followed by doing
endless and mindless worksheets. I was a
bookworm from a very young age, and read a lot in my spare time, but saw very
little connection between my own reading and so-called “reading class”. Sister Mona changed all that by asking that
we read whatever we wanted. Her
classroom library was large and varied, and she made full use of the school
library as well. An occasional book
report was required, primarily for grading purposes, but most of the time, she
held us accountable by randomly calling us up to her desk while everyone else
was reading at their seats and simply asking us one on one to tell her a little
about our current book for a few minutes.
It was very low-key, but very effective.
Sister Mona never neglected the skills side of English
either. Diagramming sentences was one of
her favorite things, and though such activity could have been deadly in the
hands of a lesser instructor, she actually made diagramming somewhat
entertaining. I have no doubt that I
learned a lot about parts of speech and sentence structure from it. She also let us play the game “Password” as a
class every Friday, which we absolutely loved.
Little did we know at the time that she was also teaching us to broaden
our vocabulary at the same time.
Every quarter for four years, Sister Mona required that
everyone in the class present a Minute Talk, as she called them. As the name implies, it was an original
one-minute talk each of us had to give on a general topic that she chose, such
as an important person in our lives or a holiday memory. They were a horrifying prospect for us as
young fifth graders, but as the years passed, many of my classmates and I
became fairly calm about public speaking.
She was a great speech coach, and really made a difference in the
presentation skills a number of us developed.
Always one for a good chuckle, Sister Mona often gave an example of a Minute
Talk she never wanted to hear from us, which she said a former student of hers
had once given. It was on the topic of
snow. It went something like: “Snow is
white and it is wet. It is frozen
water. Snow comes in the winter. You can make snowmen from it.” And so on with
brief, random snow observations up until the one minute mark. She delivered it in exactly the opposite way
she would have wanted us to deliver ours: in a deadpan voice with poor
posture. It always cracked us right
up. It was a running gag in our class
all four years for at least one of us to tell her our upcoming Minute Talk
topic was “Snow” when she asked. She
always laughed when someone said it, even after four years of hearing it, just
like we did every time after hearing her snow-themed “what not to do” Minute
Talk.
Sister Mona loved to laugh, and as the Christmas season
approached in my seventh grade year, she asked me and a small group of others
to take on a pretty hefty assignment in lieu of other work in English
class. We were to rewrite Charles
Dickens’ A Christmas Carol into a
humorous play that we as a whole class would then put on at the school
Christmas program. She insisted that it
be true to the original, but that it also be funny and appropriate to an
audience of students and parents. The
final product, in which I portrayed Bob Crachit, turned out pretty well, if I
do say so myself. I think I learned more
about writing for a specific audience and writing in collaboration with others
from that assignment than any other I ever did in my life. As for whether the final version was really that funny, I’m not so sure, but it sure
made Sister Mona laugh a lot as we prepared to perform it.
We were required to write compositions and other
assignments, of course, but much like her approach to reading and speaking, Sister
Mona usually gave us some latitude in what we wrote. She set forth page-length requirements, a
time limit and other such necessities, but made sure the topic of the
composition was broad enough that almost anyone could make it their own. Instead of “What I Did Over My Summer
Vacation”, she might assign the more generic “Summer” instead, allowing us to
take it in any number of directions.
Sister Mona’s influence extended beyond English class for
me. My mother had had a baby just a
couple weeks into my fifth grade year. I
had seen my mother and my new baby brother very briefly for a few minutes
before school the day he was born, but was apparently visibly pre-occupied by
the whole business all day long. My
father had to work until 5:00 that day, so Sister Mona and our principal,
Sister Margaret Anne, called my father and offered to take me up to visit my
mother and the baby at the hospital after school, not only so they could visit,
but also to set me at ease.
In fifth grade, Sister Mona instituted a nursing home
visitation program with her "homeroomers", as she called us. Every Monday afternoon, she and a large
percentage of my classmates would walk to a nearby nursing home and visit with
the residents, talking and doing activities.
It was a lot of fun, as it gave my classmates and I time to spend with
each other while doing some good deeds.
One of the upsides of Sister Mona’s loud laugh was that it often helped
us know where she was in the nursing home at any given time. As kids, one of our favorite things to do was
to hang out with some of the nursing home residents in the TV room watching
game shows. Sister Mona would rather we
be visiting people in their rooms and interacting with them more directly. As long as we knew where she was, we could
get our Match Game or Family Feud fix along with some of the
residents.
After eighth grade, my classmates and I were leaving
parochial school for the local high school, and Sister Mona decided that she
was going to the Bahamas. Not for a
vacation, by any stretch. She was going
to do a year of mission work with the poor of that nation. In the final weeks of our eighth grade year,
she shared a great deal of material with us about the nature of her work down
there. It had very little to do with the
golden beaches we imagined. It had
everything to do with shacks that were barely able to stand on their own, cramped
one-room schools with too few teachers and books, and hospitals with too few
doctors and supplies. Sister Mona had to
leave our parochial school for the last time that June day in 1984 one hour
before my classmates and I did, so she could catch her plane to the Bahamas. I never saw her in person again.
Sister Mona also had a fiery temper and was not someone you
would ever want to cross. My classmates
and I were so fond of her that rarely did it cross our minds to do so. When one of us did…watch out! She was no saint, but neither were we, and as
adolescents it was valuable for us to see that, especially in a nun. Nuns at that time were often seen as holy and
virtually faultless. Sister Mona, on the
other hand, was very down-to-earth. Once,
someone brought a copy of Dr. Hook’s “Cover of the Rolling Stone”, a
semi-novelty record, to school and played it in the classroom during a rainy
recess. Sister Mona, whom we didn't
think was listening, thought it was one of the funniest things she had ever
heard. Every Lent, when Catholics are traditionally
encouraged to make sacrifices, she gave up the same thing: potato chips. As kids, we could really get on board with
something as relatable as that. She
talked with us about what a challenge it was to stay away from them for that
period of time, but also about why she did it and its importance to her. Her leading by example meant a lot to us, and
taught us more than any textbook ever could.
I owe a great deal to Sister Mona, and I regret that I did
not get a chance in later life to let her know that. As often happens, I lost track of her as I
got older, and never was able to share my gratitude. Books and writing are an important part of my
life, and she deserves no small part of the credit. When the day finally comes that I publish my
first book, Sister Mona’s name will be right there on the dedication page where
it surely belongs.
God bless you Sister Mona, and thank you.
