A Great Teacher’s Legacy

Liberty Common School students encounter, daily, professional classroom instructors and administrators who help shape their future lives for the better.   Each member of the faculty connects with her or his students in different fashion.  Some bend the arc of a young scholar’s life in profound ways.

Such was the case of a high-school instructor of mine who died this week.  I attribute some of my own life’s trajectory and character to him.  Formative, youthful years are crucial in everyone’s life when blessed to encounter a wise teacher in the fullest sense of the title.  It results in magnified intellectual growth and elevated personal bearing – in joy.

LCS alumni tell me this all the time.  Whenever one stops by the school to visit, I reflexively ask which instructor had the biggest impact.  It’s interesting the responses are not isolated to a handful of great teachers. 

Rather, alumni responses reflect broadly upon great LCS instructors covering the waterfront.  Alumni dwell on faculty of all academic disciplines and every grade level going all the way back to kindergarten.  As the school’s headmaster, these responses matter a lot to me.  They make me proud to work alongside such impactful educators. 

Sure, we want to hire and retain instructors who are masters of their content.  We want for them to be clear and efficient in communicating the most important elements of the school’s curriculum, adept in guiding students to acquire and retain useful knowledge, the skills of learning, a true thinking framework.

The school cares even more about forming up each child through maturity imbued with proper character, morality, and virtue.  Knowledge plus virtue – that’s the essence of the school’s vision – the deeper and wider, the better. 

Each child being a unique soul, an individual personality, and a distinct mind, it’s hard to predict which classroom teacher, coach, support staffer, or administrator will knit the firmest human-to-human attachment.  But aiming to surround the school’s youngsters with the best humans in the profession, on all important levels, is more than a recruiting gambit; it’s an indispensable imperative, one that truly drives our mighty community institution.   

Over time, it has become the school’s brand – “it” being virtue education built upon an architecture of the Core Knowledge curriculum in the primary grades (k-8); and, in the secondary grades (9-12), an ambitious battery of honors-level, classically oriented, college-preparatory course work aiming toward mature literacy. 

This is no marginal matter.  In fact, the premium placed upon virtue education doesn’t just hold the promise of guiding lives for the better.  Done properly, it rescues some, possibly many.

Like me, every LCS-affiliated adult – parents, grandparents, alumni, employees – can think back on their own k-12 schooling and recall how their lives were shaped by the guidance of at least a teacher or two.  My high-school alma mater announced the death of one just this morning (as I write this essay) and it prompted me to change my intended topic which I’ll revisit another day. 

“Dear Alumni – We received the sad news of the passing of Bro. John Habjan, S.M.”  The balance of the solemn email from Cincinnati Archbishop Moeller High School's alumni director didn’t need to be long.  Habjan’s legacy speaks for itself - volumes.  “His commitment to Catholic education and to forming young men in the Marianist tradition has touched the lives of generations of students, colleagues, and families.” 

Put me atop that list.  Bro. Habjan was the hardest teacher I ever had.  Most of my peers didn’t like him.  I didn’t either, at first.  He had a reputation among students as being one to avoid.  He projected an icy-hard exterior of a no-nonsense disciplinarian, an arrogant intellectual.

He taught a class I remember as being part history, part religion, part Western civilization, and part philosophy.  Lots of reading, difficult texts, essay writing, and seemingly impossible exams.  He docked points for grammar errors and misspelling, and wielded a red “Flair” felt-tip pen with sadistic enthusiasm. 

No grade inflation in his class.  My “C” reflected comparatively average work, and I was relieved I didn’t finish with a lower mark which I suspect he could have justified. 

I remember approaching him, apprehensively, for guidance on a lengthy term paper he assigned.  Topic:  “The American National Character.”  Forty-seven years later, I still recall being completely flummoxed by the magnitude of the theme, lines of ostentatious research prompts, the enormity of composition objectives facing this baffled 17-year-old.

I might have cried a little at that short conference given everything else on my busy plate including homework from all my other instructors who dished it out nightly.  In that moment, Bro. Habjan grinned ever so slightly, didn’t let me off the hook, but coached me – rather lovingly – on how to go about conquering the thesis.  I got a “C” and regarded it a grand triumph; still do. 

Eventually, Bro. Habjan’s cold and severe façade warmed, not a lot, but enough for me to realize a sagacious educator who only intended for his students to learn about prudence, temperance, justice, fortitude, and love in the context of deep dives into history, religion, Western civilization, and philosophy.  His arrogant intellectualism was really complex sarcasm, a cultured wit I came to appreciate and admire, once I could understand it – some of it. 

Most of my high-school peers never came to like him.  I’m convinced he was fully okay with that.  Being liked wasn’t his style.  Pushing boys into Christian manhood was; and that task, at our age, required more than a polite tap on the shoulder.  It often demanded howling reproach.  He was among the rare educators who understood both the urgency and the eternal consequence.  

Somehow, I cracked the shell of a friendly advisor within the framework of some student-life leadership duties I took on outside of the classroom, but only after I had (barely) survived his course.  He helped me pick my college and my major.  We stayed in touch through those years and beyond. 

Whenever LCS students ask me which of my teachers had a big impact on my life, I reflexively answer, Brother John Habjan.  In fact, if there’s one educator who helped shape the way I serve today as our school’s headmaster, that good man passed away just yesterday.  May his soul rest in eternal peace.

In reflecting upon his substantial life, I’m humbled to realize that, here in our town, LCS is succeeding in assembling a truly world-class faculty – a growing cadre of legitimate academic-content experts who, similar to Bro. Habjan, are uniquely equipped and vocationally inspired to shepherd their young scholars in knowledge plus virtue.  Liberty Common students are surrounded by these remarkable sages over the span of thirteen academic grade levels.

As a founding LCS parent, I never considered entrusting my five kids to be educated anywhere else.  For their kids – three of whom are LCS students now – I have no doubt they’re in exactly the right place and on the right pathway to conquering their journeys toward truth, beauty, goodness, and perfection.   

Someday, they’ll look back on their difficult and demanding expedition here and realize they’re grateful for it.  They might even say so aloud. I hear that from alumni all the time.