As anyone who has ever taught a class can tell
you: four years in front of a chalkboard can seem like a very long
time. Ask most teachers about the prospect of spending FORTY years
there, and you’re likely to get called — at best — a little crazy.

That’s a label that doesn’t fit former
Catholic High teacher Michael Moran. Hard nosed? Yes. Dedicated, yeah.
But not crazy. A 1961 graduate of Catholic High School for Boys in
Little Rock, Moran returned in 1968 as a teacher. Over the next 40
years, before his retirement in May 2008, he taught English, Religion,
Latin, World History, National Problems, Introductory Mathematics, and
Driver’s Ed. In the process, he helped shape the life of thousands of
young men. Moran’s new book, “Proudly We Speak Your Name,” to be
published this month by Butler Center Books, is the chronicle of a
lifetime spent at one of the state’s last all-boys schools.

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Moran said that he wrote the book in
two months, after a friend talked him into the idea that someone might
want to read his reminiscences about the school. He said it wasn’t an
attempt to be a history, just a recollection. The stories in the book
aren’t really in any chronological order. Mostly they’re just a series
of humorous or touching vignettes, ranging from pranks pulled by the
student body to tales of the school’s legendary rector, the late Father
George Tribou.

Some of the best stories in the book
are Moran’s accounts of epic washouts by newbie teachers. Moran said
that because Catholic is males-only, the students find other ways to
fill time that — in a co-ed school — might be taken up by the
“delightful distraction” of girls. Often, this meant finding new ways
to torment those teachers who had been deemed vulnerable to hijinks.

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“It’s not necessarily so that everybody
is well-behaved,” Moran said. “That’s an objective of Catholic High and
every other school, of course, but you have to be prepared to go to
some lengths in terms of effort and awareness to keep high school boys
on task.”

For those who weren’t prepared to go to
those lengths, the results could be the stuff of high comedy. In the
book, Moran recalls one new teacher who, day after day, spent the whole
class period reading aloud from the textbook. While he was engrossed in
the text, the students in class began incrementally scooting their
desks toward the front of the class. By the time the teacher raised his
head, he was surrounded. 

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“That teacher’s ineptitude was just
about legendary,” Moran said with a chuckle.  “He also happened to be
in the hands of an extremely bright, inventive group of juniors. That
combo made for one incredible story after another.”

One can’t really write about the last
four decades at Catholic without talking about Father (later monsignor)
Tribou. The principal of Catholic High for 41 years, Tribou shaped the
school in every aspect, from keeping the academics up to snuff, to
striking fear in the hearts of rule breakers, to redesigning the senior
sweater — modeled after a sweater Tribou had seen Catholic school boys
wearing in New York. After his death in 2001, the section of street in
front of the school was re-named in his honor. Moran said that Tribou
was an awe-inspiring figure to the student body.

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“His reputation preceded him at
Catholic High,” Moran said. “I ran into a former student of his who is
even older than I am who said that he was at Catholic High Father
Tribou’s first year, and he was fierce from the word go. He was really
demanding and uncompromising in his principles. He was a handful from
the start, apparently.”

Moran said that Tribou was particularly
concerned with making sure the teaching staff was attentive to the
needs of the “least attractive, least appealing” boys. The smart kids
and the attractive kids, Tribou told the faculty, would take care of
themselves.

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Asked if the boys have changed along
with the tastes in music and hairstyles over the last 40 years, Moran
said that he has seen a subtle difference emerge. While he said the
smartest students at Catholic are as smart as they ever were — it’s a
place where it has never been out of style to excel academically, he
said — it appears to him that there aren’t as many boys in the academic
“middle” as there once were. Moran said this might be due to the fact
that teens spend so much time on other pursuits: television, games, the
Internet and cell phones. For many, Moran said, reading for pleasure is
a contradiction in terms.

In terms of the preserving the soul of
Catholic High, one of the biggest changes Moran discusses in his book
is the move away from clergymen on the faculty. When Moran was a
student at the school, he said there were 13 priests who taught regular
classes at the school. Now, there’s only one. It’s a national and
international trend, Moran said, caused by fewer young men and women
entering the clergy. Moran said that he doesn’t like to think about
Catholic High without a priest on staff. While the rest of the country
wrestles over how much religion in public schools is too much or too
little, Moran said that if religion wasn’t taught at Catholic High, the
school wouldn’t have any reason to exist.

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“There’s a benefit to all the students,
just in terms of being made aware of the multiple issues that four
years of religion classes can offer,” Moran said. “There’s a lot to be
learned, trying to take students beyond their childhood understanding
of what religion is and heading them toward an adult understanding of
what it’s about.”   

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