Moving into St. Joe's that fall felt almost as big as walking up the gangway of the USS
North Hampton. This is my new home
.
St. Joe's was an old-fashioned four-story, beige-brick dorm house filled with lots of little boarding rooms and a few communal bathrooms for maximum efficiency. It slept about 140 students on its top three floors. The main floor had a dining room, a communal area, and a chapel, which I quickly found to be a perfect, quiet place to study without being disturbed, where no one would come knocking on my door to chat or to try to convince me to go out carousing.
I started out in room 224, without much of a view, but to me the view didn't matter. I was here. I was on the Notre Dame campus! I could step out my door and walk right down to St. Joseph's Lake, follow the winding path off to the right through the beautiful woods, which led me to everything I ever dreamed of: turn right and follow the path along St. Mary's Lake, up past Fatima House to Holy Cross; or down around and off to the left where I'd wind up right in the spot where I first discovered the glowing candles of the Grotto on that senior retreat back in high school. It was my personal gateway to the Basilica and those beautiful lawns under the watchful eye of Mother Mary atop the Golden Dome. It was all right there.
I could hear the bells from the Basilica without so much as stepping a foot outside.
My room was so narrow I could almost reach my arms across from one wall to the other. My bed was like a military cot, with a metal frame and a mattress with no box spring sitting on top of a set of spring-like wires. There was a lamp on a little utilitarian wooden desk by the single window, a closet with room for a few hangers and a set of wobbly drawers. That's it.
Some kids might have a hard time adjusting to that. To me? It was much more than I ever had to myself growing up in a shared room with six brothers, and far more comfortable than my sardine-packed quarters in the belly of a navy destroyer escort. Heck, it had a door that I could close whenever I wanted. It even locked!
To me, it was more than enough. I was grateful for every inch of it.
The first person I met in that dorm was a student named Freddy. I was so excited to be there, I introduced myself about as boldly as a guy could: “My name's Rudy. I'm gonna go to Notre Dame to play football. And I was in the navy!” He was a sophomore at Notre Dame, and it turned out that Freddy and I were both dreamers. He had his eyes set on the law, maybe becoming a judge someday, and he loved that I made such a bold statement as soon as I met him. We both had money issues, and we had both agreed to mow lawns and keep the place clean in order to pay for our room and board, which meant that we'd wind up spending a lot of time together. Thankfully we hit it off. In fact, the two of us became fast friends almost immediately, and Freddy would soon help me in ways I never imagined a fellow student ever could.
My very first class at Holy Cross was math. I dreaded it. I was nervous. I had visions of repeating my high school experience all over againâvisions of that fifth-grade humiliation in front of all of these smart college kids.
It took about ten seconds for all of that fear to fly out the window. Our professor, a little Holy Cross Brother named Pedro, stood in front of the fifteen or so students in one of the school's eight classrooms and said, “How many of you guys want to go to Notre Dame?” All of us raised our hands. Maybe one guy didn't. Clearly I'd have my work cut out for me competing against all of these guys for a spot, I figured.
“Good,” Brother Pedro said. “That's good. You all know what you need to do to get to Notre Dame: you all took basic math in high school.”
I spoke up. “I didn't have any algebra. I wasn't smart enough,” I said.
“You're smart enough,” he countered. “Here's the deal. This course is parallel with the math they teach at Notre Dame, and it counts as the math credit. So if you pass this, you won't have to take any more math at Notre Dame.”
Wow. That sounded pretty good to me. I just hoped I could pass.
“As of this moment, you've all got an A, so don't worry about it,” he said.
We all have an A? What did he mean by that?
“Here's what you need to do to keep that A: you need to follow the plan. The plan is: Show up every day. Do your homework. If you don't know how to do it, ask your friend.”
Did he just say all we need to do to get an A is to show up and do our homework?
In a heartbeat he took the pressure off the grade, the grade being one of the big obstacles I dreaded. Do you know how exciting that was? I kept writing down everything he said.
Ask your friend
.
You mean I can ask a friend for help if I don't know the answer? In high school that was called cheating! This is awesome!
It certainly seemed like a plan I could follow, unlike the plans they tried to lay out for us all in high school, where I (like everyone else) had been told that in order to become a “college-bound” student I would need to take trigonometry and all kinds of advanced math. Brother Pedro insisted that wasn't true.
Why didn't anybody tell me this sooner?!
If I hadn't been so excited about it, I might have been angry. Why had I been told time and time again that there was only one way to get to college when here I was, in the middle of my first college class, hearing an entirely different truth? I wanted to run back and bust open the doors at my high school to tell everyone, as if it were some kind of secret I'd uncovered.
Why on earth would anyone keep this a secret?
Some of the other Brothers were a little more rigid. They seemed more like regular teachers to me. But none of them put me down. None of them put anyone down. It seemed like they really wanted us all to succeed. That was new. Some were even fun! I'll never forget Brother Larry's biology class. We laughed so much, it didn't even feel like we were learning. But we were. And even in the more rigid classes (Brother John's psychology class, for instance) I took that easygoing attitude Brother Pedro preached about and applied it liberallyâasking my friends for help whenever I didn't understand something, and not feeling guilty for asking for that help, which was such a relief to me.
Even so, I still found myself struggling. A few weeks in, that old grade-school frustration kicked into overdrive. I wasn't keeping up the way I wanted. I didn't do well on my first assignments. I failed my first two quizzes in English and psychology. It wasn't anywhere near the kind of work I needed to do to get into Notre Dame.
Back at the dorm one night, I complained about it to Freddy. I remember saying to him, flat out, “I'm just not a smart guy.” He looked at me as if I were talking nonsense, and his immediate response was a generous one: “Let me help ya,” he said.
Freddy was smart. That's just the plain truth. He had dreams of becoming a judge someday, and it was clear to me that he had the brains and the drive to get there. The fact that he would open up and offer to share some of his knowledge with me was a gift.
The first time he looked at my notebooks he said, “Geez, how come you take all these notes?” I was shocked. I thought everyone took notes that way. I told him I just take down every word the professor says, so I can go over it all once I'm back home. “Well, that's your first problem,” Freddy said. “You're so busy writing, you're not listening. You gotta listen! You're not listening if you're taking all these notes.”
No one had ever mentioned that before. I asked him how to do it right, and he just started teaching me. He made it seem simple.
Another time I said to him, “How am I gonna pass Spanish?” Well, he
was
Spanish! He was happy to help me with that too. “This is all you need to know. Here's how you pass your test.” He explained to me that most teachers try to teach you too much, and you need to pick through it and remember the most important stuff so you don't get overwhelmed. Not only did I take too many notes, I studied too much, he said. Plain and simple. Studying everything made it too overwhelming. What I needed to do was learn how to study the
right
stuff. He even stepped in when I was tired to make sure I went to take a nap. “You're not going to learn anything if you're barely awake. Go to sleep, then come knock on my door and I'll help you,” he'd say.
Once I learned Freddy's techniques, it started getting easier. My tests improved greatly. I wound up doing better on homework assignments.
All they did in high school was let me know how stupid I was. Why didn't anyone sit me down and show me a different way to study? Or how to study, period? Why didn't anyone ever consider the fact that I might have a learning disorder?
It was shocking to me when my Holy Cross English teacher, Mrs. Shane, first brought that news up. No one talked of dyslexia in those days, though that's clearly what I was facing. She simply noticed that I had trouble concentrating, trouble absorbing whatever I was reading. She and Brother John worked together to get me testedânot as a way to single me out but as a way to help me. They let me know that there wasn't a cure for these sorts of things and that there didn't need to be. It just may take a little work to figure out how to help me learn better, they said, since I processed things a little differently than a lot of other kids. They made it all seem like a very normal, helpful process. They shared examples of some really famous people who had learning disorders, including Albert Einstein. It was shocking.
Why hadn't anybody told me? Why didn't anybody try to help before now?
In fact, there's a great quote from Einstein that seems fitting to share here: “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” For my whole life, I'm pretty sure I was that fish!
When it came to reading, which was the biggest problem for me, Mrs. Shane tried to get me to slow down and read each line with purpose. I didn't want to do it. It took forever. It drove me nuts to read slowly. Then one day, she suggested that I try listening to soft music while I readâclassical music, ideallyâjust to calm my brain down a bit. Well guess what? It worked. Listening to a little peaceful music allowed me to understand what I was reading. It worked like magic. I have no idea where she got the insight to be able to suggest something like that. It was just clear to her that I had a learning disability, and rather than using that as an excuse to let me slide, or an excuse to give up on me, she did what she could to help me. Between Mrs. Shane, Brother John, and the major help I was getting from Freddy, I got a handle on it. I turned my study habits around. I turned my whole relationship with learning around.
Before I knew it, my first semester at Holy Cross was over. I was surprised how quickly it flew by. College classes were more intense than high school courses, but they were also short-lived. I liked that you could see the end just a few months out and wouldn't be stuck doing the same stuff for an entire year. It made sense to me. There was a goal you could see. A finish line. An end zone.
I had never had so much as a B all through school, yet my first college-level report card was all Bs and a couple of As. It felt awesome. Those were the kind of grades I had always been told I needed in order to be “college bound.” Funny that I had to actually go to college before anyone would help me figure out how to get those grades in the first place.
Despite my good grades, Brother John was very
clear to me: the only way I could get to Notre Dame was to complete four semesters at Holy Cross. Applying early wouldn't do me any good.
I didn't listen.
Who could blame me? I was excited. My GPA was through the roof (by my own personal standards, at least). My study habits were improving; heck, I
had
study habits for the first time in my life. Walking across that campus every day, interacting with other students, getting out there at St. Joe's just to mow the lawn and keep the place looking good, got me more and more excited about being a Notre Dame student. So with that very first report card in hand, I filled out my application to transfer and dropped it off in the admissions office in the Main Building, under the Golden Dome.
The building itself is daunting. The massive granite staircase leading up to the entrance seems to put the whole place on a high pedestal. The doors are massive. The entry hall is massive, and the weight of the thick, dark-wood moldings gives the interior a sense of history. The hall is covered with magnificent old paintings of Christopher Columbus. Back in those days no one questioned the Columbus legacy or whether it was right or wrong that the Europeans came in and basically took the land from the Native Americans. When the paintings were done in the late 1880s, Columbus was seen as a saint: a Catholic Italian who risked everything, who did the impossible, who sailed across the vast ocean when everyone said it couldn't be done and discovered America in the process. (Talk about a leap of faith!) Luigi Gregori, a Vatican portrait artist whom Notre Dame's founders brought over to work some artistic magic in the Basilica, did the paintings. Gregori took on the Columbus murals after the original main building burned down in 1879. They were almost one hundred years old as I walked past them with my application in hand. I couldn't help but feel like I was a part of that history, as daunting as it was. The feeling of elitism, of implied greatness, permeates the walls at Notre Dame. It's the polar opposite of the warm embrace of Holy Cross. I could feel it in that building, and it still made me feel like I was a bit of an outsider.
But not for long!
I kept telling myself.
I dropped the application in the appropriate slot. Then I waited. I checked my mailbox every day. I started living like I was a Notre Dame student. I put a Notre Dame stamp on my Holy Cross ID and ate in the South Dining Hall whenever I wanted, with its high, vaulted, church-like ceilings and large, wooden communal tables. I fed off the energy of all of those students. I wore a Notre Dame jacket and acted like a Notre Dame student in every way possible. I got involved with student government, attended student council meetings, helped influence and make decisions that would affect the Notre Dame student body. No one asked to see my ID. No one knew the difference! No harm, no foul, right?