The most unique class and teaching experience for many students of St. Albert’s was Mr. O (Stanley Osolinski) who really went above and beyond to give his students a unique understanding of the world around them. One of the Class of ’75 first encounters with Mr. O was not in third grade but actually second grade.
Sister Charlotte had asked Mr. O to watch her class while she went to the office and Mr. O could have just sat at the desk and been done with it, but not Mr. O. He asked the class a simple question “Why did your parents send you to school”. The first hand went up and Mr. O called on him and he said “to learn” and Mr. O said no. More and more hands went up and Mr. O would call on them as they went up, then saying no to their responses. Finally one student said the word Mr. O was looking for … education. Your parents send you to school to get an education!
The second graders loved this little game and learned a four syllable word as well … “education”.
One of the boy’s most pleasant memories was playing softball at recess in 3rd Grade with Mr. O. One time they had a homerun derby and the boys batted until someone hit a home run over the parking lot fence. The boys batted around and around but no one could hit a ball that far. Recess was usually about 20 minutes but this went on for a long time, much more than 20 minutes. Finally Steve W hit a home run and everyone celebrated as the physical barrier of being able to hit a home run past the parking lot fence had been achieved.
Mr. O was a very good softball player in his own right and several of the parents of the little friends played with Mr. O on recreational teams. As his students grew older they admired this more than ever because in softball no one really likes to pitch and not get a chance to hit, but Mr. O did not have a problem with that at all. He would pitch all the time to the little friends and never tired of it.
When football season would come around, Mr. O would have the boys in the class line up in two lines, one to his left and one to his right. He would then have the boys run a receivers route – alternating from the left line and the right line – and throw them the football as he played the role of quarterback and his students were the receivers. Again Mr. O did not mind the repetitive role of tossing the ball to his class, be it as a pitcher in softball or a quarterback in football – and his students loved him for it.
Mr. O had a knack of making learning interesting. For math class he would sometimes have a contest where two students would come up and stand on each side of Mr. O. He would then ask a math problem such as 5 x 4 and the first student who said 20 would get a point and one of Mr. O’s fingers on that side would go up. Whoever reached five fingers first was the winner. While the contest was going on Mr. O would ask a non sense question just to keep things fun. For example 2 + 3 … 4 x 7 … Who is the best looking male teacher in the school … 9 – 3 … 7 x 2. Things like this made it fun and since Mr. O was the only male teacher in the school he was always the best looking, smartest, and kindest male teacher in the school. This was all in fun but the children did learn their math and they learned to think quickly with this competition.
After doing this for a while Mr. O had a playoff system for this math challenge and it would be an elimination tournament. Like the aforementioned home run derby there was not a time limit on this event and it went well passed the designated time allotted to math that day. As the contest progressed, the final two competitors were David P and Kenny G. David won in a close round, although both were winners to make it that far in the tournament.
Mr. O had a great car. It was a GTO and it seemed to us that every year he got a new GTO. Often times at recess he would gather the class around his car and talk about it or take a picture of the students around his car. Mr. O had a gift to make everything interesting for his students and he used this gift often. St. Albert’s didn’t seem to mind if his classes and sometimes recess went a little beyond the time frame set for them, they knew Mr. O was special as well.
Mr. O also started something called the Nature Club where students could learn about the world around them. The nature club met on Saturdays at the school and this is where many of the students learned about animals, dinosaurs, nature, and things that were not in any of the standard books. While in other classes children could not wait to leave the class and go home, Mr. O’s class would come in on Saturdays for these special classes that had no time restraints on them and would often go much longer than what was scheduled. However none of the students ever complained; they were learning about Tyrannosaurus Rex battling Triceratops in the Cretaceous period millions of years ago. What’s a few extra minutes on a Saturday compared to that?
Mr. O would demonstrate just how long the dinosaurs ruled the earth with simple experiments. For instance, he would have the first child say one, the child behind him say two, and on and on till they hit a hundred. By this time the kids had had enough counting but he had demonstrated that what they had counted was seconds while the dinosaurs ruled the earth for millions of years. Then he threw them a real curve ball when he told them the time between a Stegosaurus living on the planet and a Tyrannosaurus living on the planet was longer than the time between a Tyrannosaurus living on the planet and the rise of mankind, which really gave the students a basis of just how long the dinosaurs did rule the planet.
In addition to a dinosaur class he also had an animal class on Saturday called Animals A-Z and the children would study three different animals each Saturday in alphabetical order. For example, the first Saturday they would learn about Alligators, Bongo’s, and Cheetahs, then the next week would be Dolphins, Elks, and Falcons, and the next week would be Gallinules, Hyena’s, and Iguana’s and so on throughout the Saturdays until the alphabet was exhausted. Each lesson would have handouts with information and pictures of the animals that the children could take home and study for reference, because in the nature club there were no tests and no quizzes, just fun learning.
Another great example of how Mr. O taught could be demonstrated by how he taught his students about the speed of sound and that it is not instantaneous but actually takes time to travel. To demonstrate this he brought his entire class out to the field behind the gym and separated the class into two groups. The first group would line up near the convent on the West side of the field while the second group would line up at the fence by the track on the East side of the field.
Mr. O would then instruct both groups that when they heard him shout a word that they should raise their hands. He first shouted a word from the West side and all the hands went up from the West group a split second before they heard the word on the East side. From the East group’s perspective, they saw the hands of the West group go up but without any sound for a moment. From the West group’s perspective, they saw a delay in the time their hands went up and when their counterpart’s hands went up on the East side.
Mr. O then walked to the other side of the field and repeated the experiment from East to West. This was truly a lesson that the children would never forget and a great way to show children how the speed of sound actually works.
Of course, there was Stingleman. Stingleman was Mr. O’s yardstick which he would occasionally slap on a desk of a sleeping students. Mr. O told tales of Stingleman but Stingleman was primarily a bluff on Mr. O’s part. Rarely did he ever use it even to rap on a desk but one day a student acted up and Mr. O hit his desk with Stingleman very hard and Stingleman shattered right there. It was truly the end of an era.
Mr. O was a nature photographer and often he would bring these nature photos into class as prizes or to raise money for the missions in raffles. His favorite places to photograph were Kensington and the Everglades but he was very versatile with his photography and could take great pictures of nature anywhere (including the creek outside of St. Albert’s). Perhaps this was best illustrated in an art/photo exhibit that he did called “100 miles outside of Detroit” and it was displayed at museums around Detroit (including Dearborn Centennial Library where several of the little friends were able to visit the exhibit in person and meet with their former teacher). The display showed the beauty of nature that you could find just outside of a major city like Detroit which was not a surprise to his students as he had showed them the beauty of nature just outside St. Albert’s for years.
Perhaps one of the biggest accomplishments that went on during Mr. O’s tenure at St. Albert’s was his teaching of evolution and Darwinism in a Catholic school. This was both a tribute to St. Albert’s and Mr. O and somehow they managed to teach both Genesis and Darwin without conflict. This was not really appreciated by the students at the time but as they grew into adults they were thankful of learning both without censorship of any kind. The nuns would often explain that the Catholic Church’s position on evolution was that at some point God put a soul into man so there was never a conflict on this subject at St. Albert’s.
Mr. O taught his class many things that were not covered in the curriculum. These included sportsmanship, protecting the planet, preventing pollution, etc. He loved to teach through interaction with his students, and they responded very well to his style of teaching. Perhaps the best example of his influence as a teacher was in the action of his students who found a bird net outside in the park. The students protected the area even though it was right in the center of their recess activities. For about two weeks the students would line up behind Mr. O and his telephoto lens camera at during lunch hour. Each student was given a chance to view the birds nest as the eggs gestated and eventually hatched undisturbed by human beings. This was, perhaps, the closest thing to a St. Albert reality show decades before they became common.
This might not sound like a big deal, but for a school with 600 students (everything from first graders to young teens), to collectively protect a bird’s nest in their recess area until the hatchlings could fly off, was an amazing feat of compassion and respect for nature. Mr. O could not have been prouder during this period of time, not only of his own class, but all the classes at St. Albert’s who were briefed by Mr. O about the birds nest and responded in kind.
Teachers like Mr. O are very rare and several little friends will tell you that Mr. O was the most influential teacher they ever had.
Mr. O published several books on the subject of photography and nature including “Nature Photography – A Guide To Better Outdoor Pictures” and “Michigan”. His students like to think that Mr. O left them a “personal message” just for them in the book Michigan which was published years after he taught at St. Albert’s. In the book, while Mr. O tells stories about the nature just outside of the “school he used to teach at just North of I-94”, he then writes the following message to his students. “I am confident that many of those happenings will be long remembered by those now mature children that I will never see again. I can even wistfully imagine that a handful of them may at this very moment be perusing these contents and mentally traveling backwards in time to those days of discovery.” Naturally students from St. Albert’s who saw this message in the book were doing exactly that, mentally traveling backwards in time to those days of Mr. O teaching them about nature as they read and looked at the pictures in his book.
You can still find Mr. O’s photographic works today on the internet sold as posters, prints, and art. His books, although no longer in print, can still be found relatively easily on E-Bay and Amazon. The book “Michigan”, in addition to many coffee table style pictures in a hard bound book, has a very in depth history of the State of Michigan that any Michigan resident would enjoy.
A bit of history on Mr. O, he was a graduate of the University of Detroit and taught 3rd grade at St. Albert’s for nine years. After leaving St. Albert’s in 1973, his career focused on his love of photography and nature. He worked on assignment for National Parks in both the United States and Canada and was the Director of The Discovery Gallery in Troy Michigan for many years. His works have been published in Readers Digests, National Geographic Society, National Wildlife Federation, and the American Museum of Natural History.
