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Twenty-seven years of instructing elementary school students have done little to diminish the seemingly ever-present smile and twinkle in the eyes of Sister Veronica Higgins, the fourth-grade teacher at Villa Teresa School in Oklahoma City.

Sister Veronica has fun teaching, so her seven fourth-grade students - Gabrielle Cloer, Lean Norsworthy, Andrea Midgalski, Emma Rupert, Katy Young, Amanda Phan and Chase Langely - have a great deal of fun learning, and learning well.

A Carmelite Sister of St. Therese since 1973, Sister Veronica spices her traditional teaching day agenda - math, English, reading, social studies - with Irish Jig dance lessons, guitar-accompanied music sessions and playground basketball games.

"The Irish Jig is a 40-year tradition here at Villa Teresa, and nobody graduates without learning the jig," she said, chuckling.

Sister Veronica said she has been teaching the Irish Jig to students since the late 1970s.

She said she accepted the call to her spiritual life while a sophomore at the University of Tennessee/Chattanooga. She also picked up her first guitar while at UTC.

A recent two-year stint as a student of classical guitarist Edgar Cruz added a new dimension of Sister Veronica's guitar-playing skills.

The bachelor's degree in English literature she earned from UTC in 1973 was not the end of her own educational endeavors, either. In her "spare time," she has received a master's in special education from the University of Central Oklahoma (1989) and a master's in Christian spirituality from Creighton University (1994).

Sister Veronica has been a fourth-grade teacher at Villa Teresa the past 10 years, but she also has taught first through third grades during her teaching career. All but three of her 27 years in teaching have been spent at Villa Teresa. The other three she taught elementary grades at St. Charles Borromeo School in northwest Oklahoma City.

Next year, Villa Teresa School is not offering a fourth-grade level, and Sister Veronica said she will not know where she will be reassigned until the end of May.

Whatever the grade level she instructs next year, the most difficult "assignment" will be to determine who is having the most fun - the students successfully learning their lessons or Sister Veronica teaching the lessons.

© The Oklahoma Publishing Co. and its subsidiary, NewsOK.com.
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