Heavy topics in a culture of inclusion: St. Mary’s O’Day instructs heads and hearts

Editor’s note: The following is one of three profiles of the Archdiocese of Baltimore’s teachers of the year. Read them all here. 

Anna O’Day encourages her students to bring their deepest, most difficult questions, and she challenges them to tackle such inquiries with sincerity and rigor.    

“This is one of those rare classes where you can have a bigger workload, but still be excited to learn,” was the assessment of an anonymous student from O’Day’s theology class at St. Mary’s High School in Annapolis, where she has taught for 13 years.

Dr. Donna Hargens, schools superintendent for the Archdiocese of Baltimore, read the quote aloud in O’Day’s classroom May 3. Hargens and James Sellinger, the archdiocese’s chancellor of education, were making a surprise visit to the school to notify O’Day that she had been named one of three Archdiocesan and Independent Schools Teachers of the Year.

O’Day, 35, told the Catholic Review that she had initially graduated from Franciscan University in 2009 with the intent to teach social studies and language arts to the middle grades in the public school system.

Instead, she thought to herself, “I love being Catholic, so I guess I’ll try to teach for Catholic schools.”

She arrived at St. Mary’s as a 22-year-old to teach freshmen, sophomores and seniors.

“After a year, I loved it,” she said, adding that the realization that the school year was over and her classroom empty moved her to tears.

At present, she teaches sophomores and chairs the St. Mary’s theology department.

“She is a pivotal teacher for both their faith formation education and their academic success,” said Mindi Imes, principal of St. Mary’s. “She is appreciated by her students as a teacher with high expectations, and she fosters a mutual respect with them. The kids know she cares about them.”

O’Day demonstrates this care – and emphasizes her students’ individual worth – with key discussions and exercises that take place during the first few days of the school year, which she says are “critical” days.

“It starts with meeting them where they are and showing them they are valued and loved,” she said.

In one game, she will select a student who will not enter her class but instead stand out in the hallway. This exercise, she said, gives her students “a sense of who’s missing” and fosters a “culture of inclusion.”

“She creates that space safe for dialogue that is critical for teenagers,” Imes said.

O’Day believes such an approach will help her students incorporate their theological formation “in their hearts.”

“Theology needs to be more than something that’s just in their heads. It should also be in their hearts,” she said.

There is plenty of head work, too, though. O’Day said that her own parents were the first to give her training in “articulating why we believe what we believe.”

She wasn’t referring to formal sessions but rather formative years “surrounded by intellectual conversations.”

O’Day’s family attended Mass at Sacred Heart in Glyndon, and she went to the parish school. Her mother, Nancy Binette, was a teacher there, albeit after O’Day had moved on to high school.

“She was very outgoing and passionate, and a favorite teacher because of her eccentricity,” O’Day said, noting that her mother would stand on tables or dance to emphasize a point or hold students’ attention.

O’Day also drew inspiration from the Dominican Sisters who taught her during grades nine through 12 at Mount de Sales Academy in Catonsville.

“They were incredible examples of what it means to be a joyful woman,” she said. “They were so on fire for life and exhibited a true joy for the Lord. It was something that inspired me in the classroom and made me love the classroom because it was a place of joy and of intellectual discovery of things I didn’t think I could do.”

O’Day said the combination of the COVID-19 era and the advance of technology have brought new challenges for teachers.

“There’s no room for boredom anymore,” she said, adding that she has observed a “decline in the natural curiosity of students” over her 13 years of teaching.

“It’s an uphill battle, but that’s one of the joys of teaching,” O’Day said. “It’s finding new ways to inspire students, even in the midst of a technologically changing culture.”

Sometimes, she finds, the weightier the topic, the better.

“The unit on suffering is one of my favorite things to teach, and the students love it too,” O’Day said.  

In addition to her bachelor’s degree and teaching certification earned via Franciscan University, she earned a master’s degree in educational leadership and administration from the University of Dayton (Ohio).

But for now, she plans to stay put.

“My passion is in the classroom,” she said. “Why fix it if it’s not broken?”

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