Marilynn Mason Noel – Elementary Education, 1973

MariLynn ( Lynn ) Mason Noel

May, 1973

                When I think of Lafayette and the University, I am grateful that I had the experience of living and learning in that part of the country.  There is no place as special as Cajun-land and no people as special as those that live there.  Not only did I receive an excellent preparation for teaching, but I was also exposed to a culture rich in history, tradition and  appropriate values.  I remember fondly meeting people from all over the country who grew to appreciate the uniqueness of southern Louisiana.  Just the other night I was describing the experience of going to a little honky-tonk type place in a small town somewhere outside of Lafayette.  There we ate the food and fais-dos-dosed to Cajun music.  We loved  and appreciated the food and the music before they became the global rage.  And whenever I travel out of the country, people are interested in the country music here in Nashville and the Cajun experiences of my earlier life.

                I have taught now for twenty years, sixteen of which have been in a private independent school across the street from Vanderbilt University and what used to be Peabody College.  I am here because of Dr. Robinette and his wife, who were instrumental in encouraging me to go to graduate school.  Not many days can go by when I don’t think of their influence. The longer I teach, the more I realize how well prepared I was because of the program at USL, not only from the methodological and philosophical standpoint, but also because the atmosphere of open-mindedness at USL prepared me to work with students from all over the world.

                When I think of USL, I remember Homecoming floats and Tri-Delta friends, Piccadilly Cafeteria, the alligator in the swamp and the Christmas tree lights in the swamp. Then there was bowling with Flossie in the student center for twenty-five cents a game and rolling gutter ball after gutter ball until tears were rolling down our cheeks. I remember Bo Lamar and cheering for a winning team in basketball and football games that I never watched because I was too busy partying with my friends.  I think fondly of the nice people who owned and worked at THE KEG!!! I remember professors that were remarkably interested in students even though the classes were large.  I remember pulling “all-nighters” in order to allocate the proper number of studying hours in relationship to the proper number of hours spent partying.

I think we got it down to a science.

There is one memory that is especially meaningful.  I had the privilege of being an SAE little sister.  One year they were broke and probably on probation for something or another.   No telling!   Anyway, they could not afford to pay someone to clean the house, so we volunteered to clean it for them with the help of the pledges.  T was an experience…it gave a whole new meaning to the word E!!!  Everything in the house was at least grimey, and we probably could have worked for weeks on it.  After we cleaned to the best of our abilities, we made the food by hand for the Homecoming party.  We made hundreds of sandwiches and trimmed every crust off of every piece of bread.  It took hours and hours.  It was a lot of work, but mostly we had a ton of fun.  The party, of course, was great.

The significant part of the story was that the guys did not have enough money to honor us with gifts at the formal that year.  This fact escaped us because we did not know what the traditions were.  So, you can imagine our surprise the next year when, after they announced the new little sisters, the fraternity made a special announcement honoring the little sisters from the previous year who had done all of that extra work.  It was a complete and very special surprise.  They gave us beautiful bouquets of violets. I’ll never forget it!