Found Passion: Greg Rustico

There was no time for Greg Rustico to get adjusted to the Lower Rio Grande Valley when he first arrived to begin his teaching assignment at St. Anthony Catholic School.
An Alliance for Catholic Education teacher — a position similar to Teach for America” in public schools — Rustico, of Middletown, N.Y., came to the Valley to begin an assignment as a social studies and language arts teacher for grades six through eight, and then quickly found out he was also going to do much more.
Rustico completed his undergraduate degree at Notre Dame University near South Bend, Ind., but didn’t go to Catholic school before that, he said. Now he’s a graduate student, taking graduate courses in education online during the school year and will head back to the Notre Dame campus next summer for on-campus classes.
For him, St. Anthony School is a totally new experience from what he had before college, he said.
“It was public school, K through 12, and then I went through undergraduate at Notre Dame,” he said. “That was my first experience with Catholic education. I was a political science and economics major.”
He had not planned to be a teacher.
“To be honest, I never really thought I would be interested in education,” he said. “I never dreamed of being a teacher when I was a kid. But when I heard about the ACE program, the opportunity to be a volunteer teacher … I had the opportunity to teach in Tanzania one of the summers when I was at Notre Dame. I taught in Africa. I enjoyed that experience so, even though I really didn’t know if I wanted to be a teacher. But I saw that (ACE program) as a good way to do service because I thought I had been very blessed with the opportunity to go to Notre Dame. It was such a great school, so many talented individuals, so I wasn’t ready to jump into the profit-based world of business, or go into politics or anything. I really wanted to give back, so that’s the real reason why I ended up here.”
Also, he had met a couple of law students at Notre Dame who had gone through the ACE program before they went back to law school. “They really recommended the program,” he said.
Although he had only three days to get adjusted to the Rio Grande Valley when he arrived, he since has been able to learn more about it, Rustico said.
“The best way we were able to learn the area — I’m in my first year of teaching — and we live with teachers (in Brownsville) who are in their second year. They’ve kind of shepherded us; they’ve shown us around the area,” he said. “They’ve shown us around the surrounding area; they’ve shown us a lot of the cool cultural idiosyncrasies. I had never been to the area, drove down, and within three days, I was in the classroom, teaching.”
Teaching at St. Anthony is not like teaching in inner city public schools, Rustico said. There are few discipline problems and there is a family atmosphere with volunteer parents serving as substitute teachers, bringing in baked goods, as well as supporting the faculty and staff in many ways, he said.
“I jumped right in,” he said of his teaching duties. “I have to be a jack of all trades at a small Catholic school, teaching social studies and language arts for grades six through eight,” he said. “That’s my job description, but on top of that, they have me coaching basketball; I’m the adviser for the student council … they have me playing trombone with the choir and I’ve somehow become the de facto yearbook photographer, too.
“It’s challenged me in different ways.”
Because he does so many different things, it is hard to feel totally adjusted, Rustico said.
“The thing I’ve probably noticed the most, being in a Catholic grade school for the first time, compared to the big public school I went to, was that just because it’s so small, the teachers have to play different roles,” he said. “It’s challenged me in different ways.”
But it’s hard to be an expert at so many things, he said.
“The down side is everything I teach, it’s always new; I only teach everything once, I guess” Rustico said. “Some of the people in the Alliance for Catholic Education teach high school and they’ll teach the same class five times, but I teach six classes every day and each class is different. So, it’s good and bad. It’s never a dull moment here. With the middle school students, you never know what they’re going to be like when they walk in the door.”
To relax, he likes to watch all kinds of sports on television, read and practice his trombone, and he’s a big fan of movies.