When I was teaching at the old Jesuit High School in what is now downtown Dallas, my mother was teaching kindergarten in what is still Holy Name of Jesus school on the campus of Loyola University of New Orleans.

My mother and I corresponded (well, she wrote a lot more and much better letters than I wrote in my early twenties).  One time, she mentioned how she marveled that I was willing to go unafraid into a classroom full of big brutes.

She was meanwhile going into classrooms daily with twenty-five or so little boys and girls who needed introduction into rational human life. So, I wrote back, that at least the big brutes I faced had the use of reason (when they chose to use it). My  mother was not impressed. She loved the little children.