Picture this: a classroom full of seventh-grade boys at Brilla Veritas Middle School, and a young student standing in front of the class. He is teaching a lesson on theological mystery and apostolic succession. He explains the virtue and saint of the week to his peers. At the back of the room sits a man too old for seventh grade, asking all the annoying questions.
Robert Nussman, a Seton Teaching Fellow in Cohort 10, was this annoying interrogator, having switched places with a student who asked to teach the day’s El Camino lesson. Robert let the student teach, claiming it was, “the most engaging lesson. He really learned it, and the boys were all listening.”
Despite his natural demeanor with his class, Robert wasn’t always a likely candidate for teaching, having studied mechanical engineering and philosophy at Marian University. Around his sophomore year, all the engineering internships were backlogged due to COVID-19, so Robert worked at a summer camp called Totus Tuus instead. That summer showed Robert that teaching was something he enjoyed.
Not long after, Jack Morgan visited Marian University and sold Robert on the Seton Teaching Fellows program. Robert loved the centrality of the Catholic faith, the concrete avenue for service, and the ability to teach the faith alongside math and science. Robert was especially moved by “hearing Jack talk about his personal experiences and how challenging but formative the year was for him.”
Robert also knew he wanted to go to New York: “My favorite TV show is Blue Bloods, and I was actually watching it while discerning. Once when Sinatra’s ‘New York, New York’ played, I was like, ‘Ah shoot, I gotta go to the Bronx.’”
Today Robert is an El Camino teacher at Brilla Veritas Middle School in the Bronx and works in the sixth-grade Language Arts and Math classes during the day. It is after school, during El Camino, that Robert teaches catechesis to seventh-grade boys at the front of the classroom. Usually.
“I didn’t understand how middle schoolers could be adorable until camp and then here,” says Robert. “They’re so direct.”
One of Robert’s favorite memories from his year of service so far was watching two of his students serve at Mass for the first time.
“We had an El Camino Mass and two of my disciples were so excited about serving and kept jumping around, pressuring me to ask them. Finally, I said, ‘You’re gonna serve mass, and I’m not gonna stop you,’” Robert recalls fondly. “It was so fun watching them up by the altar.”
When he isn’t teaching, Robert has loved living in the city with his community. In turn, community life has energized and supported his work as a teacher.
“Community dinner is always great and we laugh a lot. It’s good to decompress from the day; that’s probably the best part, along with how many intentional, faith-filled relationships are formed from living in community ” Robert says. “Our day-to-day is amazing: night prayer, community dinner, and intentionally checking in on each other. A couple of my community members also work out together.”
Given the joys of community life and teaching, Robert encourages others to consider the fellowship and the profound ways a year can change you.
“To any engineering student who’s thinking about Seton Teaching Fellows, I’d say if you’re bored with classes and equations and are frustrated with technology and how much engineering is becoming tech, if you’re interested in building relationships, then this is definitely the right thing,” Robert says to anyone on the fence.
“And if you want an adventure and something radically new and you want to be pushed in every facet of your life, one, come to New York, second, do STF. It breaks you down in all of the best ways, in all the ways you need to be broken down.”
