Day Two at a Lutheran School in Chicago's Austin neighborhood in 1995. Part of the St. Paul School appeal was its no-nonsense approach and making do with less --

-- fewer teachers and less space per students than suburban public schools. Another is the personal touch.

It started with parents on the two days I watched in 1995. Kids arrived a few at a time, some dropped off and even ushered into the building by parents, usually fathers. One of these could hardly get away from his kindergartener, a little girl with hair beaded to its tips who kept calling him back for another goodbye kiss at the door.

A mother checked with the principal, standing at the door as they arrived, about arrangements of some sort, noting that she and her husband had gotten had it straight the other day, at registration. "Yes, you were very well organized," he told her. He remembered.

Inside later, the bell rang. When kids kept talking, teacher Viki Day, a 14-year veteran in Lutheran schools, asked, "What does that final bell mean?" Then she led her 26 kids in the sign of the cross, an opening prayer, and pledges of allegiance -- one to the flag, another to "the cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ, our savior."

Leading the devotional service that starts each day, she asked what happens to the carrot and the egg when both are boiled.

Answer: "One becomes hard (the egg) -- weaknesses are firmed up. The other becomes soft -- hard hearts are softened by grace. We all have carrot qualities, as hard-heartedness. We all have egg qualities, as laziness or what we won't give up."

She asks for a hard-heart example, a girl says "Yelling," adding "for no reason."

Viki asks how you help a person "with attitude for no reason." Pray? Yes, says one. Have a good attitude, which the other might notice, says another. They rehearse possibilities.

Then: "Let's fold our hands for prayer," she said and led them, asking God to "soften my hard spots and strengthen my weakness."

More later about those amazing Lutherans, not to mention Jews, Presbyterians, and Catholics!

Lutherans ho! . . . Reader Doug responds generously to Blithe Spirit's account of the Missouri Synod Lutheran school in the Austin neighborhood, where black kids learned the 3 R's and theology too. He attended such a school in the '50s in far suburban Dundee, Illinois.

"Not a day goes by" that he doesn't recall "those old German-American men" -- ordained as teachers, by the way -- who drilled him in his Palmer penmanship, "steely in their determination" to make him right-handed.

One kept fifth-graders reciting constantly in unison, "perhaps to keep all 54 from talking" while he himself "strutted the aisles" brandishing a rubber-tipped map-pointer.

The kids memorized Luther's Small Catechism and learned all the songs in the hymnal. Nothing about law vs. gospel, however, which I called a "Lutheran staple." (Maybe it isn't.) His school may have been "repressive and brutal," as he understands Catholic schools of the era also were. But he "suffered no ill effects from it," he has always felt. "We got a good education, solid values, and firm discipline -- and we were all factory workers' kids."

As for Catholics, they were to be both pitied and scorned. Years later, when Doug married an African-American woman, the issue with his family was less that she was black than that she had been a Catholic nun. But in his Lutheran school, they all "prayed and cried" when Our Lady of Angels school burned, and teachers held special services for the victims.

Their "loving and caring" Christianity won out over their "residual" anti-Catholicism, said Doug.