Features and Stories

Jim O’Connor: A strict math teacher, a caring baby-cuddler

Jim O’Connor: A strict math teacher, a caring baby-cuddler
Bernadine Racoma

Jim O’Connor is a calculus and algebra teacher at St. Francis High School, an exclusive boy’s school in La Cañada, California. He is a very strict teacher and students say that they hate him. Little did they know that their teacher has another persona. Mr. O’Connor can be found at the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles in his spare time as a TLC Volunteer. He has been doing this for 20 years, cuddling and caring for sick babies, which earned him the nickname “Baby Whisperer.”

The “terror” teacher

Jim O’Connor is an engineer and Vietnam veteran and has been teaching for 38 years. The Brooklyn, New York-native spent three years with the U.S. Navy and served aboard the USS Enterprise during the war in Vietnam.

Mr. O’Connor still sports a crew cut, but his hair is gray now. Inside the classroom, his authoritative voice and keenly watchful eyes are the bane of his students. He is so used to commanding respect when he is teaching. He believes that if you cannot control the classroom, you will not have a learning environment.

That is why when his students finally learned how he spends his free time away from school they were greatly surprised. As a hospital volunteer worker, Jim O’Connor cuddles sick babies. Hospital staff and parents of sick children call him a baby whisperer. This is just the exact opposite of how their teacher appears before them in class. Babies trust and adore him. He has a calming presence, which transfers to even the crabbiest of babies.

He was first introduced to the hospital through a friend who asked him to come and donate blood. With a Type O negative blood, he is a universal donor and after that first time, he kept returning to donate. So far his blood donation has amounted to 72 gallons.

Curiosity and compassion

As a regular blood donor Jim O’Connor gets to visit the hospital often and he constantly sees volunteers at the hospital helping children who are sick. He got curious and inquired how he could be a volunteer himself. Mr. O’Connor has never married and he doesn’t have any kids yet he immediately took to this task of comforting sick babies, who seem to trust him at first sight. His work taught him how to cuddle babies, take them for walks and feed them. He even gets them to smile, according to the nurses at the hospital.

He has become invaluable to the hospital staff. They think that it is his deep voice that calms the babies but for him, it is simply because there is another warm body holding the baby that keeps them calm. He is more drawn to those babies and children that are not visited often by parents who might be living far away, had other children to take care of at home or had to go to work. He also tends to older children, and displaced and abused kids.

He became an instant celebrity when a senior student of his came to the hospital to donate blood. Quickly the word spread in and outside the school and now Mr. O’Connor has to deal with the media. He does not mind, for he believes that if his story inspires his students to get involved like him, then this minor inconvenience is fine.

Photo credit: Taken by Debster88 under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

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