It's almost noon on Wednesday, and Sister of St. Joseph of Cardondelet Consuelo Aguilar is doing what she's been doing for more than 60 years --- teaching.

Her makeshift classroom is the spacious fifth floor of the Archdiocesan Catholic Center on Wilshire Boulevard. And her students today are three Korean women religious --- Blessed Sacrament Sister of Charity Rosa Shon and Sisters of Little Jesus Martha Park and Gemma Choi --- sitting at a banquet table. With pen in hand, each is staring down at their open workbooks. Nearby is an oversized white pad with 30 words neatly printed describing common community places.

After telling the Sisters she wants them to use two of the words in five sentences, she gives an example: "I am going to the library and then to the park today."

Then, gesturing with both hands, she encourages the foreign-born Sisters to try their hand at writing out the sentences, underlining each key place word.

Sister Aguilar has been encouraging students since she entered the convent at 18. She showed up on a Thursday, and the following Monday found herself in a classroom teaching second-graders at St. Anselm School.

"I was too dumb to know what was happening," she recalls with a straight face, "But I had a good mentor who guided me on what to teach and the 'seat work' to give out. My only problem was I was so eager that I would be finished with all the schoolwork by 11 a.m. and wouldn't know what to do for the rest of the day.

"I learned how to teach the hard way --- by doing," she points out. "That's how we did it, and in some ways it's the best way. Or you could get to hate it, either one or the other. I stuck it out. But I knew elementary school was not for me because I didn't have that much patience."

Still, she taught elementary school for three years in Los Angeles and Oakland, while also giving piano lessons before and after school to bring in extra money for her religious community.

Then Sister Aguilar became the music teacher at Cathedral High School in San Diego, followed by a nine-year stint at her alma mater, the old St. Mary's Academy at Crenshaw and Slauson in South Los Angeles. Besides being the music teacher and putting on musicals, her class load included algebra, Latin, Spanish and glee club.

It was at St. Mary's and her next assignment at the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet's boarding school in Tucson where she really got "turned on" to teaching.

There were other high school assignments at San Francisco, Concord and San Diego. Wherever she taught, "It was a full day and full night," she acknowledges.

In the late '50s, while doing campus ministry at Mount St. Mary's College, she started an ESL (English as a Second Language) program, helping immigrants fulfill the amnesty requirement for citizenship. Then she decided to "slow down a little bit" by teaching ESL classes at the Sisters' high school in Tsu, Japan, near Kyoto.

When she came home two years later, Sister Aguilar knew she wanted to continue working with ESL students. So she got a job at Los Angeles Unified School District's Evans Adult School, where she taught for another 9 1/2 years.

It was only at the age of 78, when her health told her to "slow down more," that she agreed to semi-retire. But she kept teaching English to the housekeepers, kitchen help and other Spanish-speaking employees at Carondelet Center, the Sisters of St. Joseph provincial house in Brentwood.

Now 80, Sister Aguilar still teaches two times a week at Carondelet Center as well as at the Archdiocesan Catholic Center every Wednesday morning.

"I enjoy doing this because it doesn't cause any stress in my life, which I don't need at my age," she explains with a little grin. "But I'm very pleased to be able to help out, and I get a lot of satisfaction out of it. Because the adult students are so interested and willing. They really want to learn. And because I'm older, I don't think I threaten them at all."

But the woman religious admits that teaching ESL is harder than teaching regular English. Sometimes she gets discouraged when she thinks her students have really "gotten it" and she finds out they haven't.

"But I enjoy it because you do the best you can and use your rapport with the students to motivate them," she says, before explaining, "I'm one of those few who never went into something else --- except for campus ministry for awhile.

"I enjoy teaching, and I still do," she adds. "I'm not saying I was a real professional great teacher. But I think it was my enthusiasm and my desire for students to learn. You know, my whole philosophy was to empower them to move ahead."