Class Thoughts

This is a bit of a strange week – being Catholic Schools Week and such. As a result, I decided that I needed to get in as much as possible today. With the freshmen, it was largely combining aspects of Jesus’ identity – of Redeemer, Teacher, and Miracle-Worker, emphasizing the redemptive suffering and death he endured. I always find it an important point to make because too many people will reduce Jesus to a one-dimensional being and neglect the essence of his life – his death.

Because tomorrow is “Student Appreciation Day” – we have shorter classes, a movie, and a volleyball game (of which I am foolishly partaking). I believe class periods are roughly 20 minutes, so that’s just enough to make the point then about how the words and actions of Jesus’ ministry caused people to go wild.

As for the Juniors, taking moral and social issues – it was a review of virtue: Cardinal and Theological alike, and our first main issue of the course: human dignity. Today was discussing the meaning of “equality”, and what it doesn’t mean. Tomorrow’s short class will revolve entirely around the use of language and the clarity and obfuscation it provides when speaking of these issues. We’ll see how it goes. I have one section that is really chatty and another that never says a word. Such is the life in teaching!

New Semester Courses

The first week of the new semester is over, but even with that, it wasn’t truly a full week. Here on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, we have these things called “fog delays”, in which school will start later due to the heavy water vapor. Granted, driving in the fog is no joke, but it’s not usually a problem by 8 in the morning. Nevertheless, yesterday’s school day was started 90 minutes later due to such a delay, and by the time I was leaving campus in the afternoon, it was 75 degrees.

On January 26th.

Anyway, the courses go like this – for the 9th graders, we are doing Christology – the study of Christ. It’s straightforward in the sense that it is a combo of talking about who Jesus is and a study of the New Testament. It’s one of my favorite topics to teach and it is something I really get into, regardless of the grade level. For the 11th grade, the course is called “Catholic Moral and Social Issues”. They took Moral and Ethical Philosophy in the first semester, and now they concern themselves with the applicability in the issues we face in life and society.

It is a little bit of a tricky course. for a few reasons. The main one is that teenagers are (largely) fickle and ignorant about the deeper issues. This isn’t necessarily a criticism of them, it’s just the way it is . There are always exceptions, and adults aren’t exactly better either. My larger point, though, is that teens will mature and more often than not will change how they view things the older they get. I certainly did.

Another element is the very counter-cultural nature of such a course. The world says one thing, and proper Christian formation says another. Separating the two is always difficult especially given the age group involved, who largely are still focused on reputation and gaining the approval of their peers. My challenge during the first couple of days was tell them to look deeper at the issues and use their God-given sense of reason to wade through it and see the nuance; emotive argumentation is not going to be permitted. Disagreement is allowed, but we are going to be rational in our disagreement.

In other words, exactly the opposite of how our social and political bodies act in the world.

The course is designed around the Ten Commandments, namely Commandments 5 (Thou shall not kill) through Commandment 8 (Thou shall not bear false witness). We will start with the latter as a stand in for human dignity and its status as the skeleton key for every other door we open. It makes sense – quite frankly, if you dehumanize someone, it becomes easy to take his property, family, and even life. Therefore, it is important to start with the dignity aspect even though it isn’t a “tangible asset”, so to speak.

We’ll see how it goes. This week is Catholic Schools’ Week, which means there will be lots of auxiliary events and a shortened amount of class time. Alas, on we move!

The Questions…The Questions…

Why do I have to take religion?

What am I ever going to use this for?

Why isn’t my grade higher? I should be doing better, because I go to church, fill function X (and so forth).

I love teaching. I love teaching theology. What I don’t love are some of the inane questions I get from students regarding my subject matter, such as the ones above. Every teacher has gotten some variation of these questions, especially along the “when am I ever going to use this” lines. It can be frustrating at times, and some of this flows from the cultural shift that has taken place surrounding education at large over the last few generations. At one point, education wasn’t for the masses, except for the basic skills (known colloquially as the “Three R’s”), but rather for those who could afford it and wanted a broader base of knowledge and worldliness. It certainly wasn’t for job training or preparation. When provided, it was usually done so under the guidance of religious people – Catholic orders of priests and nuns, divinity schools, and churches. Universities were meant to be seats of knowledge.

Over the past 125+ years, education has become the purview of the government, and that has been a mistake. Government isn’t interested in broader bases of knowledge or worldliness; in fact, it is interested in the opposite for the general population and to sort out and set aside its next generation of mandarins to carry out the Prime Directive of the Bureaucracy.

What appalling cynicism! (Yes, it’s true…read here)

At one time, the rationale could be made that the government school system (let’s call it what it is – “public school” has always been a euphemism – As if “the people” actually have a say in what goes on, get real!) was looking to “help the next generation become productive citizens,” but that has long been gone, at least in my lifetime. Now, the bureaucratic side of education merely aims to keep feeding itself and the students pay the price – they aren’t learning, whether it is considered “useful” or not by our modern standards.

So how does this tie back into the questions posed at the beginning? The questions buy into the more recent premise set within education that any kind of schooling is supposed to provide some kind of job training. If one desires to be an engineer, then sure, a theology class is going to have little to no meaning to that individual who pursues engineering. I found myself in school saying it as well – why do I have to take pre-calculus when the only math question I need to figure out in theology is “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”¹ But having been in the classroom for 20 years, I know that mentality is wrong, and it is not the fundamental premise of education – which is about the person, not the job/career he wishes to have.

My “Little Things” provides much of how I view the purpose of education, using theology to make the point. Education is about life – the vicissitudes we face in this vale of tears. Love God and love neighbor, be able to think on your feet, use your talents and abilities the best you can. Everyone has something to offer, and I believe it bears repeating that education is about broadening one’s horizons, not becoming a cog in a machine. The premise used to be the former, it has now become the latter, and we are all worse off for it. Well, most of us are, anyway. It will not change unless there is some form of Great Awakening – which I wonder if that even gets taught in government school history classes…too much religion involved. Hopefully such an awakening doesn’t happen too late. Until then, we are slowly careening toward the final stage of doom.

Or maybe that’s just my pessimism speaking.

¹ The answer is zero, since angels don’t have bodies and therefore, cannot dance. How’s THAT for pedantry?

Snow Days (Among Other Things…)

Hey, look who’s back!

Yes, it’s been so long, but realistically, I decided to keep YATG active just in case I ever got the itch to write again. I did consider getting a Substack, and while it is still an option, the free and open availability of WordPress allows for me to pick up and drop off as needed.

So, we have a snow day.

It is exam week, and it has been one of the stranger weeks in a while. The last time I remember exam week being messed up like this was in the winter of 2009-10 (i.e. “Snowpocalypse Winter”). Last year we didn’t get any snow days and we’ve now had three in the past week and a half. Interesting times, indeed.

As with many things in life, I have a love/hate relationship with snow days. The one we had this past Tuesday, I hated. The one we have currently, I don’t hate. My car is the shop right now getting the first major repair in its 14 years and 194,000+ miles of existence, and I was also supposed to go to DC for the annual March for Life with a bunch of my students. School got cancelled by all the local counties here on the Eastern Shore, so that eliminated going to Washington. Which is a bummer, but is helpful for me on this particular day.

Except the 700+ dollar repair, of course.

Alas, we head into another weekend where I don’t have a lot to do. All my previously administered exams are graded and in the system; I have one left to administer on Monday morning. New semester and new classes begin Tuesday and all the paperwork for that is complete. Why not pick up a write a little bit as well. Hopefully unlike last year at this time I will attempt to keep up with this. It’s not as if I haven’t done the writing bit before, but one thing that is true the older I get is I react less to what’s going on around the world and would rather wait for some kind of inspiration to hit.

In the words my brother loves to repeat: we shall see. Until then, Happy (belated) New Year and enjoy the snow if you are able to!

Course Preparation

In a previous post, I asked how we can crunch two-thousand years of Christian history into four months? What is going to be left out?

Turns out, plenty. But I do believe I got the formula down at least for the first unit – which will cover from Pentecost to the collapse of the Roman Empire (this is for 10th graders, by the way). The theory is that the theology curriculum (as put forth by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops) is house-building: start with the foundations and work up. Therefore, I shouldn’t have to spend a lot of time going into detail about who Jesus is and what he came to do – that is the main theme of the 2nd semester course in the 9th grade.

HOWEVER…

And this is how the devil is in the details (ironic use, huh?). The question is: how much did we ever recall over the summer between grades?

Right.

So there is no doubt I am going to have to swing back through what Jesus said and did to make sure the students understand why Pentecost was so important as a launching point. And so the first unit will have 3-4 days specifically devoted to Jesus’ ministry, mission of redemption, and establishment of the Church. That’s ok, though, because it is always interesting to give it a refresher so there can be a running start.

The 9th grade course is about Christ and Divine Revelation. It largely consists of walking through the foreshadowing of Jesus in the Old Testament. Some of the students coming in will never have taken a theology course before, nor do they know how to read Scripture. So before we even get to the nuts and bolts of the Old Testament, we’re going to have to lay the groundwork It’s something I used to angst over, but the older I’ve gotten, the more at peace I am with it.

That said, teaching the unchurched/non-religious is still always going to be a struggle. That piece I linked was something I wrote a few years ago, intending to try and get it published in a Catholic publication, but life happened and it never came to fruition.

There’s a bunch of things coming in the near future that have to do with the start of the school year. I am putting my nose to the grindstone to get them done, but I still enjoy sharing them with you, because this is a new journey and one I haven’t made in eons.

I do ask that you pray for me as I begin all of this. I am an experienced teacher, but a lot of this is returning to “rookie” mode, and I need all the help I can get!

St. Joseph, Pray for Us. St. Peter and St. Paul, Pray for Us.

My Cynicism and Education

I’ve been spelling out how I view the larger world, especially in terms of corrupted and corruptible institutions, but I figured I would address the objection of “how can you see the world this way and be responsible for the education of impressionable young people?”

It’s actually not that difficult.

For one, I never discuss specific politics in the classroom. My students never know who or what I vote for in any given election, nor do I discuss it with them. Why? Because it’s not their business or concern. We all had teachers who wore their political opinions on their sleeves. I have had colleagues through my 18 years in education who did the same.

I find it takes away from the classroom experience because all it ends up doing is providing confirmation bias for one group of students and giving license to another group not to pay any attention to what the instructor has to say on the actual subject, because “he believes X, Y, and Z on political issues A, B, and C,” thereby rendering (in their minds) invalid his actual expertise.

I prefer to keep them guessing. One of the most fun moments early in my teaching life was right before the 2004 election; one section of freshman boys spent an entire class period in early November debating whether I was voting for George W. Bush’s re-election or for John Kerry. They could never figure it out, and I liked it that way.

Which brings me to another point, and one that doesn’t get enough of a spotlight in our youth-worshipping culture: teenagers don’t know anything. Ok, that’s unfair – a few know some things, but I remember how I was when I was ages 13-17: I merely spouted off what I was hearing from my (liberal) parents and what they read and watched. Once I was old enough to realize I needed to form my own views of the world, it dawned on me that if I went into education (as I always wanted to do), arguing politics with teenagers was really just arguing with their parents, not them, regardless of which way they leaned on the spectrum. This has been borne out way too many times to be enumerated in my experience, and I believe leaving the politics at the door is the best way to be effective.

So how do I square my cynicism with teaching? Teaching theology, it’s actually simple. There are certain principles involved – one is faith in God, not in princes (Psalm 146). Another is the reminder that man does not live on bread alone (Matthew 4:4). A third is the Golden Rule (Matthew 7:12). A fourth one is the Greatest Commandment (Matthew 22:37-40), and the fifth is the New Commandment to “love ye one another, as I have loved you” (John 13:34). What all of these things remind us of is that life starts with ourselves and how we interact with God and neighbor. Other principles such as charity beginning at home and the lesson of the Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25) are included as guiding forces in the classroom.

A major problem in modern society is we are encouraged to be how Luke Skywalker was prior to becoming a Jedi – always looking ahead, never paying attention to where he was in the present. We tend to miss the fact that there are things we can do right in front of our own faces. Instead, we are encouraged to try and solve problems that no singular individual can possibly solve at a distance, and all that leads to is “virtue signaling” and an elevation of good intentions above all else, with the problem remaining.

Instead, I try to encourage thinking things through logically, knowing that students aren’t going to learn anything if I just spoonfeed them what I want them to think and say. I also try my best to get them to think and act locally – one’s neighbors will benefit so much more from acts of charity and goodwill. “Changing the world” is a foolhardy exercise, but it gets more attention and recognition. However, real change starts small and locally – one step at a time.

If you go back to my original post on my cynical thoughts (as well as the follow-up), I stressed that top-down solutions almost never work. It always begins with the little things. Do the little things, and the big things will follow.

However, it takes patience and a willingness to make mistakes. Difficult for a teenager, but a lesson well learned, and one that will help them make their place in the world and society better.

New Courses For the Fall

I did learn what it is I’ll be teaching for the fall: Old Testament and Church History.

Both of those courses will be a hoot. Except for the fact they are semester courses. Which makes things a little more difficult. The question becomes: what gets emphasized, and what gets cut?

I’ve taught both course in entire years and I felt I couldn’t do justice to them. With the Old Testament, we could spend way too much time on the early Genesis items (Creation to Babel) or not enough time on things such as the Wisdom writings (Job, Psalms, etc.). With Church history, there’s so much to cover with the Roman Empire, and lots to gloss over with the Middle Ages and even toward modern times.

So no matter what, it is going to be a challenge. I am up for it, to be sure, but I’m also sure someone is going to be annoyed if topic X doesn’t get covered. What I can’t tell you is if that someone is going to be me! Either way, my job and goal is to present the topics as faithfully as possible regardless of the time constraints, such as they are. I’ll definitely be keeping everyone up to speed as these changes keep coming along in life. It’ll certainly be interesting.

Language in Society

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’”

Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll

A lot is being made over the fact the current people in charge of the government of the United States are playing games with what constitutes a “recession.” I’m not an economist, but it was always clear to me that a recession was defined as “consecutive quarters of contracting gross domestic product (GDP).” This is a rather objective standard. However, there is a concerted effort to try and tell us that it isn’t really a recession, despite all of us seeing the numbers that says it is.

My point here is not to get into a political flame war (as I wrote last week – I have disavowed that in my current writing life), but what this signifies is a dangerous game being played. What makes it so dangerous is the attempt to undo reality itself. Let me clarify – reality is always going to be reality; one’s perception of it is never going to change what the thing/setting/element is. However, this attempt to make everything based on what an individual wants it to be will do nothing but damage…and…what happens when the shoe is placed on the other foot?

That last element is something the subjectivists (using the term loosely) never consider, and it is a lesson that has to be learned repeatedly. The people who want to alter the language think they are going to be in control forever and once they aren’t, the power they created now gets passed to people who are their opponents or enemies. Then all bets are off as to what happens down the line, and the subjectivist-types are going to be under the thumb of their adversaries, and according to the rules they established.

This is why commonality has always been so important to a stable society – common laws, rules, norms, customs, and language. Fixed definitions of these things allows for them to be beacons and anchors even as times change, and if any of the above changes, it is because there was a large enough consensus over a large amount of time, not because a small group of people decided it was in their own personal and parochial interest at that moment to change things.

Within teaching, and especially within theology – semantics is very important, because without it, concrete concepts are just thrown to the wind. Things such as grace, redemption, sin, and repentance all have specific meanings to them, and I cannot manage a classroom without having that common vocabulary established. Classrooms are societies in micro, and nowhere is there a better example of chaos popping up if even the 20 students don’t have a common understanding of the terminology and concepts at hand. All it takes is 2-3 students (i.e. 10-15% of the population) not understanding to cause a potential disruption. Extrapolate that to society, and one can see where issues can begin arising.

Long story short – words have meaning, and when one changes things willy-nilly, be careful what you wish for.

Starting to Get Set

I am in the midst of the “time off” between Summer School and the start of the next school year (circa August 29), but because I am switching schools for the first time in my professional life (after 18 years, no less), this summer is a little different.

It is a bit strange, because I am moving from one Catholic school to another, and yet, the two schools could not be more different in a lot of ways. The former has 800+ students, all boys, and the campus is a very tight fit in an urban/suburban setting. The new place has around 200 students, it is co-ed, and the campus is brand-spanking new with room for expansion and growth.

My life and teaching career are also at completely different spots. When I started teaching I was in my early 20’s and because I was returning to my alma mater, I didn’t need to be brought up to speed about the culture of the school, or the schedule, or how to get from point A to point B. I only needed to concentrate on the items inside the classroom – curriculum and class management. Now, in my early 40’s, I don’t have to learn how to teach (don’t get me wrong, I can always still learn), but I do have to spend a lot of time getting to know the people, the facilities, and the general culture. I am coming in as an outsider; I have to do everything new except the teaching part. It’s a very strange dynamic, indeed.

Other things include having to submit to a drug test. Never done that before (at least not before this coming Friday). I am guessing with the proliferation of marijuana decriminalization and legalization this is now a thing. The courses are all semesters rather than year-long courses. That will be an adjustment, although I have taught some semester courses before, just not for freshmen.

No matter what, though, teaching is what I love. And this is definitely going to be an interesting year, and I will continue to write about it as we move through it. If you ever wondered what it is for a sort of middle-aged guy to up and start over again in the same profession, pull up a chair and gather around, because you will find out.

The Last Day

It’s a bit of a bittersweet day. Today is the final day of summer school, but more importantly, it officially closes the book on my professional association with my beloved alma mater. I know many people have worked jobs longer, but 18 years is still a long time, and it has been my only “day” job in my adult life (various side hustles don’t count!).

I’m not a sentimentalist by nature, but when you throw in my high school years and all the time I spent here even before the age of 14, we are talking about two-thirds of my life. I think, for the most part, I am going to miss the support staff most of all – secretaries, maintenance men, the aides – the true “invisible hand” that allows a place as large as this to actually function. Given the way my personality is, I bonded very well with the staff over the years.

So I guess it is time to bid farewell, as I begin the process of preparation for a new job and a new school. Exciting and apprehensive times. At some point over the upcoming months, how and why the process took place will be divulged.