Blood of the Lamb

Monday, October 8, 2012

My latest light bulb over the head was that I should arrange to do chalk drawings with the kids. We could talk about iconography, and put chalk drawings on the pavement around the church, to be enjoyed by people attending Mass. I wasn't born yesterday, so I knew the first step would be to get permission from everyone who could possibly be in a position to grant it.

Henry Kissinger famously remarked that the reason academic politics are so vicious is because the stakes are so low. Well, the stakes don't get much lower than parish religious education, at least in terms of status or money. My request for permission immediately revealed an ongoing turf war between the director of PREP and the Principal of the parish school.

My co-teacher suggested I bypass everyone and go directly to the pastor and get his permission. Our pastor is a very sweet man; I'll call him Father Magnanimous. In our discussion, it became crystal clear that he doesn't have the foggiest notion what's going on in the PREP program, or what's in the curriculum. For instance, he said that "of course" the kids would all know Psalm 23 ("The Lord is my shepherd ..."). I would bet legal tender these kids wouldn't know Psalm 23 if it walked up and bit them in the ear.

But the part of our discussion that I remember best went like this:

Fr. Magnanimous: "Your role as catechist is to serve as a model of charity [i.e., perfect love]."

My thought balloon: "wow, I'm even less qualified for this job than I thought."

What I said: "I'd better bring more than that, or the kids will start a riot."

In the end, Fr. Magnanimous gave his permission, but said he'd have to check with the business director.

Next, I got an e-mail from the director of PREP (let's call her "Ms. Charge"), explaining that she had consulted with the parish business director and the parish director (let's call her "Attila the Nun"), and they were concerned that people might walk on the chalk drawings and track chalk into the church, the kids might make noise, etc. Their counteroffer was that we could draw on a remote portion of the parking lot, and that Ms. Charge could bring her personal collection of religious objects to show to the class.

We said OK to the terms of the counteroffer on the theory that we might as well take what we can get. Ms. Charge came to our class this morning and showed the kids her collection; miniatures of items used for saying Mass, a priest's traveling kit, icons, rosaries, etc. This went extremely well. The kids were interested, and glad of the chance to get up out of their seats and look at and handle the various objects.

I'm hoping to draw symbolic animals for the chalk drawings, so I introduced the symbols of the dove and the lamb.  I showed a couple of videos containing doves behaving unpredictably;

Next, we talked about the lamb.  I told them about the use of lambs for a sacrifice; this got a little graphic.

Kid (sardonically): "that's pleasant!"

"It's not pretty", I said.  That's why their curriculum never mentions it.  But if you don't know that lambs got sacrificed, you don't know why Jesus was called the Lamb of God.  It wasn't because of his sweet fluffiness, that's for sure.

I wanted to tell the kids about the Sacrifice of the Mass, part of the dark, mystical, difficult tradition of the Catholic Church, or what I consider the good stuff.

Me:  "does the Church still perform sacrifices today?"

Kids:  "No!"

Me: "Actually, the Church performs sacrifices every day, many times a day."

Kid (raising hand):  " ... but where do they get all the lambs?"

I told them that the Mass is both a sacrifice and a banquet; an important if mind-boggling point.

We still had a few minutes left, so I had time for this:

Me: "So I talked to Fr. Magnanimous earlier this week. He says my job is to serve as a model of charity. Charity is the highest form of love, higher than romantic love. It's the kind of love that God has; it's the kind of love that God is. Do you think it would be easy for me to be a model of charity?"

Kids and co-teacher, as one: "No!"

Me: "I think it's practically impossible."

And with that, the class ended. Next week, chalk drawings, I hope!

For my Sins

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

In teaching catechism (PREP), I've been getting an effect which is, I'm sure, familiar to any teacher. I would ask the class a question, and the same 5 kids would raise their hands; 3 because they knew the answer, and the other 2 because they like to talk. Meanwhile, the other 15 kids stared vacantly into space.

So, I'm looking for ways to get every kid involved. Last Sunday, I wanted to show the kids how the Church's ideas about penance have changed, so I looked through a bunch of medieval penitentials, and took a couple of examples from history. Then I printed up the sins and penances separately, handed them out to the class, and asked them to match the sin to the penance. The idea was that the kid who got

If a King encourages his friends to murder the Archbishop of Canterbury,

would find a match with the kid who got

he should be publicly flogged at the Archbishop's tomb.

and the kid who got

If anyone steal a thing of middling value,

 would find a match with the kid who got

he is to return the stolen object to him who owns it and fast 1 year on bread and water.

Once the kids caught on to the idea, they found the matches quickly; quicker than I had anticipated (it's a bright class.) At that point I stared vacantly into space. Fortunately my co-teacher had printed up a bunch of word searches, where you read a definition and then find the word, out of the book.

Here we encountered an ongoing problem. The textbook has lots of definitions (that's about what it's got for content), but they're so squishy and peculiar that they don't line up with English as spoken by the rest of us. My co-teacher, for instance, got two of the textbook's definitions reversed, and I didn't blame her. What word do you think is defined by "the freedom that comes from trusting God and respecting all people"?

The Honeymoon is Over

Monday, Sept. 24, 2012

Well, this was bound to happen. After a very successful first 2 classes of PREP (catechism), yesterday was a mess. The kids were rowdy even during the little pre-class gathering, and it just got worse once we were in the classroom. The most enthusiastic response I got was when I inadvertently opened the window at the same moment that a skunk sprayed a dog just outside. Otherwise, the kids were very difficult to engage. A bit of dialogue from the day's proceedings:

Me: "The Church names its councils after the place where the council was held. So, where was the Council of Trent held?"

Kid (shrugging): "I'a'know."

It was like pulling teeth. The kids were moderately interested in acting out a skit about the good Samaritan that my co-teacher organized. Also, they liked a couple of video clips I brought in; one, a very funny confession scene from a Britcom called "My Family", and the other, historic footage of the election of Pope John Paul I (the one who died after 33 days, possibly poisoned.)
Sigh. Soldiering on to next week --

A Conclave

Monday, Sept 17, 2012

This school year, I've joined up with a friend of mine to team-teach 4th-grade catechism class at our Catholic church.

Before our first class, we obtained the year's textbook. It stinks. It's all disconnected bits of factoids, word search puzzles, match the word with the definition, dumbed-down, sanitized, dull dull dull. The layout looks like somebody's design program barfed on the page. Yes, our curriculum is the Everyday Math of religious ed. We've even got the dreaded "spiral" effect: as my friend discovered this week, "they've done the Beatitudes for the past 3 years, and they don't know anything about them!"

My friend and I agreed that we could get through the assigned content of a chapter in about 10 minutes, so that leaves us 45 minutes a week to do something else.

I decided that we should try to teach the kids some history in our remaining time. The first week, I presented a brief wrap-up of Vatican II, with the line-up of recent popes. I threw out what I thought was a softball question:

Me: "Who elects the Pope?"

Kid 1: "We do!"

Kid 2: "Priests! ... um, catechists!"

Kid 3 (confused): "I thought we elected Obama ...?"

Her friend: "No, he's the President!"

After some discussion, I explained that the Pope is elected by the Cardinals, who were appointed by previous Popes. The kids were surprised. One asked, "if the Pope appoints the Cardinals and the Cardinals elect the Pope, how did we get the first Pope?" (Excellent question, I thought.) My friend said, "Next week, we're electing a Pope!"

So, yesterday we held a Conclave. I was really hoping we could burn ballots and produce black and white smoke, but my friend talked me out of it (we waved black and white fabric instead.) I gave a brief talk about how the Conclave works, appointed the kids Cardinals, and passed out the first round of ballots (I Elect as Supreme Pontiff ____). Suddenly, the room came alive. The kids were competing to be the one to read out the ballot names or tabulate votes on the whiteboard. After four rounds of balloting, they elected a girl (a historic first.) Habemus Papam!

So, for all you teachers who read this blog, I am now getting some experience from your side of the desk. Wish me luck!

6 comments:

Chris: Fascinating! I remember attending catechism classes once a week, too (though even then I think people were becoming uncomfortable with the word "catechism," just around the same time they became uncomfortable with movie reviews in the Catholic newspaper that categorized some movies as "condemned"). I don't remember that kind of Everyday-Mathish approach, but whatever approach they did use, I can't say there was much long-term retention in my case...

I've had a similar reaction when I see what now passes for the Guinness Book of World Records. That book was always a best-seller at our annual book fairs, and was basically about five hundred pages of relatively small-font text with some occasional photographs -- we loved it. The ones they sell now are made up mostly of full-page, full-color photographs with a little text here and there, often contained in little sidebars and captions, with a lot of big-print in various trendy fonts. The result is that there are far fewer actual world records discussed. You could probably "read" the entire book in less than an hour. Because the default assumption is that kids have no interest in reading and can't focus on anything for more than about thirty seconds.

By the way, I know of a Mennonite woman here who, as part of her church's Sunday school program, performed the Beatitudes as a rap song, to help the kids learn and remember it. Not crazy, really -- the verses seem to fit the rap mold surprisingly well. If you try it, though, please post a video!

FedUpMom: Chris, how right you are. It isn't actually called "catechism", it's called "PREP", which stands for something or other.

It's bizarre. We dumb everything down for kids, and then criticize them for being restless. I'd be restless too!

Chris: Funny -- I think ours was technically called CCD, which also stood for something or other, I never knew what.

Megan:   If there's anything I disliked more than regular school, it was Sunday School. I went for probably nine years, and I really don't think I retained a single thing. It was all workbook stuff, crafts that were fun but didn't teach anything or reading from the Bible and then discussing (that was occasionally interesting). Yours sounds much more interesting!

FedUpMom: Thanks, Megan! I fear that we might have peaked too soon. I just hope we can continue to hold the kids' interest.