The above quote is from the blog of author Robert Hutchinson. I love his January 26, 2009, post about becoming a catechist. He really captures the feeling that many catechist have when thrust in front of a group of kids. Enjoy his account!

I have to say, it’s very humbling to become a teacher of any kind. When you have to stand up in front of a group of people and expound on a given subject, even one you think you know something about, it becomes clear very quickly how little you really know. As the old Jesuit joke has it, “I don’t know anything about that subject; I’ve never even taught it.”

Also, students have an annoying habit of asking questions that are so basic – so antecedent to the subject matter you are discussing – that you can be flabbergasted and utterly at a loss at how to answer them. Students can ask questions that are so basic they’re actually philosophical and therefore quite mind-numbing.

A lawyer standing up and giving a lecture on intellectual property law, for example, expecting and ready to answer knotty questions about the Internet and copyright, can be stopped in his or her tracks by a question like, “Why is it wrong to kill people?” or “What is a crime?” Questions like that are four or five degrees behind, or ahead of, depending upon how you look at it, what the lawyer really wants to talk about.

So it was that I became, kicking and screaming, a Catechist, a teacher for Confirmation. I agreed to do it because I have children going through the whole Confirmation program, my parish desperately needed teachers, I spent 10 years earning a master’s degree in theology, and I ran out of excuses. I also wanted to know what my own 14-year-old was learning from the program.

I’m a writer, not a teacher, but in the past whenever I imagined myself teaching a course of some kind, I always assumed it would be in front of interested, retired people or graduate students. I could see myself teaching Biblical Hebrew… or Kierkegaard… or Contemporary Philosophy of Religion. What I never imagined was standing in front of 15 or 16 nice enough but utterly bored 14-year-old Orange County kids who are being forced by their parents to attend confirmation classes and listen to a bookish, middle-aged guy (me) talk to them about such things as Baptism, Christian Ethics, the Gifts of the Holy Spirit, and so on, as mandated by the curriculum we were given.

Read more: http://roberthutchinson.com/apologetics/the-humbling-spiritual-path-of-teaching-teenagers/

Did you come on board as a catechist “kicking and screaming?”What’s you reaction to Robert’s account?