Tonight is week 2 for religious education and a big chunk of the time will be devoted to an opening prayer service in the Church. Of course, this provides an opportunity to teach the young people about reverence. In many ways, reverence is a lost art in our society. Simply put, reverence means recognition of the sacred. In the church, we gather in a sacred space, aware of the presence of the Living God. One […]
Most of us catechists would prefer to “preach to the choir.” In other words, we tend to hope that our classes will have good participants who are enthusiastic about faith formation. I know I do. Today’s Gospel reminds us that Jesus came to seek out the lost. This Gospel challenges us catechists to pay special attention to those participants in our group who are “lost.” I pray that this week as I teach, I will […]
Praise God from whom all blessings flow! I am blessed with a wonderful group of 8th graders! Tonight’s first class (I couldn’t wait till the morning to write this post!) went like a dream. I have 15 eighth graders – 8 boys and 7 girls – and from the moment they walked in, I could tell they were going to be a good group. They were polite and friendly, very outgoing, and very respectful. I […]
In today’s world, the concept of “coaches” has really grown. Now, we not only have coaches for sports, but we have business coaches, relationship coaches, life coaches, and so on. (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, just Google life coaches and you’ll see what I mean) I like to think of catechists as “faith coaches.” I used this term last night when I spent the evening with the 6th grade families at St. […]
Elton John had a song some years ago titled “Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word.” He’s right and this morning I learned the hard way. While parallel parking this morning near the train station, the woman parked in front of me suddenly started waving her arms and yelling, while pointing at her bumper, “YOU HIT ME!!!” I’ve parallel parked thousands of times and I know when I “hit” someone. I told her I hadn’t […]
On Monday evening, I had the pleasure of attending the first catechist meeting of the upcoming religious education year. The meeting went very well and there is a wonderful spirit among the catechists and staff. The pastor and DRE offered warm welcomes and the Deacon and his wife offered a very helpful formation session on understanding the Bible with a focus on the Old Testament. I also had the pleasure of meeting my catechist aide. […]
I have an article appearing in September issue of Catechist Magazine titled, “Assessment in Catechesis.” I hope you get a chance to peruse it and the many of the other fine resources offered in this excellent magazine. Also, I received a nice plug from Gilles Côté in his Catholic Educator News about my blog and about The Catechist’s Toolbox. Thanks, Gilles! Don’t forget to visit his website, 4Catholiceducators.com. P.S. Tonight is my first catechist meeting […]
Please take a look at a comment from yesterday’s post (8/23/07) that surfaces a situation that is all too common: a volunteer catechist with no training (and, as a recent convert, not a lot of familiarity with Catholic Tradition) being asked to teach a group of 30 – that’s right, I said THIRTY – 6th graders!!! Ugh! This is just not fair to any catechist, let alone a new one. Even Jesus had 12 Apostles […]
I’ll be talking with my DRE today about finalizing the schedule (syllabus) for the year for grade 8. I know that both of us will have to resist the temptation to “try to do too much.” There’s so much great stuff packed into the textbook (Finding God, Loyola Press) and we also schedule a number of additional events that take us out of the classroom and into the Church, meaning that there’s just never enough […]
I’m terrible at remembering names! That’s why I work so hard at trying to get to know the names of my students on the first day of class. My inspiration comes from a college professor I had at Loyola University, a Jesuit priest, who brought in a Polaroid camera on the first day of class, arranged us in groups of 5 or 6 (the class had over 50 students!), took photos, and had us write […]
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