…this thread’s for you!

In honor of our continuing recognition of Catholic Schools Week, let’s listen to the Catholic school teachers, from K-12 (or college), of religion or any subject.

It’s said if you are talking about education, parents will always blame the teachers for the problems, and the teachers will always blame the parents. Not quite on topic, but it’s commonly agreed among folks who work in parish religious ed that those in most need of catechesis are parents, first, then children. It’s them we need for an hour a week, and can you even imagine the ethos of Protestant Sunday School for adults had even the slightest foothold in Catholic churches?

So it’s interesting when you can see both sides – as, in fact, most teachers can, since most teachers, no matter where they work, are parents as well.

And for me, in 20+ years of seeing both sides, I’d have to say that my ultimate sympathies in that endless conversation lie with…the teachers.

Sure, some of them are not so competent. (One of my colleagues, teaching Honors World History, once joined me at lunch and asked, "So, tell me about this Edict thing that Constantine did. I don’t really get it." The school chaplain was in the habit of referring to a particular class – I believe it was juniors – as "Visigoths." Same teacher looked at him blankly and asked, "What’s a Visigoth?") Others (as a thread below aptly demonstrated) are destructive. But what , in general, do they have to work with?

An institution – on the local school level, as well as the broader bureaucracy, ranging all the way up to state systems and ed schools, which is enamored with process and method at the expense of content, coming up every few years with new  complications and reasons for aggravating in-services.

Textbooks that reflect the above.

Parents who don’t know how and don’t care to discipline, who are busy, tired, and either emotionally absent or overprotective. And who view the high school diploma essentially as a document for which they have paid good money for, and which, with its attached GPA, represents nothing more than a ticket to the next step. So just hand it over please, so we can all move on.

And, most importantly, a culture which does not value, in the least, the content you’re trying to convey, whether that content be quadratic equations, the Gospel of Mark, the New Deal or The Iliad.

The religion teacher has her own set of issues – non-Mass attending families, for one. sometimes surveyed my students as to how many of them had been to Mass the previous Sunday. By the time they were seniors, in a class of 30, 20 of whom were Catholic, usually 5 had made it. The reasons are many – two Sunday mornings ago, driving to Mass, our route took us by the Natatorium that’s attached to Katie’s high school. Big indoor swimming facility. The parking lot was packed with cars, the streets were lined with them – obviously some sort of city swim meet. On a Sunday morning. Soccer, scout events – rinse, repeat.

(I’ve often stated – and this is a subject for another post, perhaps on Thursday, that the fundamental problem with contemporary Catholic education is the vacuum in which it exists, not only in the broader culture, but in the Catolic culture as well, from family to parish and what used to be the neighborhoods and communities in which those parishes existed. Learning about saints wasn’t just a textbook unit. Saints surrounded you in church – their images and their relics, both. You were probably named after a saint. Devotions to saints flourished and saints were used in homilies as models. Your community honored saints is feasts and processions and shrines. Now, it’s all up to the schools, and the schools can’t bear the brunt of it – it’s not the way it’s supposed to be anyway. Catholic schools, as we know them now, didn’t exist for the vast majority of the Church’s existence. But somehow the faith was passed on – without 100% comprehension, true – that’s a given. But is it so much better now? A plea for the mythical era of "Catholic culture?" Not quite. Also blogged on here – the sometimes bitter fruit of "Catholic culture." But still – at no time in history has anyone believed that schools should bear the brunt of the responsibility for catechesis)

Anyway – just a couple more notes of Catholic religion teacher travails (aside from the obvious one – $$) – sometimes administrators are not helpful. I worked for a principal once, who while effective in many ways, was not particularly interested in religion and thought it would be okay if religion class were decreased from a 5-day a week class to maybe 3 – or 2.

Secondly, the attitude of parents, and by osmosis, their children, to religion class. Even though we’re passed the era in which it was verbotem to give grades in religion courses for fear that the young impressionable ones would go away alienated because they would think that we were grading their personal faith, the second-class status of religion class still looms in many places. I never quite sorted this out myself, but it was a constant question at one of the schools at which I taught – didn’t colleges, the students would insist, just drop religion grades when they re-factored GPAs? So, you know, it didn’t matter what they made? Except…it did matter in terms of the school’s calculations so your initial application as well as class rank factored in the religion grade, so when Junior snagged a "C" you knew you were in for a call from a Concerned Parent – primarily concerned about the impact of this rather unimportant course on The Future.

Long way from Queen of the Sciences, that is.

Schools are varied and different. The schools at which I taught shared some similarities – struggling, small, diocesan, in the South, with a hefty proportion of non-Catholics, ranging from 35-50%. Told you it was hefty. Schools that struggled mightily with identity, with great pressure to simply be an good alternative to the public schools for whomever. And since that was the case, we don’t want to alienate or offend the non-Catholics. Which then just deepens the dynamic.

Some dioceses have estimable and excellent school systems with a clear sense of identity. One of my friends had taught in the St. Louis Archdiocese for years and she could never quite get over the difference. Another friend moved and ended up teaching in an Archdiocesan school in Philadelphia and she, too, was astonished to be finteaching in a place in which religious instruction was not a daily battle with students, parents and administration. Where it was valued.

So…there you go. It’s all yours!

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