May 2013 – Mysteries and Manners

Catholic Schools are Better. Period.

May 30, 2013

I thought that title might entice some discussion!

My dad just sent me this article from Public Discourse comparing religious private schools in the US to public and charter schools.

You should read it, and I’d love to hear what you think:

The Data Are In: Religious Private Schools Deserve a Second Look

Jeynes begins his article this way:

An inquisitive elementary school student asked his teacher, “Is it wrong to steal?” The teacher replied, “I don’t know. What do you think?” This incident in a major midwestern public school alarmed thousands of parents, and reminded myriad others why they value religious private schools: these schools are usually guided by a moral compass for academics and behavior that public schools patently do not offer.

As a Catholic school English teacher, I of course find this particularly interesting (and edifying). What is not explicitly stated in the article is the fact that the “religious private schools” Jeynes is referring to are largely the Catholic schools.

That’s right.

Four thoughts though:

1) I am interested as well if there have been studies that also include home-schooled students. Due in large part to doubts about the quality of public and private education, a large number of my UD friends were home-schooled for most if not all of their lives before going to college. For more thoughts from an actual home-schooler, see Amy Welborn’s post on her wonderful blog, Charlotte Was Both: Homeschool Notes.

2) Additionally, despite the apparent benefits of religious private schools, there are some obvious problems. I can really only speak to my experience, but many Catholic schools do not have adequate resources for students with learning disabilities, English language learners, or other students who do not fit a certain mold. I cannot tell you how hard and frustrating it is to be a teacher who sees students struggling, but who is unequipped to really help them succeed. And to be honest, I know some of these students leave Catholic schools for public schools in hopes that they were be able to find the resources they need there.

3) Catholic schools cost money! Oversimplified version of the story: while originally founded and run by religious sisters and brothers to serve the poor and the immigrant families, Catholic schools over the course of the last century have had to make up for the lack of unpaid employees by raising tuition. So, many of those whom we originally sought to serve can no longer afford a Catholic education.

4) The voucher program. See what ACE has to say here: Program for K-12 Educational Access. See the Indiana Supreme Court’s recent decision here: IN Voucher Program Upheld.

A last thought, and the most important one, according to the Sacred Congregation for Catholic Education:

The Catholic school is committed thus to the development of the whole man, since in Christ, the perfect man, all human values find their fulfillment and unity. Herein lies the specifically Catholic character of the school. Its duty to cultivate human values in their own legitimate right in accordance with its particular mission to serve all men has its origin in the figure of Christ. He is the one who ennobles man, gives meaning to human life, and is the model which the Catholic school offers to its pupils. (The Catholic School)

mother seton — Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton, pray for us.

Graduation and the Final Exam Question

May 24, 2013

Some years ago a friend of mine described to me a concept that I immediately loathed: he called it “graduating from people.”

I hated it because my worst fear was (and probably still is) the fear of being left behind by those I love. “You can’t graduate from people!” I protested. “People aren’t like subjects or classes that you can master on a final exam! You can never graduate from a human being.” The concept was clearly utilitarian, narrow, immature. “People aren’t topics to be learned, papers to be written, puzzles to figure out.” I thought about how so many former subjects I have “graduated from” seemed to me. “You don’t just squeeze all the learning you can out of a person and then in a couple of years forget him! It’s not like you can earn a ‘grade’ on a friendship, or even worse assign a grade to one!”

heaven2 — from the last chapter of The Last Battle

Didn’t C. S. Lewis say something about how we are always surrounded by immortal souls, destined for the glory of God? Eventually it would be like my favorite scene in The Last Battle, where—once again, from Lucy’s eyes—we meet all those we ever loved or ever knew or ever loved us or even the ones we did not know, but met fleetingly. There certainly wouldn’t be diplomas or report cards.

Thinking about it now, for all of my philosophical moralizing at the time, my younger self was probably most afraid of an idea implicit but unsaid: People leaving. People changing irrevocably. People not needing me or wanting me anymore. People graduating from me.

Ironically, my greatest fear has now become an essential part of my chosen vocation.

The words of another friend of mine, “your vocation is where your deepest desire meets the world’s greatest need,” come to mind—only now they seem a little adjusted: “your deepest fear meets the world’s greatest desire” or something like that.

I say this because being a teacher means to love people, help them learn everything you can teach them and give them, and then to let them go. You want them to graduate from you. Year after year, over and over again.

I’m sitting here in my empty classroom, gazing at the empty desks and the bare walls and the remains of a Great Gatsby project in the corner. I know where all the kids sit and where most of my last year’s seniors sat, where the posters should be, where the books should be, where everything should be—especially the noise.

But now they have all graduated from me. And it is good and right that they have. That’s my job. That’s their job.

The temptation when you’re an ACE teacher, I think, is to imagine yourself as a Mary Poppins or a Maria in “The Sound of Music” or a Robin Williams in “Dead Poet’s Society” or a Sidney Poitier in “To Sir, With Love”… or as any of those iconic teachers who transform the lives of families or schools or disadvantaged children by their charisma and determination. That’s the temptation. When really you are, most likely, a self absorbed, middle class Northern college graduate who is the real one in need of learning—the truly uneducated one, the truly poor one, the truly needy one. Whether the learning you so desperately require can come from a group of second graders who teach simplicity of heart or a pack of fifth graders who offer courses in chaos survival or a mob of eleventh graders who can give you a Masters degree in humility and pride-annihilation.

But at some point, graduation day comes. They graduate from you, and you graduate from them. And this type of graduating from people does not exclude love but rather, for a teacher, constitutes it.

And not in some idealistic or Romantic (as in Romanticism) way, either. I got some awkward hugs and hesitant “see you later, Ms. Shea”s and a few beautiful notes scribbled on the back of exam essays yesterday that made me cry. But there is no good way to say goodbye.

When I graduated from college two years ago, I walked around the campus and promised to keep in touch and finally left with my parents to go have lunch.

A little anti-climatic to say the least, for the great Epic Story that so many of us former Romers feel we are a part of at UD! And it feels the same way now.

In his convocation address to us, Dr. Roper warned us how it would be. I’ve been thinking about his words a lot as I approach my second graduation—from ACE, from Notre Dame… but most importantly from my kids here in Louisiana. And I actually think now that my friend’s idea of “graduating from people” is not wholly incompatible with Dr. Roper’s final address to us. In fact, like my friend, he described life and people in academic terms. He said there was one last final exam question we have to answer, which he posed to us as we sat all together as a class in the Church of the Incarnation for probably the last time:

Are you ready to die?

Now, I want to assure you that, proposed legislation in the Texas House aside, under this voluminous late-medieval guildsman’s ceremonial outfit, I’m not “packing”.

And I know what else you’re thinking: “Sweet Holy Job, Roper, I know you Irishmen like to read the obituaries, but could you make this any more depressing? It’s supposed to be a happy time, a celebration—we’re heading towards Commencement, a beginning, not… that.” Well, I promise I’ll bring this back around; the nature of reality is, after all, comic. I mean, you can’t hold back grace and comedy in a world where Michael Kelsey can become a multinational pick-up artist, right?

But in fact graduation, leaving UD, can have as much a sense of a little death as of new life; students often feel bereft, find themselves grieving, over losing daily contact with the immediate and close circle of friends, the great professors who are my colleagues, the wonderful, endless yack about texts and ideas. (When I walked down the Mall after my own graduation too many years ago, a five-foot Cistercian, Father Chris Rabay, the Charity Week jailbreak expert long before Father Maguire assumed his mantle, asked me how I felt. I thought I felt great, but surprised myself by choking out, “It’ll be hard to leave this place.” “Oh, we have a saying in Hungarian,” he responded: “‘Life is one long goodbye’.”) And soon after graduation you will find that student loans, marriages, children, mortgages, careers, all involve daily dying to self. I think it’s providential that this remarkable class ended its time at UD with the events of Holy Week so close to finals, so I’m going to ask you my final exam question, whether you like it or not.

Are you ready to die?

The entire education you have received here, if we look at it in one way, has had this question looming from the beginning.

Teaching and World-Making – Or, the Importance of Setting

May 14, 2013

So I’m finishing up my unit on short stories with my sophomores. Our last lesson has a relatively simple goal, but it gave me a lot to think about: SWBAT analyze the effects of setting on plot in short stories.

We define our terms first:

Plot = what happens (in a story, movie, play, novel…)

Setting = when and where the plot happens (in a story, movie, play, novel…)

This is what Eudora Welty has to say:

Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else… Fiction depends for its life on place. Place is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of, What happened? Who’s here? Who’s coming?…

Eudora Welty was a photographer as well as a writer. This is “Home by Dark.”

I don’t think we often think about this potential power of place over character and action. Setting is one of the things all teachers talk about in English class, along with plot, characterization, exposition, climax, resolution, etc. But I think it is sometimes left in the background.

(Pun intended. Go back if you didn’t notice it… )

Yet Welty insists upon the importance of setting, and even that events and characters somehow depend upon it. Or, as my students had to write down in their notes: setting defines the logical possibilities and limitations of plot.

It defines what can or cannot happen in a story.

I think Southern writers have a particular sensitivity to the importance of place or setting. The setting IS the story. Think of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying or The Sound and the Fury. Or Katharine Anne Porter’s “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” (the setting is both exterior, the rural South, and interior, the wandering mind of Granny). Or Flannery O’Connor in “Revelation” and “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” O’Connor, largely due to her sacramental view of reality, expands the traditional notion of setting so that it transcends the physical:

The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location. (O’Connor, Mystery and Manners)

I gave my kids a different example that I thought might work better for them. The reason why the Harry Potter series works so well, I believe, isn’t so much because of the plot and the characters (although of course these are important). The plot and the characters work because Rowling spends so much time in the first book carefully developing her setting, creating her place, defining the possibilities and limitations of the Muggle world and the Wizarding world.

Think about the detail given to describing Privet Drive, and Diagon Alley, and of course Hogwarts itself. Her world is magical but consistent – it has it’s own logic and it’s own rules. Indeed, really what made me read book two, and three, and all the others was this sense of wanting to return to that place. Yes, I cared about Harry – but I cared about returning to Hogwarts even more.

I think one of the very best examples – that really sets itself apart from any type of comparison to other stories – is Tolkien’s Middle Earth. What is so good about The Lord of the Rings isn’t just the wonderful characters, the stirring struggle between good and evil, the languages, the recalling of myth. Rather, it’s the fact that all of these things are at home in Middle Earth itself, – a world we believe in, and want to return to, or learn about, because it feels like our own history. I don’t know about you, but I spent a lot of time when I was little just looking at the maps in the opening pages of the book.

There is Narnia, too. What we really desire, why we keep reading, is because we want to go back to that place created by Lewis. I checked every closet in my house, several times, just to be sure. “Once a king or queen in Narnia, always a king or queen.”

I was thinking about all of this as I sat in my empty classroom during 5th hour, normally the seniors’ class. I was sitting in one of the student desks in the middle of the room. I like to sit in the student desks sometimes so I don’t get completely locked into my teacher-desk perspective. The room looks pretty different out there.

And I realized that teachers are engaged in world-making, too. We create a setting – our classrooms. And, in a way, we help define what is possible in our classrooms by creating a particular environment, unique to our personalities and our teaching style, but also hopefully open to our students’ personalities and their learning styles.

This year I have worked hard to make my classroom more accessible. Places for papers, folders, essays, are all labeled. I try to keep the space as clean and organized. This is a setting for listening and discussing and writing and reading and writing and revising and writing and writing and writing… and the classroom has to reflect that just as much as my words and actions do. My kids need to know that as soon as they walk through my door they have entered a place for learning.

I have substituted this year in many rooms where there a papers on the floor, dirty desks, and bare walls. I remember my own classroom last year – “disorganized” is a gentle way to describe it. And I think such classrooms limit the possibilities for students. Carelessness, even in the details, suggests a lack of thoughtfulness and purpose. A question I found myself unable to answer a lot last year was, “Ms. Shea, where do I put this?” “Um… I’ll just take it for now…” This year, I love when the kids don’t have to ask me that any more. They know where to go, where to put things, when to do it… setting setting setting.

Anyway –

To what extent does the setting affect the plot in your favorite stories… in your classroom… in your home?

If you really want some tough but tasty food for thought on setting, you should go read O’Connor’s story “The Displaced Person.”

Love II

May 10, 2013

So, let’s be real.

Sometimes being a teacher really sucks.

I know I just wrote a post about love in which I talked about teaching as my answer to Reverend Mother’s challenge to “climb every mountain” until I “find [my] dream.”

And, if you’re a teacher, and you read that post, and you were thinking does this girl actually teach real high school students or is she just making this up???? … Well, I have an answer for you.

I teach real high school students, and I had a bad day at school today.

A really bad day.

There. I said it.

I won’t go into all the gory details, but suffice it to say that, among other things, a severe lack of classroom management was suddenly involved. I felt like I had stepped back into my first year of teaching. When I turned off the lights in my classroom at the end of the day to quiet the kids, or at LEAST get their attention (sometimes this makes them calm down and feel sleepy… no really, it does), I had unfortunately forgotten that it was raining outside. And when it rains outside in Louisiana, it can get really dark.

So, of course, when the kids in my last hour class suddenly found themselves in eerie twilight, they did not quiet down as I had hoped.

They screamed.

And kept screaming.

For a long time.

The office called my classroom, and within moments the principal was at the door (rightly) demanding to know what was going on.

After impending doom had been announced, and after the principal left, and after a brief silence in which I looked at them and they looked at me, I was barraged with angry comments. “Ms. Shea why did you do that? Why’d you get us in trouble? You was the one who turned off the lights! Hey you’d better make sure [insert student name] gets in trouble too, cuz she was here even if she’s not in our class!”

After the day was over I sat at my desk and cried. I haven’t done that in a long time. And then I thought about how angry I was that the kids were treating me this way when I was really trying to help them with this project and all the grading I’ve done lately and how giving them an inch of freedom was a big mistake and WHY did I decide they didn’t need bell work today and how dumb I was to trust them and… blah blah blah.

I mean, I’m upset because I love them. I wouldn’t feel this horrible otherwise.

But I’m also disgusted and exhausted.

So, basically, I’m just trying to say that this is the other side of love. Love Part II. And I feel a little bit like Maria when she finally comes back to be with the children only to discover that the Captain is engaged to someone else. And that’s the moment when she probably thinks to herself, “Well, Reverend Mother, I guess I climbed the wrong mountain.”

Actually, I think I feel more as if the children had turned on me and screamed “WE LIKE BARONESS SHRAEDER BETTER.”

Really guys?

Calvin and Hobbes

May 6, 2013

Thanks to The Comic Ninja for this one.

Love

May 2, 2013

*Note: All student names have been changed.

I’m not a Mom. I hope to be, someday. But I think I know a little bit—a very little bit—of what that kind of love will be like.

My first year of teaching was easily the hardest experience of my life. I won’t go into all the details, but half-way through the year, I was seriously considering leaving my school and the ACE program. Exhausted, discouraged, and completely in over my head, I sat at my desk as my seniors came in to take their final exam.

And then I began to look at them, one by one. There was Maria, who had intimidated me so much on the first day with her bored eyes and sarcastic remarks… and who, later on, asked me to teach her and her classmates what plagiarism really was so that they could be ready for college. There was Jonny, who had a habit of giving up on everything difficult… and who had formed a new habit of actually finishing his essays. There was Lars—big, obnoxious, flirtatious, inappropriate—who had finally decided that Mr. Wickham in Pride and Prejudice was a jerk, and he didn’t want to be like him after all.

There were also the ones who had been easier to love from the beginning: Gary, with his stubborn agnosticism and insistence upon questioning, Selina, with her gentle attentiveness and surprising perspicacity, Peter, with his hunger for knowledge and something to finally challenge him, and Catherine and Ashley—who came into my classroom one day, arm in arm like Austen’s ladies: “Let’s take a turn about the room! Ah yes, it is so refreshing!”

I looked at them all as I sat at my desk, and I felt astonished. So many of my college friends were finding love, getting engaged, having babies…

tumblr_lxaz6viggB1qzili5o1_500 — (Also getting more awesome at grading and lesson planning while driving to school.)

… but I had found a different kind of love.

I think I understand The Reverend Mother’s words a lot better now in The Sound of Music when she tells Maria that she needs to “climb every mountain” in order to find

A dream that will need

All the love you can give

Every day of your life

For as long as you live.

I think I get that now.

Nothing else I have done has required more exhaustion and work and anxiety from me—and nothing else has given me so much love in return. Not thankfulness in return, necessarily—I think really good moms know they will and never can be truly thanked for all they do—nor understanding in return, either. I’m sure that a large percentage of my kinds don’t even like me.

(As I mentioned to my pleading junior class a couple of weeks ago – “I’m not here to be liked. I’m here to help you learn.”)

But I can’t help myself, to be honest. I love them—their comments, their nosiness, their complaining, their messiness, their mistakes, and their little triumphs. And I’m so grateful to God that he has given me my kids to love.

Go listen to Reverend Mother here, and don’t settle for anything less.