 |
 Religion Teacher's Journal offers teachers and catechists an extraordinary wealth of resources including:
+ fresh and exciting ideas for more interesting and creative classes.
+ excellent reproducible resources, and
+ top-notch theological and spiritual formation.
For up-to-the minute ideas, news, tidbits, and conversation, join us on the interactive readers’ blog, Ideas for the Whole Community. Click on the link in the menu on the left.
Finally, I offer you my personal pledge to provide your catechetical team with a magazine that will
+ encourage and assist them in their vocation to proclaim the gospel message to the best of their ability.
+ provide total formation, professional support, theological content, and connection with other catechists and teachers.
+ offer age-appropriate methodology, teaching tools, and activities, and
+ create a partnership with you to achieve lifelong formation in the context of whole community catechesis.
Sincerely,  Nick Wagner, Editor
Editor's Notes
Give yourself an A—and everyone else too
What would happen if you gave all your
students an A? Maybe you don’t give out grades,
but I’ll bet you have other ways of measuring
performance. So what if you gave all your students
the equivalent of an A, even if it’s just a
mental A that you keep in your heart?
I read a book recently which contends that there is no
meaning to an “A” except the meaning we assign it (The Art of
Possibility by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander,
Harvard Business School Press). We all know that’s true from
our own school experience. Mrs. Smith was an easy teacher
and Mr. Jones was hard. Meaning I got an A from one and a C
from the other from roughly the same level of effort.
So if the meaning of our grades is made up anyway, why
not make up that everyone is A caliber?
The author, a famous conductor, described one of his
first challenges in giving everyone an A. Once, while serving
as a guest conductor, he was rehearsing Mahler’s Ninth
Symphony. He noticed one of the violinists seemed subdued
and even indifferent to his conducting. The rest of the musicians
were engaged and enthused, so he was sure the difficulty
didn’t lie with him! When he asked her about it later, she
told him she thought the pace of the music was too fast.
His first instinct was to think she was a “B” musician—
that she just couldn’t keep up. But he decided to give her an
“A” instead. If she were an A musician, could she be right?
He spent the day of the concert looking through the score,
imagining how Mahler would have wanted it played, and
changing some of the bowing instructions for the violinists,
easing the pace in places. That night at the concert, the violinist
was the most impassioned and demonstrative musician in
the orchestra. It turned out Mahler was her favorite composer
and she was passionate about all his work. When she saw
how the conductor was leading the Ninth, she had resigned
herself to another “B” level rendition of it. The lesson the author
learned was that the people who look least engaged may
be the most committed member of the group. “A cynic, after
all,” he wrote, “is a passionate person who does not want to be
disappointed again.”
To adapt this for learners of faith, we might give them all
an A at the beginning of the year. Even those we think may
not deserve an A might actually have A level faith. What they
might be longing for is an A level catechist or teacher who,
finally, is going to engage the class in a profound sharing of
faith.
I suggest this to you now so you can prepare over the summer,
before classes start up again in the fall. What will you do
this summer to become the A level catechist your most “cynical”
student deserves?
It’s the best day of the year. RTJ
|
