Dear Friends in Christ,
We have decided against returning to the classroom again this year. Our interest still remains. Our calling is still quite present. It has been a season of intention for us. Having children spanning in ages from young adult to pre-schooler makes for an interesting work life balance. Specifically helping young adult children navigate this world is far more involved than we were led to believe. We have found ourselves using much of our free time tutoring our college children in upper level sciences. Keith and I have educational backgrounds in Mathematics and the hard sciences which has been such a great help with our children’s current disappointing profs making for academic challenges. (We have much to say about how current younger profs are “teaching” these days, but let it be known there is little by way of “teaching” in traditional lecture methods and more “figure it out yourself” methods of smug indifference paired with an air of condescension. All this to say that as the older profs retire younger profs do not share that same understanding of actual teaching being about your students learning, or even wanting them to learn successfully. It has been replaced with lack of skill and pride.I digress and could write much about this disappointing facet of upper education.)
I mentioned intentional as a season. We have chosen to be more intentional with our time and energy. (see above) Especially as it pertains to the emphasis we want to use our time and talents. We continue to collaborate making notes of our brainstorming inspiration. We had full intent of weekly supplemental posting summarizing our lessons as we taught them to our children. Many are still in draft form. Most are laying in wait a disorganized assortment of handwritten scribbles on paper. Many will remain in that state. We do have a goal for turning a focus towards older students. All lofty goals that one day will come to fruition.
As for this year we are enrolled in the same Family Faith Formation program. We will post with the same infrequency picking the topics that have inspired us. The 2024-25 Family Faith Formation year is on Biblical connections. We would like to write more lessons with sacramental prep focus this year as we have a child who intends to receive Confirmation in May 2025.
This is where we are in our journey.
Pax Vobiscum,
Yvonne & Keith
Note: The default plan is to release supplemental lessons based on the lessons that we feel will be helpful resources. I will make a note in each post with the original date of the topic. Any and all will be published after the date, many months later, but will be published in relation to the year they occurred. A revisionist history it is not. This backdate publishing is with intent to help us keep track of when this lesson was originally taught. As a point, much of what we wrote did occur in that precise moment, we are only getting to the editing months later.
Author’s note: For those who have not followed us long we decided to step away from teaching in the classroom in 2021 because our son was born in 2020. We thought just a short break would be good for us to be more present at home. Now that baby is an exceedingly active little boy that really does take far more of my attention than I would like to admit. Long days with little time for extras we had to be intentional with our time to the family. We enrolled our children in the catechism program at our parish. Continuing the new format where the parents attend class with their children: Family Faith Formation.
If you are not familiar with this type of catechesis our parish sets the program up based on a particular focus for each week of the month. The first and last weeks of the month are taught in group form (think one room school house ages together) with a Leader and the mini-lesson activities are taught by the parents. The second week of the month is reserved for the sacramental children. Only those families with sacramental-prep children attend in class and the others remain home to teach an assigned lesson. The third week was reserved for the children being taught in class by the Leader while the parents attend a lecture/discussion on challenging topics relevant to raising Catholic children. The parent classes are very much like continuing education.
The Small Pencil Catechist 