Catechesis 101

I have just said yes to Father’s generous offer of an opportunity to teach the First Communion class, and I’m not a little tied up in knots. First of all, when Father asked me, I looked around to see whom else he might have been addressing: I haven’t been Catholic all that long, so he couldn’t possibly have meant me, right? Wrong.

Furthermore, I’m not a teacher. I do not do that well in the classroom. Part of the problem is that I’m naturally disorganized; also, I’m a natural introvert, and the experience of four children at home peppering me with questions all day long tends to drive me sometimes right straight to the outskirts of whatever reserve of patience I might have started the day with.

I teach my children at home largely by reading aloud to them, shoving books at them to read for themselves, going places with them, and allowing them to keep gigantic dead beetles in jars on the back-porch shelf and live Madagascar hissing cockroaches in a securely-lidded tub of pine shavings in a bedroom with the door shut tight. Catechesis happens in much the same way, minus the entomological element. We go to Mass and Adoration a lot, we read and talk, we observe the seasons of the liturgical year with its feasts and fasts, and we pray together. The thought of having to distill a family culture of lived religious learning into forty minutes of classroom experience once a week for thirty children not my own makes my palms sweat.

And so I emailed my friend Janet. In the years of our acquaintance, I have discovered that if I need to say Hellllllp to somebody, Janet is a good person to whom to say it, because she knows so many helpful things. I don’t know whether the acquisition of wisdom absolutely depends on coming home at least once in your life from a long road trip to find that in your absence a duck has flown down your chimney and died; this did happen to Janet once, and it doesn’t seem to have hurt her any.

So maybe — only maybe — that is why, when I emailed her this time to say Hellllllllp, she had some useful answers at the ready. She has promised me a series of emails on various First-Communion-related topics, and here’s an excerpt from the first one:

One of the things I try to do is create a really Catholic atmosphere in my classroom. I suppose it’s a sort of Montessori approach. Although there are certainly some facts that they need to know before their First Communion, at this age, I’m just as interested in them soaking in Catholic culture. Of course, you do this in your home. It’s just a question of moving your whole home into the classroom. At the end of the year, I bring home boxes of stuff.

I wanted to have some really good art on the walls depicting the OT stories that we would be covering. I found that this was difficult to come by. I am lucky enough to have access to a color printer, so I found picture online and printed them as big as I could—11 X 17 is
the biggest paper we have in the machine . . . I tried to get different styles of art, too, so I have a Caravaggio of David carrying Goliath’s head . . . and an icon of Joseph and his coat of many colors and a picture from a psalter (Luttrell, I think) of Abraham and Isaac. If you just do a Google image search for the name of the Bible story you are interested in, you should be able to find whatever you need.

So of course now I’m trying to envision how I’m going to move my whole home into the classroom, and still have some home at home . . .

Janet also mentions that she uses one of these nifty laminated liturgical-year wall calendars. She says she doesn’t much like the artwork, but a visual aid to represent the rhythms and colors of the church year is very helpful. When I taught the Sunday School class in my Anglican parish in Cambridge, we had something like this calendar, except that it was a puzzle, with green, purple, red and white pieces you fitted into a big wheel-like puzzle form. That was very nice, being hands-on, though on my own I’m the kind of effective leader under whose watchful eye things like that get lost by the end of the first class period.

At any rate, I’ll give the laminated calendar . . .
[Rating: 93 out of 100]

I’m not nuts about that artwork, either. It would be nicer, I think, if it weren’t so busy-looking. Still, it’s the kind of thing that comes in handy, and I might get one for home, too. Or maybe, if I’m going to move my home into the classroom, I’ll just go ahead and move my family there, too, to save time and effort. In that case I’d only be needing the one calendar.