Coaching Students Toward Better Thinking & Writing

Coaching Students Toward Better Thinking & Writing, Part II by Mary Frances Loughran at Cana Academy. Writing provides students with an opportunity to think their way through a story, character, or argument. Having read carefully and reflected upon a text, the student has something to offer. Whether the student’s task is to make sense of an argument from an expository text or to illuminate a character or story, frequent opportunities to write build the students’ skills and confidence. With the teacher’s attentive coaching during the writing process and thoughtful evaluation of the completed essays, students will develop and improve the quality of their thought. Read

Books That Should Be Assigned Reading in Catholic Schools by Mark Bauerlein at First Things. If we want eighteen-year-olds to have a sufficient Catholic formation, teachers should assign more readings that foster a historical understanding of the faith, a “Big Picture” or “Grand Narrative” of the Catholic past. It is true, of course, that we find in the curriculum works of Scripture, passages from St. Augustine, the Divine Comedy, some Cardinal Newman, Chesterton, and so forth. Those Catholic classics should be supplemented, however, with other Catholic classics rather than with secular works. To that end, here are some recommendations. Read 

Classical Education and Great Literature by Joseph Pearce at The Imaginative Conservative. The following will be my effort to construct a solid program of reading for a classical high school curriculum. The first criterion would be to design the sequence of readings in chronological order so that students would be getting an education in the history of literature and culture over their four years of studying the texts of the Great Books. The freshman class would read works from the pre-Christian era; the sophomores from the period of the Middle Ages; the juniors from the Early Modern period (1500-1800); and the seniors would read some of the great literary works of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Read

'Educational' Screens In Classrooms Do More Harm Than Good | Opinion by Clare Morell at Newsweek. There has been a lot of recent attention on attempts to get phones out of schools. The data make clear that phones inhibit students' learning, cause and exacerbate discipline issues, and harm students' mental health. Evidence is also clear that phone bans work. Bans improve academic outcomes, especially for the lowest-performing students, and improve the social environment for students. Read

The Ever-Present But Anti-Transcendent Screen by John M. Grondelski at Crisis Magazine. The culture and ethos of the screen is flat and temporal, very immanent, very now, in some sense very ephemeral. None of those characteristics is conducive to openness to transcendence. They in fact foster an indifference to, if not alienation from, more transcendent realities. The outcome is not, however, merely religious disaffiliation. It arguably also goes hand in hand with other phenomena, such as the greater indices of depression and mental illness among youth, social dysfunctionality, and even suicide. Read

Saving Our Girls from Social Media by Ashley McGuire at National Catholic Register. No one denies the mental health crisis roiling America’s youth; even the Surgeon General labeled it a formal epidemic with “devastating” impacts. But the problem is particularly acute with girls and is increasingly a runaway one. One in three girls, UCLA notes, is depressed, as compared with one in 10 boys. Their depression is intense, with the same number of girls having seriously thought about killing themselves. Half of teen girls, the CDC reports, “feel persistently sad or hopeless.” Read

Keeping (or Making) Catholic Education Great by George Weigel at First Things. An authentic Catholic education is founded on a Christian anthropology. We are not made for self-satisfaction alone. Nor are we individual monads, sentient billiard balls careening around a terrestrial pool table and occasionally colliding. There is a human nature, and that human nature is ordered to holiness. We are made to be saints, and we become saints through relationships with others called to holiness by the sanctifying, triune God. Catholic education should thus inspire a burning desire to be more, rather than just to have more, even as it helps us understand that “being more” is a work of grace, not merely of our efforts. Catholic education should draw us to be like Christ, who, as Vatican II taught, reveals the truth about us as well as the truth about God. Read

Indiana Diocese Issues School Guidelines Affirming Biological Sex, Promoting Pastoral Care by Kate Quiñones at Catholic News Agency. The Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend, Indiana, released guidelines on Sept.12 affirming that diocesan schools and institutes must practice the Church’s teaching on sexuality and gender while being compassionate toward those struggling with gender dysphoria. Bishop Kevin Rhoades notes in the policy that all diocesan institutes must use pronouns that align with a student’s biological sex. The policy does not permit the use of “‘preferred pronouns” in any capacity. Read

Throwback Thursday

On Education: 3 Counsels from My Little Plato by Robert Mixa at Word on Fire. Education shapes the way human beings see the world and encourages them in certain ways of life. It is a leading forth to the contemplation of the Good, and politics is the practical fostering of the Good in communities and individual lives. The greatest image of education as such is The Republic’s Allegory of the Cave, for the protagonist is led out of the cave to properly see only to be called back into the cave so as to lead others to the light. The allegory presents education as a conversion of the whole soul, away from appearance to reality. The journey outside the cave requires askesis (training), accustoming the soul to the light of reality. Education, accordingly, begins with proper vision (contemplation or theoria, seeing). But the seeing is accompanied by doing, and right action is only possible through right vision. Read