Aug 8, 2024
Setting the Stage for a New Year: Building Classroom Culture by Monica Clarke at Institute for Catholic Liberal Education. It is an astonishing fact that, during the school year, students spend more (waking) hours with their classmates and teachers than they do with their own families. To ensure that the children entrusted to our care are being nurtured in the same way they would be in their homes, Catholic school classrooms can and should have a family feel…Here are some tips to build and sustain a beautiful and rich classroom culture with your students this year. Read
Getting Phones Out of Schools by Clare Morell at Ethics & Public Policy Center. Smartphones in schools are increasingly wreaking havoc on both the academic and social development of America’s children. They are distracting students from learning, inhibiting students from healthy socializing, and causing student discipline issues in class and on campus. Teachers are frustrated, students are suffering, and parents feel like they’re fighting an uphill battle against technology and peer pressure. Math, reading, and science scores have been dropping in the United States since 2012. As of 2022, the situation is dire, with scores for the lowest performing students at levels last seen in the 1970s. Studies have also consistently shown that excessive smartphone use negatively impacts both short-term grades and longer-term skill development. Read
Social-Emotional Learning Is Hurting Students by Adam De Gree at Intellectual Takeout. Social-emotional learning (SEL) has been in vogue in education circles for decades. Following its precepts, teachers, counselors, and administrators encourage students to look inward and focus on their feelings. The result? A generation of young people who can’t stop thinking about their emotions, leaving them incredibly fragile. But that’s not what many of the experts will tell you. Read
What Is Super About Super Intelligence? by Edward Trudeau at Humanum Review. In 1993, Vernor Vinge, a former computer scientist, professor at San Diego State University, and science fiction author wrote on the coming technological singularity, which he defined as, “the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence.” The dramatic changes that would follow the Singularity could come quickly, perhaps within hours, as machines rapidly improve their own algorithms at billions of times the speed of human thought or action. The consequences of the Singularity are unknowable, “a point where our models must be discarded and a new reality rules.” Although that sounds uncomfortably vague and dark to most of us, companies like OpenAI were created to explicitly pursue the goal of artificial general intelligence (AGI), albeit very carefully, and every large technology company in existence has raced to keep up. Read
Education in a Pluralist Country by Mark Bauerlein at First Things. Listen to the latest installment of an ongoing interview series with contributing editor Mark Bauerlein. Ashley Rogers Berner joins in to discuss her new book Educational Pluralism and Democracy: How to Handle Indoctrination, Promote Exposure, and Rebuild America’s Schools. Listen
Forming Hearts and Minds of Students for Worship by Father Johnathan Duncan at The Cardinal Newman Society. To understand the place of the Eucharist in Catholic education, we must first understand worship. Here are four elements of worship that Catholic educators should contemplate: worth, training, method, and culmination. Read
When Numbers Tell the Story of Unspeakable Events by Andrew J. Zwerneman at Cana Academy. Data are often ignored features of history—ignored, likely because they are often perceived as appealing less to our historical imaginations than do maps, artifacts, photographs, eyewitness testimonies, and other features of narratives. Data, however, are remarkably helpful in making past events clearer to see. They are distinct from numbers as such, since, in the field of history, they have been selected and organized for purposes of interpreting past events. Read
Get to Know Rose Coleman by Nell O’Leary at Word on Fire. One must be well-formed before being entrusted with the formation of others. Lifelong learning is essential for excellence in teaching. Teachers need to have ongoing opportunities for their human, spiritual, intellectual, pastoral, and professional formation. In practice, this looks like learning to live an integrated life of Catholicism in their personal and professional lives and being able to respect and reasonably defend the faith with students, colleagues, families, and administration. Read
All-Boys, Scholarship-Funded Jesuit Catholic School to Open in Cincinnati by Kate Quiñones at Catholic News Agency. A scholarship-funded Catholic academy for boys is set to open this August in Cincinnati with the help of state scholarships and private donors, reviving a building that has been unused for more than 30 years…Xavier Jesuit Academy (XJA) will serve students in third through eighth grade in Bond Hill, a neighborhood of about 7,000, where almost 20% of residents live in poverty, according to an Ohio government report. Read
Oklahoma Supreme Court Declines to Stay Ruling to Rescind Religious Charter School Contract by Kate Quiñones at Catholic News Agency. The Oklahoma Supreme Court on Monday denied a stay of a recent ruling that required that the Statewide Charter School Board rescind a contract with a Catholic charter school. St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School had asked the court to stay the order so it could preserve the contract while filing an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. The publicly funded, Catholic-directed institution would be the first of its kind in the nation. The Oklahoma Supreme Court earlier this summer ruled against its establishment, ordering the Statewide Virtual Charter School Board to rescind the school’s contract. The court argued that extending public funding to a religious school would be a “slippery slope” that could lead to “the destruction of Oklahomans’ freedom to practice religion without fear of governmental intervention.” Read
Throwback Thursday
The Art of Teaching the Faith by His Grace Bishop Raymond L. Burke at Catholic Education Resource Center in September, 2000. Catechesis is carried out by humans who employ human means but it is a participation in the saving mission of Christ, the saving action of God the Father. Therefore, catechists must be on guard that they are presenting the truth of the faith and not their private ideas or some ideology. Catechists will employ a teaching art which permits them to promote the full adherence of the catechized to God and to the content of the Christian message which makes full adherence to God possible. They will also help the catechized to develop in all dimensions of the faith: knowledge, prayer and worship, and the life of the virtues. Ultimately, the catechist helps the catechized to give himself or herself to God, especially in "the vocation to which the Lord calls." In this regard, catechesis is fundamental to the apostolate of vocations by which the Church helps young people to know their vocation in life and to embrace it with their whole being. Read