Yesterday I taught my seniors about conditional and disjunctive syllogisms. It was basic logic and easy enough for them to grasp. Perusing some of the syllogisms that they wrote as an assignment caused me to think of a couple of my own.
Last Saturday I really missed college. Perhaps it was the fact that my sister just headed back to school or maybe it was due to a longing for good community. Or because I would like to be the student again and not the teacher, despite the satisfaction I get from job at times. Every now and then I have to stop and remind myself that I am not on a break from college but that I will never go back to college, at least I will never return to where I was before. I’ve tossed around the idea several times of getting my Master’s degree but I know it won’t be the same as my undergrad. There is a sadness that comes with that repeated realization. That phase of my life is completed and it is a place to which I can never return.
I find myself missing things that I didn’t plan on missing along with things I knew I would miss. Now I live in a house but I find myself missing the dorms and being able to walk across the hall to talk to someone. I didn’t love going to the abortion clinic on Saturday mornings, yet I find myself missing that mission field and the people that I prayed alongside. I miss beautiful lectures by brilliant professors that just feed my soul. While I don’t miss paying for them, I miss the feeling of picking of a new stack of books at the beginning of the semester. Perhaps I miss writing papers and I try to live vicariously through my students by assigning frequent 1-page papers. I miss campus and walking around through the changing seasons. Oddly enough, I miss the adult-like feeling I had of going to Mass off-campus. It made me feel so grown-up to be going to Mass with adults who have jobs. The odd factor is that I do this now but I think it is because I am going to parishes I went to before college that I don’t feel so adult-like. My heart misses the adoration chapel and the beautiful peace found there. I miss my schedule and the mode of college life. Yeah, I miss many things. I didn’t realize this so much the first semester because I felt so overwhelmed with work. But now I am able to look up a little bit more and I find myself looking into the future, wondering what else could be in store.
What beautiful plan does God have for me? And what is He doing with me in the meantime? He has never failed me but I am so quick to fall back into fear. I miss college and that is natural because it was an important part of my life in which I grew substantially. Yet I would be amiss to spend this next phase mourning over the last one. My goal is to recommit to live in the present with joy, embracing as fully as I am able every aspect of my present life. God is loving me in so many ways right now. Right here is living in God’s will.
Perhaps I am not alone in feeling this way, but I desire a great mission for my life. I want to do big things and transform society. When I look at the different passions in my life, I wonder how I will ever be able to use them all, how will God be the fulfillment of all of my desires. Taking a look at where I am at the present moment can cause me to feel impatient and claustrophobic. I want to travel, to live life, to have adventures, to be incandescently happy. There are moments, like on Thursday, when I look at my life as a teacher and I wonder what in the world I am doing. Some people are able to say that every day they go to work they are filled with a desire to go to work and that because of that, they never feel like it is work. Unfortunately, I cannot say that the same is always true with me. There have been several times over the past few months that I didn’t want to go to work, that the thing I wanted most was to extend the weekend. My heart desires something grand and beautiful. Yet when I look at where I am in my life, I begin to wonder if it is ever possible to attain that. Am I simply missing God’s will in my life? Will I be my own worst enemy? Everyone desires a great love and a great adventure and too quickly I begin to wonder where mine is. I’ve spent half of the past semester longing to live life fully and the other half praying to enter into eternal life. At times I am filled with a passion for teaching and with gratitude that I am able to do what I wanted to do right out of college. Nevertheless, I wonder what else there is for me and how the plan will unfold.
Maybe much of this is natural–the transition years after college, the quest to find stable footing, the desire to be a saint, the longings to be fulfilled. Yet some of this is perhaps the temptation of the evil one. If he can make God’s will for me now seem to be unimportant or too little, then he is winning in a sense. God could have a grand mission for me next year but His will for me is to be a teacher now. If I focus on the future grandeur and fail to do my duty in the present moment, then I am effectively not doing God’s will out of a misappropriated desire to do His will in the future. I need to learn patience without succumbing to passivity. How will I know if God is asking me to step out in faith or if it is my own desire for the grand that will cause me to run contrary to the will of God. I have this desire to be a saint and although I know there are many saints of the ordinary, I don’t want to be ordinary. While I don’t want to stand out especially, I long for a great mission, something where all of my desires are fulfilled. Maybe this is just my melancholic nature coming out and longing for the ideals that can only truly be found in Heaven. All I know is that I long for a beautiful adventure that will be personally transforming and will transform others. A little daisy wants to be a bouquet of roses.
What a different view of me my students would have if they read this blog. I know they don’t think I’m perfect but I like to think I look generally put together and collected. At times I wish I could tell them how ridiculous and confused I truly am. The facade would be destroyed. What does God want me to do now? He has placed me here for a reason. I forget that reason, though, in moments of frantic worry and a desire for my will to be done. So, Lord, if Your desire is for me to be here now, please teach me how to do Your will in the present moment–and to love doing it.
A new year, some new classes, and nearly 80 new students. Some interesting things have already transpired, some for which I suppose I asked. I thought it would be neat if my students took a temperament test and then I could review the results and try to discover some of their characteristics quickly. So in class I gave them the web address that I wanted them to go to take the test and it just happened to be one for Catholic Match. I didn’t fully understand what I was setting myself up for until I was preparing to write the address on the board. When I did, the response was typical–some chuckling, a few muffled remarks, and the overall questioning air that seemed to compel me to confess or deny their silent accusation. I did neither, for the most part. Perhaps the next embarrassing thing was telling them that they couldn’t do this assignment at school either, because the school had blocked the address. At times I forget about the person of the high schooler and fail to remember that many trivial things can be made ridiculous when presented to a group of teenagers. Another interesting thing occurred when I reviewed the syllabus and mentioned the school policy on cell phones. In order to make it absolutely clear to them, I added a line that said that failure to comply with the rules would result in harsher penalties. My seniors primarily glazed over that but my sophomore classes picked up on it and some wanted to know what the penalty was. I hedged and simply told them that they didn’t really want to find out.
As I was speaking to my seniors today I tried to present the idea of sanctity to them. I called them to become saints and to not wait for later or to assume that knowing the answers is sufficient. As I spoke to them I realized how much of this I need to remember. I cannot simply spend my day talking about Jesus, I must talk to Him. The more I interact with my students, the more I realize how much further I have to grow in sanctity. The thought came to me today that God is using this job as a way to draw me closer to Himself, that all of the challenges and problems are His way of perfecting me. There is a lot of perfecting that needs to take place. Today I considered my deficiency in love. I want to love only those who like me. Praying outside the abortion clinic in college was my initial experience of forcing myself to love in the face of intense adversity. However, school is different. It is much more of a marathon. It isn’t exhilarating or enlightening to love my students in the midst of their utter humanity. It doesn’t seem heroic, it doesn’t fill me with warm feelings, and I don’t have someone to talk to about how much I feel like I grew in the process. Instead, it is just hard. I don’t want to do it and I can feel myself rebel. Loving to the point of pain. That is my calling and yet I fail to do it so often. I was serious when I told them that I would help sanctify them and they will help sanctify me. Then I realize that if I truly desired to be a saint above all other desires, if my holiness was what I was concerned about more than my physical or mental health, how much more I would do to further that goal. It is often surprising how lukewarm we can be while mistakenly thinking we are so zealous and hard-core. How good it is that we have a God who knows the trappings of human nature because He took them on Himself. But our desire to please Him and live for Him does please Him. And if we are serious, we will accept the grace He offers to live out His will.
MY LORD GOD, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.
–Thomas Merton
My first semester is officially complete–grades posted and all! In less than one week I will again be in a classroom, surrounded by some different seniors and the same sophomores. I dream of doing things perfectly, of using this new start to be better than I was before, to truly excel. I hope this zeal to improve will continue through the entire semester and not simply fade away when I get tired. Prayers would be appreciated. 🙂
“Droid.”
The sound came from the midst of my students as I was in the middle of a discussion/lecture about abortion. I was already giving far too little time to such an important topic, but I had miscalculated with the semester. As I heard the sound I briefly thought of my nephew and how I had heard that sound come from his phone many times while he was at our house. Now, though, it was in the middle of my class and school policy was that the phone was now confiscated for a week. The first time this had happened in my class was on day two of teaching. My students were looking at me and while part of me questioned if I had heard correctly, the looks on their faces reconfirmed my hearing.
“Alright. Give me the phone.”
Then it happened. I watched the students, one in particular, lean back in their seats, cross their arms, and give me that smile that aroused every stubborn fiber in my body. Suddenly it was them against me. They were unwilling to give up the phone and they wondered how I would get it from them. It was an implicit challenge. I’m not entirely certain what their perception of me is, but they didn’t think that I was as stubborn as I turned out to be.
“Come on. Just give me the phone.” I waited, letting the silence extend, showing them that I wasn’t just going to brush off this incident. The students began to look at each other.
“OK. If you don’t give me the phone, I’m just going to have to check your bags to see who else has their phones.” They didn’t look very perturbed, but after a while longer they began to tell me that it wasn’t their phone, that they didn’t have a Droid, that their phone was off/in their locker. As time continued, though, the individual with the offensive phone didn’t come forward. I was remembering what I had overheard other students say about phones going off in other classes and how when they simply sat there and didn’t give it up, they left the classroom at the end of the period with the teacher simply saying that what they did was very rude. Rude, perhaps, but that didn’t bother them too much when they all still had their phones at the end of the class. I decided that I wouldn’t be one of them.
“You’re right–I’m not going to check your bags. But if I don’t get the phone that went off, then you all have detentions.” Their faces changed a little bit with that. It wasn’t that I wanted to give them all detentions (they would be my first of my career) but I figured that would be enough of an incentive for the person to come forward. Who would be willing to give the entire class a detention simply so they could keep their phone? In my mind, it would be a few moments before I would have the phone in my hand and class could carry on as it should. A couple of the girls were uncomfortable with the situation, as displayed by their red faces. When a couple of the boys found out that these girls had never had detentions, they riled the class to take the detention.
“Guys, let’s take it!” “Yeah, its just a study hall in the morning!” “We can talk with Mr.— about bringing donuts tomorrow!” Their excitement wasn’t what I expected or wanted. I didn’t desire them to be miserable, but I was hoping the peer pressure would make the person step forward and surrender the phone.
That didn’t happen. Instead, I waited for them to give me the phone. When I pressed them more for the phone, one student got up and handed me his phone, telling me to just take it. I knew it wasn’t his and although it was an act of valor, I was unwilling to allow that one person to avoid punishment simply because a classmate of his was sacrificial. With the one phone stowed in my podium, I told them that I wasn’t going to waste any more class time over this but that if I didn’t have the phone by the end of class then they would all have detentions. And then I continued with class. I ended five minutes early, on accident, but I thought it would be a good time for them to think about it and then give me the phone. Perhaps they thought I had issued a simple harmless threat, but I fully intended to give them what I said I would. No, I didn’t want to give them a detention, but I wanted to be true to my word and I wanted them to know that I meant what I said and should be taken seriously. When the bell rang, they all walked out and I never got the phone. I was amazed that the person never came forward and that the class didn’t pressure them to do so. While I didn’t want them to rat the person out, I was hoping that the disgruntled class would impel the person to honesty.
I didn’t think I was over-reacting. After e-mailing the principal the list of people in the class, I waited for him to come and talk to me. Somehow, I knew he wouldn’t like that I had given all twenty-four people a detention, but I thought I had sufficient reasons. He came just before my third period class and asked if I could locate the area of the room the sound came from. Over the next couple periods he called discreetly into his office a couple trustworthy people in the class to ascertain who let their phone go off. By fifth period he came and told me who it was and their punishment. What I didn’t altogether expect was that the rest of the class would no longer have detentions. A student came and asked me at the end of the day if the detentions still stood and I told him that as far as I was concerned, they did. I had said I needed the phone by the end of the class and since that hadn’t happened, I intended for the consequences to stand. The next morning a had a couple visits from the administration explaining to me why they did what they did and how to handle a situation like this in the future. I understood where they were coming from, but I still think my method was better. I heard from several people that my students were complaining about the detention for the rest of the day. By the time 8th period walked in on that same day, they were smirking and saying, “Droid” and laughing about the incident. I wasn’t offended. Now they knew I was serious and that I meant what I said. Too many high school teachers of mine made empty threats that nobody listened to because they knew they would never follow through. I was determined to not be one of them.
In an e-mail to a parent, I told them that one thing I desired the students to learn from this was that they are an individual belonging to a community and what they do as individuals does affect the rest of the community. So perhaps it was one person’s phone that went off. The rest of them were complicit in the act by not speaking up or encouraging the person to be honest. Whether or not that explanation was sufficient, I don’t know. But it makes sense to me.
And that, dear readers, is the story of how this young teacher gave twenty-four detentions in one class period and had them all overturned within twenty-four hours.
The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh. Blessed be the name of the Lord!
Last week was just one of those weeks. The kind where I gave a detention to the entire class that doesn’t really care for me, only to have it revoked by the administration. The kind where I walked around feeling dumb for doing what I did, yet not regretting it in the slightest. The kind where I felt like a first year teacher with no experience and little knowledge. Where I felt like I was doing absolutely everything wrong and I wondered why God placed me in this job.
This week was just one of those weeks. The kind where I successfully complete my first semester of high school teaching (minus grading the final exams). The kind where a veteran teacher said, “Good for you” for giving the entire class a detention when they wouldn’t hand over the phone that had gone off in class. The kind where a senior thanked me for teaching them and told me that he had learned more in my class than in any other theology class thus far. The kind where I made bon-bons for my classes. The kind where I felt that I wasn’t doing absolutely everything wrong.
Praise the Lord.
This line always evokes conflicting emotions within my heart. I am filled with the realization that faith seems to be dwindling among people–I see it in the media, my family, my students, and my own heart. Faith seems to be that elusive thing that people desire yet which we also run from. However, while my heart is grieving about the loss of faith, it also attunes itself to the implicit challenge that is embodied in that statement. I am competitive. You probably wouldn’t discover that from people who only casually know me, but from those who are closer to me, they would probably roll their eyes at my ridiculous, insignificant challenges and competitions that I try to evoke. I just like to win. The challenge found in this statement seems obvious–I want to prove them wrong. Faith will be found within the hearts of mankind. The Second Coming can be millenia away, but there will be a faithful remnant. This remnant will be purified by persecution and grounded in sacrificial love, but it will remain. The gauntlet is thrown down and I accept the challenge. My life should be spent in the quest to ensure that faith will remain within the hearts of men.
Lord, we will believe. Come what may, we will still believe. We need your strength and your grace, but we will remain faithful. We will fall, but we will still believe. When I think of the alternative, that Christ will come again and there will be no faith on earth, I stop the image and declare internally with a firmer resolve, that it will never happen.
The headlines and news broadcasts are filled with images of the families and friends of those affected in Newtown, CT. This is one of those instances when the media and technology is both a grace and a curse. How wonderful to know that people around the nation and world are joining together in prayer for a community most people have never been to or even heard about prior to this past Friday. Yet the images and constant replaying of the stories leads one to wonder if this is all done truly out of compassion or perhaps out of a desire to have a big news story and our insatiable desire for excitement. When is a breaking news story shared because of a desire to enlighten others and when is it the desire to be the first to hit the airwaves with the shocking news? I wonder at times if we aren’t simply living from one drama to the next.
I saw this not to downplay or dismiss the losses felt by those in Newtown, but simply to re-evaluate our constant desire to know more about it. I, too, have watched news fragments on the Internet and desired to weep over what was being shown. There is something about the death of the innocent that evokes strong feelings within each person. It is a greater sense of injustice, a greater wrong has been perpetrated. The grief we feel would be of a different caliber had the victims all been adults. But when we see the ages of 6 and 7, we rightly feel that justice was not done. Every time something like this happens, I internally link it back to abortion. Not because I want to diminish the tragedy and say, “Something bad happens every day, get over it.” Far from it. I desire to simply say, “Yes, this is a tragedy. But there is another tragedy that doesn’t get the news coverage, that doesn’t get the recognition it deserves because it is considered to be a ‘hot button’ issue and that people have conflicting feelings about it. Or because it is a choice. That is a tragedy that we should all be weeping over.” The death of the innocent does evoke a heartache in us that speaks to our very desire to defend that which is weak and vulnerable. Rightfully so. But let us not forget the accepted deaths that occur daily. Let not familiarity breed apathy. We hear about abortion and so we are accustomed to the horrors of it. Yes, it is bad, but could it truly ever be stopped? I don’t think that is the important issue, really. Each parent would greatly desire one more of those children to be spared, even if the child was not their own. As such, I desire for each child that is being carried into the abortion clinic to be spared, to be carried out once again, living in the womb of his mother.
As a teacher, I find it especially touching to hear the stories of the teachers who sacrificed their lives or put themselves in harms way for the sake of their students. It makes me wonder if I would have the same resolve. My students had asked me about the morality of a very hypothetical situation over a month ago. I had been telling them that it was wrong for the biblical Saul to commit suicide and that while we can never judge the fate of one who committed suicide, that the act is always intrinsically wrong. Being sophomores, they wanted to find a circumstance in which it would be acceptable. Who better to put on the stake then their teacher? So the situation went as follows: say a person came in with a gun and said that either I killed myself or he would kill all of my students. They looked at me, thinking that they had stumped me.
“Which one would you pick? Would you sacrifice yourself for us or would you just watch us all be killed?”
They thought I had to choose one of their options. I was firmly convinced that there were other ways that they had not thought of. So I presented my “game plan” to them, should this event ever actually take place in real life. I said that I would throw myself at the man–knowing that I would die–but that when I did that, all of the men in the classroom were to jump up and charge him also. They seemed a little surprised by my response, and while I wasn’t, I was left wondering if this was really a matter to be discussed with my students. A while after I heard about the Newtown murders, I re-thought what I had told them and decided that I wouldn’t really alter anything I had said. The vastly hypothetical situation seemed a little less out there and closer to home. I thought about how I would be shaking and terrified, but I prayed that God would give me the necessary strength, should something like this actually happen.
Perhaps this is inappropriate to put in a post that also speaks about Newtown, but I don’t think it is. I often refer to my students as “my kids” even though I know they aren’t really kids, but they do feel in a way like they are mine. They may never know the affection I harbor for them, even the ones that also drive me up the wall. For the most part, I can never tell them I love them, because they would never take it as seriously or as deeply as I mean it. They are each too deep to know in such a short amount of time, yet I feel like I know quite a bit about them, simply from their behavior and class work.
From the fragments of this blog, perhaps what can be redeemed is this fact: that the ultimate sacrifice is never made without smaller, seemingly insignificant sacrifices made prior to it. The sacrifices would largely be chalked up to “my job” by most of my students and those around me. But I think there is something deeper involved. I do not claim to be the best teacher or the most sacrificial. Yet I think that despite the incongruent images, spending two hours to make bon-bons for my seniors, staying in my classroom until the sun has gone down again, listening to their stories and ramblings, grading their countless assignments, and taking them in prayer to nearly every Mass I’ve been to since I got the job–all of these will be the tiny sacrifices that make it possible for me to make the “ultimate sacrifice” should it be required of me. Sacrifices like these and the ones many other teachers make will generally not gain the headline on the newspaper, but they are what makes it possible for one to lay down one’s life for a friend.
May God grant peace to those who have died, peace to those who survive, and peace in our hearts and the entire world. May He also grant us the grace to sacrifice, regardless of the personal cost.
Sometimes when I really think about the “controversial” issues of today, I am completely baffled by the fact that they are controversial. Society has made these issues into emotional issues and situations that prevent one from really looking at the truth objectively. I find it interesting that my high school students have been almost more instrumental in my grasping the extent of society’s depravity than the past eight years of college and high school. My students are not depraved but they give me a window into the mind of society. And I find it to be quite frightening. I am realizing, as I told a friend a week ago, that I wasn’t the typical high schooler. As I speak to my students I waver between feeling as though we are in the same generation and then thinking that we are in completely different generations. But, to be honest, I often feel that I am in the wrong era altogether and that I would have fit rather nicely into the 1800s.
My viewpoint into the culture made me slightly frantic this week. If my students, who attend a Catholic high school in a rather conservative state with typically traditional values, seem this affected by the culture, I was quick to bemoan the fate of the entire world. Especially after listening to their defense of their opinions, I was convinced that we, as a society, do not understand truth. My students aren’t stupid and they don’t seem to hold beliefs that they think are radical. There is also an interesting mixture within most of them, they don’t exactly buy the Church’s teaching on human sexuality (for example) but they appear open to know more about it. This doesn’t mean they come off as accepting of it, rather they appear to be skeptical of anything the Church says that doesn’t mesh with society. Yet many of them are hesitant to say they flat out disagree with the Church’s teaching. These opinions provide an interesting blend of hope and despair for me. I have come again and again to the realization that I do not know how to accurately convey my beliefs or the Church’s teaching to them. I accept what the Church teaches but I cannot properly show them how this should impact their beliefs. Multiple times this past week I have felt acutely the limitations of my abilities and knowledge.
What do you do with a society that makes truth seem bigoted and intolerant? How do you present a truth that is immediately labeled as hate speech or offensive? The truth is remarkably offensive. Don’t believe me? Take a quick look at the videos below.
Why does this continue to surprise me? Perhaps because our culture is very good at pinning “radical” and “extreme” to things that are simply not in line with the secular media. If you say things often enough and loud enough, people will begin to think that they are true. So when you begin to speak the Truth, be it ever so softly and charitably, it comes off as cruel and unjust.
“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not! Behold, your house is forsaken and desolate.” –Mt. 23: 37-38
It lead me to wonder how one could possibly win. Not because I am making the transformation of a culture into a competition, but because it seems that the odds are so against the truth. Even the fact that when the Church teaches the truth it doesn’t make any head-way in many modern minds, points to a culture so “open-minded” that it is closed off to truth. Modern progress seems to be running full speed away from everything good, true, and beautiful. And the issues that seem to be the most fundamental–marriage, families, life, and the human person–are the most attacked now.
“It is true that I am of an older fashion; much that I love has been destroyed or sent into exile.” -G.K. Chesterton
Perhaps I should have been more encouraging when one of my students asked what we should do when the whole of society seems to be opposed to what the Church is teaching. I told him that we need to be prepared to be martyrs for the truth. That we will be at least verbally mocked and crucified is seeming to be a closer and closer reality. It is not something that will take place when I am old and gray but is gradually sweeping society right now. The hope in this is that Our Lord knows all of this. And the times of greatest persecution and evil are the very times when He raises up the greatest of saints. They give hope and inspiration that standing with the truth is something that is only fully rewarded in Heaven. As for now, we are the Church militant, battling anything contrary to that which is true. Not just “true” by our standards, but is actually and objectively Truth.
“Strive even to death for truth and the Lord God will fight for you.” –Sirach 4:28
This causes me to think of the book of Daniel with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Like them, we should refuse to serve the gods that society worships and refuse to conform our lives to the tune that is being played. Instead, even in the midst of the flames of persecution we should bless the Lord.
“Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, for his mercy endures for ever.”
Seeking After His Heart 