Signs of Faith - Fall 1999 - Our Everyday Work

Our Everyday Work
Educators bring life to De La Salle's vision of a good teacher
By Brother Brendan Kneale, FSC,
Jacqueline Tasch, and Terri Wetter

There is no role that has a more dramatic impact on a student's life than that of the teacher. One way to measure that impact is to see how teachers engage students and, ultimately, help them move from wonder to wisdom. That is to say, academic education is the adventure on which the teacher leads the student to acquire the skills of thought needed in order to become wise -- that most human of undertakings. College preparatory schools help youth to gear up for a lifelong intellectual exploration. In stimulating wonder, teachers help motivate students to pursue wisdom. They do so with the tools of logic, language, persuasiveness, sensitivity, quantitative skills, and appreciative insights.

But we do not imagine that schools are the only educators of youth. Family, church, workplace, peer culture, and the media are some of the other major educating agencies. Family and church especially need our support and cooperation -- forming character and educating the heart. Still, no other place than the school has as its primary responsibility teaching the intellectual skills needed for life in the modern world, for both its human and Christian dimensions. In every Lasallian school this responsibility, however, is not simply for an education with the added dimension of Christianity; it is rather for Christianity with the added dimension of education.

Throughout the 1999 -- 2000 academic year, Signs of Faith will provide a closer look at the everyday work that Lasallian educators undertake with their students. In this issue, we visit with teachers from La Salle High School in Milwaukie, Oregon, and Christian Brothers High School in Sacramento, California. It becomes clear that these classroom leaders are very much in a tradition that emphasizes the famous "Twelve Virtues of a Good Teacher", a list found at the end of Saint La Salle's classic text on school administration -- seriousness, silence, humility, prudence, wisdom, patience, restraint, gentleness, zeal, watchfulness, piety, and generosity. It is the romance and challenge of Christian teachers' lives, in their everyday work, to engage students' minds and hearts and help embed them in the Christian outlook, in fulfillment of the Lasallian goal: to provide a "human and Christian education".

-- Brother Brendan Kneale, FSC

Tom English || Tim Joy || Sue White || Loreva Bromley || Shelly Gorman
Cecilia Powers || The Lasallian Difference

Tom English:
From Wonder to Wisdom: Engaging Young Minds
At Christian Brothers High School in Sacramento, California, the freshmen in Tom English's world history class build the Great Wall of China across their classroom -- using Legos and books. And sometimes, they rebuild it -- because mysterious earthquakes wreak destruction overnight or because the Great Emperor of China (a.k.a. Mr. English) wants it rebuilt.

Part of the idea is to give students a feel for what life was like in the times they're studying, but another part is engagement. Projects like the Great Wall "keep them emotionally as well as intellectually involved," Mr. English says. Once they're hooked emotionally, the students can move on to more challenging academic material, he believes.

Getting students engaged in a subject doesn't always require Legos. Sometimes, the tool can be as simple as the question, "Why?" Mr. English uses that tool frequently in his college-level Introduction to Philosophy course for seniors. Take, for example, a session on epistemology, the philosophy of knowledge.

It starts simply enough, with questions: "What do you know?" "How do you know you know?" "What can you know?" The goal is to help students develop an attitude of critical questioning, rather than easy acceptance of sensory or common sense answers.

"When they start explaining 'how they know' or 'what they think they know,' then I ask, 'How can you verify this?'" Mr. English says. "If they answer the question 'Why?', I turn around and ask it again. 'Why?' is the simplest of questions, but it's also one of the most difficult."

Students find themselves emotionally engaged and challenged to reply. "They're always looking to me for an answer, and I won't give it to them," Mr. English says. "I tell them that I'm a student just like them. I'm always learning."

Allison Albericci, a recent philosophy alumnus, confirms the effectiveness of Mr. English's strategy. His class "makes you examine what you believe and try to justify that." The question, "What do you know?" pulled Allison out of her old consciousness and dropped her on new intellectual turf. "I had never asked that question," she says, "and I don't think I've answered it yet."

Tom English || Tim Joy || Sue White || Loreva Bromley || Shelly Gorman
Cecilia Powers || The Lasallian Difference