Catholic Schools Week 2014 - For Our Students

Each day during Catholic Schools Week, we will post a reflection on the focus of the day centered around this year’s theme: "Catholic Schools: Communities of Faith, Knowledge and Service". You can find a complete list of the reflections here. The following reflection is from Andrea Cisneros:

Middle school teachers have the incomparable privilege of overseeing the production of a cornucopia of projects. The wonder of these is their comprehensive range of styles, quality, and adherence to directions. Give one million middle schoolers the same assignment, and you’ll get one million distinct efforts in return.

Once, I tasked my personality-rich eighth graders with a multi-part research, writing, and presentation project: identify a human rights issue, gather and present the relevant facts, and persuade us we ought to care about this issue. Trusting such a topic to a group of people who have only recently discovered their frontal cortexes and who, moreover, find that area of reason and rationality very much in development is a gamble. I was vividly aware of this when presentation day came.

One girl shared a thoughtful talk about human trafficking, an issue almost none of her classmates were aware of. In the midst of a rock discovery phase, she titled her poster after a moderately inappropriate 80’s anthem, explaining that by “sugar”, she meant kindness and Christian love. I remain skeptical that she was as innocent of the song’s connotation as she claimed, but her conviction about her chosen issue was genuine.

The boy who managed to be both the most gregarious and the most pugnacious in the class spoke about the prolife movement. Considering the tendency of adolescent conversations to devolve into rhetoric and finger pointing and the tragically similar nature of discussion on this particular issue, I was nervous. Instead of a rant, however, he lead with the need for compassion and care for those who believe abortion is their best option, and described a slew of services for women in crisis pregnancies, including a number in our area for which his peers could donate or volunteer.

Every class has one student who, if writing and intensity of stare are reliable indicators, takes in everything but never speaks. That girl stood before her peers the most fired up I had ever seen her and talked about girls’ lack of access to education worldwide.  It was a battle to get more than five words at a time from her, but on this matter, she had plenty to say.

Two things struck me. First, when I trusted my students to do something important, they did it brilliantly. Second, that every single one of them focused on their faith and the call of our Church to care for the least of these. While they didn’t say it in so many words, they talked about their shared humanity and the God-given dignity of these people they had never met, people they wanted to help, in the tiniest measure, through their essays and hastily assembled poster boards. In the meeting of these discoveries –the needs of their brothers and sisters, and their own ability to do something constructive – they lit up. They became more fully themselves, the persons God created them to be, compassionate towards and empowered by their global community.

Giving eighth graders a meaty project is a gamble. It almost always pays off.

Andrea Cisneros is the Assistant Director of the Notre Dame ACE Academies. She graduated from the University of Delaware before enrolling in ACE's ACE Teaching Fellows program and teaching in Brownsville, TX. In her current role, Andrea focuses on developing and strengthening Catholic school culture, seeking out successful schools and learning from their practices to enrich the environment at Notre Dame ACE Academies.