At the moment, it feels like we are in something of an indefinite holding pattern. We don’t know what the next few months, let alone the next few weeks or days, will look like. I am friends with a lot of teachers at various levels of the education system, and they are feeling the uncertainty particularly strongly as we enter the months of planning and preparation for the new school year. What will our “public life” look like in the fall? It is impossible to say. And yet, teachers have to prepare for all eventualities. Whether students are back in the classroom or still learning from home, teachers will be there to support them and their parents.
I myself find myself working through several models of how I might present faith formation for those who would like to become Catholic. We are very fortunate to have access to online options at the moment, but it can become a poor substitute for in-person interaction. I find myself falling back on certain strategies I learned in my special education training classes in college. Differentiated instruction, here we come! Find multiple ways to convey the same information. Simplify. Break down. Chunk. All of my education buzzwords. Don’t assume one way will work for everyone, just because it works the best for you.
Who knows? Maybe we
will stumble onto something that is better than what we had before. And if not, that’s okay too. We will adapt, and we will carry on, and we
will do the best we can with the circumstances we face. It doesn’t do us any good to despair over the
fact that we don’t know what is coming.
Even when life seems to be predictable, it really isn’t. Life is going to throw us curveballs, and our
reaction to them is what matters in the end.
No comments:
Post a Comment