“Faith Day”
Posted by simonsays on October 10, 2007
The first professional development day that my school board has every year is on the Friday before Thanksgiving (which is in October in Canada) and it is called “faith day.” Funny title, I thought faith was an everyday thing, not just a once a week, or even once a year thing. As we are a Catholic learning community the day is meant to help build up teachers in our own faith and to remind us of the vocation that teaching is and that our call includes remembering that the children we are presented with every morning is a child of God and each is particularly loved by Him. Great stuff. However the faith day that my staff experienced this year was met by almost unanimous criticism; most left at the end of this day of encouragement feeling rather deflated. The faith day is organized by the school chaplain, and I by no means am writing this post to criticize her. She arranged the speakers in good faith in the hope that they would come and encourage us. The first speaker was a lovely woman with a great heart, however, her delivery could use work. This was a little surprising from a leader in education. She spoke at us for the better part of three hours with very little involvement from her audience. It made me think of the Chinese proverb “Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.” She did one thing in particular that I have told my students over and over again not to do when using PowerPoint and that is to not create text-heavy slides which you read aloud. There is a good article about it here. What she had to say could have been said in one hour.
An integral part of every Faith Day is the celebration of the Mass which is the central ritual of our faith. Unfortunately, and I am not one to engage in clergy bashing, they are called to a difficult vocation in difficult times, the priest who came to celebrate with us used this opportunity to encourage us in our vocation to critique our mass etiquette. Now I realise that there are certain dispositions and practices that are expected of us as Catholics, however, there is a way to go about encouraging and teaching people about these. To be publicly critiqued ad nauseum during the mass I found to be a little off-putting. This kind of attitude has only pushed those who were teetering on the edge of disdain for the Church a little further. There was nothing pastoral about this priest’s performance. Some complained about the length of his preaching, which did cause me to be late for picking up my kids from daycare, but I thought what he had to say was quite good in this regard.
I hope and pray that the effects of this faith day are not too damaging of the mission of Catholic education and indeed the spiritual lives of the teachers who experienced it.
Image from KatieW
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