Sacred Sunday - Religious Education

It's a very busy weekend at the hospital. My sweet Bethany has agreed to post this week's Sacred Sunday blog post while I attempt to recover the craziness that is the nature of Respiratory Therapy. I present to you Bethany's blog post on her experiences teaching Religious Education.

Since my mom is very busy, and Daylights Savings doesn’t help anything, she has asked me to do Sacred Sunday for this week. 

When I found out that I needed 40 Service Hours to graduate 9^th grade, I was frantically searching for hours (even though it was August). A friend of mine mentioned teaching Religious Education, and I thought that I could possibly be good for a teaching position. So, I talked to the Director of Religious Education after Mass one day, and got a teaching position for 5^th grade. 

During the first class, half of the students were out with Swine Flu, so we combined classes. It ended up working well, and we still have the classes combined today. There were originally four teachers, but later on in the year, one had to drop out due to family issues. The adult I was paired up with originally creates the best lesson plans, and interacts with these kids better than many people could. I mainly just add my thoughts on what she’s teaching. And the other adult from makes sure everyone is behaving, although they are some of the best-behaved 5^th graders I have ever met. They ask very good, relative questions, and actually want to learn. For the first test, they were the class with the highest score.

You may be wondering how this ties in at all with Sacred Sunday. Well, teaching these kids has changed me. I’m ashamed to say that, at first, I was doing this only for Service Hours, but now I find myself going there because I want to. I want to see these kids understanding this beautiful faith that they were blessed with. I want to see them each week.

You know how they say you learn more through teaching? Well, it’s completely true. Before I was just loaded with these facts about The Faith, and didn’t put them to any use. The other teachers call me the Catholic Encyclopedia, because I’m always throwing out facts, they swear I’m not disrupting the class, though. But as I throw out these facts, I begin connecting all these things I know to real life, and I begin realizing how these can be applied to real life. 

Looking back, I realize how much of a blessing God gave me by letting me work with these amazing kids. I can see how much I’ve changed in just this year, and how much of that change has come through teaching. I can only hope that I’ve helped them, even just a bit, like they’ve helped me.