There is an ambiguous relationship between sports and religion in the United States. On the one hand, we might wonder why it is easy to get 70,000 fans to a football game but it is difficult be to fill a church on Sunday morning. On the other hand, spectator sports can be a healthy family activity.
Ask students to compare these aspects of the Mass and a NFL football game to find similarities and differences. (Suggested answers provided)
Entrance procession (Announcement of players, coaches, and refs/Priest processes in with deacon, readers, and altar servers)
Statement of Beliefs (Pledge of allegiance/Creed)
Music (Fight song, Liturgical Music)
Expected Dress (Team colors/nicer clothes)
Types of Participation (Cheering/In the Mass, a person participates in the Celebration of the Eucharist – visible participation includes responses to the priest’s statements)
Social element (both are places to meet family and friends)
After considering the parallels, complete the activity by posing this dilemma and question:
The popularity of sports in the United States reveals that Americans have a real desire to invest themselves in something bigger than they are. Does this fascination with spectator sports disguise a deeper longing that sports do not fulfill?
Catholic Schools Week is a great chance to point out the reasons teens and adults alike are Catholic. Share or adapt the following assignment from Sr. Kieran Sawyer, SSND, to help teens answer the question "Why be a Catholic?"
Part 1
First, give the students the question "Why be a Catholic?" Tell each person to list at least five reasons why a person would want to be a member of the Catholic Church.
Next, make a composite list on the board of all the reasons why a person might want to be Catholic. List both "good" and "bad" reasons. When the list is complete ask the students to put a plus (+) sign next to what they consider to be good reasons and a minus (-) sign next to what they consider to be bad reasons for being a Catholic. Then have them pick out three reasons that best answer the question for themselves: "Why are you Catholic?"
Part 2
Call on individual students to be interviewed in front of the class. Some of the possible questions you can use are:
Do you think you will be a practicing Catholic ten years from now?
Do you think you will want to be married in the Church?
Do you think you will want to raise your children Catholic?
Do you think you will send your children to Catholic grade school? high school?
Do you think you will be the kind of Catholic that will serve the Church on a parish council, as a lector, in the choir, as a religious education teacher?
Part 3
Take the discussion in a new direction. Ask the students to imagine that they are being put on trial for being a Catholic? Call on volunteers to come before the class. Present them with the classic question scenario. Say, "You are on trial for being a Catholic. How do you plead?" Continue in a mock trial format, perhaps choosing prosecutors and defense lawyers to "try" the case before the class. After some time, play this new seven minute video La evidencia as a summary.
The well-documented incident with former Notre Dame football player Manti Te'o serves as a reminder to teens and others to observe Internet safety. Make sure to take some time to review Internet protocol, rules, and potential dangers with your students. Here are a few helpful web links. Please feel free to add other helpful tips in the comment section.
New York Public Library
Basic safety rules.
The My House Initiative
Specific message dealing with reasons for and ways to avoid pornography on the Internet sponsored by the Archdiocese of Kansas City.
Online Dating Tips
From the CatholicMatch website. Several articles on online dating, mainly intended for adults but with some appropriate rules for teens to consider as well.
Pope Benedict on Online Relationships
Pope Benedict XVI offers a reminder that virtual contact cannot and must not take the place of direct human contact.
In the last iPad tutorial, I explained how teachers and students can use the Study Cards feature of the iBooks app to review glossary terms, main ideas, and Review Questions. A major part of that tutorial focused on effective highlighting with a designated color for Study Cards.
One of the important advantages of eBooks for education is that highlights don't have to be final. When you highlight a book with colored ink, the highlight is there forever. It is a static experience. You highlight, then you review. You can't change it.
The highlighting experience for eBooks and eTextbooks can be a much more engaging experience. One of our responsibilities as teachers is to use the tools to effectively teach students how to be better independent learners. The highlighting feature, when it allows you to have multiple colors, can be used in exciting new ways.
Check your eTextbook reader app to be sure it offers multiple colors for your highlights. The iBooks iPad app, the Direct Digital app, and the GoodReader app (for PDF eTextbooks) all include the ability to highlight in more than one color.
Teaching Good Highlighting Skills
First, let's focus on the purpose of highlighting. To increase engagement with what students are reading, they need to do something active to help them organize new information into their brains. When reading printed books, this may include highlighting, writing notes in the margins, taking notes on paper, outlining what they read, or creating a mind map.
Unfortunately, highlighting becomes an incredibly passive way to read books. We end up highlighting well-written sentences or long paragraphs with important information. What we are left with is a set of interesting sentences and paragraphs.
Now that highlights and notes are so easy to see in a book and access outside of the book context, we need to become better highlighters and teachers of highlighting skills.
What is the purpose of a highlight? Review.
If we never review the highlights we've made, then we've wasted our time.
If we do review our highlights, and notice that we've highlighted nearly the entire text, then we are again wasting our time.
Instead, try and teach this:
Highlight sentences that summarize main ideas of paragraphs and sections.
Highlight supporting arguments of main ideas (sometimes numbered lists or bullet points).
Highlight words, sentences, or concepts that you don't understand (for now).
Highlight words or sentences that your teacher points to.
Turn your highlights into outlines, questions, and summary points.
Or, consult the highlighting suggestions in the final section of the Study Cards Tutorial, "Using iPad Study Cards to Review Reading."
Most kids don't know how to study for tests and quizzes. Studying is a process that begins the first time you read something and ends in thinking creatively about ideas.
Highlighting with Multiple Colors: A Pre-Reading Strategy
I'm a huge proponent of pre-reading strategies. Most of us, whether we are teachers or students, skip this important step in reading new material.
Pre-reading is reading before you read. It requires a quick scan of a section of text looking at the headings, the images, the bold words, and the first and last sentences of paragraphs to get an idea of what a selection of text is about before we even read the details.
So how do you use highlighting to do pre-reading?
Remember that highlights in an eBook/eTextbook can always be changed. So if you highlight something now, it can be deleted later. If you highlight something in yellow, it can easily be changed to green.
Before releasing the students to read, ask them to use the following colors to highlight parts of the text:
Green: Words, concepts, and ideas that you already know well.
Blue: Words, concepts, and ideas you've heard of or understand a little bit.
Red: Words, concepts, and ideas you've never heard of.
Give students a little direction by pointing out certain words or concepts you want them to preview and highlight in green, blue, or red.
Next, give them five to ten minutes to look up the words or concepts they highlighted in red and blue (kind of know and never heard of). In most eReaders, students can do this directly from the app by clicking on a word or highlighted text and selecting "Search Web" or "Search Wikipedia."
Have them write what they've learned in a note connected with the red highlights.
As a class discuss some of the concepts they didn't know before reading that they understand now.
When they read the text, they can either delete the highlights to their liking or change the colors from blue and red to green.
You will need to practice this activity to get students used to this kind of pre-reading and highlighting, but eventually these will become habits. Students will find the things they don't know and utilize the incredible tools at their disposal to quickly increase comprehension. You will find that in the long run they will learn faster by engaging in a text in this way than in just reading and answering the review questions.
The Pew Forum recently released The Global Religious Landscape: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Major Religious Groups as of 2010, a country-by-country analysis of data from more than 2500 censuses, surveys, and population registers. You may want to explore some of this data with your students. While the content may fit perfectly into a World Religions course, the report really contains information that all of our students should know.
73 percent of the world’s people live in countries where the majority of the population are of the same faith. How do you think that a person’s experience of faith differs if one is in the majority group rather than the minority group?
The median age for Muslims is 23, 26 for Hindus, 30 for Christians, and 36 for Jews. (Can a religious group’s median age suggest anything significant about the people in each religious group?)
A further breakdown indicates that the median age for Christians in the United States is 39, Europe (42), sub-Saharan African (19) and in Latin America/Caribbean (27). (Do these ages suggest anything about Christianity in the past or future?)
Catholics make up about 50 percent of Christians. (Do you think that the Catholic Church has leadership responsibilities or other obligations to the larger Christian community because of its size?)
Currently only one percent of the global Christian community lives in the Middle East and North Africa where Christianity originated. (How and why do think that the Christian community spread so far from its location in the time of the early Church?)
The study finds that 16.3% of the people in the world are “unaffiliated” with a religious group. (Who are the “unaffiliated?” Why might the majority of the population in China, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hong Kong, Japan, and North Korea be “unaffiliated”?)
Check this link for this data and more.
Notre Dame, Our Mother
Notre Dame, our Mother
Tender, strong and true
Proudly in the heavens,
Gleams thy gold and blue.
Glory's mantle cloaks thee
Golden is thy fame,
And our hearts forever,
Praise thee, Notre Dame.
And our hearts forever,
Love thee, Notre Dame.
GO IRISH, BEAT BAMA
The following exercise is a prayer experience that focuses on repairing hurts and divisions and extending the peace of the Christmas season. Distribute copies of a paper with two equal circles and one 3" x 5" index card to each student. Play a recording of Christmas carols as the prayer experience begins. Have the students gather near a creche. Light a candle. Then say:
One of the best indications that people are followers of Jesus Christ is by the way they live out the virtue of peace. Many Christmas songs speak of pace. The enveloping feeling of peace that seems to take over a person, a family, a community during the Christmas seasons is part of Christmas that affects a great number of people. You may have thought, "I wish it could be Christmas all year long."
To make the feeling of Christmas peace last for 365 days a year would take an about-face by individuals and society. Rather than letting grudges with family members and friends simmer and explode, making peace entails saying words like "I am sorry" and "What can I do to make things better?" How often do you use these words in your relationships? Is your life one of peace, identified by reconciliation, honesty, justice, and respect? Or, is your life one of "un-peace" marked by hurt, anger, injury, put-downs, mistrust, and disrespect? If you are honest, you would probably have to admit that your life is a mixture of both. As we prepare for prayer, reflect on some of the times that we are not peaceful people and what we can do to bring real peace to others."
Have the students refer to the paper with two circles. Continue with the prayer script below.
Think of some family members and friends whom you have hurt. Write their initials in the left circle—people you have embarrassed, disappointed, teased, left out, disrespected, take of advantage of.
Think of people who have hurt you. In the right circle, write the initials of people who have hurt you in any of these ways: embarrassed you, disappointed you, teased you, left you out of an activity, disrespected you, taken advantage of you. (Allow a few minutes for writing.)
What would you have to do or say in order to heal the hurts you have been thinking about and make peace with these people? I am going to pass out an index card to each person.l I would like you to write three or four constructive ideas for making peace in your relationships. These notes won't be delivered, though you should write them as if they were to be given to the people you thought about. Some of the items on the index cards will be read anonymously to help us continue our prayer. Write a private number or symbol on your card to help you reclaim your card after the prayer.
Pass out the index cards. Allow time for writing. Then collect the cards. Distribute copies of a Christmas carol with lyrics that speak of peace. Lead a singing of verse one. Then read anonymously several of the ideas for making peace from various index cards. Read only one or two items from each card and replace any names or nicknames with initials. After you have gone through about half the pile, lead a singing of verse two of the Christmas carol. Then continue reading ideas from other index cards. When all have been read, ask everyone to stand around the creche. Conclude by leading the following prayer from the responsorial psalm of Christmas day. Say:
Sing a new song to the Lord!
Everyone on this earth,
sing praises to the Lord,
sing and praise his name.
R: A savior is born, Christ the Lord!"
Day after day, announce,
"The Lord has saved us!"
Tell every nation on earth,
"The Lord is wonderful
and does wonderful things!"
R: A savior is born, Christ the Lord!"
Tell the heavens and the earth
to be glad and celebrate!
Command the ocean to roar
with all of its creatures
and the fields to rejoice
with all of their crops.
R: A savior is born, Christ the Lord!"
