In Praise and Defense of Catechists

They frown. They squint. They knit and raise their brows. They purse and chew on their lips. They glower. Students’ faces are the masks of cannibal priests but their eyes are the eyes of martyrs. Except cannibal priests don’t collapse face-down on a pillow of their own crossed arms in the last hour of the seminar, and martyrs don’t get calls on their iPhones.

When I was a sophomore at ASU, I studied medieval history with a white-haired professor who fixed his gaze, during lectures, on a point about 20 degrees above the horizon, as though outlining the Constitutions of Clarendon for Tempe Butte. The habit seemed impossibly old-fashioned and reinforced our impression that he was narrating these events from memory. But he knew. He knew it’s unwise to stare too deeply into those black wells of need and conceit and cunning and blockheadedness that are students.

It’s been less than a year since I took up teaching, but already I count myself an initiate into that mystery, and into the piques of catechists. The blame for everything from undersized families to Democratic victories has a way of tumbling right onto their shoulders. Like veterans of quagmire-type limited wars, they tend to pay the blame both back and forward, fuming about 1) damned shilly-shallyers who won’t untie their hands and let them fight to win; and 2) damned ingrates who curse them from the safety of their armchairs as they stand watch on the wall.

Now I get it. Being the bearer of hard-earned and arcane knowledge means getting the kind of respect that holy fools once got from scrofulous landgraves. It’s nice while it lasts, but holding onto it means you’ve got to perform miracles. Betraying a worldview not too far removed from superstition, many administrators believe lessons write themselves, just as many students believe expertise can seep in through osmosis. This finally dawned on me after I had my fourth or fifth conversation along these lines:

“What do you think my English? My English enough, I think.”

“I’m afraid your English would be inadequate for business purposes.”

“Yes? Thank you very much!”

We bearers of hard-earned and arcane knowledge sustain a deep wound the day we figure out that the people calling the shots and footing the bills are philistines whose interest in our specialty is limited and pragmatic, not all-consuming and geekish. The director of the first school where I taught used to summon me on my days off to teach classes to students I’d never met before and would never meet again. They’d paid for their hours up front, and she was obliged to give them their money’s worth one way or another. Some were beginners who wouldn’t have known an irregular verb if one had curled up in their lap.

“It’s just general English,” she would write in her e-mails.

I would type back, “’General English’ is not English, you simpering –” But then I quit, as I didn’t want to teach her any new words, not even short words that would have been easy to pronounce. That would have felt like more work.

It’s a lot easier to sympathize with this cavalier attitude when it comes from the students themselves. Not one in five has any real gift for, or even a very strong interest in, foreign languages. With the American economy shriveling visibly, none plans, or even dreams, of emigrating. Instead, they’re studying English because it’s an unavoidable career move. A few of the more ambitious ones will sit for the TOEFL or the civil service examination, which includes an English section. But most just want to be able to tell their HR manager that they’ve been certified as advanced English speakers according to CEFR standards. They won’t be communicating with native speakers in these sought-after jobs, but with Central and Eastern Europeans, whose English, in many cases, will be just as pidgin-like as their own.

It would be pretty silly for any American to gripe about the effects of his own nation’s global hegemony, especially when he owes his livelihood to it. But this narrow focus on formal qualifications brings to mind the old joke: What do they call the guy who graduates last in his medical school class? Answer: Doctor. An awful lot of students seem content to be that graduate, consigning hard topics like relative clauses and mixed-type conditionals to the 25% of English they believe they can afford to miss. The teacher’s job becomes more mama bird-like, as he must grind this stuff into a form digestible for the sickliest hatchling. This grinding takes time, which is why mama birds don’t have much of a social life.

Catechists will have plenty of their own stories, but the RCIA program in which I was involved – initially as a baptismal candidate, later as a sponsor – was making the most of the same kind of less-than-ideal situation. Out of each class, which totaled between 10 and 15 people, maybe two or three had a burning interest in Catholic theology or social teaching. One of these was always a rock star of a Bible scholar coming over from the Southern Baptists.

The rest of us were there for reasons that were either more mundane (promise to a dying parent, engagement to a Catholic) or more obscure (my world-weariness and determination to recover my spiritual roots). We all worked full time. So as not to burden us any further, the instructors never assigned homework or ambushed us with quizzes on Grace and Nature. One prepared exquisite handouts on each Sunday’s Gospel reading. All of them, I’m sorry to say, ended up jammed in my glove compartment.

Apparently, like the administrators of Turkish foreign-language academies, the RCIA cadre aimed at a high retention rate. The polarizing life issues were duly addressed, though with something I now recognize as a trigger warning and without anyone’s playing Colonel Travis and drawing lines in the sand. Whether or not the religious sister in charge of the program ever said so in exactly these words I can’t remember, but she gave the impression of thinking that if the Holy Spirit had gotten us through the door, then the Holy Spirit would mold our consciences in its own good time.

Maybe we would have responded well to being drilled like pine planks with Thomism pur et dur. All I can say for sure is that the diced-up, dumbed-down version kept us coming back, week after week, all the way through the end of Mystagogia. The couples were wed and their babies baptized, and I found the image of a patient Holy Spirit appealing and plausible enough that I allow it to work on me even now.

Buried deep in the belief that people will surrender to the truth once someone has explained it till he’s blue in the face is a near awe for the power of reason. There was a time not so long ago when Catholics believed only the pope, the king, and the executioner, working together, could keep society out of the abyss. That the catechist has been allowed to usurp some of their importance shows just how liberal we’ve all become. Could we also acknowledge, without upsetting the whole apple cart, that ignorance can be a little less easily vincible than we’d like to think?

Education is often a racket where gobs of money are made selling hope to people whose abilities hardly justify it. Yet, like all rackets, it creates jobs and feeds families. And who knows? If my bad students haven’t been too permanently damaged by my bad teaching, one of them might make go on to make some use of his bad English. One thing to recommend rackets: they never let the perfect become the enemy of the good.

Follow Diary of A Wimpy Catholic on Facebook.