As 2021 wraps up, everyone seems to be a little bit tired of something. Have you noticed that? It has been a long pandemic, and it seems we don't know the Greek alphabet or when it will end. When I pledged a fraternity in college, I had to learn that alphabet, but, like Algebra II, I don't use it very often day to day so my skills are rusty.

In any case, now is the time to be optimistically thinking ahead to 2022 because it is only a few weeks away and January 1st should never be a surprise. You've either had a great year or not, and when you look back, you probably had more to do with that than anyone. I had a decent year, and over the next few weeks, I will be sharing thoughts about the new year, and may even recycle a weblog or two as the season dictates.

I plan to have an even better year in 2022, and I think that is the first baby step to making it happen: planning.

Today's story is about church and catechism, but it is not necessarily a story about religion. Rather, it is a story about how to get by giving.

One day, shortly after moving to Tennessee, a coworker was raving in the break room about his church and his Pastor and he invited me to a men’s club meeting at the church. I didn’t really know anyone in town, I didn’t really know what a church men’s club was either, but it seemed like a good thing to do. I’d had plenty of practice as a Catholic growing up, but back in 1985 when moving to Memphis, I hadn’t been doing much practicing for a few years, so I was officially ‘lapsed.’

When I walked into the meeting room at the Church of the Resurrection, there was a group of guys already there and the pastor, Monsignor Peter Buchignani, was hanging out with them and everyone was laughing and joking around. They were all friendly and welcoming to me, and it seemed that there were some cool guys in the Men’s Club, but what really sold me was the pastor.

It was obvious he was a great down-to-earth guy. The evidence for that thought was that he was drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette when I walked in, and my first reaction was ‘this is my kind of church,’ especially since I was a beer drinker and a smoker at the time.

Maybe not the perfect reason to join a church, but the end result sometimes is what counts, and that visit led to another and in short order I knew I was official when I received a stack of dated donation envelopes for the basket passed during Mass. I was off to my second career as a practicing Catholic, generally impressed at what I had retained for knowledge, but also wanting to be good at being good as well.

As newcomers in a strange town in what, to us, was a strange part of the country, the sense of welcoming and sense of belonging offered by the church was just what we needed, and eventually led to my wife and I attending classes for her to become a Catholic as well.

But along the way, I became frustrated at a couple of small things that actually changed my life, and potentially the lives of dozens of others. No, it wasn’t as serious as the church scandals that would eventually come to light. It was simpler: poor planning.

We enrolled our son in the pre-school part of the religious education program. Those kids met during the 9:00 AM Mass. As parents with young children know, the formula is:

However, there are basically two things that can go wrong with this universal formula, and we encountered both of them, almost immediately.

Frustration Point #1: We’d stand in a line outside the classroom after Mass with 20 other sets of parents and the class would run long. What sense did this make? It wasn’t a surprise that Mass was going to take 50 minutes. How could you not be ready?

Frustration Point #2: The running long issue was supplemented by another kind of frustration: it seemed like every other week we were taking some kind of pre-school artwork home that wasn’t dry yet, so we had to carry it horizontally to the car and carefully place on the rear window ledge (when cars had rear window ledges) for the ride home. Open a window by mistake and you had blue and yellow paint on the seats as the artwork blew off. Did the lesson plan actually state ‘wait until just before pick-up to use paint?’

Those who know me well can guess what I did next: I volunteered to teach that pre-school class the following year, along with my wife, so that at least one class would end on time and have dry artwork for the ride home. My style was to do something about it, rather than simply complain.

On the first day of our first class, when the new ‘teachers’ presented during the ‘meet the parents’ session, we told everyone to come to our room first, if you have multiple kids in different grades because we will always be ready, and we do all of our artwork at the start of the class, not the end. Some readers may find it hard to visualize me in a class of pre-school kids, and looking back, I find it hard to visualize me in that space as well. I think my wife did most of the work.

Over the course of our one year in pre-school, we became pretty popular with parents. Let me rephrase: we were rock stars: finishing on time with dry finger paintings? Who wouldn’t love us? Even if we did have funny Boston accents.

The Director of Religious Education who was desperate for a third grade CCD (Confraternity of Christian Doctrine) teacher also noticed us, so we said, why not and signed up for that class the following year. One year of pre-school is probably enough for most preschoolers and it was definitely enough for us.

We thus graduated to Wednesday afternoon teachers the following year. We’d teach our class while our son was in the first-grade class in another room.

Little did I know at the time, but for 17 years, I’d be a Third Grade CCD teacher. For nine years, every Wednesday I’d head to that same church in Memphis and have a group of 20-25 third graders spellbound.

Right after we relocated to Cincinnati to the Church of the Good Shepherd, they put out an appeal for a third-grade teacher and I answered that call and held class for another eight years. I was pretty familiar with the subject matter and curriculum.  But I also had some secret methods that made being a teacher a little easier.

I was entertaining (in my own mind) and effective and made solid use of behavior bribery to control the class. I had only one rule and I stated it at the start of every year and every class, and when the inevitable rambunctiousness started up (try spelling that word without spell check), I would ask for silence and then ask the kids to state what that one rule was. My rule? “I am the only comedian.” I could be funny, at least to an 8-year-old, and I didn’t want anyone to be funnier, or funner than me.

My biggest secret weapon was pencils. Every third grader needs pencils, and I had a system where a kid who gave the right answer would get a colorful pencil or sometimes I’d state: ‘if everyone is quiet for the next minute everyone will get a pencil.’ It worked great. I’d stop at a store buy a bunch of pencils and use them as bribes, I mean rewards, during the class. I even had 'pencil exchange nights', where, for example, if you didn’t want the My Little Pony pencil you got last week, you could exchange it for a Baseball pencil. The kids were also allowed to negotiate with each other during these pencil exchanges.

The rule in both parishes was that a parent of each child needed to sign up to help for one class and be a co-teacher with me. (Safety note: I always kept the classroom door open and was background-checked at my own request before background checks were cool or mandatory). The parents would get to see what we were doing and got into the curriculum a little bit. My methods were not a secret.

What I knew, as a parent, was that when the kids were picked up and placed in the back seat of the car, Mom or Dad would ask ‘what did you learn today?’ Of course, the usual answer was ‘nothing.’ I set about to change that. During the last five minutes of the class, we’d rehearse the answer to that question, sometimes with a rap (yes that kind of rap), sometimes with a memorized sentence. We’d usually do this sitting on the floor with a clapping tempo to the words.

I turned out to be a very popular teacher. The parents liked my humor when they were in the classroom. They liked my planning when the kids were lined up and ready to go at the end of the class. And they liked the fact that the kids actually said they learned something. In fact, parents liked it so much that they started requesting me for their younger children as they entered third grade. Maybe the highest praise I’ve ever received.

I liked teaching the class because after the first year, I didn’t have to do a lesson plan. I simply used the one from the prior year, so my investment was only the drive to the church, the class, and the drive home.

But what I liked most of all was the number of bad days I had at work that dissolved the minute I saw the enthusiastic third graders.

Teaching that class and going from high pressure, demanding, problem-filled days and settling into a ‘job’ where I was volunteering and doing good in the world, really helped in a lot of ways.

Disappointment during the day, was offset by the vibe of doing good and making a difference. Balance. Perspective. Peace. Lots of benefits to me and a real-life example of ‘the more you put into it, the more you get out of it.’

I have always been busy (and hopefully productive), and I wouldn’t have volunteered for 17 years if I wasn’t getting something out of it. I think the experience helped me understand myself, my faith, and my priorities. Although you may think of me as grown-up, I like to think I am still growing, and the time as a CCD teacher was a big part of that growth.

As our relocation to Massachusetts was upon us, I started what I knew would be my last class at the Good Shepherd with mixed emotions. Over the years, more than 500 kids had heard enthusiastic classes on my favorite Commandment (Honor thy Father and thy Mother: they take care of you now and you will take care of them later), but I knew my teaching career was over.

At the very end of the very last class, as we were all sitting on the floor practicing what to say when we got in the car, and to kill some time, I asked if there were any questions.

A little girl in the back raised her hand and asked in a soft voice: ‘Mr. Ed, what’s a comedian?’ All those years, all those kids, all those pencils and I never defined that word for the third graders. Oh, well, they know now.

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