[We're discussing William Blake's "The Lamb."]
ME: Blake's poem offers a series of questions and answers. In fact, there's a technical term for what the child is doing...
[The students remain silent]
...some of you probably did this in Sunday School...
[The students look puzzled]
...c'mon, folks, this is a Jew up here asking you this question! There's got to be a Christian in the room somewhere.
[The students crack up]
[Yours truly, writing on the board] C-A-T-E-C-H-I-S-M.
["Ohhs" of recognition from the students]
You'd have had a great time with the student who told me that she thought Jews were Christians, wouldn't you?
At least yours recognized the term you invoked!
Posted by: Ancarett | September 28, 2005 at 11:15 PM
I confess I would have been as perplexed as your students – I got a Christian upbringing but the catechism my church used was just a collection of commandments and prayers. Now that I actually looked it up on the internet, I found remnants of the q&a form but not so many that I would have associated it with catechism. I guess the form was modernised at some point, and I’ve just never come across a more archaic version.
Yet, my students seem to be even more ignorant about religion than I am (and unlike me, some of them are practising Christians). Recently one student claimed in a literary history exam that Ecclesiastes was about Jesus, lambs and grace. Um, I hope she hadn’t actually read the book and was just guessing.
Posted by: katariina | September 29, 2005 at 01:59 AM
I'm ashamed to say that even though I was raised as a "High" Anglican and our catechism was in the Q & A format, it took me a while to answer this very same question when we were covering the poem in my high school lit. class.
A lot of my other friends did not recognise the term though, being Christians but of the more modern bent (Pentecostals, "Non-denominationals" and the like).
Posted by: Arethusa | September 30, 2005 at 06:40 PM
of my class of 57, graduating in 1992, those that i recall participating in catechism number around 5-10. keep in mind that this was a fairly rural, and is nor a religious place....
Posted by: jeremy hunsinger | September 30, 2005 at 08:47 PM
Catechism is not something we Protestants do, it's Catholics who do it
Posted by: russael | October 01, 2005 at 10:36 PM
Most of our students are Catholic, as far as I've been able to tell.
Posted by: Miriam | October 01, 2005 at 11:06 PM