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On Friday the 6th of November, myself, Andrew Spiteri, alongside another three Year 10 students being Joel Mathias, Elizabeth Burns and Jamielhea Bernardo were given the opportunity to be involved in Catechist training. Catechists are obligated to teach the Catholic faith to those Catholic students in the public school system. We had a visitor, Connie Cassar who trains the Catechists in Blacktown, come over to St Andrews College to teach us many things such as legal information, how to prepare and present a lesson in order to fulfil such roles as a Catechist.
We were firstly given the legal obligations which each of us are to follow as Catechists in the education system. It was overwhelming as every single detail was to be understood well as this was a very serious guide which we all needed to abide by. Once all of us understood, we were then taught how to react during certain situations in a classroom. After a while we then spoke about the structure of a normal lesson that we were to teach and how we are to prepare the lesson for our class. This was all very interesting and was very easy to understand.
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After the recess break we were given a great opportunity to prepare any lesson we would like in pairs. To our surprise, we were provided with software which contained games and videos which relate to our lesson, to bring fun into the lesson. We were also able to spend time with the other catechist-in-training, enabling us to get to know each other. The information for how to prepare the lesson in the manual was written in a simple way, thus was not difficult to understand. Once we completed this, we were able to present our ideas to our trainer, who then amended a few ideas to make the lessons more time efficient. Finally at the end of the day, we then were able to do some art and craft which was interesting as this was to prove the idea that children want to have fun in this class in order to remember what they learnt.
Each one of us was inspired by God’s Word and other aspects, either our grandparents, other catechists or others things in order to make us want to be involved in such ministry. In my personal experience as to why I wanted to be a Catechist, is one which I find is a gift from God. I was given the opportunity early in January to meet dozens of missionaries from all over the world, many of them being Catechists and Priests. I had the opportunity to speak to everyone about the Word of God. I noticed one common thing from the talks which was that they all spoke with such great joy. This joy touched me and thus made me want to become a Catechist.
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Faith and joy is what all we would love to give to the students in the public school system. we also want our students to understand one thing above all, that God loves each and every one of us no matter what.
We would like to thank St Andrews College for providing their students with such opportunities. We would also like to thank Mrs Melki who takes care of the program in the school, but most importantly we wish to thank Connie Cassar for her very interesting and helpful tips on how to be a good Catechist.
Andrew Spiteri