Forming our Future
By Bridget Martin
The spring semester generates excitement in our middle school students. The energy in a middle school is electrifying this time of year. End of the year activities keep everyone busy. The group of middle school students producing the greatest amount of energy and excitement is the class embarking on the transition into high school.
Students practice transitions all of the time in school. Some transitions are small like moving from one learning center to another in a classroom. Other transitions are bigger like moving from one grade to the next.
One of the largest transitions for children may be transitioning from middle school into high school. This transition ignites an enthusiasm and strikes a fear in young teens and parents alike. The thought of a new school, new teachers, new friends, and new expectations elicits a range of emotions all at one time.
Interestingly enough, both parents and students feel the same pressure before the transition to high school. I recently asked eighth grade students in my school what concerns them most about transitioning to high school. Then I asked their parents the same question. Students worry whether or not they will make friends. Parents worry about the type of friends they will make in high school. Students worry about the clubs they will join while parents worry about the cost of the clubs. Both were equally concerned about the academic rigor of high school.
Families can be proactive in planning steps to ease the transition to high school. Parents and students need to take steps to prepare for a shift in the types of interactions they have with schools. Researching the programs of a school is important to find the best activities for your child. Parents and students should plan a visit to the high school campus. Some schools require interviews and placement tests while others do not have entrance requirements.
Participation in school orientation sessions provides opportunities to explore the campus and learn expectations. Young teens may appear uninterested in these activities, but only because they are trying to camouflage their nervousness.
Parents and students feel more confident on the first day of class if they know the layout of the campus, expectations of the day, and a familiar face or two. Proper preparation is vital to creating a smooth transition from middle school to high school.
Involvement in high school activities connects students to the school community. One reason high school is exciting is there are so many new opportunities. Activities and clubs provide important academic and social enrichment. Students need a peer group for support during their challenging high school years.
A well-rounded resume that includes participation in various activities and clubs strengthens a student’s applications for college admission and scholarships. Parental encouragement and support promote student participation.
High school brings a new level of academic and social independence for students. This is a difficult adjustment for both parents and students. Parental involvement is still important in high school but the type of involvement is different from elementary and middle school involvement.
Parents more than likely will not continue to assist in classrooms, attend field trips or drive the carpool. Rather, they do need to become a coach for their children on how to appropriately handle situations with teachers independently. Parental support for independence creates a pathway for a student’s success.
Setting expectations for academic progress and social behavior prior to transitioning to high school may alleviate problems in the future. Encouraging students to take responsibility for their own academic growth is important. Students need the self-confidence to take the initiative for seeking help with complicated assignments and in gathering missing assignments. Learning to manage time and accept responsibility is a skill they will use in college and in the work force. While parents should monitor academic progress, it is now time for students to take charge of their own academic affairs.
The transition into high school generates social independence. High school brings together a large cross section of society. Students have more exposure to lifestyle choices. When parents clearly and continually set social expectations by engaging their children in conversations about social responsibility and values, students are more often able to make positive choices.
They must truly understand the value of social justice and responsibility to understand the consequences of their choices.
The promotion from middle school to high school is a milestone for students and parents. This is one of the first transitional moments students clearly understand and remember. The combination of excitement and fear are natural feelings during times of new beginnings. Properly preparing students to handle this transition will be a skill used many times in their lives.
(Bridget Martin is the principal of Southaven Sacred Heart School)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Something there is that needs a crucifixion. Everything that’s good eventually gets scapegoated and crucified. How? By that curious, perverse dictate somehow innate within human life that assures that there’s always someone or something that cannot leave well enough alone, but, for reasons of its own, must hunt down and lash out at what’s good. What’s good, what’s of God, will always at some point be misunderstood, envied, hated, pursued, falsely accused, and eventually nailed to some cross.
Every body of Christ inevitably suffers the same fate as Jesus: death through misunderstanding, ignorance and jealousy.
But there’s a flipside as well: Resurrection always eventually trumps crucifixion. What’s good eventually triumphs. Thus, while nothing that’s of God will avoid crucifixion, no body of Christ stays in the tomb for long. God always rolls back the stone and, soon enough, new life bursts forth and we see why that original life had to be crucified. (“Wasn’t it necessary that the Christ should so have to suffer and die?”) Resurrection invariably follows crucifixion. Every crucified body will rise again. Our hope takes its root in that.
But how does this happen? Where do we see the resurrection? How do we experience resurrection after a crucifixion?
Scripture is subtle, though clear, on this. Where can we expect to experience resurrection? The gospels tell us that, on the morning of the resurrection, the women-followers of Jesus set out for the tomb of Jesus, carrying spices, expecting to anoint and embalm a dead body. Well-intentioned but misguided, what they find is not a body, but an empty tomb and an angel challenging them with these words: “Why are you looking for the living among the dead? Go instead into Galilee and you will find him there!”
Go instead into Galilee. Why Galilee? What’s Galilee? And how do we get there?
In the gospels, Galilee is not simply a geographical location, a place on a map. It is first of all a place in the heart. As well, Galilee refers to the dream and to the road of discipleship that the disciples once walked with Jesus and to that place and time when their hearts most burned with hope and enthusiasm. And now, after the crucifixion, just when they feel that the dream is dead, that their faith is only fantasy, they are told to go back to the place where it all began: “Go back to Galilee. He will meet you there!”
And they do go back to Galilee, both to the geographical location and to that special place in their hearts where once burned the dream of discipleship. And just as promised, Jesus appears to them. He doesn’t appear exactly as he was before, or as frequently as they would like him to, but he does appear as more than a ghost and a memory.
The Christ that appears to them after the resurrection is in a different modality, but he’s physical enough to eat fish in their presence, real enough to be touched as a human being, and powerful enough to change their lives forever. Ultimately that’s what the resurrection asks us to do: To go back to Galilee, to return to the dream, hope, and discipleship that had once inflamed us but has now been lost through disillusionment.
This parallels what happens on the road to Emmaus in Luke’s gospel, where we are told that on the day of the resurrection, two disciples were walking away from Jerusalem towards Emmaus, with their faces downcast. An entire spirituality could be unpackaged from that simple line: For Luke, Jerusalem means the dream, the hope, and the religious centre from which all is to begin and where ultimately, all is to culminate.
And the disciples are “walking away” from this place, away from their dream, towards Emmaus (Emmaus was a Roman Spa), a place of human comfort, a Las Vegas, or Monte Carlo. Since their dream has been crucified, the disciples are understandably discouraged and are walking away from it, towards some human solace, despairing in their hope: “But we had hoped!”
They never get to Emmaus. Jesus appears to them on the road, reshapes their hope in the light of their disillusionment, and turns them back towards Jerusalem.
That is one of the essential messages of Easter: Whenever we are discouraged in our faith, whenever our hopes seem to be crucified, we need to go back to Galilee and Jerusalem, that is, back to the dream and the road of discipleship that we had embarked upon before things went wrong. The temptation of course, whenever the kingdom doesn’t seem to work, is to abandon discipleship for human consolation, to head off instead for Emmaus, for the consolation of Las Vegas or Monte Carlo.
But, as we know, we never quite get to Las Vegas or Monte Carlo. In one guise or another, Christ always meets us on the road to those places, burns holes in our hearts, explains our latest crucifixion to us, and sends us back – and to our abandoned discipleship. Once there, it all makes sense again.
(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX.)