Last year about this time, I was walking through a long, winding hallway at Holy Apostles School with crowds of [...]

As a boy, Yogi Berra was asked how he liked school. Berra supposedly responded: “Closed.”

Obviously the baseball immortal didn’t attend St. Coletta Day School in Milwaukee. According to Sue Jiardini of St. Sebastian Parish, Milwaukee, her son Oscar and his schoolmates “all love” St. Coletta.

“All the children totally look forward to going to school,” Jiardini said in a telephone interview. “The kids are so nurtured there. They are so taken care of and treated with so much dignity.”

In Mrs. Weas’ morning science class at St. Joan of Arc School, Nashotah, nearly 24 students sit three to a table as the day’s lesson begins. Science posters, upcoming experiments and caricatures of well-known scientists such as Albert Einstein and Madame Curie surround the classroom as students patiently wait for their teacher to begin. It would appear as though this is just like any other classroom, if not for one difference: two grades in one room.

“Fifth grade girl needs to call on a sixth grade boy, sixth grade boy needs to call on a fifth grade girl!” Weas calls out as students open their textbooks to the correct page and prepare to read aloud.

“Wait, then who’s going to call on the sixth grade girls then?” she asked the class.

The students erupt in laughter, as it is just another learning experience their teacher has to go through. 

Did you get a time machine for Christmas? I didn’t either, but I did get the next best thing.

Shortly after our older son was born in 1986, I bought a camcorder. By today’s sleek standards, it’s big and bulky, difficult to balance, and records on the ancient, outmoded format known as VHS tape. My plan at the time was to use this then state-of-the-art technology to document our children’s lives as they grew up.

I was inspired by my father, who used 1950s state-of-the-art technology, namely an 8mm movie camera, to document his family’s escapades. Unfortunately, due to the unstable make-up of color movie film, many of those images – along with my memory of the original events – have faded. I did not want that to happen to the VHS tapes, which are also vulnerable to the ravages of time, so a while ago I purchased a DVD/VCR recorder-combo-unit with the intent of transferring dozens of tapes containing precious memories to the latest state-of-the-art technology, DVDs.

Dominican High School gave me just the nudge I needed this past fall. Actually, it was a little more like [...]

My 13-year-old suddenly refuses to pray at meal time, is balking at going to Mass and spends a lot of time in his room with the door shut. I used to feel so close to him and now he seems to be deliberately shutting out the family, especially me, his mother.

THIS IS SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN. What? How could the sullen distancing of adolescence possibly be part of God’s plan for your family? Think back to a few Sundays ago on the Feast of the Holy Family when we heard the story of the finding of Jesus in the temple. Between the infancy narratives of Christmas and the beginning of Jesus’ adult ministry (The Baptism of the Lord) this is the one glimpse we get of the “hidden years” of Jesus’ growing up. I used to wonder, if we were to get only one scene out of Jesus’ youth, why couldn’t it have been of an idyllic little Jesus playing with the wood chips in Joseph’s carpentry shop, or of an energetic boy Jesus running with the other boys of Nazareth?

Benny the Bear is no armchair traveler. He’s been spotted in Handrup, Germany, four U.S. states and once he leaves St. Martin of Tours School, Franklin, he will head to Ballaghadereen, Ireland. He has hobnobbed with children from a variety of cultures and backgrounds. His photo album and journal of adventures is impressive.

Barely a foot tall, Benny is a dapper, stuffed member of the Ursidae species and works as a liaison among the six schools run by the Priests of the Sacred Heart. Initiated by staff at St. Joseph School in Chamberlain, S.D., to bring a cultural awareness to students, Benny has captured the hearts of grade school students and brought them together unlike any textbook could.

At Prince of Peace School/Escuela Principe de Paz on Milwaukee’s South Side, the halls are alive with the sound of music, thanks to the acquisition of 25 new Yamaha portable keyboards, purchased with a $5,000 grant last fall.

Previously, Prince of Peace owned only 10 working keyboards and transported them back and forth throughout the week between the school’s two buildings, seven blocks apart. The new keyboards are kept at the school’s 22nd Street building, designated for kindergarteners and middle-schoolers. Prince of Peace’s 25th Street building houses grades 1-5.