We Are Thankful!
JPIIHS Community,
Thank you so much for your end of year support. We are so thankful for your faithful support to help our students, teachers and faculty continue to be funded year after year. This great project forms the youth of Northern Colorado in Jesus Christ through a Catholic education. Your financial support has directly assisted each student by giving them a place to discuss, grow and learn who they are in light of how God sees them. Without this critical formation we would not have the next generation of future Catholic leaders who really know their faith and live it out well. May you be blessed for your generosity!
Gina Brandt, Director of Development
Welcome Our New Art Teacher, Mr. Tschampl!
Please join us in welcoming our newest addition to staff, Mr. Michael Tschampl! He will be teaching our art electives.
Art and design is in Mr. Tschampl’s blood. He graduated from Briar Cliff University with a Bachelors of Art in Art and Theology. After two internships at the Chinati Foundation and the Des Moines Art Center, he received his Masters of Industrial Design from Iowa State University. He now works as a user experience designer. Mr. Tschampl also loves board games and human powered sports like paddle boarding, climbing, archery, and Kung Fu.
2023 Gala Committee Call
Interested in giving to St. John Paul II High School in a different way? Consider joining our volunteer committee for our 2023 Gala event!
We hope to build on the success of our first Gala this past year, and we need your help to do so. If you would like to join our committee and help us make our event successful, please come to our committee meeting on Monday, January 23 at 6:30pm in Room 110 at Our Lady of the Valley.
Thank you for your generosity!
From the Headmaster’s Desk: With The World As It Is, What’s The Point?
“I am happy to meet you precisely because you are young. For to be young means being able to appreciate sincerity. It means searching for the path to a life that is worthwhile. To be young is to be attracted to truth, justice, freedom, peace, beauty and
goodness. To be young means being eager to live, but to live joyfully, meaningfully: to live a life worth living.”
– Pope Saint John Paul II, “Address to the Young People”, May 6th , 1984
Safely, I can admit that I am not a foremost authority of pop-culture or internet trends, but today I should like to speak to something that students have been parroting at me for the last six years now (and the uniformity of language makes me think it must come from the world-wide web). Students ask me what the point of education is the way that we do it today. They say for what you need to know, there’s YouTube; for careers, there’s technical training or college. Then, they typically go on to lament that they are ‘forced to be in schools’ and that we don’t even ‘teach how to change oil or file taxes’.
I know that they don’t see the joke in that they just claimed all knowledge can be found on YouTube. I find it most amusing because the argument that they propose is that we should teach them things to fit modernity, when in fact we stopped teaching them about oil changes and filing taxes because of modernity.
You see, apart from the ironical elements, I think there’s something of a revelation about what people think education is for. It seems that people think of all education as though it were a technical education—one whose purpose is purely to pass on skills. Indeed, look at any modern curriculum and you can see the skills and benchmarks
labeled out before you. And this is not a devaluing of those skills in the least! We need to know facts and figures. Punctuation and prediction are pertinent. Understanding elements and equations are elementary. But I don’t think that’s what an education is for, and before you decry me as barking, allow me a defense. My examples are numerous.
It is the case that a preschooler or kindergartener that spends more time specializing in schooling than socializing typically will perform under grade level for the remainder of their schooling. There are studies that prove this. Further, there are studies which show that more hours in school do not improve student scores, but a valuable use of the time that they have there does. It turns out that the learning is more effective the more they’re enjoying themselves. The same is surely evident in the workplace—productivity increases in a healthy environment rather than one that is unhealthy. And so we should ask what the best environment for education is. Let us take some claims—disagree with any that you see fit, but for argument’s sake, permit me:
The best education is one that is academic and serious, because we are fatigued by boredom. The best education is one that allows students to argue and push against ideas, because when we only allow for internal disagreement, it disincentivizes participation and engagement. The best education is one that offers a robust variety
of thoughts, for monotony lulls us into stupor and stupidity.
In short, the best education is one that humanizes us. The best education is the one that allows and encourages us to live our lives.
This is Catholic education at its core. Many schools will claim to ‘educate the child fully’, bodily, mentally, spiritually, and emotionally, but can they articulate what that means, what it is to actually do what they are saying? Look to the people we are called to serve in Catholic education! Young men and women who are meant to be so entirely loved by us that they may see in a vague reflection the total love that Christ has for them!
So what is the point of education today? A task infinitely necessary as it is in all ages: To let our students know their incredible, wonderful worth. For my part, this is the value I see in Catholic education.
Blaise A. Hockel, Headmaster