A Class Catechism for High School British Literature

(Choosing passages for a class catechism is like choosing from a box of yummy donuts!)

Earlier this spring, I read Josh Gibbs’ book called Something They Will Not Forget: A Handbook for Classical Teachers. Gibbs describes a common and disheartening experience: realizing just how little you remember from a course you took recently or, for teachers, recognizing just how little your students remember from what you just taught them. Wouldn’t it be amazing to be able to guarantee to your students that they would remember at least a few important things from your class?!

Enter Gibbs’ provocative new idea, the class catechism. Gibbs suggests starting every class with a group recitation of important passages from each book on the syllabus, arguing that material recited together as a group is most likely to be remembered. I think this is probably true based on my own experience. I still remember the Shel Silverstein poems we recited together in second grade, and I don’t remember any of the lines I learned on my own for high school plays. Gibbs always starts his class catechism with a reminder to the students of who they are, a passage from Scripture, and a plea for the teaching of virtue. The rest of the catechism is made up of selections from each book on the syllabus and a timeline of important dates. The class catechism has the added benefit of filling the first few minutes of class with something beneficial and worthwhile (minutes that are often wasted in chit chat or settling the class down.) 

His catechisms are typically 1500 words long and take seven minutes to recite quickly. The passages are chosen to convey the themes of the works and to be morally formative. The idea is to give your students something to ponder if they were marooned on a desert island and something to fall back on in moments of crisis. 

Here is my catechism for the British literature class I will teach in the fall, with generous borrowings from Gibbs. 

1. Class, what is your only comfort in life and death? 

That I am not my own, but belong with body and soul, both in life and in death, to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ. He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood, and has set me free from all the power of the devil. He also preserves me in such a way that without the will of my heavenly Father not a hair can fall from my head; indeed, all things must work together for my salvation. Therefore, by his Holy Spirit he also assures me of eternal life and makes me heartily willing and ready from now on to live for him. 

(From The Heidelberg Catechism)

2. Who made you a child of God?

For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him. 

For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. 

(Romans 8:14-21)

3. What is the bondage to corruption? 

The vices are pride, avarice, lust, envy, gluttony, anger, sloth.

4. How do the virtues teach us to be human?

The virtues are faith, hope, love, wisdom, justice, courage, temperance. 

5. How does the brevity of life teach us to live?

Choose, dear Beowulf, the better part, 

eternal reward. Do not give way to pride. 

For a brief while your strength is in bloom

but it fades quickly; and soon there will follow

illness or the sword to lay you low, 

or a sudden fire or surge of water

or jabbing blade or javelin from the air

or repellent age. Your piercing eye

will dim and darken; and death will arrive, 

dear warrior, to sweep you away.

(From Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney)

6. How does the Green Knight taunt Arthur’s court? 

“So here is the House of Arthur,” he scoffed, 

“whose virtues reverberate across vast realms. 

Where’s the fortitude and fearlessness you’re so famous for?

And the breathtaking bravery and the big-mouthed bragging?

The towering reputation of the Round Table

skittled and scuppered by a stranger—what a scandal!”

(From Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, translated by Simon Armitage)

7. What does spring do?

When April arrives, and with his sweetened showers

Drenches dried-up roots, gives them power

To stir dead plants and sprout the living flower

That spring has always spread across these fields,

And the God of Winds then blows his gentle seeds

In every wood and heath of England, feeding

Tender crops, as the sun, still young in the sky,

Compels small birds to sing their melodies, 

Creatures who sleep at night with open eyes

(Exactly as Nature frames their lives’ short ages).

Then people think of holy pilgrimages, 

Pilgrims dream of setting foot on far-off 

Lands, or worship at distant shrines, their thoughts

Reaching for grace, as holy teachers taught them.

(From The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, translated by Burton Raffel)

8. What kind of son is Hal?

I know you all, and will awhile uphold

The unyoked humor of your idleness.

Yet herein will I imitate the sun, 

Who doth permit the base contagious clouds

To smother up his beauty from the world, 

That, when he please again to be himself, 

Being wanted he may be more wonder’d at

By breaking through the foul and ugly mists

Of vapors that did seem to strangle him.

If all the year were playing holidays, 

To sport would be as tedious as to work; 

But when they seldom come, they wish’d for come, 

And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents. 

So when this loose behavior I throw off, 

And pay the debt I never promised, 

By how much better than my word I am, 

By so much shall I falsify men’s hopes; 

And like bright metal on a sullen ground, 

My reformation, glitt’ring o’er my fault, 

Shall show more goodly, and attract more eye

Than that which hath no foil to set it off. 

I’ll so offend, to make offence a skill, 

Redeeming time when men think least I will. 

(From Henry IV Part 1 by William Shakespeare)

9. How does Christian escape Despair?

Now a little before it was day, good Christian, as one half amazed, brake out in this passionate speech, What a fool (quoth he) am I, thus to lie in a stinking Dungeon when I may as well walk at liberty? I have a key in my bosom, called Promise, that will (I am persuaded) open any Lock in Doubting Castle. 

(From Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan)

10. How does Elizabeth recognize her mistake?

“How despicably I have acted!” She cried. —“I, who have prided myself on my discernment!—I, who have valued myself on my abilities! Who have often disdained the generous candor of my sister, and gratified my vanity, in useless or blamable distrust. —How humiliating is this discovery!—Yet, how just a humiliation!—Had I been in love I could not have been more wretchedly blind. But vanity, not love, has been my folly. —Pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect of the other, on the very beginning of our acquaintance, I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either were concerned. Till this moment, I never knew myself.” 

(From Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen)

11. Summarize Frankenstein. 

Hear my tale; it is long and strange. 

(From Frankenstein by Mary Shelley)

12. What is temptation and what is virtue?

I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself. I will keep the law given by God; sanctioned by man. I will hold to the principles received by me when I was sane, and not mad—as I am now. Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation; they are for such moments as this when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigor; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? They have a worth—so I have always believed; and if I cannot believe it now, it is because I am insane—quite insane: with my veins running fire, and my heart beating faster than I can count its throbs. Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations, are all I have at this hour to stand by: there I plant my foot.

(From Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte)

13. What is our age?

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only. 

(From A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens) 

14. How does creation glorify God?

The world is charged with the grandeur of God. 

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; 

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; 

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil, 

And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell; the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. 

And for all this, nature is never spent; 

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; 

And though the last lights off the black West went, 

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings. 

(“God’s Grandeur” by Gerard Manley Hopkins)

15. How does knowing God remake us? 

Remember always, that He really likes the little vermin, and sets an absurd value on the distinctness of every one of them. When he talks of their losing their selves, He only means abandoning the clamour of self-will; once they have done that, He really gives them back all their personality, and boasts (I am afraid, sincerely) that when they are wholly His they will be more themselves than ever. (65)

(From The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis)