Sure, it’s the New Year’s Resolution time of the year, and I can’t resist a good self-improvement goal. But I’m posting this today because most of us are taking a little halfway-point break from our classrooms over the Christmas holidays, and it’s a great opportunity to regroup and come back fresh next week, or whenever your catechetical duties resume.

Here’s my challenge to you, then: Set one PERSONAL and one PROFESSIONAL goal for yourself as a catechist.

Kick it up a notch by using Jennifer’s Saint’s Name Generator to choose a saint to be your personal mentor for the next year of your vocation as catechist.

St. Margaret Mary Alacoque Lookin’ out for me in 2011

My goals:

PERSONAL: Resume structured prayer time at the beginning and end of the day. It’s the most important thing I can do each day, and yet I let it slip by the wayside – or, worse, see it as just another “good habit” I’m working on, along with exercising more, going through the mail each day, meal planning, etc. Making prayer my personal self-improvement project leads me to look around and evaluate the results – well, what percent more holy am I after these three works of daily Bible readings? How’s that working out?

And so, even as I’m talking about this in terms of a habit – spending time at the beginning and end of the day with my Magnificat magazine and assorted other spiritual reading – I’m not doing so with a specific goal (yell at children 1/3 less often) so much as recommitting to a relationship with Christ.

PROFESSIONAL: Focus on involving my aide in our class sessions in a more meaningful way than just taking attendance and walking around to monitor behavior. I’m going to follow up on this in a later post.

So, reader, how about you? What goals will you set for yourself as a catechist in the year to come?

Catechist Chat will be an ongoing series of posts for teachers in religious education programs. It is based on my personal experience and not on any statistical evidence of the effectiveness of my advice. Suscribe to my feed to follow along, and Caveat lector, which is Latin for “your mileage may vary.”

Click here to read other entries in the series, and be sure to follow Catechist Chat on Facebook! You can also sign up for my email list, and I’ll send you resources, including non-PDF versions of the activities I post (which means you can edit them in Microsoft Word to customize them for your own students).