What's Happening in Cougar Country

One of the Lake Catholic core values is “a willingness to serve.” The sign that you see when you leave the school parking lot reads “Exit to Serve.” All students must complete 50 hours of service to graduate and have 80 hours to qualify to wear the Service Cord at commencement.

Service is woven throughout the fabric of the Lake Catholic school year – service projects on and off campus, Turkey Day, Meal Ministry, Pallbearer Ministry, and the list goes on and on.

Service-learning, though, is another form of service – one that second-year art teacher Carolina Kane hopes to bring more of to her classes with the hope that it spreads throughout the school.

“I’m trying to bring service-learning into what I do in my classroom,” Kane said. “It’s actually a goal of mine. I want it to be incorporated into my curriculum. It’s what I did when I worked at John Carroll, and I want to bring that type of service here.”

Service-learning is more than just a beach cleanup, raking leaves, or shoveling a driveway – although all of those things are important. Service-learning incorporates the learning aspect of the classroom with the service. 

So, although Kane’s Art Foundations class and the Art Club seemingly just made Valentine’s Day cards, there was more to it than that.

“We did these before Thanksgiving, so it was one of the first actual design projects we did,” Kane said. “But it was more than making the cards. It was how they interacted with the card. How did the paper feel in their hands? What colors made sense to use? What font and font sizes made the most sense for this project?”

Although it was a real classroom lesson and project for Kane and her students, the service part of it will have a much broader reach.

As a school, nearly 100 cards were donated to the Lake County Council on Aging’s Meals on Wheels program to be delivered on Valentine’s Day. In total, from nine schools, more than 1,400 cards were collected for distribution.

“When people receive these cards, most of them are just so excited,” said Kelly Johnson, who helps Meals on Wheels spearhead the Valentine’s Day card initiative. “You can just see on their faces how much it means to them and that it makes their day.”

The cards were made before Thanksgiving because Johnson and her team of volunteers have to inspect each card by hand because there is a list of things that each one can, or can’t, say on it.

“Carolina and her students’ cards were awesome,” Johnson said. “While it usually takes us hours to go through a school's cards, I don’t think we spent more than an hour on the cards from Lake Catholic. They followed the parameters perfectly. Every person that hand-checked the cards from Lake Catholic loved them and came away very impressed.”

While a student at the Cleveland Institute of Art, Kane worked as a photographer and visual storyteller with John Carroll’s Center for Service and Social Action (now the Center for Service-Learning and Social Action), which is where she was then hired when she graduated from CIA. And she said service-learning is something she’s always been drawn to and wants to bring more of here at Lake Catholic.

“We see it all the time here – the spirit of giving and service,” she said. “It’s right there in the mission of Lake Catholic. I just want to continue to help our students appreciate their important role of service, but while also learning.”

According to the Council on Aging’s website, Meals on Wheels delivers food five days per week, with an option for frozen meals for the weekend. According to a study conducted by Brown University and funded by AARP Foundation, home delivered meals improve overall health, reduce anxiety and depression, decrease feelings of loneliness and isolation, and help seniors feel more safe and confident about living in their own home.

Sometimes a lesson in one of your high school classes was just that, a lesson - something you needed to learn and know, something you had to study for a test, something you would use in future lessons.

Sometimes, though, a lesson is much, much more than that.

Miss Tabitha Halcomb’s freshmen English classes each read Night by Elie Wiesel. The 1960 memoir is based on Wiesel’s Holocaust experiences with his father in the Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944–1945, toward the end of the Second World War in Europe. 

According to Halcomb, the text heavily addresses indirect and direct characterizations, symbolism, and themes. So, that might be enough for a freshman English class, especially considering the subject matter itself. 

But there’s more to it for these two sections of English 9.

“I also use this memoir to discuss central connections between literature and history through exploring the Holocaust and aftermath through Elie Wiesel’s perspective/life story,” Halcomb said. “Also, this text is central in teaching and discussing Catholic social justice principles and their connections to Elie Wiesel’s life experiences and story throughout his time in Auschwitz as a Holocaust survivor.”

This year, however, Halcomb has added even more to the lesson plan. She has partnered with Visual Arts Department Chair Kelly Wolf and brought her two classes to Wolf’s art room so they could work on their very own Butterfly Projects. 

“I truly enjoy doing cross-department collaboration throughout the school year,” Halcomb said. “I think it’s important for the students to learn from me and so many other teachers throughout the school. It really helps all of us build and maintain good relationships with others across campus and connect as the Lake Catholic family. Also, I really love the combination of teaching art and literature together. Anytime I can make that happen, I think it brings my students joy and really makes the content come alive in a meaningful, memorable, and real way for them.”

Wolf said this is not the first time she’s been involved with cross-department collaboration. She’s worked with several teachers from the English, social studies, and science departments in the past. 

According to its website, The Butterfly Project is a call to action through education, the arts, and memorial making. They teach social justice through lessons of the Holocaust, educating participants about the dangers of hatred and bigotry to cultivate empathy and social responsibility. By painting ceramic butterflies, which are displayed as symbols of resilience and hope, participants remember the 1.5 million children killed during the Holocaust.

The students have sketched and designed their butterflies, built them with clay, painted them, designed their butterfly boards, and will eventually display them once their projects are completed. 

“I thought the project was worthwhile,” Wolf said. “The students had fun creating their butterflies. It was apparent that many of them had never worked with clay before though. They spent a lot of time working on their background and how they were going to incorporate a quote from the story. Many of the students really tried to make their butterflies look real. Others were just having fun experimenting with color.”

The final Butterfly Projects were put out in Main Hall this week, where they will stay as a silent reminder of the project and its larger meaning.

“The students have asked so many questions about this unit and have shown real passion for it,” Halcomb said. “They have been most surprised about the reality of anti-semitism, how it led to the Holocaust, and the outcome of it for the Holocaust survivors’ lives.

“Elie ends up in Auschwitz at the age of 15, so the students connected strongly with many of the questions that he has about his relationship with God, his family, friends, himself, and life. Many of the students shared that they couldn't believe he could “find joy after so much pain and hatred that Elie experienced in his life. We have had good conversations about how to deal with major problems in the world and the importance of our words and sharing our stories.”

The lesson was to include another piece as well – a trip to the Maltz Museum. The goal of experiencing the Maltz Museum was to participate in the “Stop the Hate” writing workshop, discuss and reflect on Jewish influence on social, historical, religious, and economic growth in Cleveland, and hear another story from a Holocaust survivor. 

Because of the calamity days in late January, though, the trip was canceled. Halcomb said she would want to incorporate the field trip into next year’s lesson.