The Value of a Cascia Hall Education by Arthur Howe

As a teacher and a parent of two past graduates, I have asked myself, what makes Cascia worth the investment.  There are many non-academic positives over many other schools, such as the religious component, community, more opportunities to participate in activities and sports, and a student body that is socially confident and accepting of each other.  One or more of these factors were involved with my decision to send my children to Cascia.  However, an extremely important fact about Cascia students is that almost all of them go to college and graduate from college, usually with high grades.  What is it about the academics at Cascia that is so powerful and certainly worth the investment?

You may have heard many Cascia graduates say that college is easier than Cascia.  When I first heard this comment, it disturbed me, because it sounded like teachers at Cascia have a goal of making their courses difficult.  I knew that was not a goal of mine or any other teacher at Cascia, so I tried to figure out why so many graduates felt like college is easier.  It seems to me that most people who graduate from college will at some point change the way they learn from the concrete memorizing of material to the abstract organization or structuring of material they are learning.  As someone continues to learn, they get overwhelmed by the amount of material they are trying to memorize, so they either drop out or start learning concepts and organize them.  That is, they ask, how is this new idea similar to earlier concepts and how is it different?  For me, and many other people, this happens around the sophomore year of college.  As this critical time approaches, school will seem difficult.  In math, we approach the material abstractly beginning in the freshmen year, so most students at Cascia will make this conversion to structuring material they are learning during their high school career, usually their freshman or sophomore year.  This same thing happens in other departments also.  These ideas were somewhat validated whey my daughter went to college.  She would study just a few minutes the night before a test and would usually make a grade of one hundred percent.  Her peers would stay up very late to study for a test and make C’s or worse.  They would ask my daughter to tell them how she prepares for tests.  She said she could not teach them how to study, but that it something she learned at Cascia.  She said I do not memorize or get bogged down in details.  She told them as she does her daily work she puts structure to the material and then she can answer any question asked.  Many of her peers continued to struggle until their sophomore year when they became so overwhelmed, that they figured out how to organize the material they were learning.  Our graduates do not usually face that point in college, they already made the adjustment in high school.

Also, our curriculum is very efficient.  For example, in math we carefully examine methods so that we teach the strongest procedures and demand that students use these strong procedures.  All teachers know what their students have learned in previous courses.  Therefore, we do not do a lot of “review” or re-teaching of material, but instead give the students the tools to “transfer” their previously learned concepts to the present.  Other departments do similar things, for example, in English the reading sequence is carefully thought out to help the students grow.  When my daughter was a freshman at Cascia, she would still see some of her old friends at other schools.  She recognized that the books she was asked to read at Cascia had been carefully selected, where she did not get that feeling about the books her friends were being asked to read.