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REMEDIATION-Algebra I COURSE DATES DIRECTED DELIVERY: June 12 – August 9 FLEXIBLE DELIVERY: On/After June 1, close August 9 WHAT TO EXPECT ​ REGISTER HERE < Back Course Description This course utilizes an NCAA approved curriculum for Algebra I. It employs a competency-based model which means that students work through the material independently, allowing them to demonstrate their knowledge and understanding when ready. Though students work in isolation, that doesn’t mean they are completely alone. Technical support is always available. In addition, Arrupe Virtual will send regular reports to host schools, parents, and students to help them monitor student progress. Each student receives teacher support according to the course delivery model in which they enroll. The DIRECTED DELIVERY option balances flexibility with a higher level of teacher support and a defined schedule of activity. The model incorporates specific course start and end dates, and prescribed activity due dates and submission deadlines. Though the experience is still self-directed, this option provides teachers and students a more structured approach to help ensure steady progress and timely support. Most students will benefit from this option, and it should be the preferred choice for students needing higher levels of support. $410 The FLEXIBLE DELIVERY option provides the greatest level of flexibility and student autonomy though the level of support is diminished. The teacher’s primary role is to assess student work, answer questions posed by students, and send an occasional correspondence to solicit student feedback. There are a small number of general deadlines to encourage student progress. This option is appropriate for self-directed students with particularly significant scheduling challenges, or for students with a solid outside support structure such as a tutor. $285

AI IN CATHOLIC EDUCATION: Session II < Back How do we approach AI Policy in our schools? WATCH VIDEO

DUAL CREDIT WITH CREIGHTON UNIVERSITY ​ AVLI has a dual credit partnership with Creighton University, a premier Jesuit university based in Omaha, Nebraska. Students are eligible to receive college credit for select AVLI courses (identified in the course listing). To qualify, students enroll in the course and pay the traditional course fee. They will then be provided the option of applying for Creighton credit for an additional fee of $110 paid directly to the university. Request more information about Creighton University RELATED CONTENT Dual Credit Courses Taking dual credit courses is a great way to jump start a high school student's college career. Learn More Resource Library Our hub for resources, materials and everything students, parents and schools need to be prepared for courses. View Resources

This past May, we had a couple of kids obtain college degrees. Our two other kids came into town to help celebrate so Cathy and I decided to host an open house for family, friends, and neighbors. It was delightful to see so many of our children’s friends, now young adults making their way. A particularly enjoyable surprise was when Josh and Ryan - former neighbor kids who had moved away when they were still quite young - showed up at the door. Their mother came as well (separately), and we had a wonderful time laughing about old times and catching up on the many happenings in the years since. Later in the afternoon as the party was beginning to wind down, these two young men as well as our four kids disappeared for more than an hour. They had ventured out as they had so many times before to visit the Zucchini Club. The Zucchini Club was a small, shaded enclave located underneath some bushes in the backyard of our neighbors, Leslee and Mike. I’m not exactly sure of its origins, but I believe the club was formed by Leslie and Mike’s two children along with a few other neighbor kids. Leslee served as the informal den mother, and as her kids began aging out, she welcomed other younger kids from the neighborhood in. This second cohort included my kids. However, once Josh, Ryan, and their sister Allie moved away and the neighborhood kids continued to age, the club slowly dissolved. At the time of its demise, my oldest was probably 8 and my youngest 3. Twenty years have passed, yet my kids felt drawn to the site and to a long visit with Leslee and Mike. What made the Zucchini Club so special? Leslee had created a welcoming space that still felt like an adventure. When they were there, our kids were transported from our neighborhood on 59th Street in Omaha Nebraska to a place with vastly different possibilities. We should all be so lucky to have such a place. Mine growing up was beside a tiny bridge halfway up the gravel lane that connected my grandparent’s farmhouse to the county road in Hartington Nebraska. I visited the farmstead as an adult and found the bridge to be much, much closer to the house than my six-year-old self remembers it, and my parents could easily see us kids from the window and tend to rising needs at a moment’s notice. Still, it felt just beyond the boundary of safety though I also recognized safety to be just a step or two away. It feels to me that we have slowly been losing such places of blissful wonderment - in life and in our educational system. In previous times, we placed a premium on the pursuit of knowing. Embedded within the basics of English, Math, and History, were curiosities waiting to pique the varying interests of individuals. Wonderment was inherent in the system as recently acquired knowledge produced new questions for the learner to pursue. No matter how far you ventured, there was always something left beyond the horizon. It was this thirst for knowledge that eventually spawned the data models and algorithms that produced search engines like Google and, more recently, the large language models used in artificial intelligence. This places our traditional models of knowledge immediately at our fingertips, just a few clicks or a voice command away. Thus, gathering information is now so simple and convenient that “knowing” has far less utility. While our educational systems have been struggling to discern what exactly this means for teaching and learning, students have been perfecting transactional efficiencies that enable them to numbingly sleepwalk through aspects of their education. Good bye wonderment. This isn’t meant to suggest that schools are doing a poor job or that today’s kids are lazier than those of previous generations. This is more a byproduct of circumstances and timing. As I’ve written previously , I believe we have moved out of a “knowledge age” and are now in the nascent years of an “understanding age" and it’s simply going to take some time to sort out the norms and values associated with this shift. One thing, however, seems clear (at least to me) - people are far less certain of things than they used to be, and this makes them really uncomfortable. In previous times, a person could feel relatively confident in what they learned from parents, teachers, mentors, therapists, and trusted peers, and they would conduct their lives accordingly. Occasionally, they would butt up against something in life that would challenge their system of thinking, and most of the time people would assimilate this new found knowledge into their mental models, feeling a sense of growth. Today, data, “facts”, propaganda, news, and opinion, are one big jumbled mess. Even when facts are generally agreed upon, vastly divergent narratives are spun to meet varying agendas. The result? Doubt creeps in. We know more information but we understand things less. We feel more vulnerable. Things feel more dangerous. We take fewer risks. We’re less open. We seek validation of “our way” of thinking. In this way, confirmation bias isn’t something that is acting upon us, but rather something we actively pursue. This isn’t healthy, but it’s the only way that people can feel as though they are in control. Simply put, we’re in a bad place. I’m a glass half-full kind of guy, so I believe we will reach a point where we collectively realize that this way of proceeding is neither desirable nor sustainable, and that the best way forward is to live in a state of tension between disciplined resolve and ambiguity. This won’t happen overnight nor will it happen without a collective effort to seek a better way forward. It will also require purposeful attention to our youth, incorporating new ways of teaching and learning alongside traditional methodologies that emphasize the building of skills that foster meaning-making out of ambiguity. The skills themselves are not new. Things like curiosity, analysis, dialogue, objectivity, and discernment have long been a part of the learning lexicon. What’s needed is a new way of speaking about them, recognizing where, how, and why they are valuable in our modern world, lesson planning around them, and providing intentional practice - all in a manner that is life-giving and hope-filled. Our Catholic schools provide fertile ground for such efforts. For our part, Arrupe Virtual is on a journey to develop new delivery models that will challenge and transform, and I look forward to sharing more about this in the months and years ahead. Accepting a level of ambiguity isn’t a surrender to relativism, but rather a recognition that objective truth follows a straight path while we walk a winding road. In this way, each of us does NOT possess our own personal truth, but rather our own personal journey toward the truth - a truth which will never be fully understood. And when we recognize and accept this, we will be providing wonderment a small entry point back into our lives and perhaps, occasionally, some of our childhood sensibilities as well. Long live the memory of the Zucchini Club. CONTRIBUTOR: Jeff Hausman, AVLI President vol 7 issue 1

Routines. We all have them, and, for the most part, they are a healthy part of productive living. Having things scheduled ensures that certain important aspects of our lives receive the attention they deserve. Sometimes, however, routines are actually ruts. This becomes particularly problematic when one’s entire existence is on autopilot, sleepwalking through life somewhere between comfortable and numb. On Good Friday, I realized that an alarming portion of my faith life has been on autopilot. To be sure, I have developed some helpful habits around prayer, church attendance, and other “measurables” that keep me on a good path. One of those habits is a practice I started a number of years ago where I choose a character from the Passion narrative and spend Holy Week imagining myself walking in their shoes each day starting with Palm Sunday. Sometimes I pick a main character like Peter, Mary Magdalene, or Pilate while other times I choose a lesser role like a Roman guard, or Simon of Cyrene. This year, I chose Judas. All was going well (as routines normally do) until the very end of the reading of the Passion on Friday evening when Jesus said, “I thirst.” That’s when it struck me; over all of these years of imagining the Passion, I’ve never immersed myself in the person of Jesus. This is mostly due to the fact that I’ve never truly entertained the idea of Christ’s human-ness. Of course he was human, but it's easier to think of Jesus as something “other”. Even in the brutality of the Passion my mind tells me, “Yah, but he’s God.” The mystery, though, is that Jesus is fully divine and fully human - 100% of both. I’ve sat through a hundred readings of the Passion. How did I fail to notice that Jesus thirsts? Why does this matter? Because thirsting is primal; we cannot control it. Thirsting is the signal for us to address a life sustaining requirement. And though it can be quenched, thirst cannot be completely extinguished. We will thirst again. If Jesus experienced something as primal as thirst, he surely experienced temptation, loss, love, jealousy, joy, and anger in ways very similar to me. Jesus felt emboldened, and Jesus felt inadequate. Jesus felt in command, and Jesus felt overwhelmed. Jesus felt connected, and Jesus felt alone. Jesus lived for roughly 12,000 days. One could only assume that on some of those he wasn’t at his best (on a “Jesus” scale). There must have been days where little things annoyed him, or the constant demands of others were exhausting and made him curt. Did he ever not want to get out of bed? Jesus was also a teenager at one point. What must that have been like? Did he feel the pressure to fit in? Was he ever embarrassed by Mary and Joseph? Did he ever have a crush? This is all part of being 100% human, and it’s the Jesus I had never previously considered. I bring all of this up because there is another kind of thirsting that is particularly human - a thirst for meaning. This isn’t a new phenomena though it seems to be more acute in recent times, particularly among young people. I use the word “thirsting” intentionally here because I believe the search for meaning to be more than a yearning since yearnings often resolve or abate. The search for meaning is ever present up to a person’s last day. A variety of experiences and personal epiphanies provide glimpses of our purpose, but the thirst around meaning always returns. Most often, these glimpses are lightning strikes of gratitude - a brief moment in time when things seem to align and affirm a larger purpose. Sometimes it's in the experience of nature, a musical score, or an inspiring conversation. Other times the gratitude comes in the form of consolation, when a difficult situation yields a personal understanding of why we are present at a particular moment. Each of these quenches, yet they are also fleeting. Woven together, however, they are sustaining. It’s the weaving that tends to get us. In living our busy lives, we simply aren’t attentive to the regular practice of reflecting on these moments, cherishing them, and then knitting them together to form a larger narrative of gratitude. In previous writing I’ve referenced an Ignatian practice called the Examen which is especially well suited to assist with such reflection. Still, it isn’t easy. This is particularly true when searching for gratitude as a self-conscious teen growing up in a society that requires you to have a personal brand. That’s where Catholic schools come in. Returning to the water metaphor, one of the things Catholic schools do best is continually lead young people to healthy forms of hydration. Sometimes, particularly when they are younger, we need to tell them, “Don’t drink that!” But at some point the message and tone shifts toward self discovery, and then, to agency. Here we no longer provide the water. Instead, we are gifting them the tools and habits to search for life-sustaining water on their own. Seeing this as an important part of their journey will help them endure the periods of spiritual drought a long life affords all of us. So what was the teenage Jesus like? Personally, I hope he was a tiny bit mischievous during these formative years. A bit of innocent adventure would surely have made those around him grateful for their shared experiences. And Jesus’ grateful memories of these early years likely helped him endure later in life during some of the more difficult periods of his ministry. It’s easier now for me to imagine the Last Supper and Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane. He knew what awaited him, including the betrayal. Still, there seemed to be a melancholy gratitude for the life he had lived, and that sustained him until the end. That’s the human Jesus. I’m not sure Jesus really needed faith, but that’s what it reminds me of. After all, at its core, that’s what faith is: surrendering to the fact that we don’t have all of the answers to the meaning of life, but trusting that a purposeful, dogged pursuit will yield the desired outcome…eventually. CONTRIBUTOR: Jeff Hausman, AVLI President vol 5 issue 9