Hello! My name is Father Conrad (Tyllmann) Wald, OSB. Conrad is my religious name as a Benedictine monk of Saint Andrew Svorad Abbey, though Tyllmann is my given name. My hometown is Atlanta, Georgia, but I have lived in Cleveland, Ohio for the last ten years. I studied History and Political Science as an undergraduate at the University of Georgia, and then I earned a Masters in Political Science from The Ohio State University. I was ordained to the priesthood in May of 2019, after six years of Philosophy and Theology studies.

As a monk I am, of course, into praying and singing, but my other interests are foreign/independent movies, old TV sitcoms, horse racing, college football, Premier League soccer, and spending time with family and friends when I can. This semester I am hoping to move beyond my job as a study hall monitor at Benedictine High School to actually spend more time in the classroom with students. Being in my 50’s, I am used to traditional lecture-and-take-notes types of instruction in college classrooms. I do not mind working with others on projects and tasks, as long as I believe that the assignments are well-defined and that there are resources, including the instructor, for students to consult when difficulties arise. I love learning new things, but I have always been a bit slower reader and learner, as I tend to absorb everything and am not always able to detect what is most important in the material or assignment.

As my eventual goal is to teach at my abbey’s high school (Cleveland Benedictine), I am particularly interested in culturally relevant pedagogy because our school is rather diverse. An article I read last semester that is particularly appropriate to this concern is “Were There any Black People in Johnstown? An Investigation of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy in Service of Supporting Disciplinary Literacy Learning in History.” What appealed to me about this source was its investigation of how a teacher in an urban Pittsburgh middle school managed to make the 1889 Johnstown Flood a topic of great interest for his African-American students. (Kucan, L. & Cho, B.Y. [2018]. “Were there any Black people in Johnstown?” An investigation of culturally relevant pedagogy in service of supporting disciplinary literacy learning in history. Urban Education, doi: 0042085918804011).

A question for Dr. Shutkin would be: We allow our students to have their cell phones with them throughout the day, and most of them have iPhones. As each student also has a portable laptop computer, are the students likely to receive any additional educational benefit from having the phones with them? It seems the phones are not being used for educational purposes but only for texting, listening to music, and playing video games. The students seem to view the phones as a non-educational device, whereas the laptop computer is for their schoolwork.