Category Archives: teaching

Iteration in the Classroom

So here’s my one small idea: I’d begin to teach iteration. Iteration as a subject, equivalent to math, science, history, language, art, music, etc. How do you make something better over time? How do you return to something that you’ve done and see it with fresh eyes? How do you apply new perspective to an old problem? Where do you find that new perspective? What trails do you follow and which do you ignore? How do you smash the familiar and reassemble something new from the same pieces?

Once you’re done with school, and cast out into the world, your job is likely to involve iteration. No matter what you’re doing, you’re probably going to have to do something over. And often times again and again. You rarely simply deliver something and move on. You’re asked to refactor, to build on it, to “make it better”.

Jason Fried

I’m not sure about teaching iteration as a subject in itself, but it should definitely be a part of every class. Speaking for myself, the main difficulty in teaching iteration is giving students specific, insightful feedback. In the real world, your work will be evaluated by your boss, your family, your customers, the world at large. If you don’t do a good job, you’re forced to try again and do better. In school, you’re lucky if your teacher looks at your work with anything more than a passing glance.

Between Two Stools

It is impossible to talk about how a person should be educated until you can say what a person is. All education is an attempt to demonstrate to someone, usually young, how he ought to exist in the world. Much can be made of that “ought.” A modern philosopher might define a human being as homo sapiens, that is, “thinking man.” The development of thought, then, becomes the focus of education because modern philosophy believes that man ought to exist by thought. (This view is rapidly falling out of favor, actually, and is being replaced by a new form of tribalism, in which thought isn’t as necessary as following the habits of whatever group you happen to be in. Modern education has fallen between two stools. On the one hand, modern schools teach that thought is the key to existence. On the other, they teach that persons are inextricably bound to their history, family, and culture. In one view, thought is the basis of reality. In the other, thought is optional. No wonder modern education is a mess.)

~from the proposal for an imaginary classical school

Gibbs on How to Save Classical Christian Ed

First, get tougher admissions standards. Start asking prospective parents: How do you discipline your children? Do your daughters have smartphones and social media accounts? Do your sons play video games? Do you go to church every Sunday? Do you eat dinner as a family most nights of the week? Do you want your children to change the world? Are your children special? Do a survey of your best teachers and ask them what common cultural attributes are shared by the worst students they have. Use a little common sense. Don’t let more families into your school which have a lot in common with the most vexing, worldly families already there.

Second, work on your faculty culture. If you can’t offer teachers a compelling salary, you have to offer them a compelling faculty culture. Hire substitutes, give your language department a couple bottles of good scotch, and tell them to just spend the day chatting. Culture revolves around food and drink and singing and dancing. If your faculty doesn’t do these things together regularly, you don’t actually have a faculty culture.

Third, make a concerted effort to not let board member’s kids, teacher’s kids, or rich kids get away with murder. You know which students ought to have been kicked out years ago. Kick them out. A classical Christian school is a bit of a ministry and a bit of a business, but bad administrators have a tendency of dicing up the ministry and business aspects of a school so that teachers always get the short end of the stick. Faculty salaries? It’s a ministry. Badly behaved board member’s kids? It’s a ministry. Massive sports program? It’s a business. No matter which way they turn, the business/ministry dichotomy leaves teachers with less: less money, less time, less freedom, less peace, less respect. If you don’t want a Great Tradition school to open in town and soak up all your best teachers, start asking yourself how’d you treat faculty differently if there was a Great Tradition school in town that could beat your salary offering by 5%.

Fourth, take a survey of where your families go to church, then take a survey of where your faculty go to church. On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 means Sponge.TV Faith Café and 10 means St. Prude’s Catholic, if your average family is a 3 and your average teacher is a 7, mission drift is a huge problem at your school and the only way to fix it is to completely overhaul your admission’s process.

Finally, every teacher needs a hero, but every school needs a hero, as well. Every school ought to have a school in mind that it is striving to be like. At the moment, classical Christian schools too often compare themselves with the non-classical Christian schools in town and generally come away feeling quite pleased at their accomplishments. Quit comparing your school with schools that aren’t even trying to do the same thing. Find classical Christian schools (and colleges) that are better than yours and start making the painful changes necessary to become like them.

Source

A Good Word for Lit Teachers

We can never know that a piece of writing is bad unless we have begun by trying to read it as if it was very good and ended by discovering that we were paying the author an undeserved compliment.

CS Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism

And Quite a Wager

It is the wager of a classical education… that all the study and exams and memorization would be time well spent even if the student died on his way to the stage to collect his diploma.

Josh Gibbs in How to Be Unlucky

I can’t imagine a single student at my school agreeing with this statement. I can think of only a few parents who might.

The Classical Part of Education

A few weeks ago, a friend asked me whether Christian kids really need to study pagan literature. “Isn’t the Bible more important than immoral books written by Romans and Greeks?” he asked. My reply: “Absolutely.” The Bible is more important. An old woman living alone in the middle of Nebraska who reads her Bible every day is wiser than a classroom full of godless Ivy League Classics professors. But pious spinster and overeducated atheist aren’t the only two options. Many Christian kids today have the opportunity to study both the Bible and the works of Homer, Plato, Ovid, and Virgil. The question is, given that opportunity, should they take it?

Let me say at the outset that “classical education” and “Christian education” are not the same thing. You can have one without the other, and the latter is infinitely more important than the former. “Classical education” originally meant studying the classics: the language and literature of the Greeks and the Romans. Without those pre-Christian works, an education isn’t classical, but it can still be Christian.

I suspect that most Christian parents send their children to classical Christian schools not because they love the classics but because they see these schools as stalwartly conservative and less likely to cave in to cultural trends. It’s probably true that classical schools are less likely to cave, since anyone who commits to studying old things necessarily has less time to pay attention to passing fashions. That doesn’t mean other schools will cave, however. I’m sure there are faithful schools out there that are not classical. If a Christian family is uncomfortable reading pagan literature, they can choose another school and maintain a clear conscience.

That said, I believe that there are good reasons for Christians to study classical literature. First, there’s the concept of what might be called “free grace” or “natural revelation.” Even the most savage human beings retain a hazy memory of a time when man walked with God in the Garden. This means that pagans can figure out some true things about the world, even about God Himself, and we shouldn’t be afraid of digging around in their books for that buried treasure. After all, we do the same in books written by nominal Christians like Melville, Emerson, and Twain. Is a pious pagan any worse than these? And if we do start removing “objectionable books” from the curriculum, where do we stop? Should we examine an author’s Christian pedigree before reading what he wrote? Worldview should not be the determining factor when deciding the value of a book. Once we start examining an author’s ideology to determine the value of his poetry, we may as well give up studying literature altogether.

Second, we should study classical literature as a broad cultural application of the fifth commandment. Just as we honor the man and woman who brought us into the world, we honor the men and women who brought them into the world and the country that produced them and the history that produced that country. For centuries, those who read and wrote and taught in the Western world drew on the literature of the Greeks and Romans. In practical terms, knowing classical languages and literature is a passport to vast areas of our culture, to the point of effectively doubling a person’s access to knowledge. Hundreds of thousands of words across dozens of languages can be traced back to Rome, not to mention the overabundance of classical allusions at every level of our society (Amazon, anyone?). There is a sense in which the very thoughts in our heads are built out of materials shaped by the minds of Plato, Aristotle, and all the rest. We may wish this were not the case, just as we may wish we had been born in a different time, in a different place, or a to a different family. But here we are, stuck with this heritage.

Finally, we should study classical literature because it’s what Christians have always done. The apostle Paul, whose life was completely transformed by Jesus, was familiar enough with the Greek poets to quote them on at least two occasions (Acts 17, Titus 1). In the fourth century, Emperor Julian, who renounced the faith, passed a law to stop Christians from teaching Greek and Roman literature. This tells us two things: 1) Christians taught that stuff and 2) they taught it in such a way as to enrage a pagan emperor. (I’m grateful to Wes Callihan for this particular insight.) Clearly, pagan literature can be put to good use. Remember that it was the descendants of Cain who invented musical instruments.

One could argue that Paul and the rest drew on pagan literature because they had nothing else. Perhaps we should sweep that culture from the earth and replace with our own based on the Bible. This is an excellent suggestion, so excellent in fact that Christians began the process almost two thousand years ago. In his biography of Saint Francis, Chesterton describes the so-called Dark Ages as a purgation, the time when the spiritual diseases of paganism were expelled from the system. Christians in these times worked and prayed and cleaned and scrubbed until the Gospel was pushed into all corners of the globe, and still they decided that pagan literature must be taught. It was medieval monks, soaked in Scripture, who decided the Aeneid must be preserved.

I suspect that a culture that tossed out everything but the Gospel would soon discover that they had somehow managed to bring everything else along with them. It’s the nature of good news to spread. Christians have been told to carry the Gospel to the ends of the earth, which certainly includes the works of Homer, Plato, and all the rest.

A Verse for Teachers

Now we exhort you, brethren, warn those who are unruly, comfort the fainthearted, uphold the weak, be patient with all.

1 Thessalonians 5:14

Read-Alouds for Those Who Don’t Care

For about two weeks before the end of the school year, I put aside trying to teach one of my classes and read out loud to them instead. I wanted to revive whatever dormant interest they had in stories, or create one if it never existed.

The stories had to be engaging (gripping, funny, sad, scary), short enough to read aloud in one sitting, and relatively clean. I also wanted to pick stories that the students were unlikely to read in school, though I realized that other teachers tend to pick stories based on the criteria above, which means the pool is relatively small.

Most important, every story had to make an impact. I didn’t care whether the students hated the story or loved it as long as they cared.

Here are the ones we read, in order:

  • “The Veldt,” Ray Bradbury
  • “Through the Tunnel,” Doris Lessing
  • “To Build a Fire,” Jack London
  • “My First Deer, and Welcome to It,” Patrick F. McManus
  • “The Long Rain,” Ray Bradbury
  • “A Brilliant Idea and His Own,” Mark Helprin

Classical and Christian Education

(You can listen to the talk itself here.)

Christian Education

In his book Teacher in America, the French-American writer Jacques Barzun explains why he prefers to write about “teaching” rather than “education”:

The advantage of [the word] ‘teaching’ is that in using it you must recognize… that practical limits exist. You know by instinct that it is impossible to ‘teach’ democracy, or citizenship or a happily married life. I do not say that these virtues and benefits are not somehow connected with good teaching. They are, but they occur as by-products. They come, not from a course, but from a teacher; not from a curriculum, but from a human soul.

Throw a rock in any direction and you’ll hit someone who thinks that education is the solution to all the trouble in the world. This is true only if we hold to a certain definition of “education,” that is, one soul shaping another. Of course, we all need our souls to be shaped in the right way, and that would make the world a better place. The problem comes when we confuse “education” with what happens in schools between 8:00 AM and 3:00 PM. Barzun illustrates the difference by saying,

[Education] is a lifelong discipline of the individual by himself, encouraged by a reasonable opportunity to lead a good life. Education here is synonymous with civilization… [which] is a long slow process which cannot be ‘given’ in a short course. No one in his senses would affirm that Schooling is the hope of the world.

I want to use this discrimination between education and schooling to talk about Christian education. First, I’ll give three principles for Christian education, as Barzun defines it: “the lifelong discipline of the individual by himself.” Then I’ll talk a little about Christian education in the sense we normally use the phrase, which is what Barzun calls “schooling.”

The first principle of Christian education is that the parents are responsible for the education of their children — specifically, the father is responsible (Deut. 6, Eph. 6, the whole book of Proverbs). Parents must bring up their children in such a way that “lifelong self-discipline” becomes a possibility. Of course, parents can and should ask for help doing this difficult task. It would be a mistake to think that you could shape your child’s soul all by yourself. You are one of many shapers: teachers, mentors, friends, habits, practices, liturgies, entertainment, and self-reflection. You, the parent, are not the only one educating your child, but you, the parent, are the one who will be held responsible.

The second principle of Christian education is that a student will become like his master. Because knowledge is more than just information, teachers always communicate more than mere facts. They give a part of themselves to their students. The most influential ingredient in anyone’s education is the character of the person who educated them. You become like your teachers. Your children will become like their teachers (and, for kids, that includes more than just the person standing at the front of the classroom). When choosing a church, a school, a neighborhood, a city, ask yourself whether you want your children to become like the people there.

Lastly, the Bible teaches that Christ is at the center of all things. (Col. 1, John 1) If a comprehensive education means learning about the world, no education is complete without Christ. He is the keystone that allows the whole arch to stand.

Notice that there’s nothing here about content or methods. You have a responsibility to give your child a Christian education, and you can’t do that by sending them off to a Christian school. Going to school is just one part of education. You can’t give your child a Christian education by purchasing the right online curriculum. An online curriculum doesn’t shape a person’s soul.

I hope that you find relief in what I’m saying. You don’t need a Christian school to give your child a Christian education. It may help, but it’s not required. Hopefully, at a Christian school, you’d find men and women of good character, who will teach your child to become like them. Hopefully, at a Christian school, your child would learn to know Christ and His creation. But a Christian school is not required.

Classical Schools

If I had to guess, I’d say that many, if not most, of you think of “classical education” as the gold standard. I went to a classical high school. I teach at a classical school. I’m a big fan of classical education.

As a side note, it’s probably worth asking whether or not, since education is a life-long pursuit, someone can be “classically educated.” I would say, yes, but not at school. Thirteen years of old books and Latin can have a profound effect on you, but if a recent graduate believed himself to be “educated,” I’d say he didn’t learn anything. If a student, upon graduating, said to himself, “Man, I don’t know anything. I better learn,” that would be a success. The desire to learn and the skills to do so are a good indicator that the student has indeed been classically educated.

Classical education really just means studying the “classics,” which used to mean Greek and Roman literature, and now includes old books from all kinds of subjects. There are several benefits to classical education:

  1. The ancients and medievals tended to think of knowledge as a unified whole, so, by reading their works, students will assume the same.
  2. The same thinkers loved knowledge because they believed it brought them closer to virtue. Modern-day people aren’t accustomed to pursuing virtue.
  3. Reading old books brings Western history and civilization before the eyes of students. Modern people love to pretend that they invented everything. All problems are new problems, and therefore it’s up to us to come up with a solution. A few years of reading old books should be enough to demonstrate that not only are our problems not new, many of them already have solutions. We’ve just forgotten them. (Example?)
  4. Lastly, by its nature, classical education focuses on the things that have lasted. Age doesn’t automatically make a thing good, but good things tend to last, and the longer they last, the more respect we should pay them.

I do think that these benefits fit our definition of “education.” But a classical school can only point students in the direction of these things. A school cannot “educate” because it is not a person.

The brand of classical schooling that most of us are familiar with is the Dorothy Sayers model, which applies the Trivium of Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric to the stages of a child’s development. Young children memorize easily, so they are given the “grammar” of different subjects. Middle-schoolers like to argue, so they are placated with “dialectic” or logic. High schoolers like to express themselves, so they are given the tools of rhetoric. From what I can tell, it seems to work.

The thing that many people miss about Sayers’ model is that, when it comes to actual content, she is mostly agnostic. She makes some suggestions, but makes it clear they are suggestions. Her main point is that we should teach students to teach themselves, a goal which by nature must be content agnostic. Given that, and given the benefits of classical education I outlined above, here are some critiques of classical schools, as well as some suggestions. How can we make our classical schools more conducive to a Christian education?

Latin

In my experience, no subject in a classical school gives students as much trouble as Latin. It’s just soul-crushing. Learning a second language may be the most mind-opening experience you can have. That’s what makes it so valuable, but also what makes it so difficult. Teaching a student another language forces them to toy with the basis of their thought, which is always uncomfortable.

I love Latin. I wrote my college thesis on Latin. I’ve taught Latin. I take great pleasure in reading Latin. But I think it’s overemphasized in classical schools. (Sayers herself doesn’t say Latin is necessary, just that she prefers it.) Learning a second language is important, if only to introduce children to the idea of other languages, but you’re not going to get very far in Latin with second graders unless you have an exceptional teacher. Students regularly tell me things like, “I’ve taken eight years of Latin and don’t know it at all.”

Here’s my advice: save Latin for high school. It’s a crucial part of a classical education, but you can learn plenty of Latin in three years. In elementary school, I would start with Hebrew. Have the kids memorize the Psalms and the opening chapters of Genesis in Hebrew. Forget about grammar and teach pure memorization (reading and writing). Add a modern language (Spanish or French) if you want. In middle-school, teach Greek.

Music

The Greeks and Romans gave us plenty of good literature, but they have given us almost no good music. Music is part of our Christian heritage that we are woefully undereducated in. At some schools, music is not even offered, let alone required. At others, it’s an elective or a once-a-week activity. The reason given for this lack of emphasis is that some children just aren’t musical. That logic will get you nowhere with a math or science teacher, and ought to make a music teacher laugh in your face. God’s people sing. Get over it.

Young children pick up music easily. Puberty makes everyone self-conscious, especially boys whose voices are changing. But even when your voice is unreliable, your fingers still work. Choose an instrument. Learn to read music and add chords to melodies. Analyze a piece of music the same way you’d analyze a math problem or a poem. And, in the rhetoric stage, write your own.

Bible

Bible is almost always the Achilles heel of a Christian school. Christian schools (at least, evangelical ones) are expected to be non-denominational in practice, if not in name. Bible class is de-emphasized on the rationale that “the students are getting Bible during Sunday school.” If there is any kind of worship service at all, it is a chapel service with happy-clappy tunes and a boring talk.

Classical schools need to make the Bible the center of their curriculum. I don’t mean sprinkling a little Bible reading on their lesson plans. I mean a rigorous Bible class that asks students to read the Bible like they would any other text: with attention to details and poetic figures, allusions and patterns. That Bible class should be required every year, along with biblical liturgy woven throughout the school day.

Obviously, much of this needs to be fleshed out. And many people are already having conversations about these issues, which is very encouraging. A truly classical Christian model would be constantly seeking improvement.