Happy September! Our classrooms and hallways are once again filled with the joyful and delightful sounds of of our students and teachers learning, singing, praying together. We are so excited to begin the 2021-2022 school year with you, and we are praying for each one of our students and their families as the year begins.
Last week, our teachers and staff returned to campus for faculty meetings to plan and prepare for the new year. It has been a blessing to welcome new and returning faculty. You can read more about some of our outstanding new teachers in our “Meet Us Monday” series here on the blog. Together we look forward to opportunities to work alongside our families in the all important work of educating and nurturing our children.
The relationship between home and school is so vital in the education and nurturing of children, and it is a joy and a privilege to work so closely together with our families. Together with you we seek to engage in the work of shaping our culture at school and at home. Each month, we’ll share a "What we're reading..." blog post that we commend to your reading. These are just a few things that our faculty and staff have found recently to be inspiring, intriguing, encouraging, or thought-provoking.
Parents are reminded to join us for Back to School Night this week (Upper School Families meet Wednesday, and Lower School families meet Thursday). Families are also invited to join us for our “First Friday Coffees” each month, which will begin this Friday, September 10th, where we gather to engage in meaningful dialogue about topics related to education, culture, faith, and raising children.
Thank you for your continued partnership, and for engaging with us! Please feel free to share a link in the comments to email us any time!
The Liturgy of Back-to-School Routines - Mrs. Marie Greenway, Prelude to Postlude: CPH Music Blog
“In this “Back to School!” time of year, what are your routines? You may be back in school already or preparing for its arrival in the coming weeks. It is this time of year that—whether or not we are actively involved in a school as a student, teacher, parent, administrator, church worker, or volunteer—we tend to pay attention to a change in routines. Summer’s coming to a close and the rapidly approaching autumn signals a return to stricter schedules and more involved days.
How do we approach this return to routines in Lutheran education as Lutheran musicians? As I’ve written many times before, it is the routine of the liturgy that can, and should, guide our days. Lutheran Service Book provides excellent ways in which we can guide ourselves, our families, and our schools to learn and celebrate the saving work of Christ in the day-to-day.”
On Reading Whole Works - Austin Hoffman, CIRCE
“Most children would prefer to skip a meal to get dessert. Dessert is sweeter and tastier, although less nutritious than a balanced course. Yet, if they love their children, parents will usually insist that the child eats all his dinner first. Sweets are the highlight and culmination of supper, but they cannot be had without real food. The meal prepares for dessert.
Classical schools face a similar problem with the Great Books. Should schools insist on reading whole works, or may they excerpt the best portions? Students don’t need to read all of Beyond Good and Evil to get Nietzsche. Even Homer nods, so why don’t students just read the highlights of The Iliad? Old books are difficult. They are long. They require a large commitment of both time and effort, and most students are skeptical of the benefit.
Excerpts are an enticing option for several reasons.
If students ought to read the best of what has been thought or said, why would that not apply to books? After all, not all parts of a book are equally great. Why not read the best parts of the best books? Certain sections of great books impact more than others; can anyone list more than four of the cities represented in Homer’s list of ships? Since reading every great book while in high school (let alone a lifetime) isn’t possible, schools should streamline their curricula to give students broad familiarity with the great tradition. ”
Contemplative Pedagogy: Notes on Educating Screen-Addled Students - Mike St. Thomas, Mere Orthodoxy
“Not long ago I taught a summer class in creative writing to middle schoolers. On one sun-drenched day, I took the class outside to wander through our campus and down to our stretch of shoreline on Narragansett Bay. Their task was to find a natural object that drew their attention—a tree, a stone, a shell—and write a descriptive poem about it. Several students took to the task earnestly, finding something sitting with it meditatively, jotting ideas in their notebooks for ten or twenty minutes at a stretch. Others absent-mindedly grabbed a leaf or rock, wrote a few words about it, and spent the rest of the period asking me when we would be finished. No doubt they resented me for making them leave their phones in the classroom.
Other teachers have had similar experiences with their students in their own subject areas. Our attempts to introduce them to things we know to be good, true, and beautiful—a novel, a painting, a mathematical concept—are often met with apathy more than engagement, with vacant expressions more than rapt attention. Objective reality and subjective experience are dissonant; they often seem “out of tune” with the world, as Wordsworth put it more than two centuries ago.
Yet to blame our students would be to miss the mark. What part of their screen-addled childhood has trained them to listen carefully, look closely, and think deeply? In recent years it’s gotten harder even for bookworms like me to sit still and read for an extended period of time, and I can only imagine the effect our culture has had on the still-malleable minds of my students, who can barely recall a time before the invention of the iPhone.
As Christians we believe that God created the world, and we also believe that he created us in his image, so that we are made to know and love reality. What, then, is the role of Christian educators in “re-tuning” our students to that world, and ultimately, to God?”
Time to Return to Medieval Courtesy Books - John Horvat, The Imaginative Conservative
“Christian civilization facilitates the practice of virtue. Courtesy and manners allow people to practice acts of charity toward neighbors for the love of God. Relationships can then flourish in an atmosphere of peace and harmony. Early training during childhood develops good habits of respect that govern their whole lives.
The proof that pre-modern children minded their manners is found in history. Medieval scholars, like Prof. Walton, claim a genre of literature called courtesy books circulated widely. These were manuals by which children learned manners and courtesy as part of their upbringing. The teachings of these books filtered down to all levels of society in the Middle Ages.
Courtesy books were written in straightforward language, which indicated how a child should behave in every life circumstance. The child learned how to walk, dress, read, eat, play and socialize. The little books were written in clear didactic prose with little poetic embellishment.”
From Da Vinci to Churchill: What Our Doodles Can Mean - Clare Thorp, BBC Culture
“For Queen Victoria, it was donkeys. For Winston Churchill, it was airplanes. For Leonardo da Vinci, it was everything from crude drawings to the first workings of his groundbreaking laws of frictions. Throughout history, humans – whether royalty or a bored office worker – have doodled.
Usually relegated to the margins of notebooks or the back of envelopes, the doodle is often considered something messy, throwaway and unconsidered. If life is what happens when you’re making other plans, then doodles are the result of your mind being somewhere else – a phone call, a meeting, a daydream. Yet in those scrawls – be it shapes, animals, lines, names – can be something powerful, with what they reveal and how they allow us to express our creativity. Hence why a new art project is taking doodles out of the margins and placing them centre-stage.
Frequencies, by Turner Prize-winning artist Oscar Murillo, collects together 40,000 canvases that have been marked, scribbled and drawn on by more than 100,000 children from around the world. Since 2013 Murillo has sent blank canvases to over 300 schools in more than 30 countries. The aim is to capture “the conscious and unconscious energy of young minds at their most absorbent, optimistic and conflicted” and the results are currently on show for the first time in their entirety in Murillo’s former school in Hackney, east London. “The blank canvas is like a recording device,” he tells BBC Culture. “You leave it there for six months at a minimum and then you simply allow for an individual to interact with that, however they wish. They are my collaborators, these almost 100,000 children.””
The Face of God - Edward Riojas, The Lutheran Witness
“Christians sometimes have an unsettling desire to see the face of Christ, and Lutherans are no exception. Some scholars attempt to use anthropology, ethnology and DNA to “recreate” the face of Jesus. Others run to Scripture. Still others look to the Shroud of Turin. Despite our best efforts and personal hypotheses, we are usually left sorely disappointed and soundly declare, “That’s not what He looked like.”
The Shroud of Turin is one of the few physical artifacts people have associated with the image of Christ. The photo-negative quality of the ghostly image haunts us as we consider its authenticity. And the modern-day obsession with the shroud is not a new phenomenon. Giovanni Battista della Rovere included the shroud in a painting of the Passion done during the 1500s. Other artists have done the same.”
You Are the Fruit of Your Labor - Ryan Klein, CIRCE
“I might turn this question on all of you. Today, you graduate from middle school. What was the point of it all? What have you gained from this? What are we celebrating?
I might offer two answers. I asked a question just like this to my high school physics teacher. “Why, Mr. Stratton, do we have to learn about the equation for gravitational force? I’ll never use this.” He answered, “Of course you won’t have to use this. You won’t have to use any of the information you learn in this class, unless you become a specific kind of engineer. But that’s not why we’re doing it. We’re doing it because you need to learn how to learn, and your classes help you do that.”
That is the first time a teacher’s explanation of the value of school made sense to me. I still think it’s true. I landed my web development job not because I knew how to use the technology (which I didn’t), but because I was capable of learning on-the-go, and my future boss recognized that. Learning to learn is a highly valuable practice.
But I might take this a step further. What else have you learned in middle school? Years from now, you will not be able to pass the tests you passed this year. You will not remember when WWI started. You will forget how Aristotle defined the soul. You will try to help children with fractions and you won’t remember how they work. You will barely remember reading The Odyssey, and you won’t know what symbol Luke the Evangelist used. But this does not mean your work will have been for nothing. You will have exactly what you worked for: you will have your own self. For that is the nature of the Liberal Arts. As Sister Miriam Joseph says, the work of the liberal artist is intransitive: it begins and ends in herself. She is the sculpture she carves. You are the fruit of your labor.
Who have you tried to become this year? Who we become depends on what we do. A boy who chooses to listen to a classmate’s idea thoroughly before criticizing it becomes an empathetic man; a girl who asks her question even though she’s afraid becomes a brave woman; a teenager who chooses to act like they care whether Odysseus’ actions were just becomes an adult who wants justice. The fruit of what you’ve done this year is the person you are right now; the reward for what you do next is the person you will be later. What you do shapes your soul. Have you tried to empathize with ancient Greeks? Have you exercised the humility it takes to change your mind when you realize you’ve made a mistake? Have you resisted the desire to cheat, since cheating is good for a grade but bad for character, and character is more lasting? These are the things that forge your soul, and forging your soul is the best thing you can do for the world right now. You must become good. Your tests and quizzes will be forgotten, but you will always have your soul.”