2017-18 Tuition Rates

Good news! For the upcoming 2017-18 academic year, tuition rates for all ACA programs (ACP-12th)will not be raised. 

As a component of our business strategy to provide high-quality teachers, small class sizes, and competitive rates, ACA tuition has historically increased 3-5% each year. However, we’re pleased to provide this year of rest and to thank each of you for the continued honor of educating your children. ACA was founded with a commitment to affordability and wise use of resources, and this decision is an excellent example of that commitment. 

God continues to bless ACA steadily, and as we reflect on this Christmas season and the upcoming academic year, let’s remember the important goals we share for our children via the AugustineCampaign and our current Fall 2016 Matching Grant ChallengeOur vision for education is high, and it takes continued robust funding. Would you consider those friends and family members with shared vision who would be interested in helping us meet our rigorous financial goals? To educate the next generation of children for the glory of God and the good of all people, we need tangible gifts from people just like you. 

Thank you for loving your children and supporting ACA so well. May God bless each of you richly this Christmas season.

Developing Gratitude

From Rob Gove, upper school logic and omnibus instructor:

As we head into our Thanksgiving break, I would like to reflect on cultivating the virtue of gratitude in our students, a virtue not just for this coming Thursday, but for every day of the year.

While we all likely have some definition of gratitude (such as "being thankful for the good things in our lives"), it is not necessarily easy to teach our children to practice this virtue. I would like to suggest a few ways we can do this.

As Aristotle explains in his Nicomachean Ethics (which our Omnibus IV students will be reading soon), all virtues are habits, and we develop virtues by repeatedly doing them until they become habitual and automatic. 

So what acts can our students do repeatedly to develop the virtue of gratitude? I propose three: 1) maintaining a cheerful attitude, 2) understanding for what we should be grateful, and 3) giving frequent prayers of thanks. First, we can encourage our students to be cheerful by having a sunny, positive disposition ourselves, by showing them that we enjoy our work, and by encouraging them to do the same. A simple smile directed at a complaining student can go a long way! Second, we need to remind students they should be grateful to God for everything in our lives: even when it seems like something is simply painful, sad, difficult, or "boring", students should be reminded that God loves us and directs all of this for our good. Finally, students need to pray, and they need to pray in thanks. In my classroom, students lead prayer at the beginning of each class. In addition to asking God for help, they almost always thank Him for each other, for the opportunity to come to school and learn, and for all our blessings. It is truly wonderful to hear.

Let's all be grateful this Thanksgiving, and let's help our children to do the same.

Announcing ACA's End-of-Year Matching Gift Challenge!

Announcing ACA's End-of-Year Matching Gift Challenge!

We're pleased to share this very good news! Generous donors have offered ACA's community of supporters a matching-gift challenge: If we can raise $25,000 by the end of the calendar year, we will earn $25,000 for our school! These dollars will go to our three-year fundraising initiative, The Augustine Campaign, designed to help fund tuition assistance, drive enrollment, and support classrooms.

Gospel Reflexes and Sharing Crayons

Gospel Reflexes and Sharing Crayons

A special installment from our Preschool Director, Mindy Tipton: It’s every parent’s worst nightmare. That email from their child’s teacher. A polite request. "CAN WE SCHEDULE A MEETING?" It’s not even the week of parent-teacher conferences, and the teacher wants to talk about your child’s behavior at school! Even before you know what behavior the teacher wants to discuss, your mind races to justify your child:

Your Brain Is Not a Compute

Teaching is nothing without learning.

If a teacher teaches but students don't learn, there's no teaching.  The students might be bad, they might be lazy, the teacher might typically be effective -- but if the students aren't learning, as a class, then teaching isn't being done. In one ear and out the other, as the metaphor goes. Sometimes, it never even gets in the first ear.

Last year, as ACA's teachers studied Gregory's The Seven Laws of Teaching, The Law of Review stood out as perhaps the most crucial law of all: "Review, review, review: reproduce the old, deepen its impression with new thought, link it with added meanings, find new applications, correct any false views, and complete the true."

That's one of the best places where true teaching happens.  In the review.

Past generations understood the importance of repetition and review. They were the generations of catechisms and widespread classical education. Today, we are the generation of the quick-fix conferences.  We never read a book, and we definitely don't memorize, not with Siri. Fly in a big-name motivational speaker, get tickets to the show, take notes, and you're set.

But that's not the way the brain works, not the way it remembers and learns, whether you live in the 1800s or the 2100s. The brain works by hearing something many times, forgetting it many times, and then finally learning it. People never learn the first time. Only computers do that.

So let's remember this as we consider the way our children are learning or as we help them with their homework.  For example:

  • In upper school or high school, when your kids bring home a tough Omnibus reading, they're not supposed to get it all the first time. Do you think your child is a computer? But they are supposed to begin to get the general ideas and the bigger details with second or third readings.  So encourage them to practice reading quickly 2-3 times instead of slowly and carefully just once -- though slow reading has its place elsewhere. The key to reading comprehension is not always speed; it is usually repetition.

  • In middle school or logic-stage math, your kids are generally supposed to mess up badly on their first time through a new speed drill. No problem. The only problem comes when they don't correct their mistakes and quit doing any more speed drills. Do you suppose anyone in the world thinks a multiplication table makes sense the first time? Or as my mother once said when I jumped a creek with a horse and fell off and crunched my nose, "Get right back out there."

  • In Kindergarten when your kids are wrestling with phonograms and struggling to sound out words, do you expect them to remember how to pronounce "The" after telling them once? Look at that word! Its pronunciation makes no sense at all. No, you sit with them, night after night, and say over and over, "T-H-E says thuh." Night after night, they crash their brains over crazy English syntax, the only possible way they can learn.

  • And in preschool, children learn by listening, and listening, and listening, to the same story, the same story, the same story, and by asking you to sing the same song, Daddy, the same song Daddy, the same song, Daddy.

And we roll our eyes and smile kindly at their needs, and then we go out to the car dealership for the seventh time, finally comfortable enough -- knowledgeable enough -- to put down an offer.

Memory, Drama, and Loving What You Learn

From ACA's Curriculum Director, Elizabeth Jones: --------------------------------------------

Thud, thud, thud. The marching can be heard from down the hall. As I approach the vibrating classroom, stories leak out through the cracks in the door. I can't help but peek through the window to find a single girl admonishing her parading classmates:

“Go forth, go forth, Lars Porsena,—

Go forth, beloved of Heaven! Go, and return in glory

To Clusium’s royal dome, And hang round Nurscia’s altars The golden shields of Rome!”

As she finishes with a flourish, the next student in line jumps forward, and the story continues.  But I continue down the hallway.

Within just a few steps, I am thrust forward from ancient Rome into the early days of the American Revolution where a similar classroom scene unfolds -- but this time, with Paul Revere and his horse.

Peering through the glass I see not just one student, but the entire class parading around the room with these familiar words:

"Listen my children and you shall hear Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere, On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five . . . ."

I chant silently along with this fragment recalled from my own elementary school days, a pleasant reminder of the value of good rhythm for aiding in long-term memory.  Yet the chanting has just begun.  Little do I know, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow has more to say. 130 lines to be precise. And this class knows every one of them! Certainly a student falters here and there, having not yet mastered the next line. But his peers are a great support as they pretend to mount their steeds and set their eyes to the tower of the Old North Church off in the corner of the room, using physical cues to aid their memory.

And in all of this I am reminded of ACA's wonderful purpose.  In classical education, we see students' work come alive through robust and challenging poems, songs, rhymes, and sound-offs that both teach the material and wedge it deep into the heart and mind. Among energetic peers, classmates learn to lead with passion, develop a quick memory, and become creative students -- some of whom are already adding the perfect motion to make a tricky section memorable.  And in the other subjects -- mathematics, the sciences, geography, music, Latin, language arts, and the rest -- it is clear that there is real life and joy in the middle of all of them.

I never cease to be amazed at the mind’s capacity for memory and at the exuberance brought to life through the telling and retelling of a story in the classroom. At ACA, our students are learning to climb mountains, conquer giants, succeed in meeting an outrageous goal, and do it all with zeal.  These are skills for life.  In the end, our students will know a good deal of mathematics, poetry, world history, and science, and they'll be able to really understand them, not as disconnected subjects with tests to pass, but as that which is universally true and beautiful, for the glory of God and the good of all people.

-------------------------- Elizabeth Jones is Curriculum Director and Art instructor at Augustine Classical Academy. She and husband Jason have three children at ACA  (Sean, Piper, and Martyn) and Elizabeth was one of the school's founders in 2010.

Teacher Development Readings

As I mentioned last week, we're launching a long-term Master Teacher Development Program for our teachers which aims to provide measurable and varied educational goals, encouraging all ACA teachers to reach hearts and minds, develop their own love of learning, and become influencers of educational culture in their own ways. One small part of this development program is our monthly staff development meetings.  Each of these sessions kicks off with a one-hour discussion of a book pertaining to education and culture.  Last year, we studied John Milton Gregory's The Seven Laws of Teaching and Jacques Barzun's Teacher in America, gleaning valuable teaching strategies and delving deeper into classical ideology.  But at root, we were constantly asking this question: "How do these ideas come out our fingertips in the classroom?"

This fall, we will discuss C. S. Lewis' An Experiment in Criticism, beginning in October. In this short booklet, we will explore a variety of questions such as:

  • How should we approach art?

  • What preconceived ideas are we bringing to the table that might inhibit our understanding of a piece of literature?

  • What is the author or artist actually trying to tell us? Are we getting in the way of that?

  • Do we have a duty of charity toward any author or artist whose works we might encounter?

And of course: "How do all these questions affect the way we teach our students at ACA?"

If you're interested in exploring these questions, I'd like to invite you to join us for these three fall discussion sessions as we take the book in three short chunks.  Each meeting is from 9:30 - 10:30 AM on the second Friday of each month: October 14, November 11, and December 9.  You can purchase An Experiment in Criticism here, and you can access our reading schedule here.

I continue to be grateful for God's faithfulness to Augustine Classical Academy and for the eagerness its teachers have to pursue their own excellence for the glory of God and the good of all people.

Our Master Teacher Development Program

I'd like to share with you a bit of what our teachers will be covering in our monthly staff development meetings this academic year. We meet the second Friday of each month to discuss educational ideas, study books corporately, and take practical steps toward high quality classroom and facility-wide instruction. These meetings are an excellent time for us to build both skills and relationships, and I'm pleased with the plans for our year ahead. Specifically, we've begun a Master Teacher Development Program, partnering with the Association of Classical and Christian Schools, to informally initiate the process of school accreditation and teacher certification. This development program has three stages each teacher will progress through:

  • An Apprentice Teacher
  • A Journeyman Teacher
  • A Master Teacher

And though all of our teachers are already well beyond an "apprentice" phase as it is typically understood, this and other stages involve a number of stimulating rubrics: 1) reading requirements, 2) regular classroom observations, 3) ongoing educational conference attendance, and 3) one-on-one development meetings with administration.

Further, under each stage, we'll be aiming for three goals:

  • Our teachers should actively embody specific Christian virtues
  • Our teachers should actively exemplify classical teaching practices
  • Our teachers should possess and gain knowledge of classical education in their main content area

This is a lengthy but beautiful process of teaching development that I'm eager to oversee in the coming years at ACA. We are already blessed by high quality teaching, and we want to further ensure that each and every year, our teachers are reaching hearts and minds, developing their own love of learning, and becoming influencers of educational culture in their own ways.

If you have any questions about this program, I'd love to share more over a meeting.  You can also find out more about the Association of Classical and Christian Schools here on their website.