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.

The Trivium in Riddles

Let's make three quick mental pictures.  They're simple riddles of sorts, and each one is a picture of the Trivium.  However, each separate picture is incomplete in some way, lacking one or more of the Trivium's stages.  The question is this: Which stage is pictured, and which stages are missing?

1) First, picture a construction site, an apocalyptic expanse of gray dirt.  Piles of sand, rock, rebars, and I-beams flank the excavated abyss.  Workers in hard-hats examine clip-boards while growling cement trucks idle in the lot, waiting to pour. Finally, an artist's rendition of the finished building is posted on large sign -- a sneak-peak for everyone of the finished product, months away.  But then you hear the foreman say, "That'll do it, boys! Job well done." The site is abandoned and no more work ever done.

2) You see a carpenter at his bench with a magnificent array of tools spread in front of him.  Dovetail chisels, planers, coping saws, fretsaws, routers, carving knives, a lathe -- all of the finest quality.  The carpenter sets to work.  First, he picks up a delicate chisel and begins to hack a stone in two.  The chisel quickly dulls and snaps. Next, he picks up a carving knife, and, instead of setting it to wood, takes it to his garden and begins digging rows for his seeds.  When done, he returns to his work-bench and switches on the planer -- but his hand slips, and he neatly planes off his palm.

3) You are watching a televised debate. The issue at hand happens to be one you feel strongly about, and you listen closely.  However, you are soon disappointed: the debater arguing for the view you support is unquestionably the stronger speaker, but he is completely unlikeable.  In fact, he's disgusting. He chooses the perfect arguments, but he is perfectly arrogant.  He smirks and mocks his opponent. When the debate is finished, he has won hands-down, and truth has prevailed.  Or has it?  You realize suddenly that you had been hoping he would lose.

All Life Is Education

Mark Twain once quipped, "Education [is] the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty."

With that, welcome to the 2016-17 school year!

Just kidding.  Let me try again and find someone who's not Mark Twain:

"All of life is a constant education."

That was Eleanor Roosevelt, and that's more our style.  In fact, she hits the nail on the head.  If all life is education, then Preschool-12th Grade is just warming up the truck, revving the engine, and muscling through neighborhood streets in low gear. After that, there are still endless mountain roads to get to.

So it's just the beginning, but it's still a time of tremendous importance -- whether starting Preschool or Kindergarten or 10th Grade. Frankly, it's a little scary, too.  Scary and wonderful, and a lot in between. But it is all just the beginning, as Roosevelt implies, and it is all redemptive through the merciful hands of God.  The warm-up phase is long, but we're preparing them today for that big day later -- Commencement -- a beginning, not the ending -- the day when real independence and real self-learning begins.

During In-Service training this past week, teachers have discussed ways to even better understand who our children uniquely are at this important moment in their lives, how to recognize their changes and growth from last year, and how to continue to give them both knowledge and open eyes for the future.  We are eager to teach them how to learn and how to see -- but why?  Because when they leave ACA and spread their wings in a few years, we want them to fly further and dig deeper, not to close their minds and fall to the ground.  We want them to be ambassadors for life-long education who are full of thanks for God's unreasonable gifts to us.

Welcome to the new chapter of your child's story.  It's a real page-turner, and our teachers are eager to begin with you.

Traditional Classrooms and Student-Centered Learning

Depending on who you talk to about kids, you might encounter two different ideas about classroom structure: the traditional model and the student-directed model.  A classical school is one of many examples of the former, and a Montessori school might be an example of the latter.  The basic issue comes down to this: are teachers the primary drivers of what and how a child learns, or do the child's interests dictate what is taught, and how?

Though ACA is a traditional school, this is an important topic to think about. Is there anything a traditional classical school can learn from student-centered or student-directed methods, and vice-versa?

One of the benefits of nontraditional student-centered learning, for example, is the humility it fosters in teachers.  Teachers, particularly at more advanced academic levels, can easily become egotistical or self-centered.  They view themselves too highly and are too easily frustrated with, or disdainful toward, their students.  Student-centered learning, such as Montessori schools provide, force the teacher to constantly look outside of themselves.  Teachers are attuned to the student as an individual with unique interests, and they learn to respect and foster those interests.  This is a crucial skill for teachers to develop, as students learn best when they feel recognized, encouraged, and appreciated. They are humans, after all, and need love and validation.

On the flip side, a student-centered environment can be dangerous for children.  While it fosters affirmation on a personal, short-term level, it may not provide some important structures that all children need.  For example, when student choices are emphasized, this assumes students have a standard from which to make a good choice.  Would they rather learn to spell or play with blocks?  I would have rather played with blocks.  Would they like to draw or memorize the multiplication table?  I would have rather drawn.  This thought experiment does not mean that drawing or playing with blocks are bad (they're actually good), but it does mean that poor choices can be made.  For everything there is a season. Are teachers facilitating poor choices in their students by allowing student direction at inappropriate times?  One of the reasons we educate our children at all is because we know they don't yet know how to make good choices.  Allowing them to make repeated bad choices doesn't make them creative and independent; it just makes them even better at making more bad choices.

Another way of saying this is to think about your backyard fence.  Few parents release their kids to play outside without one.  With a fence in place, however, most parents do (and wisely) let their children roam at will.  They head for the sandbox, find sticks, dig in the dirt, and kick the ball -- all as they please.  But the fence is there the whole time.  So are other rules the parents have set up: don't throw baseballs at the window, and don't pick up fat black spiders.  With these structures in place, a child's freedoms get a whole lot better.  They're safe, and they're following the rules life comes with. In other words, fences facilitate freedom.  Without one, kids are in the street, and here comes the UPS truck driving too fast.

God made our children to love rules, and he also made parents to love their kids.  So when we ask our children, "Are you making the right choices?" we should first be sure they know what the right choices are. 

The Trivium in the Eyes of a Five-Year-Old

As parents in classical education, we've all heard of the Trivium.  On the flip-side, because it's a Latin word, it also carries some measure of weirdness.  We know what the Trivium is . . . and yet we kinda don't.  How does the breakdown go again?  So sometimes it's helpful to think of classical education and the Trivium from a slightly different angle.

For instance, instead of trying to recite something like this:

The Trivium is an age-old method of teaching, highly revered among The Chosen of Parents, in which children ages 5-9 enjoy the Grammar Stage, a time of rigorous instruction in facts and figures, in drilling and in chants, and in the importance of discipline, discipline, discipline; and in which children ages 10-13 are exposed to the Logic Stage, namely, to the high mountain air of logic and sharp rationality, discerning truth, exposing falsehood, questioning, answering, and explaining, and, as good Saint Paul said, rightly dividing the word of truth; and in which children ages 14-18 discover the pristine Rhetoric Stage, learning to dance in the ecstasies of speech, persuasion, and beauty, recognizing the creative splendor in the world through the Author of All Things, together with the thrilling joy that comes from first gaining, then sorting, and then beautifying knowledge . . . .

we could instead (thank heaven), illustrate it like this:

"The Trivium in the Eyes of a Five-Year-Old, or, 15 Minutes Building a Lego Bullet-Castle":

Step One (The Grammar Stage): Dump out entire Lego set on kitchen table.  Allow good portion to spill onto floor.  Sort pieces into various lengths and colors while singing snippets of "Frozen" and "Green Grow the Rushes" repetitively. Name and handle each piece as you prepare to determine what you will build.

Step Two (The Logic Phase): Determine that you feel moved to build a castle, preferably one that "shoots bullets."  Begin building a square base, observing that pink Lego pieces are ill-advised for this project, and that Barbie dolls will not be the castle's inhabitants.  You'll want to assert publicly that this is not a rolling castle, like Ezekiel's throne-chariot, and therefore will take no wheels, and that neither is it a flying castle, as in Gulliver's Travels, and therefore will take no sails.  You should accordingly erect ramparts, turrets, and cannons only.

Step Three (The Rhetoric Phase): Construction nearly complete, you now confirm that all castle sections are of uniform color, that all flags are flying high, and that all cannons are aimed skyward.  Most importantly, you'll want to be sure to parade this castle around the house, showing it to parents, singing its praises, energetically pointing out its most notable features, referring to it regularly as "My Bullet-Castle," and firing off several exhibition rounds from the cannon.  It is your crowning achievement, your glory.  Just think if you had stopped along the way!  Part of a bullet-castle is no bullet castle at all.  And you've inspired your family and friends to similar great exploits.