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.

Now's the time to share ACA's vision with family members and friends who might want to support a school that helps shape children's hearts, minds, and souls for God's glory and the good of all people.

If you'd like to make a gift, you can do so online or (better yet) by dropping off a check, made out to Augustine Classical Academy, to the front office. ACA is a 501(c)(3), and all gifts are tax-deductible to the full extent of the law.

Thanks for supporting ACA and sharing this opportunity with a broader community of people who love our students and ACA's mission to help them to pursue truth, beauty, and goodness their whole lives.

Grace and Peace, The ACA Board and Administration

Lifelong Learners

One of the primary goals of classical education is to equip our students to become lifelong learners. This is achieved as we teach them tools for learning and as we develop in them a love of learning.

If you walk down the halls of ACA on any given day, you will hear the sounds of students practicing tools for learning. Just outside the door of the first grade classroom you might hear young voices chanting the doubles addition facts.

0 + 0 = 0 (OH!)

1 + 1 = 2 (True!)

2 + 2 = 4 (More!) …

Next you might hear a portion of the Scripture memory verse we are currently memorizing.

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8: “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted . . . .”

These are the sounds of children in the grammar stage learning basic building blocks and tools for future learning. Our recent recitation was a wonderful opportunity to see students at all grade levels sharing what they have been learning through chants, recitations, and songs.

Sometimes, though, in the midst of the everyday memorizing and drilling and practicing of these tools for learning, I wonder if my students are developing a love of learning. Am I instilling in them a desire to continue to learn? Am I modeling for them a sense of joy as we study all that God has created?

Every Monday afternoon the kindergarten, first, and second graders go on a nature walk to the park. We spend time studying God’s creation and drawing pictures of the beauty around us in our journals. As we walk together on these days, I hear snippets of conversation as these little ones talk about the many things they are interested in; from the bug they just saw crawling along to their favorite new toy or a fun weekend activity.

This past Monday I observed something different. These children were unable to contain their excitement about the songs and chants they had recently been learning. As we walked along, I heard the sounds of sweet voices singing “Sweet Betsy from Pike.”

“. . . .Poor Ike got discouraged and Betsy got mad, The dog wagged his tail and looked awfully sad. O yo-delee, yo-delee, yo-delai-ay!”

Next, I heard the newest grammar jingle we have been memorizing as we are learning about article adjectives.

“We are the article adjectives, Teeny, tiny adjectives: A, AN, THE - A, AN, THE . . . ."

The students skipped along happily with smiles on their faces as they enjoyed these songs and chants. My heart skipped along with them as I saw that they have not only been learning information; they have truly been learning to love learning.

Hunting for Beauty

We are on a hunt for beauty.

Some beauty is easy to find. A blazing orange sunset over the Rockies? Beautiful. Aspens in the fall? Your baby asleep in a crib? Music by Mozart? All beautiful.

Whenever I think of our school’s tagline -- truth, beauty, virtue -- I find myself contemplating the idea of beauty and how it shows up during the school day. Truth and virtue are relatively easy -- God’s Word is truth, and, therefore, we know what is a good and moral standard. Both are are easily integrated into the school day. We study the Bible (truth) and adhere to a moral standard (virtue). But beauty is somewhat nebulous, and trying to define it (or find it between 8:15 AM - 3:30 PM) can feel like trying to nail jello to a wall.

To add to the difficulty of finding beauty at school, throw in teaching medieval literature, history, and theology (Omnibus II) using primary source texts to eighth graders. Mix in the rest of a student’s workload, and we’ve got ourselves a fool-proof recipe for easy beauty. Sunset-easy beauty. Right?

Wrong. What we do have is a recipe for absolute drudgery and students who feel buried by work.

What are we to do?

We have to hunt for beauty.

As a teacher, I want my students to find all that we do at ACA beautiful, and, therefore, to love it. At the beginning of the year, I told my Omnibus students that I didn’t want them to view their work and reading assignments as just another item to be checked off a list. The truth is that we are never really done with our lists and our work. There’s always a new list tomorrow. Instead, I encouraged them to be changed and challenged by what they are reading this year. I gave each student a small commonplace notebook to write down quotes from the books we read that they like or that affect them in some way. Then, promptly on the heels of handing them their commonplace books, I handed them Eusebius’ The Church History (written c. 325 AD) and told them to be looking for quotes to write in their books. (Sometimes, teaching makes teachers just flat nervous, and this was one of those moments. Will they find anything to write? Will this commonplace idea be a total flop? Should I have started it with THIS book? Will the students HATE me?)

At the end of the book, I asked the students to share their commonplace entries for Eusebius.

After an uncomfortable silence, I went first to set the example. I shared that I love when Eusebius writes: “But God became Constantine’s Friend, Protector, and Guardian . . .” Constantine, the Emperor of Rome during Eusebius’ life, had converted to Christianity and subsequently outlawed all Christian persecution. What caught my attention was the use of the words “But God.” When these two words are written together in the Bible, God is usually intervening on behalf of his people and altering history (see Romans 5:8). Eusebius is giving credit to God for the salvation of Constantine, who altered the history of the early church.

Then I asked, “Does anyone else have a quote to share?”

All hands went up. All of my students had found at least one quote from Eusebius to write down. They had found beauty. But it wasn't by accident. It wasn’t obvious beauty like a sunset or a sleeping baby or an art class.

They had to hunt for it. We had to hunt for it. And that's why we found it.

Amanda Rodriguez Writing, Omnibus, & Mathematics

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:

Did the long weekend camping make him grumpy at school? What did she eat for breakfast? Could that be the trigger? Did he get enough sleep last night? What about the influence of peers? Maybe this really isn’t her fault.

Your mind races. But when you meet, it turns out that your child’s teacher wants to discuss the same behavior that you’ve noticed, experienced, responded to, trained against, and walked through with your child from the beginning -- basic human sin. But just like Adam and Eve justified their behavior in the garden, our flesh wants to defend our child’s behavior. We rise up to explain the circumstances.

But walk into any early childhood classroom (including ACA), and you hear things like this:

“That’s mine. You can’t have it!" "You can’t play. You aren’t my friend anymore.” “I want it.” (Snatch and run.) Teacher: “It’s time to clean up the toys.” (And each child develops a sudden remarkable talent for creating a diplomatic excuse to avoid labor.)

Children everywhere, as regular sinners in a sinful world, demand their own way, just like everyone else. Every day, they sin against one another when they don’t get their way. They're just like us, fallen under Adam, redeemed under Christ, and learning how to live according to the gospel. And that takes time.

So at ACA, your child’s teachers don’t just want to "talk about" your child’s behavior in the classroom with you.

They want to offer support and encouragement to you. They want to pray with you and for you. They love to pray with your child and for your child. They desire to set an example for your children to love one another. They seek to model forgiveness. They humbly challenge your child to be kind and to anticipate when obedience will be hard.

Repentance and forgiveness. It's challenging work for children and adults.

We pray for our students to have gospel reflexes when they sin, and this includes encouragement to pursue holiness. My prayer for my class is that the children will walk in truth, love Jesus, flee sin, and live for the glory of God and the good of all people.

Today, that means we share the crayons.

Grace and peace, Mindy Tipton Preschool Director

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.