The funny thing about starting the school year is that everyone has to adjust. Students, who have been living in the school-summer cycle for most of their lives, don’t remember how to open their lockers, which books go to which class, and that response sheet you assigned Wednesdays. Teachers forget who has lunch duty and the secret to making the copier print double-sided, and which period on Thursday they don’t have due to choir (or they have it earlier and aren’t prepared; and in-service doesn’t help). Parents have to be retrained in the proper procedures of the dismissal pick-up line, hopefully sparing innocent or inattentive pedestrians in the process. And everyone has to remember (likely several times) why again they are here, getting confused and angry and flustered and laughing at all the mistakes—for the sake of learning and growing.
Gradually everyone settles into place, and that is well. Two lessons even left me feeling quite pleased and satisfied at the end of the day, which has been a precious rare occurrence of good luck (not planning) in my short career.
The first lesson was on the Code of Hammurabi in 8th grade, a group I’ve never had before and am struggling to place as new 8th graders and not the 8th graders I promoted to 9th last year. Stealing an idea from the Veritas Omnibus (something I intend to do with great frequency this year), students broke into groups and passed judgment on various hypothetically court cases from Biblical and Babylonian perspectives. Needless to say, the dear souls were delighted to administer absurd punishments to Sam for letting his goring bull Ferdinand roam free, and to Tom for trespassing on Sam’s land. Etc. And then they invented some rather harsh rules they would like to add to the school, including lunchroom lashes for failed exams and dismissal line pillories for repeat behavior offenders. Clearly Christian mercy is something we need to be cultivating this year.
The second lesson was on the Venerable Bede, who I don’t know near enough about. Veritas has students read the entire Ecclesiastical History of the English Speaking Peoples, which is a bit more than I can fit in my schedule, but something to keep in the back of my reading list. Since I assigned Geoffrey of Monmouth’s A History of the Kings of Britain as summer reading, I thought it would be fun to spend more time in the vast amounts of English history. But…I am neither an Anglophile (see the English Dept.) nor an expert in English history, so the unit will not be as successful as hoped. Maybe next year, next week we’ll move on to Byzantium and the glories of Constantinople.
The second lesson was on the Venerable Bede, who I don’t know near enough about. Veritas has students read the entire Ecclesiastical History of the English Speaking Peoples, which is a bit more than I can fit in my schedule, but something to keep in the back of my reading list. Since I assigned Geoffrey of Monmouth’s A History of the Kings of Britain as summer reading, I thought it would be fun to spend more time in the vast amounts of English history. But…I am neither an Anglophile (see the English Dept.) nor an expert in English history, so the unit will not be as successful as hoped. Maybe next year, next week we’ll move on to Byzantium and the glories of Constantinople.
Regardless, I liked the lesson (despite my poor reading selections) and spent a good deal of time discussing why Bede wrote church history rather than national history. Last year, when we studied the Medieval period, students started to complain about how much the church kept popping up. Their conception and awareness of the church as a force in daily living is very vague, something still separated in their minds as church on Sundays and Christians the rest of the week. Bede provides a helpful focus for the beginning of the school year—for him, everything is related to the Incarnation and the resulting history of God’s people. Christ is the center, in the spread of the Gospel and in Bede’s entire conception as history: before the Incarnation and Annus ab incarnatione Domini. Such should be the spirit of the Christian student.
For things are not to be loved for the sake of places, but places for the sake of good things. Choose, therefore, from every church those things that are pious, religious, and upright, and when you have, as it were, made them up into one body, let the minds of the English be accustomed thereto. – Gregory the Great to Saint Augustine of Canterbury, I.XXVII
The line about forgetting how to print double-sided made me start laughing and now I can't stop. Someone here named our printer The Balrog. And I'm so sorry...the Incarnation is so much more central, but there are days that seem to be all printer and forgotten homework and it's hard to remember anything more important.
ReplyDelete(It's a great job.)