We Don't Always Need To Teach

 

Edith Hamilton

"In Greece there are most lovely wild flowers.  They would be beautiful anywhere, but Greece is not a rich and fertile country of wide meadows and fruitful fields where flowers seem at home.  It is a land of rocky ways and stony hills and rugged mountains, and in such places the exquisite vivid bloom of wild flowers comes as a startling surprise."  (Mythology, Edith Hamilton, p. 111)

This is the passage that a high school junior who is the student of a friend of mine chose for a typical read-and-respond assignment.  What that student wrote regarding this quotation forms a powerful reminder, or perhaps a startlingly new idea, that all teachers would do well to bear in mind.

 "I personally enjoyed this quote because it was so vivid in details that I could visualize what was being described.  This quote struck me because it was not about something that could be taught or learned and applied to one's life.  It is simply a quote describing details of Greece.  I think it is important to also recognize quotes or passages like this one because sometimes in life we need the simpler things rather than always looking at quotes that are about how we should live our lives, passages that teach.  Yes, teaching and guidance quotes and passages are good but so are the descriptive ones, the ones that transport us into a space in our minds that is purely creative and imaginative.  Quotes like this one ...make whatever the reader is reading far more interesting because quotes like this allow that reader to imagine what ancient Greece or any other place from the past would have been like.  This may be a simple quote, but I see something deeper in this quote that is very important....  It brings out the creative and imaginative side of literature."

We sometimes think of lyric poetry in classical literature as being that which does not advance the plot.  It is personal and emotional.  It sets up mood and atmosphere and evokes feelings.  When, for example, the Roman poet Catullus in Carmen 5 asks of his beloved, "Give me a thousand kisses and then a hundred more/And then another thousand and a hundred like before/Then add another thousand and a hundred to the score," he could have more simply said, "Give me 3,300 kisses."  Yet, as Howard Nemerov so elegantly put it, there is a line between prose and poetry.  It is as indiscernible as the moment of transition from rain to snow, but it exists and it is the realm of lyric, and to be honest, would you not much rather have your lover propose passion in the lyrical way of Catullus than with a prosaic mathematical sum?

And this brings us back to what this high school student observed and that teachers should remember.  Education is not always about teaching and learning facts.  It is not always about producing something with those learned facts, whether on a test or through a project or presentation.  It is not, as it were, always about advancing the plot.  There is a necessarily lyrical aspect to education as well.

We seem to have lost sight of this, and there can be no more unfortunate or compelling proof than in the numbers of students who have told me over the years that they have lost their love of reading because of their English classes.  I enjoy spotting a Greco-Roman reference in literature as much as the next person and find a well crafted tricolon crescens an absolute delight, but no one looks at a Monet merely to count the brush strokes.  How often do we make a reading, especially in English or world language classes, merely a mining expedition for figures of speech, historical factoids, or salutary aphorisms?  Do we ever with our students simply read a poem, listen to a piece of music, or observe a work of nature or art and then do nothing more?

I can hear the objections rising even in my own mind as the presumed need for assessments and productivity claims the honor of precedence that we have yielded to it.  My colleague's student, however, was right.  In addition to all the pragmatic facets of education and the demonstrable proofs of their having been mastered, we need as well those facets that "transport us into a space in our minds that is purely creative and imaginative."  I hope to remember this as I plan future explorations for my own students into "the glories that were Greece and the grandeur that was Rome."

Collaboration and Communication

 

At a recent professional development meeting at our school, we talked about the importance of collaboration and communication among students.  It was one of those PD sessions that prompted me to think more after the meeting, and I began to realize why collaboration and communication are not just important but vital to students and what the prerequisites are for them to work well.

Christians know that God is eternally existent in three persons.  He is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit...three persons, one God.  It is one of the delightful mysteries of our faith.  This truth reveals, as has often been said, that community is at the heart of God, and since we were created in His image, it stands to reason that collaboration, a word whose Latin roots literally mean "to work together," should be part of our nature.  We were created for collaboration with God Himself and with others.

We also should expect to be highly communicative creatures, for, as we read in the first chapter of Genesis, God spoke reality into existence, and in the first chapter of the Gospel of John, we read, "In the beginning was the word."  Think about it.  The God in Whose image we are made spoke, and subatomic particles began to exist.  He uttered a word and the number 17 came into being, to say nothing of planets and rabbits and gravity and us.  Our God is a supremely communicative being, and as creatures made in His image, so are we.

Collaboration and communication, while natural to humans, must also be developed, just as our abilities to run and jump, paint and do math, and all other things must be, and just as we would no more expect a person who had never touched a football to show up for practice and run a complex offense, so we should not expect to shape high school students into master collaborators and communicators without some foundation having been laid.

When it comes to collaboration, docility is a key requirement.  Unfortunately, too many people think docility refers to a nearly catatonic state.  Again, the Latin root helps us here by showing that docility simply means the quality of being able to be taught, and folded into that quality are the abilities to respect others, to listen, and to exhibit self control.  Students who lack these abilities cannot suddenly be turned loose to work in small groups, at least not unless the teacher is looking for chaos to ensue.  Ideally, these abilities will have been nurtured by families and by earlier levels of schooling.  If they are present, then the high school teacher can build on them, helping students grow in their natural calling to collaboration.  If not, then these prerequisites must be established.

As for communication, there is no better preparation for the mature development of all this entails than early childhood reading.  A quick Google search will produce more evidence for this than you can possibly process, so a good place to start may be the work of Maryanne Wolf, a child literacy expert with a background in cognitive science and psycholinguistics.  Children who have experienced books, both by having them read to them from an early age and by reading on their own, not only gain linguistic fluency that helps them with the massively complex tasks of mature written, read, and oral communication, but they also gain exposure to and awareness of a vastly broader world of ideas and emotions and experiences than they could have simply through their direct, physical relationships.  Seeing how characters respond to situations, both good and bad, in stories, develops in them a rich palette from which to draw in their own responses to the world.

As a Christian who is an educator, I want to help my students become who God has called them to be, and this clearly involves helping them develop their skills in collaboration and communication.  I invite all those who work with younger children, especially parents and other family members, to help prepare their children for the levels of mature development that will come as they grow older.

Ad Astra Per Aspera

 

On Wednesday, September 15, 2021, the first all-civilian trip to space will launch from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.  Inspiration4 is the next step in a journey humans have followed for thousands of years.

I have written twice about my experience as an educator taking part in International Space Camp at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama (here and here).  In those posts, I wrote a bit about why a Latin teacher would have any interest in a science program such as Space Camp, and now I want to go a bit further.

Pythagoras, who lived from c. 570-c. 495 B.C., is credited with being the first person to posit the idea that the earth is round.  He also developed the idea that has come to be known as the "music of the spheres," a theory about mathematical relationships among the heavenly bodies.  Plato (c. 428-c. 348 B.C.) touched on this in Republic VII, as did Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) in On The Heavens, II.9.  The Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero (106-43 B.C.) wrote of astronomical things in Book VII of his On the Republic, which has come to be known by its own title, "The Dream of Scipio."  There he wrote,

Ex quo omnia mihi contemplanti praeclara cetera et mirabilia videbantur.  Erant autem eae stellae, quas numquam ex hoc loco vidimus, et eae magnitudines omnium, quas esse numquam suspicati sumus.  (De Re Publica, VI.16)

"As I gazed at them from this point, all the other heavenly bodies seemed brilliant and amazing.  And there were stars that we have never seen from earth, and the sheer numbers of them all were such as we have never imagined."

The Roman poet Vergil (70-19 B.C.) has the title character of the Aeneid meet his father in the underworld, and the old man tells Aeneas of what is to come, going so far as to note that there will be those who,

...caelique meatus/describent radio et surgentia sidera dicent  (Aeneis, VI.849-850)

"will mark out the movements of the sky with a rod and will tell of the rising stars."

Even science fiction found its start in the ancient world with Lucian of Samosata (c. 125-c. 180 A.D.), whose True History contains scenes of outer space travel, aliens, and war between planets.

What will hopefully happen on the 15th of September in the twenty-first year of the twenty-first century since the birth of Christ, is the next step on a journey going back at least as far as Pythagoras.  It is why I was proud to join educators from across the United States and around the world at Space Camp and why I will be talking about space exploration with my Latin classes on Wednesday.  I think the ancients would be pleased.

The End of Education

 

Terminus, Roman god of boundaries

Terminus is the Latin word for boundaries as well as of the Roman god of them.  A terminus stone marked the end of one person's property and the beginning of another, and a related idea is that of imperium, which is the authority of someone over a particular sphere.  Violations of imperium were quite serious, especially in the realm of the Roman gods, where one deity frequently usurped the authority of another.  In Book 1 of Vergil's Aeneid, for example, Juno, the queen of the gods, wants to persuade the god of the winds, Aeolus, to do her bidding.  She begins by acknowledging that he has the power, given him by Jupiter, to stir up storms and then promises him a proper marriage to a beautiful nymph, something she is entitled to do as the goddess of marriage.  A few lines later, however, Neptune, the god of the sea, becomes enraged when his waters have been churned to a tumult.  Aeolus may indeed have authority over wind, but he does not, as the angered sea deity makes quite clear, possess it over the ocean.

On September 8, 2021, a senseless act of violence took place at the high school where I spent twenty-three years of my career.  North Central High School in Indianapolis, Indiana, is a large, public high school of nearly 3,800 students, all of whom were sent home early yesterday because one student stabbed another in a fight.  You can see news coverage of what happened here.

Let us return to the idea of boundaries.  In 1970, The Five Man Electrical Band released a B-side song that the following year became an A-side hit, "Signs."

It reflected the growing spirit of freedom in that era, one that pushed back against boundaries that restricted people from living to their full potential.  In a country built on the idea of vast freedom and freedoms, this was a good thing.  Yet with most good things, the eradication of all boundaries is a step too far.  We need certain boundaries in society.  They provide definition and clarity.  There was a time when we dressed and behaved a certain way at church and then differently when we returned home Sunday afternoon.  We knew that certain types of talk were appropriate in the business place and others at the football game.  There was a common understanding, reinforced by parents and educators alike, of what was acceptable at school and what was not, and although fighting among children and teenagers has never been approved by adults, there was at least the sense among young people that should it occur, it must not take place in a school, for there would be swift and serious consequences.  As Ecclesiastes 3:1 puts it, "For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven."  It is why Jesus cast the moneychangers out of the temple, a reference I made in another post discussing the difference between the sacred and the profane and what difference that makes in education.

We may never know what led these young men to think that the appropriate next activity in their lives would be to fight inside North Central High School.  We may never know why one of them did not see it as inappropriate to stab his classmate in the halls of his school.  We must, however, work to reinforce with our children proper boundaries in their lives.  School is a place where people learn and grow.  It is place to try, to fail, and to try again.  It is a place to create and produce something new from what has been learned, and because this is true, there are certain behaviors and language that are appropriate within its walls.  Stabbing someone is not among them.

Sacred and Profane

Jesus Casting Out The Moneychangers At The Temple
Carl Bloch, 1800s

The English word "profane" is derived from two Latin words that mean "outside the temple."  In the most literal sense of the word, my typing these words is a profane activity to be distinguished from singing a hymn in church or celebrating holy communion.  Jesus took issue with the profane invading the sacred when He threw the moneychangers out of the temple.  It was not that there was something wrong with buying and selling, but rather that it had no place in the temple.

The distinction between the profane and the sacred has also had a much wider reach in society.  In most places and times there has been a sense that certain language, certain behavior, even certain dress was appropriate in one area of life but not in another.  Entering a conversation at a sporting event and, in an effort to gain clarity, asking, "How 'bout dem Colts?" is perfectly acceptable.  In another situation, "What do you think about those horses?" may be more fitting.  As one of my English teachers once said, "You wouldn't wear a tuxedo to clean the gutters."

Increasingly, however, the line between sacred and profane is being blurred, as are many of the other lines that give definition and character to our society.  Several years ago I wrote about the unfortunate need in one school district to tell teachers to be sober before reporting to work.  No, I am not making that up.  You can read about it here.  Based on what I saw a teacher recently post on social media, it would seem that another round of much and sadly needed training is required for some of our educators.

This teacher had shared a meme contrasting the national anthem of the United States with a pop song.  The former was described as being as old as s***, written by an unknown a**, boring as hell, and played at lame a** sporting events.  The latter apparently f***ing slaps and is played at lit a** parties.

I am not interested in writing a jingoistic post lauding "The Star Spangled Banner" above all songs, but I am concerned when a teacher has no qualms about sharing such a meme on social media.  A teacher who finds this appropriate has a far different understanding of what it means to be a teacher than can be found in the description of the high calling that most societies have attributed to those who lead children and that I recently wrote about here.

Not every thought that passes through our minds must be shared.  No matter how witty or cute or humorous we think something is, it may not need to be expressed through social media, and that is true whether or not someone is a follower of Jesus Christ.  Those who are, however, have further obligations.  As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 10:23, "'All things are lawful,' but not all things are helpful.  'All things are lawful,' but not all things build up."  In other words, just because we can does not mean we should.  Christians in particular must be careful of what they say and do not because their words and deeds are earning them salvation, but because those words and deeds will either enhance or detract from their witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ, and nothing, no matter how amusing it may seem, should ever stand in the way of that.