Brilliance

Dominus Illuminatio Mea

The world is littered with intelligent people who are not brilliant. Smart people who are arrogant. Skilled people who are selfish. Experts who are morally corrupt.

Sometime in the 1700′s the word “bright” began to be used to describe intelligence. Before that it was only used to refer to something that has a shiny quality. Both meanings are important for our purposes at TCS. We are hopeful that our students would be shiny, intelligent people–those who radiate with the brilliance of God.

The people in education who have had the most dramatic impact on me are the ones whose intelligence is brilliant. They have a way of bringing the most mundane subjects to life. They don’t just relay knowledge–they function as vessels of the infinite brilliance of God. They recognize that life is a series of steady miraculous moments in which we should be steadily wowed were we not so indifferent.

It is fairly simple to distinguish between the intelligent and the brilliant in this sense. The intelligent are happy they know what they know and happy for you to hear about it. The brilliant are happy to know some of what God knows and happy to help you access that yourself. Listening to a brilliant person makes you want to learn/worship. Listening to an intelligent person makes you want to sleep. The British seem to have a more effective use of this word. When they say “that’s brilliant,” they tend to mean it is both genius and stimulating.

Brilliance is a great word for the classical Christian education agenda. We are certainly investing towards intelligence, but praying desperately that God would grow a brilliance in our students. Our Latin motto this year is “Dominus illuminatio mea,” the Lord is my light. This is a phrase we have put forth hoping students will own it more and more through the years. Not only that the Lord would be their source of truth, but also their source of the brilliance.

One of our teachers recently relayed some information she thought I would enjoy about a student who was having trouble staying on topic. Apparently this student, who is in one of our younger grades, would raise his hand in the middle of math lessons to announce things like “God is the light of the world,” or “God loves you and you and you and you,” pointing around the room. I did enjoy this. I enjoyed it because little scenarios like this force the issue. In a public school it’s an awkward situation, in our school these comments are every bit relevant to any subject being studied. These comments could never really be considered off topic at TSC.

We pray that TCS students will be bright, knowing the Lord is our light, our Truth, our only hope of brilliance.

Recommendations

Great children’s literature is not easy to come by. At TCS, we are committed to the classics, but age appropriate classics do not exist in abundance for children who are consuming literature rapidly. It is fairly easy to get through the major body of classic children’s literature during the grammar years, leaving children to either go through some of them again or find something more modern to read.

Classical education is not seeking simply to expose children to old literature, but rather good literature. As we choose modern literature for our children to read, we are looking for books that defined by truth, goodness, and beauty–books that could become classics themselves based on their quality.

I’d like to provide a few modern recommendations from time to time that I feel fit into this category.  Here are three which our family has enjoyed. All of these also happen to have a strong Biblical motif as well.

Wise Words: After struggling to find good self-contained, Biblically inspired bedtime stories, Peter Leithart began to write his own. Dr. Leithart has taught theology and literature at New Saint Andrews College and is currently a pastor.

Wise Words contains 18 stories written in the tradition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Each story can be read in about 10 minutes which makes it wonderful for a quick read aloud before bedtime. Similar to Aesop’s Fables, each story ends with a succinct moral, but in this case, directly from the Book of Proverbs.

Also similar to the great fables, these stories do not always have a warm and cozy ending. They are written eloquently and imaginatively but with the intention of cultivating Biblical wisdom, incorporating some of the hard lessons from Proverbs.

The Wilderking Trilogy: This series contains an imaginative fantasy rendition of the life of King David. Jonathan Rogers is a skilled writer who is very much interested in providing today’s children with great literature in the vein of Lewis, MacDonald, Tolkien, etc.

Our children were completely captivated through the entire  series. These books contain a tribe of people called “feechies” who are human in nature, but animal-like in the ways they live. For the few months following the completion of these books, our boys had one goal in life… to live like a feechie.

The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane: You may be familiar with Kate Dicamillo if you have heard of the book The Tale of Despereaux, which was later adapted into a movie. Although Dicamillo does not have  a reputation as a Christian author, Edward Tulane can hardly be read as anything other than an allegory of the life of Christ. For those with eyes to see, the Biblical imagery is powerful and beautifully crafted. I highly recommend all of Dicamillo’s novels. If you have not read The Tale of Despereaux, you really should as well. The movie does no justice.

We have enjoyed plenty of great modern literature through the years and I plan to continue to share more great finds along the way.

Grades

Grades can be tricky. It doesn’t matter if our child is five or fifteen, we want them to do well. We want them to do better than well. What follows is an attempt to explain a bit of the philosophy behind grading at TCS. Hopefully this will help us not make too much or too little out of our students’ report cards.

Let’s zoom out before we zoom in. There is no Biblical precedent for what your first grader needs to know before entering the second grade. I could not comfortably say that our conviction that your second grader should be reading about 90 words per minute is one that God is too concerned with. Grade levels are man made and so are all the objectives that come along with them. Before we take a report card too seriously, for better or worse, we must keep in perspective that it is God who develops our children. His timeline is usually not the same as ours.

The curriculum is designed to bring students along with a certain amount of expected progress. Sometimes it works out like we planned it, sometimes it doesn’t. Each student is developing academically through a combination of classroom cultivation, home cultivation, and Holy Spirit cultivation. To speak metaphorically; teacher and co-teacher can plant seeds, water, and tend to growth, but there will always be core growth that is contingent upon God’s sovereign cultivation.

So if your child is advanced, rejoice, but do so in humility because no matter how excellent your homeschool sessions are, it is God who does the growing. If your child is struggling, take a deep breath and relax. Be faithful with your part and know that God’s timing is more important than our professional assessments of where your child “should” be at a given age. We are hopeful that TCS families will keep the big picture in view as we walk our children through their education.

Zooming in closer, the standards we have set are more or less on par with the norms that have been set by schools aiming to hold students accountable to their full potential. The bar is raised a little higher than normal at TCS. This is due to the rigorous vision of classical education and the focused educational attention each student receives within the University-Model. We use the E-G-N grading system in the lower grammar school in order to trigger a different evaluation standard during the first years of education. We use a standard ABCF scale for upper grammar, eliminating plus and minus nuancing until logic school.

The grammar years are developmental and the learning curve is steep. We feel it is most appropriate to provide three simple categories for assessing each student’s progress in early grammar. In relation to a student’s abilities in each discipline, students are either progressing: much faster than the norm (E), at or around the average rate (G), or significantly slower than the norm (N).

Part of the reason we assign these values is because we want you to think differently about grades at the grammar stage. There is no real point in giving your third grader an 86 because that value cannot mean very much at such an age. It is fun for a student to get a “100” on an assignment. We want this for them. But at the grammar stage, we don’t want them necessarily to feel differently about a 100 versus a 96. After all, we are working towards the value of knowledge as it relates to understanding as it relates wisdom. A 100 on an assignment can have everything or nothing to do with the ultimate goal of wisdom.

Also, we want avoid the mentality that our students “just aren’t” something academically or behaviorally. Not only is it way to early to determine what our students will be good at down the road, we want to avoid them resolving to pursue math over literature or history over science. The classical vision is that they would have equal value for all subjects even if they end up being more gifted for one.

In summary, teacher and co-teacher should work together to track and assess the progress of a student. We should be mindful of objective grade level norms, and intentional in our attempts to pursue excellence in relation to these. We should also be reverent. Education is a lifelong calling. It is a context for worship, not an annual race to an imaginary finish line.

Product

Each month, interested families attend Informational Meetings that we hold at TCS. At these meetings, we try to fit everything anyone would ever need to know about TCS into a one-hour presentation so that families can make an informed decision about applying.

At the end of these meetings we have an open forum for questions. Many of the same questions are asked each month. There is one question in particular that gets asked often, but usually is reserved for private discussion after the meeting.

This happened again recently. A parent approached me at the close of the meeting, fumbling for the most inoffensive way to ask the question. “How do you know… I mean… what proof is there… have you seen compared to other schools… um?” What this parent wanted to know is… how do we know this Christ-centered, classical, University-Model education is going to produce excellent students according to state standards?

It’s a fair question, and it is a question I would expect parents to ask. It’s not offensive. For parents who are being exposed to the model for the first time, it might feel like the door-to-door salesman technique used often these days. The salesman throws you the line that neighbors Smith, Jones, and Wilson down the street just purchased Miracle Grout Cleaner, as if the fact that your neighbors got suckered will compel you to purchase something that you have zero confidence will benefit you in any way.

There are many ways to answer the question head-on. Both classical and University-Model schools are constantly outtesting public and private progressive model schools on standardized tests and the SAT. When you combine the two (classical and University-Model), the results tend to become even more potent.

The proof is also in the pudding right here at TCS. We will administer standardized tests in late spring, but even before this, it is easy to see the fruit of the model in the capabilities of our current students. I usually encourage parents who ask this question to participate in a Class Tour.

I have to admit, though, that this question and these answers make me wonder if the heart of the conversation is off base. When the chief concern in education is “what is your school capable of producing,” and the product we are evaluating is purely academic as associated with state standards, it seems we have drifted from the point.

There is only one ultimate product we are hoping for from the education we offer. We want to produce worshippers, students who come out on the other end understanding that the true end of education is a more informed worship. The invitation to enroll at TCS is not primarily about superior academics as the gateway to superior job as the gateway to superior income as the gateway to superior person.

The invitation to enroll at TCS is extended to families who view education in the context of the Kingdom of God. By this I mean families who are seeking a Christ-centered school because Christ must be exalted in the center of education as the One from whom all things hold together (Colossians 1:17). They are seeking a classical school because they want their children to be immersed in what is good, true, and beautiful, not just efficient. And they want a University-Model school because they want it to be themselves, the PARENTS, owning this process and seeing it through.

The degree to which we gain a reputation for having superior academics, must be simply as a “product” of being committed wholeheartedly to these things, not out of a desire for academic prestige or to beat the progressives at the education game.

I would be lying if I said I do not think about how we measure up to other schools. I would also be lying if I said I am not concerned with being excellent academically. But Christ-centered education means we are committed to being centered in Him and re-centered in Him over and over through the years. I’m interested in TCS families challenging each other to strive for an eduction for our children that is fueled by Christ, filled with Christ, and sustained by Christ. I have faith that our commitment to this will result in a product that is eternal.

But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. (Matthew 6:33)

Neil Anderson
Head of School
Trinity Classical School

Rock of Ages

I don’t know if you realize it, but your children are singing about blood and wrath and nakedness and death every morning at TCS, the very things we normally try to keep from their eyes and ears at this age. It’s really very strange when you think about it objectively. We’re used to it, but make no mistake, it’s strange.

I have a vivid memory of reading through the Old Testament with my first child for the first time. My initial excitement for beginning our journey through the Scriptures was quickly met with dilemma. Blood, nakedness, wrath, death. I remember pausing to think and her prompting me, “Keep going, Dad. Why did you stop?” I was having an argument with myself in my head while she was waiting for me to continue. Does she really need to know that Cain actually killed Abel? Maybe I’ll just say he called him a really mean word. Yeah, that’s it, a really mean word.

While children’s versions of the Bible certainly “childrenize” the content, the good ones keep enough in to still present a dilemma and the bad ones leave enough out to misconstrue the whole story. On top of that, they have pictures and pictures make it worse. The one I had at the time was filled with images of God’s people crying throughout the entire Old Testament.

The dilemma continued once she was out of diapers and then worsened when she began to read for herself and wanted her own Bible. I had anticipated parental anxiety about my daughter’s exposure to a lot of different things, but never the Bible. She received her own “big girl” Bible soon after she began to read on her own. By “big girl” I mean the one with the full story in it. We gave it to her, prayed for her, and gave her some guidance on how to read it. And then we prayed for ourselves that God would secure her in His Word and look after her. I felt better. I went to bed, closed my eyes, remembered the story of Lot, snuck back into her room, tore out a few pages, and then went back to bed.

As we continued to have children and continued to read the Bible to them, we continued to evolve in our attitude towards the dilemma. Our children will be exposed to the hard realities of life at an early age through various means; a conversation you wish they wouldn’t have had, a movie you wish you wouldn’t have let them watch, a scene with the neighbors you wish they would not have witnessed. I didn’t really tear pages out of my daughter’s Bible. While I still don’t believe you should be completely uninhibited with your Scripture reading to a 3-year-old, I do believe that the Scriptures are a wonderful place for first encounters with the hard realities of life. They are a wonderful place because they are the life-giving truth of God. And they are a wonderful place because you are right there with them in these encounters; talking to them, explaining to them, easing them slowly into a world that is in desperate need of redemption.

Monday morning, our 5-year-olds will sing about blood and wrath and nakedness and death. Here is why.

Rock of Ages summed up by stanza:

Stanza 1

The blood of Jesus not only protects us from the wrath of a holy God, but endears us to Him as His own. (the double-cure)

Stanza 2

There is not a single thing we can do to make everything wrong in us right. God makes it right by grace alone.

Stanza 3

We are like infants in God’s hands, depending on him for survival.

Stanza 4

Christ when I’m born, Christ when I die, Christ forever more.

Counter-cultural

Trinity Classical School is counter-cultural by its very nature. Education, culturally speaking, is a system implemented to keep children occupied during the week (while mom and dad work) with academic routines that will ultimately give them the skills they need to work themselves, while their children go to school. Our motto this year “Non scholae sed vitae discimus – we do not learn for school, but for life,” was chosen because it expresses our desire to view education as our life calling, our worship. We’ve re-envisioned how we do “school” based on the refusal to treat education as the broader culture does.

This vision for school will end up affecting many of the little things we do. Nothing in our school will be done just because “that’s what you do in school.” It will only be done if it makes sense in light of our mission to help students grow in wisdom and apply knowledge in the light of God’s truth.

Our most recent cultural norm to go through this filter is Valentine’s Day. Now, to be clear, there is nothing wrong with Valentine’s day. I love Valentine’s Day. I view myself as a romantic and I hope my wife would agree. But celebrating Valentine’s Day with my wife and facilitating a Valentine’s Day celebration for 50 children are two very different things.

“Saint” Valentine’s Day was at one time associated with several of the martyred saints of ancient Rome, but in middle ages, transitioned into a day of celebrating intimate love. And that is what it is today–a day to celebrate romantic love.

Our students have much to learn about love in the context of their education. They don’t, however, have much to celebrate about romantic love yet. It seems that passing out Valentines, the children’s version of love notes, and candy hearts that say “be mine” would only confuse the difficult times we have ahead of discipling our children in Biblical romantic love. Surely we could play along and have a day of celebrating friendships, and that would be fine, but when it comes to cultural traditions like Valentines Day, Santa Claus, and the Easter Bunny, we would rather have parents discern how they will treat these within their own families.

On February 14 everyone will know it’s Valentine’s Day. Some teachers will be facilitating Valentine’s Day oriented activities and I’m sure one of our young romantics will sneak a valentine exchange. However, as a school, we will not be making time for Valentine’s Day parties, hoping that our intentional decision will bless our children.

School Valentine’s parties are just one of the many things that won’t pass through the filter for our school. Not because there is anything wrong with them, more because there doesn’t seem to be much right with them for our children. Our on-campus school days are few and we hope to be as intentional with them as possible. We don’t assume that everyone will be exactly on the same page with us on each one of these decisions. We simply hope that TCS families trust that all the little decisions we make are done thoughtfully, prayerfully, and with God’s glory and our children’s joy in mind.

Edmund

Children are generally predictable. When it comes to literature, they like who they are supposed to like and hate who they are supposed to hate. For our Magician’s Nephew party, we had about 70% Aslan costumes, as I would expect of Peter Pan or Huck Finn costumes if we were reading those respective works.

As we now work our way through The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, you can be sure that our young minds are day dreaming of leading the charge like Peter, standing for the truth like Lucy, or being courageous like Susan. And surely this was Lewis’ hope. We love Lewis for giving us virtuous characters who we would love for our children to emulate.

We should also be thankful that Lewis not only gives us characters who represent what we are called to be, but also those who remind us of who we really are. Although I can guarantee you no one will dress up as Edmund for our  TLWW Party, Edmund Pevensie is the character Lewis has intended to most closely resemble us. The spirit of Edmund is in play as our boys fight to be first in line and steal each others milk during snack time; when our girls say hurtful things and brag about their latest accomplishments.

I think our students realize there is something strangely familiar about Edmund in these early chapters. But identifying oneself as Edmund is like listening to a recorded version of your own voice or looking at yourself in an upscale dressing room mirror; strange and unpleasant.

The early version of Edmund’s character exists to remind us that we are radically selfish and our natural propensity is towards self satisfaction/exaltation, even if it comes at the expense of others. The difficulty is getting our children to see this. Reading the book as an adult is much different than experiencing it as a child. Right now, Edmund is just  the character they know they don’t like, the mirror is probably not working.

The book will do it’s job though, it always does. They will hate Edmund, then they will sympathize with him, and ultimately they will admire him in the books to come. The difference is Aslan, always Aslan. The narrator’s description of Edmund’s first Aslan encounter is simple:

As soon as they had breakfasted they all went out, and there they saw Aslan and Edmund walking together in the dewy grass, apart from the rest of the court. There is no need to tell you (and no one ever heard) what Aslan was saying, but is was a conversation which Edmund never forgot. As the others drew nearer Aslan turned to meet them, bringing Edmund with him.

“Here is your brother,” he said, “and–there is no need to talk to him about what is past.”

Edmund shook hands with each of the others and said to them each in turn, “I’m sorry,” and everyone said, “that’s alright.”

What was actually said is left to our imaginations, but whatever it was, we can be sure it was exactly what Edmund needed to hear.

Edmund is not a true hero in this book. But he is probably the character we would want our children to pay the closest attention to. I’d encourage you to spend some time prying with your children. Ask them what they think of Edmund at this point in the book. Ask them why he has made the choices he has thus far. Ask them if they have ever acted like Edmund. And later, when we get there, ask them what made Edmund change.