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Welcome to the Week of August 31
Warm Greetings, Griffin Families,
Our first few weeks are in the books! I am so proud to be at a school that provides refuge free from distractions of pop culture and outside noise and is dedicated to authentic learning. We are so grateful to the parents who joined us Thursday night for our annual Curriculum Night. Our teachers showed parents what it feels like for their children to be in their classroom every day and gave them a taste of our rich and timeless curriculum and vibrant classroom culture. In each class, parents were challenged with worthwhile questions to pursue, problems to solve, poetry to read, science demonstrations to observe, and Socratic seminars to participate in. Thank you for a delightful evening!
For those families who could not attend, I would like to share some “highlights” from my opening remarks on Our Classical Curriculum.
What’s the Classical difference? It is captured by our mission statement: to cultivate the hearts and minds of our students through the pursuit of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.
Our mission has several implications, three I’d like to highlight. First, our teachers rely on tried-and-true methods rather than trendy or experimental practices. Our methods are directed toward forming virtuous habits of mind and body, such as requiring students to use pens and pencils on paper rather than laptops or tablets, asking students to build up their own personal libraries of classics and coaching them on how to meaningfully take notes in these texts as they read, explicit study of grammar both in English, Latin, and modern languages, the use of Socratic seminars, classical debates, and public orations, teaching math qua math by reasoning through patterns, problems, and proofs and dealing mostly with pure forms, among other practices.
Secondly, we provide individualized attention within a common, one-track curriculum. Just as Olympic athletes pursue excellence by completing a coherent course of study using tried-and-true methods, our students similarly pursue excellence in mind and heart. Each grade level builds deliberately upon the last, allowing students to grow in knowledge, intellectual habits, and independence from seventh grade through graduation. We offer this all-around training because we believe every student has the capacity to learn all the liberal arts, sciences, mathematics through Calculus, and fine arts. We do not offer narrow tracks because early specialization offers only partial fulfillment of a student’s potential. Every student is held to high standards, which means every student tackles vigorous subjects like calculus, four years of lab science, participating in choir performances, studio art shows, and drama productions, and reading roughly 60 core literary and primary texts across grades 7 through 12! You can review our curricular sequence here.
Thirdly, we choose flourishing over fragility, or as another Great Hearts headmaster describes it, we teach “children the fruit of longsuffering.” As Toyin Atolagbe writes, “a child who reads a genuinely difficult text, rather than one pre-chewed for easy comprehension, is practicing forbearance…Whether a child is annotating a dense page, reciting fifty lines of poetry from memory, declining a Latin noun through five cases for the tenth time, or working through a math algorithm that refuses to resolve on the first attempt, they are doing the same work. None of it is cruelty; rather, it is sacred toil because a soul does not learn to bear weight by never being asked to carry any.” Our goal is to shape character, which comes from habituation—doing the hard, repeated thing until it becomes who we are. Character is not produced by ease but formed through rightly ordered challenge inside a stable community of friends. “This is what we are actually asking of our children when we ask them to suffer well, in small supervised, faithful doses. Not suffering as an end, but suffering as a seed, borne now, in the safety of a classroom and a parent’s watchful presence, so that it yields a harvest of endurance, humility, and hope no shortcut could ever produce. This is why we teach children to suffer well, so that when the larger, less supervised sufferings of adult life arrive, as they always do, our children will meet them already practiced, already strengthened, and already equipped to turn hardship into the very fruit that sets a life up for lasting success” (Atolagbe, Teaching Children the Fruit of Longsuffering).
Classical Teachers. They are the mentors, the guides, the coaches that make the curriculum and formative project come alive! The faculty is the school. I am so proud of the brilliant men and women who work so diligently to serve you and your students. I have searched far and wide to hire teachers who are masters of their disciplines, who understand and live the school’s mission, who love young people, and who can act as exemplary role models for your children. Our teachers are morally, intellectually, and aesthetically alive, and they are the most important daily leaders and shapers of intellectual and ethical culture on our campus.
Thank you for your partnership. It has been an excellent start to the year.
Onwards and Upwards!
With devotion,
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