A glimpse inside Hillsdale College's network of classical schools across the country.
A few weeks ago, I attended one of our school’s quarterly House Games. I watched as students from our 7th through 12th grade upper school competed on teams against one another in a series of contests from flag football to nerf wars. Everywhere I looked, I saw students laughing, huddled in groups strategizing, and generally having a wonderful time with each other.…
“But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”– George Eliot, Middlemarch
To learn calculus is, at its core, to learn the rules of playing with infinity: the infinitely big and the infinitely small, or infinitesimal.…
Last month, my students performed their formal recitation for the semester in front of their parents. This is a day of great anticipation and, sometimes, anxiety for the students. When we had finished our performance and returned to our classroom, my whole class was a bundle of excitement, adrenaline, and relief. We still had about 10 minutes before they needed to head to music class, plenty of time to fit in some math fact review or to go over our spelling list.…
One of the benefits of being an educator is witnessing the students’ progress. Effective parent communication is one way to help foster that growth, helping to create an environment of support for the student. Communicating well allows parents to stay informed about their child’s advancements and allows them to support you as their child’s educator.
Communication can come in many forms, and implementing an array will help ensure its effectiveness.…
My third year teaching, I had a sophomore in my fifth period class who I’ll call Andrew. Andrew was one of those students who literally could not sit still. At his desk, his heels would rapidly tap the floor, causing his legs to frenetically bounce up and down. Simultaneously, his fingers, or the writing utensil they held, would be drumming on the top of his desk, his shoulders often bumping up and down to the rhythm.…
A few weeks ago at our faculty in-service week, I had a meeting with several of our grammar school teachers with the aim of discussing our alignment in our writing curriculum. At the time, this meeting felt rather routine. The faculty at our school are constantly holding meetings like this, both formal and impromptu, to ensure we are forming our students well to ready them for the next year’s curriculum or adjusting our grade’s instruction to appropriately support our students’ growth.…
The feeling of sounding like a broken record is one teachers are all-too-familiar with. Mathematicians may struggle with finding a number that accurately represents the times a middle school teacher has hushed chatty students or had to remind a young man to tuck in his shirt. In some ways, this constant reminding and training the habits of our students’ hearts and minds is unavoidable- in some ways it is the very core of our work as educators, so we should not expect to eradicate this experience from our professional lives. …
The education of citizens is an education in love. This assertion may strike some as strange, unless what is meant by the word “citizen” is properly understood. To be a citizen of a particular place is to say that place is your own and that you belong to that place. And if we agree with Aristotle’s understanding of human beings as “political animals”, then there cannot be a nation with a citizenry of one.…