A few thoughts on switching to a classical Christian school

(as a teacher)

David Shane @david_shane

The rebirth of classical education is going to produce some better-thinking adults. Can the country survive for twenty more years to wait for them?

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(Is that… an optimistic opening, or no?)

Hi all. I haven’t written a post in about a month here, in part because I’ve been busy with what is the subject of this post! At the end of Spring semester I was a professor of physics at Lansing Community College, a public community college here in Michigan. At the beginning of Fall I was a teacher of 7th-9th grade science and mathematics at Cedar Classical Academy, a classical Christian school also here in Michigan (which currently ends at 9th grade, but has been adding one grade per year as the students age up). I thought I’d write just a little bit about that change.

To head off one question, at least in terms of what might be called the “base academic content”, the change has not been as big as you might think. What I mean is that it is not as if, at LCC, I was teaching graduate level electrodynamics, and was thrown into teaching 7th grade science, but I have no idea how to teach at that level anymore. No, no. In fact, when I ended at LCC, I had been teaching introductory college physics for many years (which, dare I say it, is not terribly different from teaching a good 9th grade physics course), and also teaching another introductory science course that had as its primary audience future elementary school teachers. Therefore it feels more like God had been preparing me to make this switch.

But, one does notice various things when you make the switch… and some might have more to do with teaching younger ages than teaching at a classical Christian school per se, but here are some personal reflections.

How long does that take, again?

Something I’ve told a few people now is that suddenly I need to figure out how long things take again! At LCC, I had taught the same courses for long enough that if you had asked me, on the first day of class in August, “so what will you be doing in class on November 14th at 1:37 PM?”… I could have pretty much told you. I had the schedule down. Now I’m figuring that all out again. I worked out some tentative schedules for my Cedar classes before the year began, but at the moment we’re way ahead in 7th grade math and significantly behind in 9th grade math. Well, we’ll figure it out.

Side comment, but one of my professors in grad school was Carl Bender, who taught us mathematical physics. Brilliant guy. And I remember that every lecture he gave fit exactly and perfectly in the time period allotted for class. It was like he told you a story every class period, and that story began at the beginning of class, and the conclusion wrapped up just as the class time was ending. How can you do that perfectly every single time? Well he was brilliant, but he was also human, and I suspect that the first time he taught the class, it wasn’t like that at all. But do it enough times and you figure it out.

No, we’re going to stop and get this right.

This one is on my mind because I’m returning our first 8th grade mathematics exams today and the students did… OK. But, said with a little hyperbole, I feel a pressure to make them perfect that I did not really feel teaching college. When you teach college, you’re teaching adults. They decide how much they want to study and how much they care, maybe this is going to be the final science course of their life and all they care about is getting through it, and so on. And so you teach them well, I hope, and you give them their exam, and grade their exam, and give it back… and if they did terribly, it is really on them now to talk to you about it if that’s appropriate, or change their behavior for the next exam.

But at Cedar now, and yes some of the 8th graders, who are imperfect humans even at a good school friends, answered some of the questions in a way that indicated they really did not understand what they were doing… no, whether in class or out of class or some combination, we need to get this right. This is not your terminal mathematics course, for one, you’re going to be using this stuff for several more years at a minimum, this cannot just be “oh well, we tried, onto the next subject”. But there is also a sort of different teacher responsibility than if you’re teaching adults. No, we need to get this right. Let’s figure out where the lack is and fix this.

Or similarly, also turning back a 9th grade Algebra II exam today, and they did quite well… but still with some vaguely worded answers. And we’re not just going to let that go (and indeed, precision in speech and writing is something I’m trying to emphasize). I know your thinking, dear student, is better than what you wrote down. So write me down something better and get it back to me.

Jury duty and forming whole people

A couple of weeks ago I had jury duty for the first time in my life. I could write a bit about the things I appreciated in that process too. Our present day, “trust the experts” political class would not design a legal system in which you had a right to a jury of your peers. They like to use the word “democracy” sure, but really they despise the whole idea. The jury on which I served was for an alleged crime that took place within the city of East Lansing, so the accused got, literally, six randomly chosen residents of East Lansing who would decide whether he was guilty or not guilty. Six random residents? Why those people aren’t experts, why should they have any power?! But that is our system, constructed by men who had greater respect for “democracy”, generally defined, than we do today.

But anyway, because I am teaching at a school for children, if you will, that cares about forming humans in every way, and I am not just popping into a classroom to teach adults science, I thought it perfectly appropriately to “steal” some time from a 9th grade math class and a 7th-8th grade science class to talk about my jury duty. And that went very well. The 7th-8th graders in particular probably peppered me with questions for 20 minutes, and they were good questions. Would’ve never happened in college, but that was time well spent. I appreciate that our larger and more wholistic concerns in this school give implicit permission to “go beyond the syllabus”, you might say.

But… how long to let us chase these rabbits?

Did I mention the students ask a lot of questions? Now some of them are a little silly and represent a younger person who enjoys the posing of silly questions (and I didn’t get much of that in college either!). But many of them are excellent and I’m still trying to figure out how much time to spend chasing rabbits down a side trail.

So, for example, last week in 7th-8th grade physical science we were talking about energy. (And I did enjoy sharing Feynman’s story about Dennis the Menace where conservation of energy is explained by analogy to toy blocks, if you know it - that they will remember.) Their textbook has this somewhat odd section about “where is the energy?”, and (while adding plenty of my own commentary, especially in science) I am covering the book with them. And one of the “places” you “find energy” mentioned by the author is the cosmic microwave background radiation. If you don’t know, basically, if you point a microwave receiver in any direction, you pick up these low energy microwaves which apparently fill all of space. They are commonly understood (and their textbook does mention this) as evidence for big bang cosmology, the microwaves representing a sort of afterglow from the big bang explosion.

So I mention all of this and… of course that prompts a lot of questions. “Isn’t it a problem to believe that something came from nothing?” There are some good classically trained students for you. But there were also questions about how hot the explosion would have been, and what the future evolution of the universe would be (“big crunch” v. “big freeze” stuff if you know that terminology), and also some ridiculing of the idea that anyone could believe in the big bang. And that last one did bother me a bit because, of course, many Christian scientists do, and at a minimum we should understand their position and take it seriously.

But from a teaching perspective in the moment, this is a little hard, because I am here today to talk about energy. And, while I know many things in my head, I didn’t really show up that day prepared as I would be for a big discussion about big bang cosmology! (This is, by the way, a nice example for why, even in an internet age, you need to teach children to know things, and not just teach them how to look things up - life will throw many situations at you where you won’t be able to look anything up before giving an answer. Having all the knowledge in your head also allows you to synthesize it in ways people looking it all up cannot.) So this is something I’m still figuring out. I think we are planning, for their 10th grade science course, something we’ve been calling “natural philosophy / astronomy”, details yet to be decided far as I know where, among other things, some of these cosmological questions can be considered more intentionally and seriously.

Free to be a Christian

I’m saying perhaps the most important thing last here but… of course it is nice to be with an institution where you are free to be a Christian. There are some practical benefits to that, like “there is a 0% chance that HR is going to subject me to a training on gender identity” (if Cedar even had an HR department). But it matters a lot in the classroom and, because I’m still new here, I still have moments of “internal surprise” where you have this moment of “oh right, we can actually talk about that question here, and should”.

So, for example, we’ve had some excellent discussions in physics about the different ways we know truth all of which are, really, infused with matters of faith. Or, the discussion is a little wimpy (and in my arrogance I am sensing an opportunity to write some better, and more updated-to-address-specifically-modern-cultural-problems, Christian science textbooks), but their physical science textbook author identifies the universe as being composed of matter, energy, and intelligence… and you know, swap intelligence for the related information, and even many secular scientists would follow him in claiming that there is something special about information, perhaps even a principle of “conservation of information”. (Do black holes destroy information?) We’ve had some nice speculative side discussions as well about, for example, did “pain” exist before the Fall? (It’s a geological and a biological question, in part. What is the purpose of pain? Were there sharp rocks before the Fall? Could Adam have stepped on one, and what would have been the result?!!) It is all, aside from being hopefully helpful, also a lot of fun that I would not have had at LCC.

Anyway, I am certainly enjoying the chance to bring more religion and philosophy into the science and mathematics classroom.

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