Intellectus Conlectio V

On the final day, most of us grumping a little all week that there was so little on the praxis side of the teaching, we got our ears full of what this looks like in the classroom. The first need was to summarize where we had been. If… …teaching is a process that entails leading students from the Theatre of Glory to the Person of Christ and… …using all the modes of knowing is the most excellent way to lead the student to this high knowledge and… …recovering Poetic knowledge is a part of this excellent way and… …the Seven Liberal arts are to be the skills acquired by our student and… …joining mythos with logos to produce fully rounded thinkers is our goal… Then… … we must develop lessons that accomplish these things. … the vision of the school must be broken down into its constituents areas of concern (what are the skills, content, and concepts we are pursuing – see Adler’s Paiedia Program for these three pillars). … the Curr Committee must be working with the faculty to develop specific goals at several hierarchical levels so that when planning the individual lesson, the teacher is planting a tree that is part of the school’s forest. James D. showed us specific examples of what such lessons looked like in Kindergarten. It is up to each school to first flesh out their specific vision (using Logos, or Veritas, or Westminster stuff will not flesh out our school’s vision) before they can move to these specifics. JD is more than willing to share his school’s stuff as templates, but photocopying will not work out into reality. To summarize, I will use the same analogy I used at the Conlectio. Having watched Babbette’s Feast (a foreign movie) the night before, I was prepared by it for this picture. I engorged myself on a multi-course meal this past week, with appropriate fellowship and well-selected wines to go with it. I am overly full at the moment and need the time to digest it. We have formed up a yahoo group to keep the conversation going. I will be figuring out how much, how soon, and in what manner these discussions this week will become fleshed out in the life of CCS. What a great week!