Another Week in the Books in Room 106

Another week in the books in Room 106. For 7th grade, it meant looking at the Greeks and the Persians and the famous battle of the 300 Spartans.  We've looked at what it took to build the kind of commitment that made soldiers stand to the last man in face of incredible odds against the juggernaut army of the Persians, and learned that the lives of Spartan boys in the fifth century B.C. were considerably tougher than the lives of CCS students today.  It took a lifetime of toughness and brutality to create the kind of soldiers Leonidas led.

For eighth graders, we've been looking at the runup to the American War for Independence, and today we sat with our eyes closed for a few moments trying to consider what circumstances might lead citizens of Conway today to believe it a viable solution to go home, open the gun safe, and head out into Laurel Park or Simon Park to engage the authorities in open combat like those colonists at Lexington and Concord did on that day.  We are examining ten years of increasing conflict and erosion of the native rights of Englishmen that had been guaranteed to those colonists in their colonial charters, and we are discussing the biblical admonition in Romans 13:1 to "be subject to the governing authorities." Hmmm.  How does that square with the idea of revolution?  It's a good discussion, and one that will continue next week.

Finally, in 10th grade World History, we turned a corner from Greece and touched on the Intertestamental Period (what was going on between Malachi and Matthew, anyway?) We looked at the Jews from the time of the Persians, who allowed the them to return to Jerusalem to rebuild the Temple, and watched the successors of Alexander the Great remake the Middle East in the image of Greece.  Hellenization profoundly affected the culture in which the Jews lived.  We observed the "evangelical paganism" of the Seleucids as Antiochus IV Epiphanes forced Jews to sacrifice to Zeus or be tortured or killed, and brought a pig into the Jewish Temple to be offered as a sacrifice to Zeus on the Altar of Burnt Offering.  The aftermath was slaughter.  We also looked at the translation of the Septuagint, and the origins of the Jewish festival of Hannakah.

A common thread is that the people in the history books were like us.  They lived their lives, worked hard, loved their families—in challenging circumstances subject to authorities who made decisions that profoundly affected their day-to-day lives.  They were drawn into the vortex of forces out of their control, and sometimes they made difficult and frightening decisions based on their convictions, while under the influence of those more powerful than themselves.

The search for meaning in all the history continues. I don't consider it my job to tell students the answers every question that studying history raises, but rather to help them discover how many questions can be asked, to encourage them to be careful evaluators of information and insightful questioners themselves, in the context of history as God's narrative.  In addition, I just love a good story.  Not all students will love the academic discipline of history, but if I can help them imagine themselves in another place and time, that will please me as well.  Thanks for trusting us with them.

This Week in Room 106: Resilience and Recovery

This week we’ve struggled a bit. After starting out on Monday with a plan, I became unexpectedly ill and missed two days, during which my plan got derailed and the continuity was interrupted for the students.  Apologies, certainly, but there’s a life lesson there for us all:  sometimes we have to drop back and punt. I’m still coughing and wheezing mightily, but I’m spending this morning amid piles of paper and plan on returning caught up on Monday. We’ll recover. Give me another day or so and all grades should be up to date.

I continue to be impressed with your children. Each class is a Duke’s mixture, of course:  students for whom everything seems easy alongside those who struggle to do each task, those to whom every issue seems to loom with great importance, and those who have difficulty getting motivated about any academic task.

After dealing with a couple of discipline issues that were disappointing early this week, I’ve observed indications of maturity and recovery that revealed a lot about who your young people are growing to be, and it has really encouraged me. Resilience is a quality that serves us all well, so I hope we are learning lessons that make us move on gracefully from moments of perceived failure, and those times when our life plans will inevitably be interrupted — such as by illness or other unexpected detours. 

I’d like to leave you with a piece of wisdom from my 87-year-old former educator father, who has watched a lot of young people through a lot of years of growing.

Nobody knows what a boy is worth,

and the world must wait and see;

for every man in an honored place,

is a boy that used to be.

~Phillips Brooks

God is not finished with them yet.