 As I began a new administrative job a few years ago, I was introduced to a new form of teaching evaluation–at least, new to me. It was a three page long self-evaluation form. It might be startling to some, but in twenty plus years as an educator, both public and private, I had not been part of a system that had used written reflection as part of an annual performance evaluation. I was eager to try it.
After observing in classrooms as an administrator, I filled out a form for each teacher while my teachers filled out their own. It felt hospitable. “You evaluate yourself, and I will too.” We met and exchanged papers, reading through comments and discussing them page by page. We were all new to the practice. Some teachers left their comment sections blank while others left copious notes. Those who filled in every comment box were often harsh on themselves while those who left entire pages blank didn’t see a need for it, revealing much by omission. Both choices allowed for good discussions, but I quickly realized that two forms versus one still left a gap. The two-part system was fair and decent, but I wondered how much we could gauge, or better yet, how much we should. Measures require standards, and we need concrete measures in our employee records. My husband has filled out dozens of these forms for decades in the IT world. In business, a good employee is a productive one. Standardized years ago, words like integrity, accountability, timeliness, leadership, dedication, populate any annual performance review. The key is in the title since entire sections ask how well you maintained the company vision. Did you increase scale and scope? Did you step up to challenges? Did you architect projects? Did you streamline support? Did you handle requirements? Were you, in fact, productive for the mighty corporation? However, an annual performance review or regular feedback can only measure a handful of character traits and job skills, never the whole person. I’m convinced no evaluation truly can, nor should it, if we look at work alone. I must manage my teachers in one sense, but how do I measure part of a person if my chief goal is success? Is success my chief goal? It might sound strange, but I am not looking for a new evaluation form for myself or my teachers. I don’t need another checklist with skills, observations, behaviors, virtues or vices. How should I really assess a person? Or more importantly, how do I think about measuring myself and others? As Dorothy Sayers said in her 1942 essay “Why Work?”, we might need a “thoroughgoing revolution in our whole attitude toward work."  In first grade, I had the misfortune of being the first left-handed student Mrs. Posey had ever taught. I sat in the front row by her desk “because you’re different,” she huffed. My five-year-old mind thought she was an ancient grump. She grumbled when she “had to” give me a pair of left-handed scissors. She grumbled when she corrected my pencil position. I felt her glare at the slant of my letters.
I was plain scared of her, and I’m pretty sure others were too. Whether Mrs. Posey knew it or not, her classroom had a culture. Every first grade classroom does. Every type of classroom, in fact, has structure, routine, and expectations, intentional or not. And the teacher is the core of that culture. Mandi Gerth’s Thoroughness and Charm: Cultivating the Habits of a Classical Classroom addresses this very issue. Classroom culture may develop accidentally, but the truth is that a neutral classroom does not exist. Although her apologia is intended for classical Christian educators, Gerth speaks to all teachers: “To be great teachers, we must do so consciously and intentionally, for we cannot avoid crafting culture, and we must be careful of the message we send." . . .  “If the condition of man is to be progressively ameliorated, as we fondly hope and believe, education is to be the chief instrument in effecting it.” —Thomas Jefferson to M.A. Jullien, 1818
For better or worse, education can shape who we are, and Thomas Jefferson knew that. In the midst of the American Revolution, he determined that the Commonwealth of Virginia should have a system of education, one that offered learning opportunities to more children. My high school students were positive, however, that Jefferson believed in education for everyone. After studying William Hogelund’s Declaration: The Nine Tumultuous Weeks When America Became Independent, May 1-July 4, 1776, they saw Jefferson as a type of unsung hero for his hand in drafting the Declaration at such a young age. They also saw fit to laud him as the first American for equal rights in education. Surely they had heard that somewhere. It sounded like a generalization to me, but my recollection was rusty. Had Jefferson fought for such rights? In Virginia, he had served for years in the House of Delegates and as governor for a time before becoming President. What had Thomas Jefferson said in all of his many letters? Did his view change over time? . . .  Wendell Berry’s 1964 poem “The Wild” captures the poignant beauty of nature breaking through a world increasingly indifferent to its presence. Offering a stark contrast between a wasted city lot and the colorful flight of warblers and tanagers, Berry calls his reader to embrace the necessary beauty of the wild, receiving as a gift to modern man “its remembrance of what is.” We have never been more in need of such a gift.
Current research reveals startling statistics suggesting disconnection, depression, and a loss of exposure to and experience of the natural world—a series of terms not unrelated. Social media touts community at the expense of in-person relationships. Technological progress spins at a frenetic pace. And a main component of human life we know to combat these ills is strikingly absent for many. Children—and perhaps their parents—have traded the forest for screen time, nature writing for animé, the classics for the latest dystopian sci-fi binge. As a result, we’ve lost even the language to name and notice the natural world. Losing More Than Language British author and scholar Robert Macfarlane sounded the alarm on this phenomenon in his 2017 article in The Guardian entitled “Badger or Bulbasaur—have children lost touch with nature?” In his insightful book, Landmarks, Macfarlane notes the loss of nature literacy among children and contemporary society’s seeming indifference, as evidenced by the Oxford Junior Dictionary’s “culling of words concerning nature.” He suggests that “the substitutions made in the dictionary—the natural being displaced by the indoor and virtual—are a small but significant symptom of the simulated life we increasingly live.” In other words, the loss of language is indicative of a loss of experience. Indeed, he is not the first to note the significant connection between language and reality. . . .  I don’t want to be a hostile reader, nor do I want that for my students. My aim is to be a charitable one, one who acknowledges that reading has the potential to form me and my students not only for the better but for the eternal. I know, however, that it is easier to aspire to this attitude than to consistently embody it.
Deep Reading: Practices To Subvert the Vice of Our Distracted, Hostile, and Consumeristic Age (2024) shares this view by encouraging us as readers, thinkers, and teachers to develop “practices that help us tend to what we read, the way we want to attend to our friends and neighbors.” Rather than viewing reading primarily as a means of getting students to arrive at the right beliefs or worldviews, authors Rachel Griffis, Julie Ooms, and Rachel De Smith Roberts challenge us to view reading as a hospitable activity that might counter the age of distraction. Where has our ‘sustained, unbroken attention’ gone? In Part I, titled “Practices to Subvert Distraction,” training our attention becomes a way of fostering self-control, of “temper[ing] our desires for what is pleasurable with our need to focus on what is good.” Ideal for new teachers, these first two chapters address attentiveness while reviewing common sense methods for encouraging it in classrooms and other reading communities. They describe the practices of discussion, annotation, and close reading exercises in effective classrooms. While they discuss ideas such as lectio divina, field trips, or reading aloud, the most helpful ideas for my humanities classes come from their reading reflection questions that ask us to consciously think through what our real reading process looks like. . . .  No other author has so immediately affected my perspective on work as Josef Pieper. In my mind, work was separate from the rest of life. Working hours have always been a discrete part of my day since I took my first job as a teenager. Maybe this division is inherent to American culture and how I grew up, but in Pieper’s mind, work is part of our response to the gift of life.
Though published decades ago, German philosopher Josef Pieper’s commentaries on work, leisure, and festivity bring to light two deficits within our culture today—true community relationship and conscious introspection. His works, Leisure: The Basis of Culture (1948) and In Tune with the World: A Theory of Festivity (1965), posit not a solution to our culture’s dis-perspective, but a call to return to a meaningful and fruitful life. If we can’t recognize leisure, then our culture is endangered. But leisure is a tricky word in the twenty-first century. Is it welcoming visitors at our leisure? Is it reclining on a couch in a leisure suit? Is it being free from work demands? Is it the opposite of work? What kind of leisure is this? . . .  Reading is a liberating act. It produces agency, a sense of independence and freedom of thought. This access to ideas and understanding is a most precious gift—one that is worth laboring over in pursuit of liberty. In Reading for the Long Run: Leading Struggling Students into the Reading Life, Sara Osborne explores the riches and beauty of a deep reading life, most especially the unspoken experience of acquiring virtue through story, ‘A compelling vision of the goodness of goodness,’ as Vigen Guroian says. Reading can shape who we become, which as it turns out, is every advantage to readers who struggle. Osborne is clear. Disability does not mark students as other or deficient, but rather as human, human in that we, parents and teachers, are all weak. And in Christ, that is a strength. It’s a unique equation that forms us through years of daily effort. The difficult path to the reading life produces a kind of character that is born through hardship. Both student and teacher are shaped by weakness—his manifest through the struggle to read, and mine through the struggle to teach him.” Through her personal journey as mother and educator of a son whose learning did not follow a predictable map, Osborne hospitably portrays the reality of the long road to reading. She first describes the ideal, the power of story and our ability to identify with characters, a distinctive process akin to Charlotte Mason’s idea of relationship with people and characters of the past, present, and future. Exposing young minds to plentiful rich language from every avenue is praiseworthy, but it is realistically accompanied by what Osborne calls the “unglamorous hours” of doing the work itself with a modest, oftentimes laborious, pace.
 It was a simple tweet. I posted a picture from the second day of school, showing my own annotations of a C.S. Lewis essay with the caption, “Teaching students annotation means modeling my own.” To my surprise, author Stephen Chiger responded that he taught the same, most notably in his book Love & Literacy published in 2021 for Uncommon Schools, a public charter network in New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts.
Intrigued, I wanted to see if a design to foster reading and literacy in urban public schools might share some practices with classical education. The premise of the book is a true ideal: “This is what love in a literacy classroom looks like: a love for the conversation, love for the text, and love for the ideas they both spark. When that includes all students, magic happens.” I kept reading.  “As I walk’d through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a Den, and I laid me down in that place to sleep; and as I slept, I dreamed a Dream. . . .” Simple metaphors work.
Education is a journey, Alex Sosler argues, one that cannot be separated from spiritual development because the journey itself is formation. “You have to learn who you want to be and practice being that person.” In other words, college will shape you whether you are aware of it or not. In Learning to Love: Christian Higher Education as Pilgrimage, Sosler directs students to “re-image” the potential of the years following high school because “what a student loves most has great control over the life they pursue.” And he clearly asks students to identify what they love most, even if it’s themselves. This open and frank dialogue is one of Sosler’s strengths as he introduces the history and philosophy behind Christian liberal education. A Christian liberal arts education should reflect our view of mankind with the purpose of reflecting God. These man-made institutions may be imperfect, but they do have the resources to help a student pursue the path of their soul’s formation as they learn of the true, good, and beautiful in their coursework. . .  It was like watching part of some half-lost hero tale, something that belonged to an older and darker and more shining world than mine.--Rosemary Sutcliff, The Shining Company In my personal quest to find worthy reads for my middle school students, I am returning to novels published decades ago. I want my students to learn not just about peoples, places, and dates, but also to experience a time, a life, in the range of centuries known as the medieval era. I didn’t plan it, but each story happens to take place in Great Britain.
Elizabeth Alder’s The King’s Shadow (1995) is a magnificently detailed historical read for upper middle grade and young adult readers. Beginning in 1063, this living history follows the life of thirteen-year-old Briton, Evyn, during the reign of Edward the Confessor. . . |
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