The Objective Standard Blog

Saturday, January 27, 2007

Life In Junior High – Part 2

Posted by Lisa VanDamme at 12:49 am

Last week, I contrasted the cliché junior high classroom—of raucous teenagers throwing spitballs, passing love notes, and giggling at lewd jokes—with a VanDamme Academy junior high classroom—of young adults in raptures over Cyrano de Bergerac. How we produce students with such maturity and enthusiasm for learning is something I hope will be made clear over the life of this newsletter. But for now, I can at least indicate the answer.

The high achievement, the sophistication, and the reverence for learning of VanDamme Academy students ultimately derive from the school’s basic philosophy. Our view is that the goal of education is to provide children with the knowledge and skills indispensable to life as an intelligent, informed, flourishing adult. We do not treat school as a holding room for adulthood, where we keep students busy until they reach the age when they can strike out on their own. We do not treat it as a grooming salon, where we prepare them for tests and build them a resume for admission into the best high school, colleges, and careers. We do not treat it as a Boy Scout camp, where we train good citizens with lessons in values and enlist them in the latest political trends. The busywork, the “to the test” teaching, the propaganda that results from these approaches defaults on the real responsibility of education and sours students on learning.

At VanDamme Academy, we believe that the purpose of a real education is to prepare the child for life as a capable and fulfilled adult. The curriculum, therefore, consists of only that which promotes this basic purpose, and is presented with this purpose always firmly in mind.

In literature classes, for example, students read the great classics for children and adults. These works are chosen for their timeless (i.e., insightful and eternally relevant) themes, for their captivating plots, and for their defined, memorable, and often inspirational characters. The goal of class discussions is to mine these values from every work, coming to a real understanding of the story’s events, the meaning of these events, and the applicability of this meaning to the student’s own life. I will always recall with satisfaction experiences such as the following: a junior high girl seeing to the essence of a Turgenev villain’s soul (“He is so shallow, phony, and pretentious!”) and then drawing out a lifelong lesson (“I would never date someone like that!”).

This can be contrasted with my own education in literature. We read the stock list of mediocre American novels (The Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby, etc.), and focused our discussions on stylistic devices (e.g., simile, metaphor, irony), an array of arbitrary “themes” that present themselves throughout the story (e.g., the symbolism of colors), and standardized test preparation (e.g., learning vocabulary words and identifying topic sentences). This experience encouraged in me, as it does in most, the view that literature—and education in general—is an obligation to be reluctantly fulfilled: not that it is deeply selfish, profoundly satisfying, crucially relevant.

It is by offering a core curriculum program, one that consists only of that which is most essential to the child’s intellectual development, and by presenting it in a way that conveys to the students the power of the knowledge and allows them to harness it for themselves, that VanDamme Academy cultivates an environment of reverence for learning. Put in colloquial terms, the experience of a VanDamme Academy student is, continually: “That is so interesting!—I really understand it!—I see why I need to know it!”

Just yesterday, we were visited by five VanDamme Academy graduates. They had just finished final exams at a local private high school, and chose to spend their time off at their beloved alma mater. During their visit, they argued (somewhat facetiously) that VanDamme Academy should require more homework, to prepare students for the pain of the piles of un-graded busywork they will suffer in high school.

These same graduates had presented Mr. Lewis with a crystal trophy at their graduation, engraved with the following words, which they had composed: “Andrew Lewis. The man who has taught us to look at kings and see more than crowns, to look at wars and see more than bloodshed, to look at laws and see more than words. The man who has shown us the world of ideas.”

Such is their feeling about a VanDamme Academy education.

Click here to sign up for the VanDamme Academy’s free, weekly e-newsletter: “Pedagogically Correct.” Every week, you will be sent a new article about the principles of teaching employed at VanDamme Academy, along with stories about the results they are achieving.

Posted in: Education

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Life In Junior High

Posted by Lisa VanDamme at 6:40 pm

When I tell people that I teach literature to junior high students, the response is nearly universal: an expression of profound sympathy. Teaching junior high is regarded as a martyr’s job, to be taken on only by those with such a selfless commitment to children and education that they are willing to endure the daily torture of a classroom full of obnoxious, disrespectful, hormone-driven, teenagers who have nothing but contempt for learning.

One can see the basis for this view by looking at the state of most junior high schools today. A recent New York Times article about the problem of “chaotic middle schools”describes a scene from a typical New York City classroom:

…paper balls fly and pens are flicked from desk to desk. A girl is caught with a note and quickly tears it up, blushing, as her classmates chant, “Read it!”The teacher, Laura Lowrie, tries to demonstrate simple machines by pulling from a box a hammer, a pencil sharpener and then, to her instant remorse, a nutcracker—the sight of which sends a cluster of boys into a fit of giggles and anatomical jokes.

Is this sort of behavior an inevitable stage of development, the curse of the teenage years? Does puberty cause children to abandon the pursuit of knowledge in favor of spitballs, love notes, and dirty jokes? Must all junior high teachers be candidates for sainthood?

Not in my experience. Here is a scene from the last week in a junior high classroom at VanDamme Academy.

I entered the classroom five minutes before my literature class, the first class of the day, was to begin. The students were milling around and talking, until the first one saw me enter and alerted the others of my arrival. They all bolted for their seats and then sat erect with hands folded, for a deliberately exaggerated message: “We want to finish the last act of Cyrano de Bergeracright now.”

I had been absent the day before, and the class had read act four with another of the VanDamme Academy teachers. Mattingly, age 11, said, in a tone playful but earnest, “I don’t think it’s right that our literature teacher was not with us when Christian died.”

I took a few minutes at the start of class to talk about plans to view the movie, in a discussion that included their protests against the modern, Gerard Depardieu version in favor of the 1947 black-and- white version of which they had watched one act. “If it is not Jose Ferrer, it is not Cyrano,”said Geoffrey, a 12-year-old student.

I assigned parts, and the students read the act aloud, with sincerity, expressiveness, and understanding. As Cyrano lamented the tragic end to his tragic life, the tears streamed down my face. Seeing movement in the desk across from mine, I looked up at Allison, the 12-year-old girl seated there, who was wiping the tears from hers.

This maturity, this reverence for learning, this capacity for enjoyment of art is to be expected in a VanDamme Academy junior high classroom—and it can be replicated anywhere with the right curriculum and teaching methods.

Click here to sign up for the VanDamme Academy’s free, weekly e-newsletter: “Pedagogically Correct.” Every week, you will be sent a new article about the principles of teaching employed at VanDamme Academy, along with stories about the results they are achieving.

Posted in: Education