Two Ways to Make School Meaningful - Part Three

A free and useful mind has its limits. An experience we have all had is learning something great… but at the wrong time. Schools have to prioritize revisiting the previous year’s material because of the “summer slide,” where students simply forget what they learned the year prior. Fortunately, humanity has a long history of thinking on paper. It may be an exaggeration and too strong a statement to say that if you’re not writing, you’re not thinking, but not by too much. Our minds have limitations, but we can use tools to expand our capacity for learning. The project our students build on every year is called a commonbox. It has a place for a historical timeline, critical thinking exercises, notes from books, and a catalog of virtue; then students then have the ability to add sections as they see fit.

A commonbox is no more than index cards and dividers. Organized, bite-sized notes serve as a type of scaffolding for Rose City’s education. Here are a few ways it is implemented: 

1. Historical Timeline - Our students will learn the breadth of human history several times over. Some events are covered in just a few pages in the early grades, and then they consume multiple chapters in later years. The first time a student encounters the event or the person, they create a note card that identifies the person, where he lived, when he lived, and why they are significant. Grammar School students will create over 350 of these cards in their four year history sequence. The Logic School students will start to expand on their understanding of those events as they read Famous Men of Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages, and Modern Times, so they’re able to add depth to the initial card notes. Their knowledge of history grows in a very tangible way.
   

2. Socratic Teaching Exercises - Rose City teachers have accumulated a bank of critical thinking assignments that can be implemented across the board in literature, composition, theology, logic, history, and most of our other classes. These are as simple as summarizing ideas in increasingly tighter boundaries (200 words to 50 words to 10 words) or as complex as giving three answers to the same question from three different perspectives, then three replies to each answer from three different perspectives. These serve as the basis for some of the most fruitful conversations on campus and are stored in the commonbox for future reference.
   

3. Bibliography Notes - One of the best ways to keep the contents of a book fresh in one’s mind is to make an annotated card for it. This can be summaries of specific sections, an outline for the whole book, an index of important quotes (with page numbers) or a mind map of main ideas. The goal is to create a companion to that book that allows the student to revisit it without having to reread several hundred pages.
   

4. Virtue Catalog - Our students read a lot. As they read, they’re prompted to identify virtue and vice in what they learn about, whether it is historical fact or literary fiction. The Classical Christian Virtues text provides a template for students to understand how each virtue is the balance between two vices; so students arrange their catalog in those terms and add illustrations accordingly. This framework helps students to judge the decisions, actions, and events and to learn from them. Lives of great men remind us, we can make our lives sublime, and this process helps students rightly acknowledge those who are worth emulating. These become memories and artifacts that shape the moral imagination.

We prize the commonbox system as a way for students to intake, evaluate, and organize information. The small act of summarizing a little historical bit each day in their younger years is stretching their ability to think in abstracts. Index cards are limited in size, so it challenges students to weigh the importance of data points—asking which are most important and need to be remembered? The physical representation of history helps students see the correlations and congruence between events across time and space. Moral evaluations of stories and history prepare students for their own daily lives way earlier and more effectively than honors-level ethics classes. The size also allows for students to distill entire books or lectures and review them in a few minutes instead of re-reading the whole text.

The work of academics is often simplified to assignments and tests, rubrics and report cards, but it is much more about creating a structure within a students’ own mind and challenging their thought processes. Our task is to teach them how to think while giving them fodder about what to think; there are objectively right and wrong answers, but we want to have students grow into their own personal understanding and appreciation for what is true, good, and beautiful.