“Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: What! You too? I thought I was the only one.” ~ C.S. Lewis
Thanks for reaching out to me to let me know you read Hemingway. Several came to me and said they were reading Hemingway last week. Look at us, our own little COVID book club!
This week, we read Lewis. Let’s begin.
There may be no better way to introduce C.S. Lewis than an article from Religion & Politics in 2012. The author, Molly Worthen, says,
C.S. Lewis. Converted by fellow medievalist Tolkien on a famous midnight walk in Oxford in 1929, Lewis could not have been more different from the average American evangelical: a pipe-smoking, claret-drinking Anglican don with a taste for pagan myth and no patience for Biblical literalism.
So, why do us American evangelicals love Lewis so much? For me, it is sense of the fantastical. For making the abstract come off the page, for making fantasy from the ordinary. For many Christians, Harry Potter was not ok, but the fantasy worlds given to us by the likes of Tolkien and Lewis were more than welcome. We laugh when Father Christmas brings Mrs. Beaver her sewing machine. We long to see the seemingly glass castle as Orual looks for Psyche. We step off the bus from Hell and enter the farthest outskirts of Heaven and feel the searing pain in our feet. Lewis has informed so many of our thoughts on theology, and mythology for that matter.
Friends, my encouragement this week is to pick up a lesser-known text from Clive and interact with it. Need a place to start? A very timely one to try could be A Grief Observed.
For a list of all of his books, I would encourage you to visit – https://www.cslewis.com/us/
Let me know if you read C.S. Lewis this week with me by dropping me an email to gbickell@theacademyok.org.
We are Hiring!
More information on all employment opportunities at The Academy can be found at: https://theacademyok.org/employment-opportunities/
Smart Watches
We will be having students with a watch that connects to a phone/internet for grammar students to leave it at home or turned off and leave in the backpack and for dialectic students to check it into the “phone motel” along with their phones at the beginning of the school day. The Academy Handbook supports this practice, and we are mirroring the Rhetoric campus enforcement of the policy. Due to the volume of students with Smart Watches it has become increasingly difficult to ask teachers to methodically manage internet access during classes while also teaching with presence of mind. Thank you for your partnership and support for this matter!
Final Exams at The Academy
We are reconfiguring the way we manage final exams for all Dialectic & Rhetoric classes. While students will complete the semester with some sort of assessment (project or test), this experience will follow the same pattern of assessment procedures used throughout the semester. We are transitioning away from intensive testing procedures that entail 1-2 hour exams and require a complete restructuring of the last 2 weeks of school. We believe that students retain information best if it is built upon in a cumulative manner without the presence of stress-induced situations that force intensive cramming. Research fully supports that depth of learning and lasting retention occurs most when students gradually develop deepening knowledge with continual opportunities to strengthen conceptual and long-term memory. We believe this new assessment practice will provide healthier opportunities in the school culture to deepen memory retention and deepen understanding of knowledge. This shift also provides more opportunity for class instruction time at the end of each semester. If you have questions about this shift in practice, I welcome the opportunity to discuss this with you further. Please contact me!
There will be a View Event the evening of the 17th for parents who desire to learn more about the Rhetoric School.
House Verse – This month we are memorizing Colossians 3:15 as part of our yearly study on the Fruit of the Spirit. If they memorize it and recite it to Mr. Bickell, they will receive 5 House Points.
Calendar for the rest of the semester
