103: Something They Will Not Forget

Hello and welcome to Classical Stuff You Should Know. This is a podcast about old books, old philosophers, old things, sometimes new books, and new thinkers, right? It is, yeah, maybe today. And it is populated by three gentlemen, myself, A.J.

Hanenberg. I work at a classical Christian school called Veritas Academy in Austin, Texas. And I'm joined by two of my colleagues who do the same, who are also huge cheaters. So, Donald, just huge, the hugest.

So, Donald, I'm not a cheater, I just remember things. That's actually fair. I cheat, I hide the answers in my brain. He pretended to be coming up with those on the spot, you big fat cheater.

Just to be clear to new listeners, you're referencing last episode, correct? Yeah, I'm referencing last episode. I was really impressed with how they had remembered, or just sort of came up with all the answers that Plato had in the Republic. Turns out that Megby had the Wikipedia article open the whole time, and Graham was just remembering from when he read it, which I guess is a little more legitimate.

Wow, okay. Don't make that clear. It's not cheating, it's learning. It's like, I hid the answers in my mind.

And then hid them from your friends, and that's deceit. Okay. Anyway, I'm the only pure, righteous, and pure driven snow. That's what we always say, yes.

And so, today, we'll be hearing, what you're hearing from Graham, good luck, believe in it. Speaking about hiding answers, so today, I'm pulling Megby, and I'm talking about a book. I talked about a book, so we just talked about a book. That's true, all right.

Is it because you're doing a book review, which I've never done, just to be very clear? Yeah, you're right. No, we're talking about a new book that's out. We talked about an author and classical educator named Joshua Gibbs.

We talked about, he's one of the only, is he one of the only contemporary authors we've, no, you've talked about. I read about a CD that was somewhat contemporary. Yeah, yeah, that's right. We've got a lot of contemporary art, for sure.

It's always contemporary. So, we reviewed and talked, not reviewed, we reviewed it, like our things matter. We talked about Joshua Gibbs' first book called How to Be Unlucky, and that one is, you can go back and listen to the podcast, there was a book about virtue, and Joshua Gibbs said he was embarrassingly old when he first heard a full-throated defense of why to live a virtuous life. And he has a most recent book that just came out, and it's called Something They Will Not Forget.

And it's about how, it's a lot more, it's more of a practical book about classroom, practical is sort of a silly way to phrase it, but it is a book that is more specific to classroom classical Christian education. Whereas the first book can be read, it's not necessarily about, you don't need to be a classical educator. This book is a little bit more finely tuned to the classical classroom. So the title is Something They Will Not Forget, and then the subtitle thing is called A Handbook for Classical Education.

Yeah, there you go. So just to be really, so Joshua Gibbs, he is a teacher at our namesake school in Richmond, Virginia, Veritas School, the Veritas School in Richmond, Virginia, that has no affiliation except that when all the classical schools were being started 20 years ago, there was a small pool of names that we could have. There we go, Valor, Veritas, and then pick your favorite classical people. There's Willerforce, which is a different one.

There's Chesterton Schools, which is more Catholic. There are, there's an Ambrose, but then just like random virtues. There's no temperance school, that's part of what I found. Easy, easy, easy.

Don't run, just jog. Walk on the light, walk on the halls. And so anyway, so he is a teacher at a school at Richmond, Virginia called Veritas School, and he has written this book about solving a particular problem that we, as I think all educators, educators face. He presented one of his solutions two or three, I think even three years ago at the Society of Classical Learning.

He talked about a specific practice that he had just done, I think, for one year. And I loved it, and I had implemented it. And it must have been three years ago, because I do it in 10th grade, and our graduating seniors were the first year where I did that. So it was at least two years ago.

So anyway, we'll talk about that. But he had a problem that all educators face, and that is that embarrassing question of asking your kids. So we teach seniors. You teach seniors in 9th graders.

I teach seniors in 10th graders. And Hanenberg, if you ask your seniors, what do you remember from 9th grade? Or in Josh's case, he took kids who were in his class, and they were doing a medieval literature humanities course, and the students sat there dumbfounded. And Mr.

Gibbs, the teacher, who had been pouring all of his knowledge into his students, was embarrassed and dismayed that his students couldn't rattle off even the basic facts about the middle ages. This is the fear that all teachers have. But it's not just the fear of teachers. Do you remember what you learned in 10th grade English?

Can you remember what books you read in 10th grade English? I don't even remember my 10th grade English. I don't remember my 10th grade English teacher. I remember Ash Wednesday.

I don't remember. You read Elliot in? No, I just remember she put Ash on her forehead. Oh, never mind.

Sorry, I can't read the poem. No, I couldn't tell you. I couldn't tell you. I can more do 9th grade.

I remember Odyssey and Elliot from 9th grade. Oh, you really? I remember that. I remember 11th grade.

What's that, Scarlet Letter? I remember American Lit. So there are certain books I kind of remember reading, but no, by and large, I don't remember any of that. I can't even remember the classroom of 10th grade.

I remember it was in Saskatoon. I don't know. I can't remember it all. I think maybe Merchant of Venice.

I remember very little. So anyway, so this is a problem, right? And so this is a problem that everybody suffers from is, so how do you teach things that are worth remembering? And essentially, this book, so then, yes, so Josh comes to this, I don't know, I feel like a first name basis is familiar.

It comes to the realization that things that are remembered are repeated, that we just remember things through repetition. And so then teachers have a tremendous power to be able to shape the things that students remember. And we, by and large, misuse that power because we misuse that power with assessments, either because we're scared or because doing it the other way is difficult. And so this was his sort of hard-won lessons of, sorry, I was wondering if I just unplugged the podcast.

These are his hard-won lessons that he has learned from educating and to avoid that possibility of students just standing there dumbfounded when they're asked sort of basic questions about something like the Middle Ages. So it's broken in, so the book is, the first chapter is that sort of problem, that problem of retention, and that students don't retain these sort of things or the things that we get them to retain maybe don't really matter. We probably all took tests where the first question was, like, where was Shakespeare born? Or what year was Shakespeare born in?

Because those are easy things to grade. But those are things that you never memorize. So we are English teachers. If I was teaching a new book on, like, a fellow, I would be looking up all sorts of things.

I was not trained when I read a fellow to have memorized minute points about a fellow, like, to be able to see from, just to, like, read a passage and be able to identify, oh, that's Iago speaking, or that's a fellow speaking. Or to, like, have memorized when Shakespeare was alive. Like, if I'm actually going to be teaching this book, those are things that you don't really need to memorize. You just sort of maybe kind of memorize things because you teach it over and over and over again.

So, because teachers look things up. Why do we teach our students, or why do we test our students for things that are easily look-offable? And he says, so this was sort of his revelation that he had, is that he was giving these types of assessments where he was giving what were sort of, quote-unquote, more objective styles of questions with objective answers. And he one day had the realization that, wait a minute, well, let me just read the passage here.

He said, So, this is sort of one of the realizations that was foundational to his change in the way that he assesses or just even approaches what students produce in the classroom. There's no such thing as an objective question. You can ask questions that have objective answers. But there is a certain subjectivity that has gone into asking that question.

The subjectivity is, I, as an English teacher, value the student knowing and retaining the year that the book was written. This is the important takeaway that I test the student on. When in reality, I would look that up. You would look that up.

We would all look that up. There's nothing valuable about memorizing 1321 as the date that the thing was published. Until Google burns. Until Google burns to the ground.

And then, there's still a second show. I mean, these books have introductions to them. So he says that he eventually learned all these dates, but he learns them because he teaches the book year in and year out. Not because it's actually necessary.

Like, until he, I forget how many years he's been teaching Dante, but his first few years he didn't know it and then he just learned it from repetition. Like, it doesn't improve his reading of Dante to know that 1321 is a year. So he sort of sets up some of the problems that schools have. And the types of questions asked is one of them.

We think that we are being fair by asking questions that have objective answers. But really, we are giving students hoops to jump through that have no real use outside of just getting the braid for the class. There's no use that a student knows that it's 1321. And he'll give examples of what he thinks are useful questions, are useful tests later on.

The other thing that he sort of sets his aim on is rubrics for writing. And he has a very funny passage, or at least it's funny if you work in a classical school, I'm going to read it too, because we definitely have had these things. The use of a rubric will not help the teacher. Although rubrics offer the illusion of an objective evaluation, in the end, a fallible and opinionated human being must decide whether young Brooklyn's essay, I probably should change the name of Brooklyn at our school.

Just be clear, that's what the book says. This is what the book says. Brookie, we're not talking about you. Although, hey, you're pretty great.

You're a good kid. Yeah. Decide whether young students' essay quote, mostly failed or completely failed to make a coherent argument. These are objective expressions which might appear on a rubric.

Every classical school in the country has a rubric for grading essays which was crafted by some former employee, which is true. We still use some variation of Allison Maynes' rubrics. I mean, not anymore. I crafted my own essay.

That rubric has been buried under a mountain of bureaucracy and left unconsulted for years. Rubrics are not like doorstops or can openers. They are hard to use, ineffective and inconvenient. I have several times fielded angry phone calls from fathers who insisted that they read their daughter's essay on Boethius and quote, thought it pretty good, but also insisted the low grade young Piper received was not objectively supported by a pre-established and minutely explained set of criteria.

A rookie teacher need only have one such argument with a parent before going back to in what year did Dante finish the comedy. And this is insightful. So this is getting to the crux of the matter is that when you were talking about if you have education as moral training and wanting to have to hear students' opinions, no, not wanting to hear students' opinions, wanting to form right opinions and then also have students think about books morally or think about them in terms of how they grow in their own personal virtue, the teacher now ends up becoming a very important locus. So it no longer is the teacher just a dispenser of the quit the tests that have objective answers.

The teacher is now sort of the subjective character through which the students are sort of ascribed passing or failing capacities in talking about moral things. I mean, it's so hard to talk about sort of giving the examples. Well, do you want to talk about your new approach to grading this year? Yeah, and I mean, so, and it's borrowed, it's a version borrowed from one of his rubrics.

And so, like, yes, if you have a rubric where you have every single minutely detailed way that a student could go right or could go wrong and then every sentence or every argument needs to somehow fit into that rubric, it eventually sort of engenders a couple of weird things. Eventually the students get used to the rubric and start writing papers that, like, match the rubric. But if you didn't have the rubric and you just read this as a regular piece off the shelf, you'd be like, this sounds bizarre and this is sort of formulaic and it seems like it's writing to some standard that is, I don't really, if you're not initiated into the rubric and then you're reading this thing and it sounds sort of robotic. So, but it's hard just to say as a teacher, or it's hard to justify to other people saying, I know good writing when I see it and I will tell you if this is good or this is bad and I will give you specific reasons why.

I think a lot of people don't trust a teacher to say that. And it flies in the face of standardization across grades, sort of having, setting up teachers as being, basically hiring teachers whose opinions matter would be the opposite end of this. Go for it. On the next page, so you read page 12, page 13.

A good school should thus aim to hire teachers whose opinions matter, teachers who have something on the line when they speak and who only speak on matters about which they have a growing reputation. The good teacher also invests his time outside of class on matters which will help his students take him more seriously. This, you can see my sticky system, this is my only one. Anyway, this was like a, actually, make sure we're talking about this.

The good teacher is morally obligated to like better movies than his students, listen to better music, and read better books. He laughs at all attempts to redeem and reclaim video games for Jesus Christ. The good teacher aims to be a great sage of subjectivity, not a master of objectivity. Yes, so the teacher ends up needing to be the standards through which the students are measured against and are trying to replicate and are trying to mimic.

So we go back to the last podcast that I did about mimesis, about copying. Not only are we copying ideas, but when you are learning something, you're also copying people. Watch the way Tiger Woods wins the club and try to do that. Watch the way this guy throws a football.

And this is why, I know H does this in his ninth grade class, giving good pieces of literature for students to read and try to emulate and imitate. Try to write like C.S. Lewis. Try to write like G.K.

Chesterton. So the teacher needs to be, and the teacher needs to be able to call a spade to spade and say that this isn't good enough. So yes, maybe the system you're talking about is one that I borrowed, I took from this book, inspired from this book, and then put in basically that there are sort of essentially four kinds of grades with a failure. The most basic of grades is some sort of middle B.

And the way that I talk about it is I use an analogy of hamburgers. Like if you're going to a restaurant and you're getting a hamburger, you have an idea of what a pretty good hamburger is. If you go to a hamburger and you get a common sense hamburger, you get meat, you get patty, you get toppings, and at the end of it, you're like, yeah, good burger. You may not go back, but it did exactly what you thought a burger would do.

It was the common sense basic default hamburger. Meat, cheese, passable toppings. It was passable. It was good.

It didn't offend the palate. And that would be like the middle B hamburger. And I tell my students that that is like default writing. When you have, you know, the first thing that pops into your mind and you write down the first thing if you're given a prompt, whatever the first thing is and you kind of write down and maybe it has a spelling stick or two, but it wasn't big enough if I really noticed it, you know, that's this kind of hamburger.

Then there's another kind of hamburger that has some craft and some care and consideration. Instead of like cheddar, maybe you put gray air cheese on it. Instead of lettuce, maybe you put cabbage, which works really well with the gray air. Is that oregano?

Maybe you've got like caramelized onions. Maybe you've got, you know, you've got like an idea as to what a better hamburger could be and you are attempting to make that better hamburger. And if there's like that care and that craft and it's like something interesting is going on, that is a top tier hamburger. If you've taken out things that you...

think don't need to be in a hamburger for you know like basically you've had an opinion as to what good hamburger should be then that should be a that is a better hamburger than your default hamburger if you can do writing like that then you're talking that is in the mid a's um the 100 would be that it is writing that is is um it is gourmet it is so far beyond 10th grade that you know uh it is it is it is its own example of excellence you can't really like give a rubric to bright excellent because being excellent is so individualized right like think about the people who are excellent in things they all have their own way of doing that thing they understand the thing itself they understand what a hamburger is and they all have their own unique individual take on how that could be amazing right so and if you give them a rubric they'll just try to copy someone else's unique creation so like if you austin's got great food and we have a really great restaurant that just opened that is um have you been to lauro yet you know lauro so it's mixing like zoro except crazy no um no it's mixing like like sort of asian street food and texas barbecue together into into this sort of like asian street barbecue it's very good you know but they're doing their own unique thing and then at this point you're like this is this is a unique creation that is that is they understand asian street food they understand texas barbecue and they're putting it together into it into something that is wonderfully excellent well listen to lauro would be a bad hamburger though does that make like but i mean but not really because they're like they've taken they've taken the hamburger and then they're doing something completely different and unique with it a bad hamburger i only ask that because you're failing category anyway well there's a failing category there's a substandard category and it's it's a hamburger but the patty's too big the patty's too small the green the bun is frozen in the middle it's frozen in the middle like you've given a hamburger but it's like it is so obviously made with disdain and slapped together and then like the person who cares nothing about the hamburger can still say well you ordered a hamburger and this is technically a hamburger that to me is a mid-c that's like like um they're you know just uh yes fine congratulations you wrote a paragraph technically they wrote a paper and they weren't completely off base and it wasn't it didn't have enough errors that it you know wasn't cogent or whatever fine it's a hamburger but it's disappointing and you know um and then the failure would be i ordered a hamburger and you gave me salad or i ordered a hamburger and you gave me something completely completely other um and uh yeah or or it's uh there's so many yeah you use yeah so anyway so that's like uh that is completely stealing tomato and yeah brown chicken just turkey yeah it's not hamburger at all um not yet no not yet so this will see how this goes um i've done variations of this but have sort of been working on tuning it to be what this is now and this book also i mean i think one of the points of gives this book is that it is to give freedom to the teachers to think differently about the assessments that we were all raised on um because we have a tremendous amount of freedom to incentivize whatever we want in the classroom right this is what tests do this is what assignments do we incentivize whatever we want so it does no good for students to stand up in the beginning of class and be like what i care about in this english class is to cultivate virtue but then completely set up my class which cultivates grades or achievement or um or you know getting some sort of giving them a different standard incentivizing a different standard than virtue but how do we incentivize the cultivation of character by using in english class the text or by using history the examples in history um this book mainly deals with the humanities courses and um thinking about science and math is a really interesting thing so he gives um sort of um three um you know sort of maybe two big categories for doing this one is the types of tests that he has the students to write on these types of formative final or so the types of final assessments and then the other thing is to get over that um the idea of the memorizing of something he starts each class with a catechism and um and so the rationale for the catechism is that you know if you want your student to be able to um you know speak like abraham lincoln outside the class i think that's the example he gave if you want the student to be able to speak like lincoln outside the class you need to practice speaking lincoln inside the class over and over and over um at least when i was in school we were sort of presented with material you go over at once you the teacher sort of gave you a grade and pronounced you master of the material congratulations you got an a on your 10th grade shakespeare essay you have you got it you mastered shakespeare let's move on to the next harder thing um and but uh instead by by having the students repeat things over and over and over they memorize it they remember it and he gives a pretty long and good which i won't get into um justification for why that this is a not only a humanizing thing a worthwhile thing and then brings kind of dignity and he says sort of an air of holiness to a classroom so um so it's an observation that the first five minutes of class is always wasted yeah so to put this catechism in place is to use that time for something useful yeah so his catechism that he has is like a eight to seven to eight minutes long speed a thing that everybody in the class has written down or everybody in the class repeats and in it is all of the big either passages or some of the big questions or some of the big things that he wants the students to wrestle with and think about over and over and over so that by the end of the year when you're asking them to talk about free will for example you're not just getting the same essay over and over of everybody's first impressions or their first pass on free will they've had a whole year where they've been saying some passage about free will and um have basically had the benefit of having prolonged contemplation on a specific thing so he's got a a catechism that depending on the class um gives the uh um sort of all the big the big points of the things that he wants to talk about in class so this was a thing that he mentioned for two or three years ago at the society for classical learning and i implemented that next year and i've done it now for this is my third year doing it i do not do catechism i open class with quote response so i have a it sounds lame but i put quotes from everything except the book that they're reading and hopefully not books that they'll read in the future maybe ones they have read but have forgotten pieces like movie dick and they sit and they write and they write until i stop them and then we have a quick discussion and we're done like it's just a way for me to sort of open up the world to them a little bit i've considered the catechism and you guys are saying a lot of really interesting stuff over here i'm like i'm kind of into it so we're gonna see where it goes i don't know i don't know how i feel about the catechism yet um uh i put so the whole point of this is to put very difficult things in the catechism and he actually gives an example of two catechisms for various classes that he's taught and um he's got questions that repeat for all these classes but he gives he gives very you know his catechisms are long passages of scripture um i'll give you an example so here's question number two what did boethius teach about the good life so there's the question and the answer is this no man is rich who shakes and groans convinced that he needs more no man is so completely happy that something somewhere does not clash with his condition remember too that all the most happy men are oversensitive they have never experienced adversity and so unless everything obeys their slightest whim they are prostrated by every minor upset so nothing is miserable except when you think it's so and vice versa all luck is good luck to the man who bears it with equanimity the more varied your possessions the more help you need to protect them and the old sayings prove correct he who hath much wants much decide to lead a life of pleasure and there will be no one who will not reject you with scorn as the slave of that most worthless and brittle master the human body so saying that every day it is a dense passage and even just reading it for the first time i mean there's maybe two or three things that you pick out in there and you know there's tons of stuff that if you just listen to it for the first time you didn't you didn't pick up on you say that every other day whenever your class is by the end of the year you've had a relationship with that passage unlike than when you just read one book once does that make sense so i've had this with my students and i um and so they have these passages of things that they're saying all day or every class that we have and um and uh they remember it so for example i had an example uh an interaction this year with a senior so i don't do the catechism in the senior class because i coach that class with other people and some of those other teachers are not so much on board with the idea of catechism um yeah yeah so uh is it you um i had one student and we were talking about crime punishment and raskolnikov and we were talking about um something you know just what was wrong he had and we were saying that he was using his reason and his reason was not being tempered by his emotions or his reason was not being tempered by some sort of like moral moral stance and she said oh um the soul is divided into three parts and she started quoting catechism and she didn't she wasn't necessarily she just quoted the catechism and she she just quoted the souls divide in three parts the first is the rational soul which commands the second is the spirit the soul which acts and the third is the appetitive soul which obeys is what she quoted and then i said okay why did you draw the connection because what you just said doesn't perfectly connect i want to know what your thought is but then she gave an answer to why what was wrong with raskolnikov's soul from something that she remembered in 10th grade and because she had said it over and over and over again and all of a sudden she had that click where it went from this thing from two years ago to now being a tool that opened up this story now and i could have taught platonic soul again to them i remember this and then used it as an example but she did it and i didn't have to you know i was planning on it um which was even great even better so then yeah the idea being that when you sort of you're not only remembering these maybe hermeneutical tools like the platonic soul but you're also remembering um dense beautiful passages that are worth memorizing them of themselves so we've got this long passage of milton talking about that the life of faith um the life of faith mixed with knowledge is carrying the garden of Eden inside of you this is this sort of passage of milton and it's really hard to say and we're still at the stage of the school year where the students are fumbling with their words and they're having a hard time saying it but by the end of the year um i can now ask them questions about that passage um and they and the answers that i get for them have a level of relationship with the passage that is far different than if i just got their first opinions on giving them a passage um and even so that i could probably ask them i could probably use that passage and ask them a question about each and every individual character from all the different books so i could talk about romeo in light of this passage with milton i could talk about adam in light of this passage of milton who's it's being spoken about i could talk about frankenstein i could talk about you know uh john in brave new world i could talk about uh sir gawain and the green knights and then they would all this passage you know that they've been saying and have it memorized in their minds uh they just have a different level a different relationship with it students come and they'll say um the preacher was preaching on something and he said the phrase what is the chief end of man and i mumbled under my breath the chief of man's chief end is to glorify god and enjoy him forever but the pastor didn't say that the pastor said the chief end of man is something different and i spent the whole sermon thinking about whether he was right or wrong i was like that's great that's awesome um turns out you were wrong man i take that uh you know uh obviously isn't chief end of man to glorify god and enjoy him forever anyway so then um uh the catechism what you put into the catechism gives the students the opportunity to have a seventh eighth and ninth impression on it as opposed to just their first impression because many of the things the students do in their life are first impressions move on first impressions move on first impressions move on first impressions move on right um and so you can choose to make the students do this thing that takes five to seven minutes at the beginning of the class by the time they're done they don't want to talk anymore which is bonus um they've got another system they've got another system and then you can also and he also advocates that this is a good thing to put this is where you can put your names and dates if the names and dates are important for orienting the students to things in the class that you need to orient them to right because as a part of his catechism he goes through a time so if he covers medieval lit he's covering when does that period begin with the period and he's also got a section where he says that this this uh at least opens up to the student the idea that there is set things in history that we need that judge us that we need to come under um whereas if you just if you were just sort of like if the teachers are saying here's a beautiful thing what's your reaction to it the student's like i think it's good and we're like good job here's a beautiful thing what's your reaction to it i don't like it oh okay here's a beautiful thing what's your reaction to it if you do that over and over and over what eventually the student is like my taste matters more than anything else um here's an interesting idea about returning so you read a book ninth grade year and then come back to it senior year so reading a book a second time yeah i find that interesting you all teach twelfth grade english i don't know if you find that i mean the idea is very interesting we bandied about the idea um i know that a lot of students who go off and do great book style classes end up reading again uh homer in first year undergrad that they read in first year ninth grade and they come back and they say two things like one it was easy because i knew it already and that's you know not what you want i mean that's fine and then two is you know we they're by reading it again you realize that there's so much more or they say things like i wish i read it in ninth grade or whatever yeah no exactly um so yeah he he does make um um some uh a claim saying like it would be valuable to return to texts that you studied in 100 in earlier years as a senior and look at it again um and then i think that's there's something very appealing about that um i think there's also something very interesting about them getting the iliad taught by aj and then getting the iliad taught by me and then just seeing different not different takes but just seeing like when aj teaches the iliad the honesty he naturally brings to it the ways that the book has affected him and that he's changed behavior or thought about life based on these books and i would do the same but it would be my own versions of them and then the student says to themselves oh crap well apparently this is what i'm supposed to be doing um and that's sort of the level of engagement that's the level of formation that you want in the student as opposed to what year was was the divine comedy written and you passed that test and similarly for our senior thesis so all seniors will write a speech where they're trying to persuade they're trying to argue for some proposal that thesis is created by five different people and so to that point earlier about the rubric eventually graded by or the paper graded by an infallible opinionated person it's a helpful lesson to learn that a message that resonates really highly with aj may not matter as much to me and that's a lesson that is important to learn and this is frustrating to the student when the student is under the impression that there is an objective grade there are there are there are objective grades to these assignments and so uh gives in the book makes a lot of distinction he says no every he made like everything is subjective especially when you're assessing somebody but they're not arbitrary um that like if you if hamburg gives an a he's not arbitrarily giving an a he's subjectively giving an a and so then immediately the thing's like well what kind of person is hamburg and that's the right question to ask what kind of teacher is hamburg if his opinion on what an a is it a good is an opinion that is that if the student works to impress aj does that set up the student to be impressive in the world so if aj's got low crappy standards and he's like congratulations you learned you could hit control p on on a document on whatever you just like squirt out on the keyboard and that's your that's your high grade um you know students gonna graduate or students gonna leave this class with an a but student is you know he's not gonna be an effective person in the world right um and i think there's just a growing understanding and a little bit of a fear that teachers are passing the buck from grade to grade and then from school to school and then we're sort of like oh well they'll figure it out in college and college is where they will become humans and then college is like that's not our job you're adults you're you're you're legally adult our job is not to tell you what to do and the student has never had any kind of um or any sort of formation that the student has had into adult has been in spite of school not in the classroom it's been in the extracurriculars in the sports in the in in um in drama and in the things in the classroom has just been hoop jumping or um compliance and a great sort of um game of compliance i personally have a tremendous amount of um sympathy with students who not so much here because we're we're wanting we're working to do this differently but students who have talked about other experiences other schools and maybe their experience here as well of that they don't have a taste for the game of compliance like like just playing like figuring out how to get really good grades usually when you look at that and when you think about that but they don't have a taste for the game of course and then there's a role in the classroom and you're not going to be thinking about it or not going to be in college again but it's not going to be a lot of um and so it seems like the more experimental things that it's not going to be a lot of uh-day what's not going to be a realistic a lot of people think oh that kid's just unmotivated but a lot of times the kid actually has a much higher view of what education should be and they realize what it should actually be doing and the fact that it's not happening here and they don't want and then this is usually what's behind the quote waste of time because it's just a game of compliance to a system as opposed to they actually see themselves growing and changing there's also students that are just lazy um exactly but there are every once in a while there are students that kind of can see the modern education game for what it is and say like this is kind of stupid i don't why there's there's so many different ways to be oh there's like this isn't this isn't making me a good man um now like i said at veritas we were trying to we're trying to change that where if you know i've talked about this before in the podcast my little um when i drive home and i think about school i sometimes have the game to myself if modern life in college disappeared um what would we keep as practices in the classroom what would we get rid of um i'm using that as a rubric of my modern life i mean if every student was you know if universal space can come exist if students were set up for for material success but um i mean let's be honest like we're private school a lot of them are going to be pretty much going to be set up for some level of subsistence like they're going to they're not going to starve to death unless some catastrophic things happen so um then like what would we what would we shed as if we weren't trying to play that game what would we shed what would we keep um anyway that's a different question altogether but it's uh i think it's one that every teacher should ask themselves yeah maybe i think related but yeah that's a really good question i wonder with this focus on catechism are we boiling the class down too much like to say you oversimplify 10th grade english to say here's the seven minutes you need to know and this is everything you're gonna get out of the class like it's a problem with math and science where math you actually you actually can't boil it down seven minutes you actually need to know every unit you learn so that you can build up the next class the catechism needs to be a little bit opaque to ignite a sense of curiosity i'll explain that in a second because hamburger's gonna say something i was gonna say i was thinking the same thing like my question you said you know what does boethius teach us and pulled out a few things he teaches a lot doesn't he right and he teaches a ton what does boethius teach about the good life so i mean like specifically about this notion of good life he teaches a lot about the good life you have to pick a very specific section does that make sense well the thing is this is not a specific section this is page 26 page 30 page 31 page 35 page 60 so he's he's stitched together a bunch of different conclusions i ask myself what does what does the iliad teach and no no no no you got to be more specific so if you want to teach about wrath about wrath or heroism or like pick your thing that yeah okay i think you asked you going that far you asked your students that question what is the what is the theme of wrath and iliad they're supposed to be doing that right yeah i almost felt like my answer is that some stories are larger than a single lesson right and it's not a single theme in that book so the catechism is not exhaustive but what the catechism is supposed to be is supposed to give um hard-won conclusions that the students wouldn't naturally get on the first pass so for example uh in his catechism he asks um this is one that thomas you're talking about what is what what is the human what is the what is the what about what does it what does it mean to be human what's the answer he gives the virtues are faith hope love wisdom justice courage temperance so if a student is saying the person asking what does it mean to be human and they respond with the virtues are faith hope love wisdom justice courage temperance there's an implied there's a there's a there's a the student would be the naturally curious person or even if they're not naturally curious there's gonna be a huh wait you didn't tell me what it meant to be human you just listed off the virtues then there's a fill in the gap kind of thing that has to happen there so yes the catechism is subjective the catechism has a take the catechism is hot takes not takes the catechism is takes on this and then the richness comes with the student contemplating those takes so aj you could say what does the iliad say about wrath and you could give a take and it's not the it's not everything that you could say about the book you could say about wrath and the student when they read the iliad and if they have this catechism you know homer teaches us that wrath is and you give this big old long spiel um then the learning comes where the student either like says yes i agree with that or no i disagree with that and here's why because wrath is so much more or and then like then you you've you've given the student a a like a an opponent instead of saying the iliad is about so the iliad is about all sorts of uh the iliad is so big you can't contain it in one catechism so i'm not gonna do a catechism because it's so big that's uh i feel that communicates to the students like do what you want with the iliad go for it it's so big that you can have your own opinion about it whereas if you set up an opponent and you say here's what the iliad is about and then you've given a bite-sized thing for the student to um learn from as a teacher and also wrestle with as maybe an opponent i don't think the i don't think the good life is the virtues okay let's you know like tell me why i'm saying but with this is about more than just that question it is about more than just one topic like is there love to one answer sure what is um what is healthy love is one of my questions i ask i say shakespeare teaches us that healthy love is not hidden in secret but sanctified by being declared to god into the church so is that everything shakespeare says about love no but the lesson that we're gonna be talking about is a healthy love versus an unhealthy love and with rome and juliet one component of unhealthy love is secrecy is that the only component of course not um but it gives the student enough of the bite-sized thing and it gives an example of the types of conclusions that you should be drawing from these books but just to say because this isn't exhaustive or because this isn't sufficient we're not going to memorize it i think just opens up the student to saying like well then what is worth memorizing um um i'm thinking the other way to say that there are so many things worth memorizing that what will connect with the student when they first interaction with the book i don't know part of what you're saying is that there are deep truths that um you want to make sure they get from the book but what will actually impact them may not necessarily be what you think is the truth i don't want to move too much into relativism but i'm just saying that like these are great books because they contain many many themes inside of them and they will latch on to different themes does that make sense that the thing that's important to them might be different than the thing that you think is important is that difference okay i think so yeah um but you need to train the student to be able to generate those themes themselves and um and i think the catechism should be disproportionately weighed on memorizing passages from the text itself than maybe the teacher's conclusions about the text and this is maybe something that i've that i haven't done well enough in my catechism now that we have less textual memorization and more me making summative statements about things that's funny because when you said you know what is the iliac about wrath the place i went was when achilles says it you know burns in the chest and storms in the chest and blinds like smoke and i only think that it rots you know it's a draft that rots the vessel right so the the you know storms in the chest and blinds like smoke that's those are actually sweet like uh streams of honey there's a few things in there that i would put directly from achilles about his own wrath and then the funny thing is it blinds again moments later and he just redirects it and then it you know just rots the man from the inside so are there texts that you all require them to memorize for recitations like did that fit in to the catechism the thing is the catechism for me has replaced my recitations because they end up doing i have one recitation two recitations that they do and one is the prologue to canterbury tales because that's just a fun classical tradition that every student has ever done in the history of english literature is memorize one that apple with a short soda and you can feel like fools on the first day yeah i've talked about that before too not fools i levels the playing field um anyway so that so that's catechism and he has more of a full-throat defense of it that you can read in the book um and then the second thing is is that he had experience of grading tests and i want to read this in full because i've had the exact same experience and have the exact same not the exact same conclusion um but uh similar conclusions so on page 79 he says i recall many years ago sitting down to grade a stack of papers one evening and finding myself quite literally in tears after half an hour because i was so bored with what i was reading and i had more than 40 essays left to read can i have you had this experience at hanberg yes we all have yes i've certainly had this was hardly the first time i had cried real tears and frustration with the banality of student writing however on this particular evening it struck me that i was entirely to blame for my own suffering it was i in fact who had written a very dull essay prompt and it was only fair that the essays returned to me were also dull the test prompting question had been written with embarrassing haste it was probably something like some people claim that satan is the real hero of paradise lost argue against this claim and use three separate citations from the book to prove your thesis i may have required as many as 1 000 words to satisfy this flaccid lifeless query such questions are scarcely better than asking for the name of the demon who built pandemonium while i did not want students to merely supply names or dates i was basically asking them to recapitulate several lectures i had already given in class um while i offered everyone the use of their books i was asking them to take a cursory glance in the margins and find the passages wherein we had discussed the question of satan being the hero the prompt was meant to reward students who had taken copious notes and to chastise those who hadn't even though there is nothing necessarily virtuous about taking many notes even a very wicked person could have completed the assignment without ever needing to second guess his own boredom with virtue if a very wicked person could do very well on a theology exam or philosophy quiz the person who wrote the quiz is not likely teaching virtue but facts facts have no moral weight i've had the same thought while grading these sorts of things and the question is well gosh darn it what on earth do can you do otherwise didn't you change your final exam i have but i'm still not all that satisfied with it but i have a a quote that comes from epictetus that has been my like guiding quote of thinking about assessment and this book has been very helpful uh for this this assessment movement which is happening in the rethinking of how we assess for virtue and the quote is this it's from epictetus and epictetus says for even sheep do not vomit up their grass and show the shepherds how much they have eaten but when they have internally digested the pasture they produce externally wool and milk this has been my like metaphor that i've used to try to think of how i can make great assignments that um create the sort of uh incentivize the kinds of things we want the cult the cultivation of virtuous character the love of god the love of man and these sorts of things whereas most of our assignments are please barf up and show me that you've eaten what i've given you and so like you know like basically re recapitula re restate my lecture on virtue that we talked about when we did book four lines 14 through 37 and then they do and then i'm bored because it's just variations on how well they could regurgitate it but then but the principle is no you want if they've ingested something good it should produce the natural effects in the human person of what you want and so um this is i'm going to read to you this in full and this is his test that he has given on dante's divine comedy and um i don't feel like it's bad to read it from the book in full even though it's a page because he's also wrote an article about this but this is an example but this is sort of the example of the attempt to try to create an assignment that is incentivizing this kind of character virtue formation as opposed to vomiting and showing me the grass you've eaten so here's one the test this is on the comedy part one the problem imagine for a moment that you have a friend at the school you have known since the second grade let us call him mark in elementary school you played together then you learned to ride bicycles together then you were in boy scouts together however during sophomore year mark has begun to struggle while you have not high school sophomores are closer to college applications than they are to middle school and something clicks in the back of your head during the summer between freshman year and sophomore year which clues you into this sobering fact quite a lot changes in the summer before sophomore year it is this summer in which many students get their first jobs a kind of jobs where taxes are taken out of every paycheck getting a job and having a little more money in your pocket changes you you begin depending on your parents less asking your parents for less going out more and dressing yourself and matter more to your taste there are a great many things about what your parents have said when you get a job you can do that and now you have a job let us say that when you come back to school next year sophomore year mark is really still stuck in freshman year nothing happened to him over the summer nothing clicked for him he didn't get a job he has not yet figured out that he is closer to adulthood than childhood and he has not caught a vision of why adulthood is preferable he begins the year still behaving as though all the same jokes and gags which had purchasing power in eighth grade are still viable currency he is incapable of taking anything seriously at all he makes laugh of everything he could have gotten a job over the summer but his parents did not make him do so and thus he wasted his time playing fortnight all day he has not purchased himself clothes that he likes he is uninterested in the clothes he has given to wear and so he does not take much care to look presentable when he told jokes back in eighth grade which disgusted girls he got respect from the other boys including you but now mark has let kryptonite the girls and girls scatter when he appears which means none of the guys want anything to do with him anymore he either still looks for high fives he still looks for high fives when he fails a test but no one appreciates his rebel soul any longer the problem is not merely one of appearances for mark is still telling dead baby jokes harassing girls and mocking the indian janitor's accent while you are still young you have seen human beings fail to become adults you have an uncle who is 41 but who never really became an adult he is an embarrassment to the family being an adult is like being a policeman you can try to become a policeman and fail you can similarly fail to become an adult nothing changes for mark over the course of school of the school year by the time may rolls around you have begun to wonder how failed adults get started on the road to failure probably you suppose by living like my idiot friend mark what you really want to do is take mark aside and say what's wrong with you but who are you to talk that way you're only 15 what do you know besides sometimes you still laugh at his jokes but then one day a week before school of the school year ends mark asks if the two of you can sit together at lunch and the ridiculous grin and funny voice he always uses are gone and he sounds like a real person maybe even a wounded person at lunch mark talks straight with you he opens the conversation by soberly saying look this year hasn't been great for me no one likes me anymore no one ever wants to sit by me no one ever texts me back only two people came with me to the movies on my birthday and i invited 20 people because the truth is often shameful you begin to worry that maybe you should tell mark a few lies so that the situation will feel less awkward but you don't mark keeps talking and i get it something is wrong with me i feel stupid not stupid but like a little kid i feel like i'm stuck in eighth grade like growing up isn't happening to me i want to grow up i want to have opinions about college and all that but look do you think i'm shallow and as opposed to lying to mark or downplaying his concern you say yes mark i do think you're shallow mark is not angry he is relieved that someone has spoken the truth to him because when people speak the truth there is necessarily hope as well mark asks how do you become not shallow and then part two of the test talks about um dante and how and dante's journey from the beginning of the comedy to the end of the comedy and i won't read that whole thing because i want you to go by this book and then the part three is in the prompt so after using all you agree from dante in our time studying the comedy advise your friend mark on how not to be a shallow person the essay should be a thousand words long and written in the first person and then gives goes on to say that mediocre essays just sort of say like they sort of say well mark remember reading divine comedy and then recapitulating some sort of banal thing in class he says those are crappy essays but he says the really good ones are those who are speaking as if they are trying to be dante themselves and they're trying um um they address marked shallowness with a discussion of the major themes of the poem knowledge desire the will and rightly ordered loves such advice was not really about dante but from dante or the student's best imitation of him so then even though you spent if you did this catechism on wrath if you then couple it with some sort of assignment at the end where you make the problem of wrath real to the student and then you uh ask like uh base of all of our conversations and what uh homer says about you know what wrath does the blinding of the person how would you advise your wrathful friend mark right like that's sort of what he's getting at and i mean hot dang would those papers be way more fun to grade than give me the major theme of of your summer reading which is embarrassing the first prompt that i did this year uh and i'm like well i don't read that um but i'm going to but then like so trying to get the assignments to have this kind of currency i mean like you do well in that assignment if you can if you have understood the material so that's sort of what he's getting at by this kind of material and then coincidentally the students will never forget that test because it's so uh tangible it's real life and like i once read that prompt because uh josh uh joshua gibbs posted it on a searchy blog it's a one-off blog and i read that to one of my students and i student come up and he's like i mark i think i mark i need to go read the divine comedy again I was like, oh, cool, go for it. You know, like, because that's real. There is this fear of people are growing up more than me. People are getting, people seem to be doing different, it's, yeah, that fear that, like, the game, that people are getting ahead of you or whatever are more maturing.

That does happen in sophomore year, for example. Anyway, that's the book Something They Will Not Forget. There's a whole lot of richness and good things in there. I highly suggest that you go and buy it so that, and then if you are a teacher, it requires a certain amount of bravery to, like, try to implement these kinds of practices in class, and hopefully you work in an institution, and I know that we do, where that kind of bravery is encouraged.

So, I mean, figuring, cracking that nut is way more exciting than, like, those sort of banal prompts, those scrappy prompts that produce scrappy essays. That's something that I know that I'm, like, trying to actively work on myself. So, thanks a bunch. I've got to change my whole statement.

So, heck with you, Gibbs. Thanks for nothing. I appreciate this all. I'm still curious about the rubric you used to grade if you don't use the script rubric.

But this is a conversation for another time. We're just about out of time. So, this has been Classical Stuff. You should know.

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