1st Annual Luddy Classical Schools Conference

Augustine is famous for his doctrine of Despoiling the Egyptians – saying "Whatever has been said rightly by the pagan, we must appropriate to our own use." This motto in many ways is the spirit of my talk- that by understanding how classical pedagogy worked and by using its many features, the 21st-century student can sharpen his/her mind and despoil the classical authors of whatever is good, true, and beautiful.

First, we will look at how grammar and rhetoric were taught in the classical and late classical age (100 B.C. - 400 A.D.). Second, we will note the age’s pedagogical focus – training of the ear, tongue, and memory as the student’s principal tools. Lastly, we will discuss how the 21st-century Latin teacher can equip his/her students to learn like the Romans and so greater inherit the goods of a classical education.

Learn how to add a spin to traditional choral reading techniques. By adding movement and integrating technology, students embody texts. The result is increased engagement and a deeper understanding of text structure and connotative meaning.

As we find ourselves in the midst of the technology driven Modern Age and as more and more schools are under pressure to develop competitive STEM programs for the emerging job markets of tomorrow, we must ask ourselves, where do we “fit” the more human studies of Literature and Writing into this blueprint for the future? How do we defend the relevance of Literature? This presentation is for instructors who wonder how they might both better understand as well as articulate the importance of Literature, classic texts, and the output of creative writing to both current and prospective parents as well as the student body whom we teach. Teachers who attend the presentation will be introduced to sound academic principles and approaches to developing non-cognitive skills amongst our student body. Additionally, attending teachers will hopefully leave the presentation with the ability to develop their own impassioned mission statement correlating the study of Literature to cultivating character in our students, which they can then relate to any skeptical audience. STEM may be able to build our future, but Literature can save it.

This talk considers the relationship between a few modern ethical theories and the ancient question of how one should live. I want to explore the suggestion (advanced by Bernard Williams and others) that because these theories (and theories generally) are unsatisfying vis a vis this question we would do well to look to alternative resources in our attempts to answer it, perhaps in a special way to the rich narratives of history, to Aristotle's "completed lives." 

Understanding the character of young people and how they learn is not a matter of having a good theory about “youth education” but of actually knowing young people as particulars, not simply as an age group, and being attentive to, and reflective about, the culture in which they are immersed. It is a commonplace to lament the toxicity of the culture, but it may be that we are still failing to appreciate the profound transformative effect it has, especially on young people. As Pope Benedict noted in his 2011 address to Carthusian monks at St. Bruno monastery, we are witnessing an “anthropological mutation” in the younger generations resulting from, among other things, their near constant immersion in mediating technology. This presentation will address the nature of this mutation and the significance it has for us as teachers thinking about moral formation.

In this discussion, teachers will learn how poetry can be used to develop non-cognitive and analytical skills, improve communication, and inspire personal and academic reflection among students. Teachers will come away with a clear understanding of how to implement poetry into their classrooms in a meaningful way that encourages 21st century learning.

This presentation will explore the intellectual contributions of Walter Ong and Marshall McCluhan to orality theory, and will argue that Socratic Seminar allows us to recover the communal learning approach while retaining the increased complexity created by the shift from oral learning to literate.

A Socratic Seminar is a pedagogical tool, whereby students closely read a text and discuss its points in a group setting. In a successful Socratic Seminar, students understand the main ideas of a text in a significantly deeper way while learning how to discuss great ideas with courtesy and civility with their peers. This presentation will focus on the goals, strategies, and the resources necessary to implement Socratic Seminars effectively on a regular basis in our classrooms. As the goal of Classical education is to teach students how to think, and not what to think, Socratic Seminars offer one of the strongest and most effective tools to build critical thinking skills. Students read through a great text, whether it is from the Bible, Plato, Thucydides, or Tocqueville, and then have the opportunity to interact with those ideas and the authors that have shaped the course of Western thought. Socratic Seminars become all the more important to implement regularly in the classroom, given that these lesson plans have immense potential to influence both the character and the intellect of our students.