Through Literature to Life

by Lisa VanDamme

Over the summer, I traveled to the county of Somerset on the coast of England, just to meet in person my hero and mentor Sue Lloyd. Among other notable accomplishments, Ms. Lloyd wrote the only English biography of Edmond Rostand, two of whose plays we read here at VanDamme Academy. 

While I visited with her in her library, I made sure to look carefully at her bookshelves to see what treasures she has discovered that I might have missed. I knew I had found one just from its title: Through Literature to Life.

I ordered it; I devoured it; I adored it. Ernest Raymond’s theme, one that resonates very deeply with me, is that we read great works of literature not for entertainment, not as an escape from reality, but rather as a way of establishing “communication with the master spirits” who help us see with keener eyes, hear with livelier ears, and think with subtler brains. The value of literature lies in its ability to sharpen, galvanize, clarify, and enrich life.

In the first few weeks of school, you could have found a demonstration of this theme in any of VDA’s literature classes, kindergarten through 8th grade: the K-1 kids marveling over a starry sky that was well worth the wait (in Waiting is Not Easy); the 2nd graders shedding tears when Little Willy carries his beloved Searchlight across the finish line (in Stone Fox); the 8th graders voicing outrage over Torvald’s mistreatment of Nora (in A Doll’s House)…

But the one I want to spend some time with is the lesson learned by the 7th graders in a discussion of Twelve Angry Men. 

Twelve Angry Men is a play about jurors deliberating a murder trial. Eleven of them come to a quick conclusion that the accused is guilty. Only one thinks they owe it to him to talk about the evidence first. Over the course of their discussion, we witness countless obstacles to clarity of thought. One juror has tickets to a ballgame burning a hole in his pocket. Another sees in the boy on trial reflections of his own estranged son. Another has a bias against anyone with a slum background. Another looks at the case with cold logic and utter lack of empathy. An array of errors reinforce the theme expressed by the heroic 8th Juror, that, “It's very hard to keep personal prejudice out of a thing like this. And no matter where you run into it, prejudice obscures the truth.”

One day, we made a list of all the thinking errors we had observed: prejudice, confirmation bias, personal grudges, imprecision, etc. Then I asked them why it is so helpful to see these errors played out in dramatic form. 

They said, of course, that it helps us to identify when people are making those errors in real life. It helps us to recognize when others are acting irrationally, and to understand what is wrong about their behavior. 

That was definitely true, but I was looking for something different. 

As Raymond says in Through Literature to Life, sometimes literature should serve as “dynamite to your complacency,” as “a destructive force that leaves you much to repair and build anew.” What I wanted them to see – which they did! – is that this helps us to be vigilant against these errors in ourselves. As Juror 8 says, it is hard to keep personal prejudice out of something, hard to see the truth. This play dramatizes ways we might go wrong such that we can stand guard against these errors in our own thinking. 

This is just one of countless ways that a work of literature the students read will let them see more keenly, hear more acutely, and think more subtly. It is just one example of how literature will teach them how to live. 

The Hierarchy of Grammar

by Jeremiah Cobra

Every year at VanDamme Academy, I tell my grammar students that they will have a stronger understanding of grammar by the time they finish eighth grade than I had when I graduated from university. I am not jealous, though. Ok, maybe I am just a little. I am certainly not shamed by the comparison. On the contrary, I take great pride in my ability to provide them with the holistic education in grammar that I did not get in school. This year, in my continued quest to show my students how the principles of grammar are connected, I had the idea of adding a bit of history to my eighth-grade lessons. In my own studies, I have learned that the way in which the ancient Greeks thought about the study of language is very much in order with the hierarchy I attribute to the principles of grammar, a hierarchy that is central to the way I teach the subject.

The key to a child’s understanding of any subject lies in what Lisa VanDamme refers to as the “hierarchy of knowledge”. After reading her essays very early in my teaching career, I became determined to develop a curriculum that treated the principles of grammar in a hierarchical manner. Just as there is an order to teaching mathematical concepts to children, so too is there an order to grammar. My youngest students must learn about adjectives and adverbs before they can later learn prepositional phrases that do the same job in a sentence. By the eighth grade, they have moved on to more complex adverb and adjective clauses. They are thus able to see that grammar is not just some long list of rules to memorize and follow, but is instead an integrated set of principles. Learning to integrate the subject while also learning about its historical development brings the full scope of their language into view. 

This is the first year in which I have introduced the eighth graders to the discovery of grammar by the ancient Greeks. They have learned that Aristotle was the first thinker to identify the noun and verb as the basic and essential elements of the sentence. Teaching his discovery to my students has afforded me an opportunity to reiterate the importance of the basic concepts of grammar they have learned over the years. By the time we discuss Dionysius Thrax and his formulation of the eight parts of speech, they will see that specific grammars are developed for specific languages. Thrax, for example, counted articles and participles as distinct classes, but future scholars of Latin would quickly realize that articles could not be essential for a language that did not have them. By injecting these short history lessons into their studies, I hope to show our students that grammar, like any other subject, follows a progression of difficulty that echoes the order in which the principles were discovered. 

Today, linguists and grammarians categorize English into the eight parts of speech that apply most appropriately to the language as it exists. When the students learn this, they come to see that grammar is not a collection of edicts passed down from on high. Instead, it is a system for understanding the complexities of our language so that we can become better speakers, writers, and thinkers. That I can give my students the chance to conceptualize the study of grammar in this way, before they enter high school, is most certainly a point of pride. And maybe a little jealousy.  

Why Bother With History?

by Andrew Lewis

“We don’t have time to bother with the past. Kids need to learn about society’s problems today. Forget history. It’s not worth the time and effort.”

Most would agree that there are many problems to address in the 21st Century. But the idea that dispensing with history will help to solve them is absurd. The nature of those problems makes the study of history more important, not less. Simply to identify problems that exist necessarily implies some standard of value – some knowledge of a time that was better – as well as to learn how those problems developed. Learning history is not a “bother,” it is a necessity.

This much is true: today’s world has many problems. All, however, are the results of historical actions and events, be it the lingering effects of Covid, the Digital Revolution of the 1990s, or the fall of the Berlin Wall – events from the last 50 years, whose effects are reasonably easy to discern. There are the longer-term consequences of the Reformation, the Age of Discovery, and the Renaissance – events whose effects continue to ripple across the world 500 years later. And, if you know where to look, events from one, two, or even three millennia in the past continue to shape the present (and the future). An electrician will not replace a fuse until he discovers why it blew. To attempt to fix today’s social problems without understanding their causes is just as futile.

It has often been repeated that those who fail to learn from the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them. (Thank you, George Santayana.) One would hope that learning from a historical error would be as simple as learning not to put your hand on a hot stove, but historical errors are not always readily identifiable, particularly as they were rarely regarded as mistakes at the time. To identify such mistakes requires a broad understanding of their context, their causes, and how those actions became mistakes, knowledge possible only through the study of history.

If it is important to avoid repeating past mistakes, Santayana’s maxim has a corollary few consider: that we should also learn from the past’s successes. It would surely be profitable to learn of actions that have succeeded. But what has succeeded? How can success be determined? And under what conditions could such conditions be replicated? Again, only a knowledge of history will provide the necessary information.

Even if people are convinced of history’s importance, they may groan at the prospect of doing so if (as too many have) they have endured a Ben Stein-like history teacher. (“Bueller? Bueller?”) But history can be fun and fascinating. The heroics of the Spartans’ stand at Thermopylae (which saved Athenian democracy and thus all participatory political systems), the courage of Patrick Henry (who helped to motivate the Declaration of Independence) and Juan Elcano (who completed Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe), the farce of Alcibiades, the tragedy of Abelard and Heloise, and the ingenuity of Eratosthenes – all are important to know and fun and fascinating to learn. 

Whether it is to learn how to fix today’s world, to learn from past mistakes and successes, or to be inspired by people’s actions, there are many reasons to “bother” with history, but only if it is taught and studied correctly.

What is the “correct” approach to the study of history?

A subject for another time.

K-1 Connections

by Jen Davila

In science class, I talked to the first graders about the wind. They have all felt it. They have observed its effects. They can even, in a way, create it, by blowing or using a fan.

But what is it?

In our discussion, they learned that some parts of the air surrounding Earth heat more than others, and that when warm air rises and cool air rushes in to take its place, the moving air is wind. 

They marveled over this force that can have such power in it: to fly a balloon, to move a sailboat, to power machines, etc. 

And yet, I asked them: who has seen it?

I was reminded that this spirit of marveling over the mysterious of power of the wind was captured in the poem Who Has Seen the Wind? by Christina Rosetti. So, I took this opportunity to teach it to my students. 

Who has seen the wind? 
Neither I nor you: 
But when the leaves hang trembling, 
The wind is passing through. 

Who has seen the wind? 
Neither you nor I: 
But when the trees bow down their heads, 
The wind is passing by.

Making this kind of connection unites the students’ intellectual curiosity about how the world works with a sense of grateful wonder. Next time they see the leaves trembling or the trees bowing, they can think to themselves dreamily, “Who has seen the wind?” and then, “I haven’t, but I still know something about it!”