Monday, January 24th, 2022
When students transition from sixth to seventh grade at Regents, a world of change occurs in their school experience. No longer are there weekly parent-teacher folders that are sent home, one home room teacher, or as many field trips and class events for parents to attend. Students at this age even hide from friendly newsletter writers! Sometimes parents and grandparents are left wondering what do they do all day in the Logic School? Here are some snapshots on current happenings in the Logic School:
- Roving bands of Logic School Latin classes regularly encircle Jefferson Park Baptist Church chanting declensions (see video here). “Classical education is about the mind, body, and spirit,” says Latin I teacher Tyler MacDowall. “As such, chanting Latin declensions is a very embodied—dare I say Incarnational—practice we ritually engage in. We’ve constructed our own little ‘Liturgy of Latin’, beginning and ending class with some collective act of education.”
- You may think that recitations ended in Grammar School, but that is not so! In Medieval Literature, students recently finished reciting from the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales.
- In Logic II, students are reading Plato’s Crito. According to teacher Clay Daniel, students are “continuing through the land of enthymemes and ending up in the country of strange medieval mnemonic devices ... all in the hopes of spotting valid and invalid syllogisms so we can reason better!”
- In Medieval History, students formed groups and presented speeches on Mos Maiorum, the unwritten customs that established Roman social norms that governed public, private and military life in classical Rome. As they constructed their speeches they considered what how to establish their credibility, what emotions their speeches appeal to, the morality of changes they are proposing, and what the general line of logical reasoning is!
