Mr. Heise
Bustling first weeks of school!
In these bustling first weeks of school, I've had the joy of getting acquainted with your students and have been impressed with their creativity, good humor, and liveliness. We've shared stories of our summer adventures and said goodbye to the memories for now, ready to turn to the equal—if more challenging!—pleasures of diligent scholarship.
In middle school humanities, we're laying the groundwork for our study of American history and literature by casting back before the founding to the great voyages of discovery. We began with excerpts from Montaigne and Thomas More, each author reflecting on the many and complicated ideas that motivated some to set sail for the New World. We looked at the vibrant mappae mundi (world maps) going back as far as Ptolemy to get a sense for how deeply Europeans were already thinking about the New World before much was known about it and read stories from Bartolomé de las Casas and others recounting the intense debates that were touched off in Europe by first contact. Today, we read Alfred Crosby's landmark scholarship on the Columbian exchange and excerpts from Thomas Mann's 1491 arguing that the prosperity of trade put early American colonies on a crash course for revolution. (The students were very interested in the diversity of potatoes found in the New World.)
We’ve also been discussing the concept of classical education broadly, reading the book Classical Me, Classical Thee. The students were particularly interested in that book's discussion of rhetoric and logic, so we modified the schedule and added a day to act out Plato’s Gorgias dialogue as a coda to the conversation on Classical Me. The students really got into character, but I was excited that everyone seemed to also have a very sharp read on the argument and interpersonal dynamics going on in the dialogue. The students followed Socrates' argument against unscrupulous rhetoricians like bloodhounds, and could instantly identify when Socrates' interlocutor was being deliberately obscure, or hiding behind some trick of rhetoric. I'd like to eventually tie this activity back in our Latin class to the long running theme of antagonism between orators and philosophers.
High school math takes us to the Greeks as well, where we introduce geometry with Euclid and learn his historical significance as the first theorist of mathematical universals. Our first two weeks are mostly vocabulary—learning the unique senses that the words “point”, “line”, “congruent”, etc. have in geometry. I’m excited to have this done and move to the real meat of the class where we’ll use these terms to prove Euclid’s postulates and extend them to the math soon to come in trigonometry and non-Euclidean geometry (linear algebra and physics). The high school students are also busy building college readiness plans and taking inventory of skills and aspirations as they prepare for what’s next.