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By Erika Adam
We are going over the time recommended in the Homework Scheduling Chart. What can I do? The first and easiest way to avoid going over the recommended homework time is to make sure that you are proactive at keeping up with assigned work. It’s so important for parents to have the flexibility to excuse assignments where needed- we are all busy homeschool families with many responsibilities. However, if too many assignments are excused, or if assignments are excused without working with the tutor to determine where excusing an assignment might cause a student to miss out on an important concept- then students can end up in a frustrating situation where they can’t benefit from the instruction in class. And, of course, a student who hasn’t learned well in class has no choice but to try to teach themselves at home, having to look up many concepts to make up for what was missed. This takes a lot of time- usually much more than completing the assignments as originally assigned would have taken. However, sometimes it’s the case that a student is faithfully completing what is assigned right on schedule, and the work is still taking much longer than recommended. If you are in this situation, we’d like to help! Often it’s possible to create a plan together that can help make things more manageable. Just reach out to CHA’s Academic Support Team (contact information below)! It starts with a conversation. It can end with the accommodations your child needs to be successful at Christiana. We fell behind a little, and I can tell that my child isn’t “getting” everything that’s taught in class. Help! It happens! No one at CHA keeps up with everything perfectly all the time. And we don’t expect you to! A certain level of flexibility is built into our policies for good reason. However, if you’ve fallen behind, communication is key! By working together, we can help you to prioritize what courses of action will have the most benefit, to help get you back on track as quickly and easily as possible. In order to do this, we need to know what barriers might be affecting you at home, while you need to know what is most necessary to help things flow smoothly for your child in class. Again, it starts with a conversation. First, reach out to your child’s tutor. Make every effort to attend Parent-Tutor conferences (coming up on February 10th!) If you have concerns about the academic curriculum that cannot be answered by the tutor, reach out to the Department Coordinator. If you have concerns about the tutor or your child’s placement in a class, these should go to the appropriate Dean. My child says that the work is difficult. Does this mean that we’re not a good fit at CHA? Did you know that good grades are not a good predictor of how much a student will remember later in life, or how skilled they will eventually become in the subject being graded? Similarly, it is well known that having a high IQ does not mean that a person will become successful, either in school or in life. If having high intelligence and earning good grades don’t make the difference for our children’s futures, what does? The answer, as it is increasingly being revealed by modern science, is that the act of struggling itself is what produces good and lasting learning.* Or, as rising 9th graders read each year at CHA- it is important to Do Hard Things. Or, as has been understood by classical educators throughout history- what produces good and lasting learning of the kind that really matters is virtue. Perseverance. Prudence. Self-mastery. All the Biblical virtues which CHA students recite each day at morning devotions. When the assigned material becomes difficult, or grades start to fall, it can feel very frustrating. It can be tempting to conclude that there is something “wrong,” or that a different method of learning would be a better fit. But in reality, embracing this and working through it provides a myriad of benefits.
Contact Information for the Academic Support Team at CHA: Mrs. Erika Adam, Temporary Director of Academic Support, [email protected] Mrs. Laura Staley, Lower School Dean (PreK-8th Grade), [email protected] Mr. Louis Stachowiak, Upper School Dean (9th - 12th), [email protected] * https://cedarclassicalacademy.org/in-defense-of-mastery-our-approach-to-assessment/
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By Erika Adam
How does mastery-based learning work for my child’s benefit at Christiana? Keeping up with material in mastery-based subjects does many things for your child:
At Christiana, we provide structure and curriculum for parents homeschooling their children in the classical tradition. We as parents have the benefit of the tremendous amount of support that Christiana provides. However, in order to provide that support without charging the high hourly rate needed to provide a private tutor, CHA must group students into classes. This keeps your tuition low, and also provides a strong community setting where learning can occur collaboratively while students build relationships and close friendships. But students don’t all learn at the same rate. How can I make the group setting at CHA work for us, while still ensuring that my child can be met at his or her own level? While CHA’s structure doesn’t allow for classes to tailor the pace to every individual student’s needs, this is impossible in any group instructional setting. However, parents know their children best. CHA’s flexible 2-day schedule allows parents to take advantage of the longer periods of time they have to dedicate to homeschooling, building strong relationships while providing the type of individualized instruction that is essential to a classical education. Parents are in the best position to take the role of private tutors at home, meeting their children exactly where they are while also making sure that they are building the knowledge and skills needed to continue to benefit from the curriculum at CHA. Additionally, for many of our subjects, different levels are available to help ensure a good fit for each student. Do all CHA classes require mastery? While all CHA classes require participation and effort, and all students are expected to show growth, not every CHA subject is structured in the same way. While standards are important, there are higher goals. First and foremost, we seek to structure our classes in such a way that an education at Christiana will train the affections to love what is Good, True, and Beautiful- and thus to love God. Within some subjects, this is impossible to do without mastery-based learning; a student who can’t engage in the subject at the level it is being taught can hardly learn to love what is Good in it. However, many subjects at CHA are structured so as to allow a student to “jump in” at any point, without needing to have mastered prior knowledge or information to follow along. We use minimum academic standards only in areas where the subject matter truly can’t be taught in a group setting without them. This is Part 2 of 3- stay tuned for next week’s Board Bit: “We are going over the time recommended in the Homework Scheduling Chart. What can I do?” and “My child says that the work is difficult. Does this mean that we’re not a good fit at CHA?” By Erika Adam
Classical education is a time-respected model. How did it work in the past? We are all here at Christiana because we want our children to have a quality classical education- an education that will teach them how to think, not what to think. However, in past times, a classical education was often available only to a small elite- just those who could afford tutors to work individually with their children. These tutors weren’t teachers in the sense that we understand the word today- but mentors, modeling the process of learning and inspiring students to imitate that process. Students taught in this way are met at the level where they are, and guided into taking charge of their own learning. Structured this way, students learned better and more thoroughly than they do now in modern-day schools. Those who learn how to learn well, naturally learn what they want to learn, far better. This is why students taught classically in the modern day have been shown to outperform their peers who are taught by traditional methods both on standardized tests and in college. What does it look like to learn how to learn?Among many others, one of the best tools we have to help students in their classical education is mastery-based learning. Put simply, mastery-based learning focuses on mastering one level of a topic, before moving onto the next level. This is an important part of understanding how learning can build on itself. What is mastery-based learning, and why is it important?Mastery-based learning applies to any subject where students need to draw on prior knowledge to understand the lessons which come later. Mathematics, Latin, and Reading are some of the main areas at Christiana in which mastery is most necessary before moving on. In any mastery-based subject, it’s essential to learn what comes first thoroughly, before moving on to what comes next. Imagine being asked to translate a sentence from Latin to English…without knowing any Latin words. Or being asked to do multi-step algebraic equations involving fractions…without understanding the basics of how fractions work and what they represent. Would you have a positive experience? Most people would quickly decide that what was being taught “just isn’t for me,” or that they are “just not good at it.” Yet these very same people might actually have great aptitude for either one of these subjects- if only they had mastered the right tools so that they could follow along with what was being taught. Any student can learn any subject- as long as the material is presented and learned in the right order and in the right way. This is just Part 1 of 3- stay tuned for next week’s Board Bit: “How does mastery-based learning work for my child’s benefit at Christiana?” and “But students don’t all learn at the same rate. How can I make the group setting at CHA work for us, while still ensuring that my child can be met at his or her own level? Why is it Important to Support/Attend the March for Life? By: Tina Dubyoski, CHA co-founder1/10/2024 Some of you may wonder why CHA participates in the March for Life each year. Just in case you never noticed, one of the core tenets of the CHA Faith Statement, which all families sign every year they attend, states:
“We believe that human life is sacred and we profess a pro-life worldview.” We choose to march because we envision a future world where the beauty and dignity of every human life are valued and protected. It is important to encourage our middle and high school students to get involved and participate because they are the future of this country. We are shaping their minds and their opinions on this topic and it is very important to have conversations about it because our culture definitely does not value human life and often treats babies in the womb as an inconvenience and something that can be disposed of. For those of you who may be unaware of what The March for Life is all about, here is some history. The March for Life is an annual rally in Washington, D.C., either on or around the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, a decision legalizing abortion nationwide, which was issued on January 22, 1973 by the United States Supreme Court. Nellie Gray organized the first March for Life on the one-year anniversary of Roe v. Wade being passed into law. What grew as a small demonstration in 1974 in Washington, D.C., quickly grew into the largest annual pro-life event in the country. Hundreds of thousands of people participate in the national march every January, many of them young people in high school and college. The goal of the March for Life is to not only change laws at the state and federal level, but to change the culture to ultimately make abortion unthinkable. Currently, with the role of the states being more important, there is also a big push to grow strong state march for life initiatives quickly; however, the March for Life organization will continue to march every January at the national level until a culture of life is restored. Pro-life Americans gather, not only to challenge abortion, but also to celebrate the beauty of life, beginning from the moment of conception. It is easy to believe that people who espouse pro-life views are in the minority if all we do is listen to many of the people around us in our current culture. The amazing thing about attending the March for Life in DC is that you see hundreds of thousands of other people who believe very strongly about the sanctity of life and protecting the unborn babies who are murdered with each abortion performed. To give you an idea of the scope of the problem, more than 60 million abortions have been performed since 1973, when Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in this country. This number only includes those performed in clinics, hospitals or physicians’ offices, or those that make use of abortion pills dispensed from certified facilities such as clinics or physicians’ offices. It does not account for the use of abortion pills that were obtained outside of clinical settings. Here are a few more statistics concerning abortion:
If anyone has questions about the March for Life or the particulars of attending, please reach out to me. I would be happy to answer your questions. You can reach Tina by email at: [email protected]. This is part of the Board Bits: Tips, Tricks, and Hacks series. Is there a question about CHA or homeschool that you would like answered? Submit inquiries to Tracey at [email protected] |
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