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Three poems by Kenneth Peters

There are at least two ways to view Becket’s transformation: either it’s a genuine spiritual conversion which resulted in his conviction that the church should remain on equal footing with the state, or it’s an instance of Becket being consistent with his brash personality.

In my previous blogpost for Saint Constantine (“Legends of the Fog”), I argued that insufficient respect had been paid to the accuracy and retentiveness of human memory.  This was a more general philosophical argument.  In this installment, I would like to provide some concrete examples from my own research to buttress the general claim.

Our students participated in a Security Council simulation debating the efficacy and enforcement of the Olympic Truce. Afterwards, we spent time considering the justification of the permanent five veto power. Little did we imagine these topics would take on such immediate magnitude soon after.

Postulates:

1. A student of mathematics ought to come away from class better able to reason logically, think critically, and apply problem-solving techniques to new situations. 
2. An effective math education will expose students to mathematical proofs and teach students to ask why formulas and theorems are true, not to merely memorize them.
3. In order to understand who we are and how we ought to proceed with regard to any subject, we must understand from where we come.

Directly following this event, my husband happened to be in my Upper School Choir classroom as a guest clinician. He recounted this story to the room full of 9-12^th graders and then followed it with this question: “When have you done the same thing?”

In the 1830s, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was a rookie professor at the relatively small Bowdoin College in Maine. Longfellow had not yet made a name for himself as one of the most important poets of the American nineteenth century. He was still merely a young teacher with an ambitious goal: to impart to his undergraduate students a winsome vision of literary history.

Stillness is not just counterintuitive for preschoolers. The Bible challenges us in Psalm 46:10 to “be still and know that I am God.” This can be quite the task at any age. 

Why spend so much time learning an outmoded model of the universe, rather than skipping straight to the scientific knowledge and paradigms of today? Many answers could be offered to this question, from the importance of familiarity with one’s intellectual heritage to a defense of the oft-mischaracterized intelligence of the ancients and medievals.

However, the most important reason to study the astronomy of our predecessors is its impact on the heart and soul.