Like you, I was once a middle school student. I still remember arriving at my big public middle school on the first day of sixth grade; I was tall (so, so tall) on the outside, but small on the inside. I remember the surprise and disappointment as I walked out of class for my first recess break, ready to diffuse some of my nervous energy, only to discover the campus covered in a foreign animal: teens. Sitting, standing, talking teens. It was my first school day that contained no play. The rest of my school days were the same, forever. We chatted. We never played. It was a little death.

This year I teach seventh grade Great Books. These middle schoolers are burgeoning teens, enjoying and suffering through all that comes with this age. I get them for their last class of the day.

I will now shock you: my middle schoolers play. They play, at school, every day.

When I arrive in the South Campus courtyard to take them to class, they are playing hide and seek tag. Nearly all of them. The game will last as long as I let it; some of them a foot taller than others and learning to run with new clumsy giant feet, others darting about like minnows glinting in the sun. They’re dodging between picnic tables, interrupting volleyball games, leaping across the wetlands rock path like so many gangly goats. No matter the weather, no matter how long they think they’ll be outside, they relentlessly and cheerfully play.

Am I tempted to let them play the entire class period? Yes. Do I let them play the entire class period? Only sometimes. When their wild panting forms go streaking past me as I sit at a picnic table in the shade, I am overwhelmed by an urge to defend their play and foster their appetite for it. I’m sure that my own middle school experience of play being stripped away before I was done with it is the norm rather than the exception. I love to see the tide reversed. The game will last as long as I let it.

There are not many middle schools in America where you would be greeted by such a scene (and not even in younger grades, now that recess has been so ruthlessly eliminated from the school life of the American child).

In this way, in the world’s eyes, my seventh-grade students are allowed to remain as children.

But then we go inside. And what do we do? My students will tell you: we stand, face each other, look each other in the eye, focus our attention, and greet each other.

"Good afternoon, class."

"Good afternoon, Mrs. Mueller."

Then, we pray: "O Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of the Eternal Father, Thou hast said, 'Without me you can do nothing.' In faith I embrace Thy words, O Lord, and bow before Thy goodness. Help me to complete the work I am about to begin, for Thine own glory. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen."

Now, we stretch our memories by adding lines to this semester’s recitation:

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest–
For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men–
Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral…

And so on, for thirty-five lines.

Then, out come the notebooks and pens and books. It could be fiction, Scripture, philosophy, drama or poetry; my students will end the year having read over twenty such works, constituting thousands of pages.

I write a question on the board.

What makes a good king?

How can education prepare the student for an unknown future?

How can you know the path you’re on is the right one?

For thirty minutes, they make my question their own, attempting answers using the book in front of them to support their ideas. They add more questions. They attend, deeply and carefully, to the task in front of them, just as we prayed at the start of class that Christ would help us to do. They speak, to me and to each other, in a room where there is nothing else to do but be present and use all your powers of reason and spirit to look for answers.

Greeting. Prayer. Memorization. Reading. Discussion. There are not many middle schools in America where you would find even one of these things occurring in a classroom: you would be hard pressed indeed to find a middle school where all of these things are happening, in most days, in most classes, in most subjects. Such is the world my seventh graders inhabit.

In this way, in the world’s eyes, my seventh-grade students are asked to meet a standard that rises above our world’s expectations for mature adults. In academic life, they are old souls.

And now we arrive at a paradox: the teens I teach every week are both very young and very old. They are encouraged to be as little children; they are also called to do serious work at which most adults would balk.

While I delight in this paradox, I find that I am not alone in finding youth and old age present in the same person. The nineteenth century author George MacDonald wrote many precious jewels of fantasy literature, including one my students read, The Golden Key. In it, a young girl who is wandering Fairy Land comes upon a majestically beautiful woman.

"How old are you, please?" returned Tangle.

"Thousands of years old," answered the lady.
"You don't look like it," said Tangle.
"Don't I? I think I do. Don't you see how beautiful I am!"
And her great blue eyes looked down on the little Tangle, as if all the stars in the sky were melted in them to make their brightness.
"Ah! but," said Tangle, "when people live long they grow old. At least I always thought so."
"I have no time to grow old," said the lady. "I am too busy for that. It is very idle to grow old…”

Tangle goes on to seek out the Old Man of the Sea, who is old in appearance but is also somehow a robust man of mature middle age. She is next sent to the Old Man of the Earth, whom she at first sees as a very old man bent double with age and with a long white beard. But she draws closer to him, and at “the moment she looked in his face, she saw that he was a youth of marvelous beauty.” Finally, she finds the Old Man of the Fire, the oldest man in Fairy Land, and he is a small child, seated on the floor, playing with a few simple toys.

How old, indeed, are these students of mine, who will live as immortal souls into eternity? What am I looking at when I look into their bright inquisitive eyes, the same eyes which will fill with all their triumphs and sorrows so long as life finds them upon the earth? What do I make of the way they use childlike and playful wonder to plumb the depths of life’s most serious questions? There is a great mystery here. I do not attempt to explain, but I will spend a lifetime marveling at it.

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A common practice in a classical school is the Commonplace Book, which serves as an index of ideas that can spur you on to further and deeper thought. A little notebook will suffice, something that you can carry around and jot into as you attempt to understand and enjoy the world God has given us.

Rather than synthesizing more of my own ideas, I’m going to give you a little window in the Commonplace Book index of quotations which I use to meditate on the mystery that is a seventh grade Saint Constantine student. Like any Great Books teacher worth her salt, I hope to present you with riches and then ask you to make something of them yourself. My thoughts on these subjects are interesting to me, to be sure; but as a teacher, I am more interested in your thoughts. Email me at mmueller@saintconstantine.org if you find yourself mulling over this topic.

From G. K. Chesterton:

The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning, but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun, and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.

(Orthodoxy, 91-92)

From Charlotte Mason:

The flowers, it is true, are not new; but the children are; and it is the fault of their elders if every new flower they come upon is not to them a Picciola*, a mystery of beauty to be watched from day to day with unspeakable awe and delight. (Home Education, 53)

*Bagatelle: Picciola is a nineteenth century novel about a man who falls in love with a plant. This commentator appreciates any novelist’s attempt to reckon with an overly scientific approach to botany by reminding the reader that the Enlightenment, while eagerly borrowing terms of human sexuality for the plant world, wasn’t sure what to do with that pesky human sentiment that comes with it. Do plants have feelings? The worried nineteenth century botanist asks such questions. The novelist, surprising no one, uses his art to explore such possibilities.

From Elizabeth Barrett Browning:

And truly, I reiterate, nothing’s small!
No lily-muffled hum of a summer-bee, But finds some coupling with the spinning stars; No pebble at your foot, but proves a sphere; No chaffinch, but implies the cherubim; And (glancing on my own thin, veinèd wrist),

In such a little tremor of the blood The whole strong clamour of a vehement soul Doth utter itself distinct. Earth’s crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God; But only he who sees, takes off his shoes, The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries, And daub their natural faces unaware More and more from the first similitude.

(Aurora Leigh, VII.304)

From Gerard Manley Hopkins:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

(God’s Grandeur)

 

From Plato:

Socrates: …So I withdrew and thought to myself: “I am wiser than this man; it is likely that neither of us knows anything worthwhile, but he thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas when I do not know, neither do I think I know; so I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know.”

(Apology, 21d)

 

From Saint Matthew:

At that time the disciples came to Jesus, saying, “Who then is greatest in the kingdom of heaven?”

Then Jesus called a little child to Him, set him in the midst of them, and said, “Assuredly, I say to you, unless you are converted and become as little children, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore whoever humbles himself as this little child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever receives one little child like this in My name receives Me. But whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to sin, it would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were drowned in the depth of the sea…”

(The Gospel of St. Matthew, 18:1-6)