The World's a Stage

Happy New Year! Welcome back! It’s been about six months since I started this podcast and so I thought I’d review what the purpose of this little dream is. Call me crazy but I just love learning about awesome ways to teach and encourage students, teachers, and parents . . . to help them find wonder, Beauty, and joy in the simple things in life as well as ideas to help them flourish as human beings and image-bearers of our Creator God. Because as I hope you all know by now, that education is more than academics, more than what you learn in a classroom or in your living room. To use Charlotte Mason’s words– it is “an atmosphere, a discipline, and a life.”

I have found that I have fallen in love with Charlotte Mason’s philosophy of education as well as many elements of the Classical model of teaching and learning. Many of the educational things I have learned, I only learned about later in life, and so I want to reveal to our young teachers and parents today these precious truths about how children learn and what education is all about so they can implement these life-giving concepts into their homes and classrooms when their children and students are still young. 

So the first 21 episodes of the podcast have focused on some of the main elements of a Charlotte Mason Classical education (like Nature Study, Living Books, atmosphere, and handicrafts), using the Classical transcendentals - Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.  My goal is to introduce you to these concepts and show you how you can learn and experience them in your everyday lives, and introduce you to people who embody various aspects of these divine ideas, whether it be a serious study using the 5 Common Topics, fun hobbies like caring for houseplants, empathizing with the world through a study in Geography, tackling life skills needed for a home business growing flowers, or learning to deal with trauma across the ocean in a new land.

In this last half of the school year, I plan to discuss more in depth elements of a Charlotte Mason education and hopefully bring to you more book chats covering my favorite authors like Jane Austen, C. S. Lewis, Tolkien, and Beatrix Potter. I hope to also help you create peaceful moments at home, bonding experiences with your kids and students, and intriguing conversations with your classroom. I also hope to bring to your attention people in my life and outside my circle who have inspired me in one way or another and who I think will inspire you as well.

So with that little introduction, let’s dive into today’s episode! It’s all about the TRUE, the GOOD, and the BEAUTIFUL of the theatre with my special guest, Adler Roberts of Innovate Academy!

Favorite Resources:

• On Acting by Sanford Meisner
• Sight & Sound, Lancaster, PA
• Servant Stage, Lancaster County, PA
• Playhouse West, Philadelphia, PA (for older students/adults)
• SALT Performing Arts, Chester Springs, PA
• People's Light, Malvern, PA

 

COMMONPLACE QUOTES

"To be or not to be, that is the question." - Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene I

“There is a danger in these days of much educational effort that children’s play should be crowded out [or what is the same thing] should be prescribed for and arranged until there is no more freedom of choice about play than about work. We do not say a word against the educational value of games (such as football, basketball, etc.) … but organized games are not play in the sense we have in view. Boys and girls must have time to invent episodes, carry on adventures, live heroic lives, lay sieges and carry forts, even if the fortress be an old armchair; and in these affairs the elders must neither meddle nor make.” -Charlotte Mason, School Education, Volume 3, p. 36-37

"Acting is living truthfully under imaginary circumstances." - Sanford Meisner, On Acting

“To become intimate with Shakespeare in this way is a great enrichment of mind and instruction of conscience. Then, by degrees, as we go on reading this world-teacher, lines of insight and beauty take possession of us, and unconsciously mould our judgments of men and things and of the great issues of life” - Charlotte Mason, Ourselves: Vol. 4, Book 2, p. 72

"beautiful things are difficult" - Socrates, Greater Hippias

"Talent develops in quiet places, character in the full current of human life." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (in other words what Adler explained: "The actor's career develops in public but his art develops in private." 

“. . . give a child a single valuable idea, and you have done more for his education than if you had laid upon his mind the burden of bushels of information.” - Charlotte Mason, Home Education, Vol. 1, p. 174

 

APPLICATION

1. Watch a silent film or a ballet and see how a medium that doesn't use words informs how you look at storytelling.

    

   2. Play a game of charades in your classroom or at home to get kids in the habit of acting things out. And make presentations or recitations a normal part of your classroom routine and home culture so that speaking in front of others becomes second nature to your students.

    

   3. Seek out and attend an interesting musical or play at your local theatre. Look for interesting story arcs and note whether or not it has a redemptive theme and whether or not it is a comedy or tragedy. How can you tell? If you need help, listen to Episode 12, where I interview Dr. Kathryn Smith of the Templeton Honors College about the four types of literary genres.