The Coming Battle

The 2021-2022 school year has roared to life. My 7th and 8th grade boys experienced the joys of homework on the very first day of class as I handed out novels for them to read: Padraic Colum’s The Golden Fleece for the former and Mark Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc for the latter. The reading pace to complete their respective novels ought not exceed 50-55 pages a week at most, and that’s excluding weekends. The students have by now all watched and taken notes from at least one instructional video as well. The maximization of instructional time being used to observe and assist students demonstrating their level of mastery over our curriculum has begun. The 8th grade boys have also participated in their first Socratic discussion over the question, “How can Chaplain Kapaun teach me the meaning of heroic virtue?”

Hitting the ground running has so far proven prudent, but that’s not the topic of this post. Instead, I return to 3 June’s post wherein I reflected upon last school year’s writing challenges.

I shall toss down the first gauntlet just before Labor Day weekend, and I shall strive to issue another challenge a couple of weeks later. The two gauntlets a month rate of writing challenges seems the best way to go, and so we shall.

I’ve also pondered more the advancement of Pages toward full knighthood. Students earn points based on the number of challenges they answer, doing so as follows:

A Page has answered one or two challenges.
A Squire has answered at least three but fewer than six challenges.
A Knight-Errant has answered at least six but fewer than ten challenges.
A Knight-Bachelor has answered at least ten but fewer than fifteen challenges.
A Knight-Banneret has answered at least sixteen challenges.

This means, as I mentioned in that previous post, I have one student who has earned promotion from Page to Squire. His Certificate of Merit will be ready for public presentation during our morning assembly this Friday.
​Huzzah.

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