Homeroom: Making a Small School Smaller

This is the second year that we have had homerooms at the high school. Homeroom period is ten minutes every day (except during block days) between 3rd and 4th bell, and immediately after Chapel on Wednesdays. Homeroom replaces the old advisory groups which met quarterly. Each group consists of ten to thirteen students of the same grade and gender and one faculty member or administrator. We have been able to create this period without taking away from instructional time because our expanded cafeteria has allowed us to go from three lunches down to two.

Homeroom has a few basic purposes. First, it is a place to give announcements, hand out forms and paperwork, and generally take care of school business. In the past, this happened at the beginning of 2nd Bell. But this wasn't always the most ideal way to communicate information. While 2nd Bell was slightly longer, occasionally announcements and business could bleed over into class time. This system had the effect of shortening the same class with every overage. We work hard to restrict classroom interruptions as much as possible. Another benefit to disseminateing information in homerooms is that, generally speaking, the smaller the group hearing announcements, the more effective the communication. Homerooms are generally much smaller than a typical class.

Second, and more importantly, homerooms form communities within the greater school community. Even though our school is small by some standards, some students still feel isolated. Because of homeroom, every student connects with the same group of classmates and an adult every day. Many churches create this community within a community with "small groups" or "home fellowships groups." Homeroom is ultimately relational time. Our homerooms foster relationships that help students navigate the school year socially, emotionally, and spiritually. It is a safe place for discussion, sharing, and praying together. Because it is immediately after Chapel, it creates a great place for chapel debrief as well. Mr. Salkil even creates potential discussion questions for his chapel talks.

Of my twelve students in homeroom, I had only worked with five of them before in a class or Winter Term. Over the past three weeks, I have had the distinct pleasure of getting to know a group of talented, considerate, thoughtful, and fun(ny) senior men. I look forward to sharing this year with them! I hope they can receive from me all of the energy, hope, and insight I gain from them.

My School

I hope everyone is enjoying the long weekend after a very busy first two weeks. It is nice to stop and breath for a minute after a non-stop, action packed start to the school year. I cannot remember a better beginning! Here are some of the highlights.

We began with a wonderful Opening Convocation service. The evening began with a processional of faculty and administration in full academic regalia. Students, faculty, administrators, and even a parent welcomed, prayed, spoke, and shared musical gifts. The highlight of the evening was Ben Lapps sharing his musical piece "Reveille" on the guitar. If you have not experienced an Opening Convocation yet, you must be sure to attend next year!

The first day of school is always a special time here. The Miracle Commons has the feel of a family reunion as students and teachers reconnect after two and a half months away. This year Student Council added a nice touch by bringing bagels for everyone! Thursday was Meet the Teacher night as each class gave a glimpse into the year. In much the same way that students reunited with each other on the first day, the parents did the same on Thursday evening, catching up with each other and asking what each other's students were taking, involved in, playing, etc. I had so many great comments and emails about how impressed our parents are with what is happening around here!

Friday morning of the first week was a Spirit Day. Because we were part of the Fox 19 Game of the Week, the Fox 19 Morning Show did their weather spots live from the MSL gymnasium from 7-9 am. So at 7 am on the first Friday of the school year, we had an optional pep rally in the gym. The pep band, cheerleaders, Encore, the football team, and over a hundred students showed some Eagle spirit for the cameras. The Cincinnati area watched as we played, cheered, sang, and gave interviews. If you missed the broadcast, click on the link under News on the website to watch video clips of the event. We had a fun morning and the entire Tri-State area got to watch!

This past week we had our first block schedule of the year on Tuesday and Wednesday. Wednesday we had our first chapel. "My School" is the theme of Mr. Salkil's first chapel series. He spoke about the way a sense of Christian community shapes our environment but how selfishness, fear, and elitism can break down what God can do among us. He challenged the students to consider what true Christian community could look like at CHCA and how God could use each of them to make it a reality. He pointed out how it was our responsibility to pull in all the new people so that they too could call this "my school."

Friday night was another one of those wonderful CHCA community times. Whether you are a football fan or not, Friday night football games are an important part of community here. Students from every building, parents and grandparents, alumni, teachers and staff all come together to share a wonderful evening. Watching and cheering over a football game only scratches the surface of what happens on a Friday night. Young and old catch up and rehearse old memories. Little kids play football in the grass, dreaming of the day they will be center stage out on the field. The pep band creates a festive atmosphere. People share food, whether tailgating or from the concession stand. High school students display their school spirit in all kinds of ways. New friends and aquaintances are made. And as a bonus to the evening, the Eagles won easily 21-0. (We also got a nice wrap up article in the Enquirer the next day!)

What a great beginning. This is our school! I've been moved the past two weeks watching our students engaging, learning, and growing in a school they proudly consider their own. But this is only a beginning. What will next week bring? I'm not sure, but I'll let you know.

Opening Convocation

The year is fast approaching! New Family Orientation is Tuesday and Freshmen Orientation is Wednesday. All teachers and staff report on Thursday and then Monday morning at 7:50, the 2009-10 school year will officially begin. Where has the summer gone?

If you are like me, summer typically ends with a list of tasks undone and a series of goals unfulfilled. No matter how much I do, I somehow always planned on more. I saw almost all of my family, traveled to wonderful places, made numerous memories with my boys, read many of the books on my "to read" list. Still I wonder, what if I only had another week? But no amount of wishing can change the inevitable.

Throughout all of human history, people have marked transitions--shifts in time, change of seasons, rites of passage. In education, we often fall into the rut of marking endings but glossing over the power of beginnings. We close each school year with Commencement, an ending which is also a beginning. But the start of school often hits us in a bustle of meetings, syllabi, and school supplies. The next thing you know, we are talking about mid-terms. We have attempted to break that cycle at the MSL High School with our Opening Convocation.

This year marks our third Opening Convocation. Two years ago it was held the first hour of the first school day on campus. Last year it was moved off campus to both raise its stature and make it more accessible to the parent community. This year we have moved it back a few days because for some, it was difficult on the night before the first day of school, especially with younger children at home. So our Convocation will be on Thursday August 20, 2009 at Hyde Park Community United Methodist Church at 7:00 PM. (Please see the CHCA website for directions.)

Please come and join us as we open our year in worship, song, and prayer to the Lord! It will be a special time as we reconvene from the summer and celebrate what God will do among us this year. All are welcome. I look forward to seeing each of you!

Lots of Reading, But Not a Lot of Writing

I hope everyone is enjoying their summer. I've meant to post regularly throughout July, but as you may have noticed, it hasn't happened. I also promised an overview of Plantinga's Engaging God's World. That is still on the horizon. The only thing I've been updating with some frequency is the "What I'm Reading" list. Thank you all who have given me books over the past month or two. I'm catching up and enjoying the discovery of new authors and ideas. Malcom Gladwell's Outliers was a pleasant surprise that I find myself thinking and talking about at least once a day!

As the Nicholas family has been driving across the country, we've all been listening to the Chronicles of Narnia. It is fun to watch my boys encounter these stories for the first time. To add to the "Narnian adventure," we stopped at Wheaton College to see the Marion E. Wade Center (http://www.wheaton.edu/wadecenter/welcome/welcome.html). Among the great academic resources they have housed there, C.S. Lewis' writing desk and the wardrobe from his study--the inspiration for The Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe--were the ones of most interest to my children. If you ever get to Wheaton College, make sure you visit it, as well as the Billy Graham Center Museum (http://www.billygrahamcenter.com/museum/).

I'll be back for more blogging later. Boys are calling, fish are biting, and books are waiting. Check back in a few days.

Summer Reading

Summer and books have always gone together in my mind. From my earliest school days, reading was a part of the summer. As the final bell of the final day of the school year rang, “freedom” was the first thought in all our minds! School work was done. Projects were finished. Endless hours of riding bikes, playing baseball, swimming, fishing, cookouts, and festivals lay ahead. But then the first morning of summer vacation, Mom woke us up extra early, loaded us into the car, and took us to the neighborhood library. Like it or not, we were signing up for the Summer Reading Program.

The Summer Reading Program was a way to keep kids’ minds active. Each summer had a theme and the library was decorated accordingly. Around the library walls was a construction paper track that had a marker for each reader. Everyone received a form to fill in the titles read throughout the summer. And with each book read, one’s marker moved along the track. Therein was the hook. Reading was school work. But the Summer Reading Program was a competition! The masses would read their two or three books over the next ten weeks. But for the overly competitive (i.e., my sister and me), we would schlep a sack of books home each week, looking to leave the competition in the dust by the Fourth of July. We’d look to lap them by the beginning of the State Fair in August. My mother started monitoring our selections when we were scolded by the librarian for checking out picture books in the fifth grade. So we may have been reading for all the wrong reasons, but an important habit formed in us. To this day, summer is the time when I begin to read all the books I’ve piled up but never got to during the school year. If you are looking for a few good reads, let me suggest a few things I’ve read this past school year.

This past fall I finally read Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace…One School at a Time, by Greg Mortenson (http://www.threecupsoftea.com/). This is the true story of a man who almost died attempting to climb K2 in Pakistan. After being nursed back to health in a small village, he decides to come back to build them a school. This began Mortenson's quest to build schools for the remotest areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Mortenson gives a complex view inside a part of the world we fear. And his solution to fighting Islamic extremism challenges us to consider again whether the Way of Jesus might actually triumph in ways bombs and war cannot.

I reread a book this past year on a Winter Term flight to Israel. Elias Chacour’s Blood Brothers is a simple book that can be read very quickly. But the power of its story is life changing. Chacour’s autobiographical work tells how his Palestinian Christian family lost their home, possessions, and village with the formation of the State of Israel. And despite the pain of his loss, his Christian father always told him that Palestinian Christians are “blood brothers” with the Jews and therefore must not fight them but make peace with them. And Chacour spends his life doing that very thing. In one of the highlight moments for me in this school year, Archbishop Elias Chacour spent two hours with our group in Haifa in January telling us his story. He challenged us to take Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount seriously because He is calling on us to “get our hands dirty”! This book is a must read.

Thomas Friedman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded will affect the way you look at the world around you. The sequel to his past best seller, The World is Flat, this work looks at globalization, the rapid rise in population, and climate issues and considers their potential consequences on America’s future standing in the world. This book seems to be a primer on many of the central news stories of the day.

One of the books a number of high school faculty are reading this summer is John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany. This book has haunted me from the first time I read it. The story opens with the narrator crediting Owen for his belief in God. The character of Owen intrigues and baffles the reader throughout as he brazenly proclaims that he is an “instrument of God.” Every time I read this novel, I am again left wrestling with how Providence works in our world and I am challenged to think whether I am an actor or an observer/critic in the story unfolding all around me.

Another book I would like to strongly recommend that you read is Cornelius Plantinga’s Engaging God’s World: A Christian Vision of Faith, Learning, and Living. This book is the theological map of how we understand a Christian education and how we shape our curriculum at Cincinnati Hills Christian Academy K-12. I will write more about this work in my next blog because it deserves a more complete treatment. But if you are a part of CHCA and want to understand the way we think about what we do here, you must read this book!

So enjoy your summer. Begin finding the books you will read during your time away. Make some authors your new friends! I’ve already fallen head over heels for Anne Rice (check out the sidebar for what I’ve read of hers recently). And we’ll talk in August over a cup of coffee!

By the way, my kids are already signed up for the Summer Reading Program. The race is on.

Greater Things

Driving into school the morning after graduation, I was exhausted. Our speaker, Paul Young, flew out at 6:10 so we'd arranged a 4 am pick-up time. As I neared school, the rosy sun rising on a late spring morning, the lyrics from a song we sang in chapel ran through my head:

Greater things have yet to come,

Greater things are still to be done here

This has been a remarkable year. It has gone so fast, yet so much has happened. When the year began, we still had a muddy mess in our parking lot without enough parking. Now we have a great new addition, with a new science lab, a computer lab, larger foreign language rooms, a beautiful artroom, larger instrumental music space, and a dance room. Our library has been enhanced as well. Alumni are awed when they see how we've grown!

This year we welcomed and celebrated students who are citizens of thirteen nations around the world. Their flags were represented in the Miracle Commons. The International Club began this year and the lunch they hosted in May was a highlight! At Commencement on Sunday, we had graduates from China, France, Germany, Korea, Mexico, and the UK.

We had our largest freshmen class in the history of the school. And they weren't just a large class. They were remarkable. Freshmen made their mark in the classroom, on the stage, in the field, on the court, out in the community, and in our chapels. Our future is bright.

Our senior class led with distinction this year. Lena Tome led as class president. Darris and Emilee set the tone in chapel. Hannah Frank was a fixture in SOS. Dana Hartsig has brought recycling to CHCA. Elizabeth Mangels spearheaded the NHS Leadership Lunches, kicked off by Dr. Nancy Zimpher. And the entire class set an example for how to form community. If the classes that follow can find ways to imitate the unity and comraderie of the Class of '09, our school will be a better place.

Again tragedy has touched our community this academic year. We continue to remember in our prayers the Corrados, Bains, Everharts, and Heaths. May God's peace and comfort come to them as they grieve.

You're the strength in our weakness

You're the love to the broken

You're the joy in the sadness

You Are

I sensed God doing something unique among us this year. Our chapels had a sense of reverence that I cannot recall in my time here. Worship was often contagious. Messages were challenging. Students were respectful. Visitors always commented on the music. We had many wonderful guests this year but we will always remember our time with Paul Young. In three days, he became part of our community. And many of our lives were changed. We prayed with each other. We confessed to each other. We began to care about each other in ways we always knew we should. We all know our school is far from perfect. But something has begun.

The perfect memory for me of this year happened on Thursday evening at the end of Diaspeiro. Following a memorable message by Mr. Salkil to the seniors, the Class of '09 stood together on the theater stairs as Darris sang "Friend of God" one last time. A wave of emotion came over me as I thought about all of these wonderful, talented, beautiful lives leaving to be scattered as seeds into the world.

What would come next? How will our rising Seniors lead? What will be the remarkable moments next year? What memories will shape us? What stories will be written about what is to come? What will God do among us in 2009-10? What role will you play?

Greater things have yet to come,
Greater things are still to be done here

The Last Things

The end is upon us. And it has come more quickly this year than I have ever remembered. We are entering into the last week of school for our seniors. For freshmen, sophomores, and juniors, everything is now the "last time" this year. For our seniors, it is forever. We've now had our last Winter Term, our last Spring Break, our last Spiritual Life Emphasis Week, our last Sacred Music concert, and our last beginning of AP Testing. This week we will have our last AP tests, our last full day, and our last chapel. The week after, seniors will have their last exams and last Academic Awards night. Then there will be Diaspeiro and Graduation practices and then the actual events. On May 31st, the CHCA experience will end at a ceremony rightly called Commencement. And in the joy of completion and "freedom," hints of sadness will be just beneath the surface as a community of students and teachers is scattered out of our school and into the world.

Many seniors who have longed to escape our "hallowed halls" for the past four years begin to exhibit melancholy and nostalgia at the thought of leaving friends and familiarity. Difficult classes and assignments, tech week, and two-a-days are now fondly relished as communal rites of passage that made us stronger and closer to each other. The end is near.

The Bible often talks about the End. The Greek word is eschaton, literally meaning "last." (So the word eschatology is really the study of "last things.") The biblical writers, when confronted with difficulty and struggle, always look forward with Hope toward the Eschaton. Whether it was the Hebrew prophets describing the establishment of God's shalom throughout not just Israel but the entire cosmos or New Testament writers longing for the "blessed Hope" of Christ's return, the End was always in sight. Apocalyptic literature, like parts of Ezekiel, Daniel, Zechariah, and Revelation, explain the catastrophic turmoil of the present as the harbinger of God's closing of history itself, bringing about His perfect End.

The CHCA experience might parallel that apocalyptic pattern. If one considers a 12 or 13 year experience (which some of our graduates have here!), the last two years could easily be see as the cataclysmic beginning of the end! The strenuous and stressful nature of the junior year, ushering in the senior college search and decision making process, punctuated by final papers and the AP exams, the End is now in sight. When Friday comes and we sing and worship together for the last time as an entire community, we will be at the doorstep of an academic Eschaton.

Let us finish strong! Let us push to the end! The End is near!

We are in the days of Last Things.