The first year I became a teacher, I was overwhelmed by the generosity of my students’ parents. They remembered my birthday, gave me gifts at Christmas, and often bought things off my Amazon Wish List just to say thank you. Receiving gifts is one of my love languages, so when all this goodness started pouring in, I thought to myself, “I should have become a teacher sooner!”

Although many of us just celebrated Teacher Appreciation Week recently, Amazon has launched a new mini-shop on their website called Amazon Haul, and the deals out there in the office and school supplies section prompted this round-up. Even though I am an Amazon affiliate, I usually just include affiliate links to the books I recommend in my posts. But this seemed like an opportunity to share with you some of the things I would have loved to get as a teacher, because they are so budget-friendly.

Ring the bell! No, seriously. Teachers may really enjoy the idea of ringing a bell to signal the start of a transition, calling students into the liturgy that will begin class.

At one point, I said to my class, “I wish I had a pointer to help you follow along.” And the next week, a student gifted me one similar to this. When teachers stand at the board during Latin review, timeline review, or when they need students to follow along in grammar, sometimes a pointer (that doesn’t look like Mickey Mouse fingers) is just what you need.

These plastic pronged folders and sheet protectors work great for organizing your classroom liturgies until the students have them memorized.

As a collaborative model teacher, I found these durable, expandable files indispensable. I created the following organization system for grading homework. I had one for work that had been turned in and one for work that needed to be handed back. Each section had its own slot in the organizer. And each class day had its own set of organizers. So I had two blue organizers for my Monday / Wednesday students and two purple organizers for my Tuesday / Thursday classes. I labeled each slot in the divider by the classes I taught that day. For example: “5 English, 5 Writing, 6 English, 9 Logic” each got their own slot, and then I wrote “In” and “Out” on the front of each organizer. This helped me so so much. I knew what needed to be handed back by grade level, by class day. And it was extremely portable, which made it easy to take home on the weekends and grade.

I sometimes used sticky notes during an opening activity or as a bell ringer. Teachers might ask an opening question like, “What happens to puddles after it rains?” and encourage students to jot down some ideas. Students can then stick their note to the whiteboard and read it aloud as the class begins to wonder together. Or at the end of class, a teacher could ask for a one-sentence summary of the passage she just read aloud in class, and ask students to stick it to the door on their way out. I also used Post-it notes as a non-verbal reminder to students that I needed them to turn in missing homework. Suffice it to say, teachers use a lot of Post-it notes. At least I did! And, I prefer muted colors to fluorescent ones.

Sometimes students will tell a teacher they are not allowed to annotate in their books because their moms want to resell the book or pass it down to a sibling. Understandable, but also frustrating as a literature teacher. These transparent sticky notes are a brilliant solution. The student can stick them on the page, make their annotation, and mom can remove them all before handing the book down to the next sibling.

As a collaborative model parent, I used these plastic sleeves to organize the homework my children needed me to review before they turned it in to their teachers. As a classroom teacher, I used these sleeves in the classroom when I wanted the students to practice something that could be easily erased. The teacher can slide a map of the 13 colonies into the sleeve and ask the students to practice labeling each colony as she walks the room and checks in with each student.

Phew! Well, that’s the roundup: a few ideas of things I used in my classroom that are especially affordable on Amazon Haul. Bless those teachers! They pour out and pour out in a “lifetime of death in love” for your children, and I know they would appreciate a gift or two at the close of the year.

Where Mrs. Gerth is speaking:

Coventry Christian Schools, May 26, 2026

Grace Christian Academy, June 5, 2026

Repairing the Ruins, ACCS, June 25-27, 2026

A Contemplation of Revolution, CiRCE National Conference, July 15, 2026

Trinity Knox Classical Academy, Waterford, CA, July 27, 2026

Evergreen Classical School, The Woodlands, TX, August 3, 2026

Faith Christian School, Roanoke, VA, August 5, 2026

Holy Rosary Family, Nashville, TN, August 7, 2026

Providence Classical School, Houston, TX, August 28, 2026

Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, MI, September 2, 2026

For help creating a more classical classroom, consider reading Thoroughness & Charm as a faculty or homeschool co-op this summer. I’d love to come kick off your experience of the book with a day of professional development seminars and workshops. Now is the time to book for back-to-school training in August.

What Mrs. Gerth is teaching:

The Thales College Certificate in Classical Education Philosophy Program(CCEP) consists of eight courses taken in any order, culminating in a certificate. Courses cost just $300 each and are held through Google Meet once every other week.

Louise Cowan on Shakespearean Tragedy Fall Seminar from the Cowan Center at the University of Dallas. Five Thursday evenings on Zoom. Registration opens in August. Subscribe to the Cowan Archive Substack to learn more.

Your first born is a novelty. Everything seems special and unique. No one’s child is like yours. Then, over time, you begin to make mistakes. Some strategies don’t work on the additional personalities born into your family, or they simply don’t scale from a practical perspective. With maturity, you realize that not every jump in the swimming pool needs to be photographed.

From the very beginning, I believed the parenting books that told me to take seriously my calling to motherhood. I wanted to love lavishly and give myself away conspicuously, not counting the sacrifices as pennies I expected to be repaid. Instead, I trusted that God saw the account balance, and he wanted it to be disproportionally weighted toward the five souls who depended upon me. He wanted me heavy in the red and he wanted their accounts to have lots and lots of zeros and commas.

Living this way requires you to pour out and pour out—and you get tired. You have to trust God to supply what you need when you live in the red. You have to believe by faith that His promises are true and that He blesses obedience. Because there is just so much dying to self—so much red.

After living this way for eighteen years, I should have been prepared for the pain of letting a child go. But this season begets a whole different type of dying to self. The grief, sorrow, and self-pity overwhelm on the bad days, and sound like white noise in the background on the good days.

When I hear my son play the piano, I think to myself: this will not happen next year. When I watch him stand for saxophone solos, I think this will not happen next year. When I talk to him about the books we are reading while he eats trail mix in the kitchen, I think this will not happen next year. So much sorrow. And I feel so much loss.

But when I examine the nature of my loss and the depth of my sorrow, I find myself humbled. It has never been so clear to me how much all of my labors to grow a person, to nurture a soul and to build a family have born fruit. And it was all just mustard seeds scattered for years and years. It was just boxes and boxes of macaroni and cheese and swim lessons at the YMCA. It was books read over and over and piano lessons paid for. All of those mustard seeds have produced one hundred fold something so full of glory it takes my breath away.

There’s a lie out there that I’ve labored most of my adult life to keep from upsetting the account balances. It says that the work of motherhood is something you can opt-out of. This degrading and demeaning work cannot be expected of the modern woman. Someone else can make deposits in the accounts of your children while you go and get the deposits you need elsewhere.

Nothing worth doing comes without cost. There simply must be a cost paid to create a home and a family. Someone must decide the cost will be paid by her own blood, sweat, and tears. She must decide that God’s economy matters most and she is going all in, confident a big pay day is coming.

I cry a lot these days. Some of the tears are joyful. Some not at all. But my constant encouragement comes when I remember that God has in fact blessed my obedience beyond what I could have imagined and definitely don’t deserve. That obedience, which actually came at a great personal cost, has produced the sort of people I want in my life forever, who I admire deeply, and want as lifelong friends.

This essay was originally published the year after my firstborn graduated high school on the Theopolis Institute blog.

Where Mrs. Gerth is speaking:

Coventry Christian Schools, May 26, 2026

Repairing the Ruins, ACCS, June 25-27, 2026

A Contemplation of Revolution, CiRCE National Conference, July 15, 2026

Trinity Knox Classical Academy, Waterford, CA, July 27, 2026

Evergreen Classical School, The Woodlands, TX, August 3, 2026

Faith Christian School, Roanoke, VA, August 5, 2026

Holy Rosary Family, Nashville, TN, August 7, 2026

Providence Classical School, Houston, TX, August 28, 2026

Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, MI, September 2, 2026

For help creating a more classical classroom, consider reading Thoroughness & Charm as a faculty or homeschool co-op this summer. I’d love to come kick off your experience of the book with a day of professional development seminars and workshops. Now is the time to book for back-to-school training in August.

What Mrs. Gerth is teaching:

The Thales College Certificate in Classical Education Philosophy Program(CCEP) consists of eight courses taken in any order, culminating in a certificate. Courses cost just $300 each and are held through Google Meet once every other week. Next session begins mid-April.

Louise Cowan on Shakespearean Tragedy Fall Seminar from the Cowan Center at the University of Dallas. Five Thursday evenings on Zoom. Registration opens in August. Subscribe to the Cowan Archive Substack to learn more.

When it comes to parenting, there are no shortcuts. Lots of good advice should be given and taken, but it’s best to avoid anything that promises expedient results with minimal effort.

I picked up an analogy for parenting from Rachel Jankovic that has long since stuck with me: your family isn’t built by depositing the occasional gold bar, but rather by sprinkling gold dust for years. This approach to parenting redeemed mundane seasons of my life and gave meaning to the routine events which occupied my days.

When my family was young, I struggled with covetousness toward a dual-income family that drove luxury vehicles and went on expensive vacations. Because we were raising five kids on one income and sending them to private school, there was a lot we just couldn’t afford. For years, my family consumed a dozen eggs, a pound of bacon, a loaf of bread, and a half-gallon of orange juice every Sunday before church. For years, our tuition bill crested $30,000. We spent a lot of money on food and tuition—what our family needed to live and learn. We didn’t have a second income to spend on vacations and car payments, which caused me to doubt the value of my work because I didn’t have a paycheck to show for it.

After reading Rachel’s book, I realized that the parents I was so envious of were taking the gold nugget approach to parenting. Their expensive vacations and luxury items were rare deposits into their kids’ bank accounts, while the daily work of enculturation and habituation was outsourced to extended family and day care centers.

I wasn’t able to give my kids gold nuggets in the form of Disney vacations, but my kids were at my kitchen counter, eating boxed mac and cheese, where I could remind them to chew with their mouths closed and wash their hands. I could go over phonics rules and history timelines while cooking dinner or cleaning up snacks. The mundane minutes of raising my children were not outsourced. They were mine, and I could make the investment or squander the time. Because of Rachel’s metaphor, I chose to see my work as gold dust sprinkled every day, and I learned to repent of my covetousness. My deposits were small, but they were consistent.

When I decided to build a family rather than a resume, I was hugely influenced by Caitlin Flanagan’s book To Hell With All That. I had read a lot of books by Christian women, who told me I would be happiest at home, but it was Flanagan’s that sealed the deal. She sounded and looked exactly like who I aspired to be—beautiful, brilliant, and successful. Suffice it to say, she had something difficult to give up. The most persuasive premise in her book had nothing to do with Bible verses; it had to do with being honest about what she really wanted.

Flanagan shares her personal journey, which includes walking through grief after her mother’s death and confronting her own cancer diagnosis alongside witty social commentary on “loving and loathing her inner housewife.” As I read, I laughed, and I cried. And I realized what I really wanted was what Flanagan observed about her own childhood: “what a wonderful thing it had been to be raised at home, by a mother who loved me.” That’s what I wanted for my kids. I wanted a house full of people who knew I was there by choice. I wanted a home built upon a mother’s love, and I wanted to sprinkle lots and lots of gold dust—gold dust that looked like practicing instruments with them, soaking grass stains out of baseball pants, and making loaves and loaves of fresh bread.

At one point, Flannigan observes: “What’s missing from so many affluent American households is the one thing you can’t buy: the presence of someone who cares deeply and principally about that home and the people who live in it; who is willing to spend a significant portion of each day thinking about what those people are going to eat and what clothes they need for what occasions…” This was the choice I wanted to make—to be present at home, willing to spend my time with them and on them. Even though we couldn’t afford the luxury vehicles and our vacations looked like traveling for baseball tournaments, we were affluent by any standard. We lived in the suburbs, could afford a family membership to the YMCA, and rarely worried about when a check might clear. Yet, it still felt like a sacrifice to walk away from that second income. Recently, when I went back to work and saw the big, fat hole in my resume, I knew something very real had been sacrificed. It was hard again not to covet, but this time I was coveting the salary level, work experience, and impressive titles of other women on LinkedIn.

I know there are all sorts of families dealing with all sorts of economic pressure, and I know there are all sorts of exceptions we could make to all sorts of principles. But at the end of the day, even when I am struggling with covetousness, I still agree with Caitlin when she says, to Hell with chasing illusive happiness rather than building a life “neatly fitted around obligation and sacrifice.”

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Where Mrs. Gerth is speaking:

Coventry Christian Schools, May 26, 2026

Repairing the Ruins, ACCS, June 25-27, 2026

A Contemplation of Revolution, CiRCE National Conference, July 15, 2026

Trinity Knox Classical Academy, Waterford, CA, July 27, 2026

Evergreen Classical School, The Woodlands, TX, August 3, 2026

Faith Christian School, Roanoke, VA, August 5, 2026

Holy Rosary Family, Nashville, TN, August 7, 2026

Providence Classical School, Houston, TX, August 28, 2026

Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, MI, September 2, 2026

For help creating a more classical classroom, consider reading Thoroughness & Charm as a faculty or homeschool co-op this summer. I’d love to come kick off your experience of the book with a day of professional development seminars and workshops. Now is the time to book for back-to-school training in August.

What Mrs. Gerth is teaching:

The Thales College Certificate in Classical Education Philosophy Program(CCEP) consists of eight courses taken in any order, culminating in a certificate. Courses cost just $300 each and are held through Google Meet once every other week. Next session begins mid-April.

Louise Cowan on Shakespearean Tragedy Fall Seminar from the Cowan Center at the University of Dallas. Five Thursday evenings on Zoom. Registration opens in August. Subscribe to the Cowan Archive Substack to learn more.

Ulysses and the Sirens by John William Waterhouse

In this episode, we contemplate the beauty of the first twelve lines, or the Proem, of the Odyssey by Homer. Mandi reads from the introduction to Emily Wilson’s translation so that you get an idea of the movement of this epic while also becoming familiar with its three main characters: Odysseus, Penelope, and Telemachus. It is hard to overstate the importance of reading both the Homeric epics if you teach in a classical school or if you have begun to homeschool your children classically. These two poems—the Iliad and the Odyssey—find their way into every corner of a classical curriculum because they are so central to the Western tradition. Enjoy!

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction to Cultural Artifacts and Homer

00:52 The Significance of the Odyssey

06:29 Character Analysis: Odysseus, Penelope, and Telemachus

11:32 Themes and Teaching Strategies in the Odyssey

Resources Mentioned:

Purchase Fagles’ Translation of the Odyssey.

Listen to Claire Danes read The Odyssey on Audible

Subscribe to Mrs. Gerth Teaches.

Learn more about Thoroughness & Charm.

Attend Repairing the Ruins. June 25-27, Atlanta, GA

Image Source: Mutual Art

Recently, I recorded a podcast for Base Camp Live about using questions to build family culture. Then, I talked about the pioneer virtue found in the Ingalls family at the Great Hearts Symposium. Now, I can’t stop thinking about how good Charles and Caroline Ingalls were at building family culture and plan to include their example in my next book, For the Teacher’s Sake, forthcoming from Davenant Press.

In Little House in the Big Woods, we see Ma and Pa laboring together to build their family culture. They take seriously the idea that the transmission of culture is central to their roles as parents. They talk with Laura and Mary constantly about what needs to be done and why. But not at the expense of joy and fellowship. They answer Laura’s questions patiently and participate cheerfully in her discovery of truth. They want the girls to understand who they are and why they exist, so they model how to live and communicate clearly and constantly with them.

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March has definitely come in like a lion.

I’ve been in a lot of schools this spring talking about creating culture and asking better questions. I’ve observed a lot of teachers and talked with lots of adminstrators.

I love teachers. I love students. I don’t walk into classrooms looking to judge or criticize, but to witness and pay homage. My biggest struggle in observing classrooms is my desire to be in the learning atmosphere with the students—I have a hard time keeping my mouth shut. I have yet to figure out how to mute my desire to participate so that I can respect the boundaries of a community to which I don’t belong.

While learning a great deal about myself as I walk from classroom to classroom, I have also walked away convinced that good teachers are good everywhere.

The struggles in the classroom are real and consistent because this whole classical education enterprise is the work of humans—big and small—trying to reflect God’s glory in ever increasing measure by the power of the Holy Spirit: “But we all, with uncovered face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image, from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord” (2 Cor. 3:18). Our students are unpredictable. Our parents are unpredictable. Our schedules are often unpredictable—interrupted by assemblies and emergency drills. And yet, we labor because one thing is predictable: now we know in part, but someday what we know in part will be replaced by that which is whole.

It is critically important at this time in the classical education movement to realize we have a lot more in common than that which divides us into groups. We are all trying to reclaim a way of being in the world that understands the divine nature of things and the moral responsibility that comes with that knowledge. All classical educators and administrators are trying to build schools where children learn how to honor those in authority, serve others above self, and persevere through hardship and difficulty because this world is not all there is. We are all on the same page here—it’s an important page in a critical playbook.

Good teachers are good everywhere, and there are a lot of good teachers everywhere.

Where Mrs. Gerth is speaking:

Holy Family Classical School, Tulsa, OK, March 19, 2026

Trinity Christian Academy, Addison, TX, March 20, 2026

Myth and Meaning, CiRCE Online Conference, April 16, 2026

Repairing the Ruins, ACCS, June 25-27, 2026

A Contemplation of Revolution, CiRCE National Conference, July 15, 2026

Trinity Knox Classical Academy, Waterford, CA, July 27, 2026

Evergreen Classical School, The Woodlands, TX, August 3, 2026

Faith Christian School, Roanoke, VA, August 5, 2026

Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, MI, September 2, 2026

For help creating a more classical classroom, consider reading Thoroughness & Charm as a faculty or homeschool co-op this summer. I’d love to come kick off your experience of the book with a day of professional development seminars and workshops. Now is the time to book for back-to-school training in August.

What Mrs. Gerth is teaching:

The Thales College Certificate in Classical Education Philosophy Program(CCEP) consists of eight courses taken in any order, culminating in a certificate. Courses cost just $300 each and are held through Google Meet once every other week. Next session begins mid April.

Louise Cowan on Greek Tragedy Spring Seminar at the University of Dallas. Five Thursday evenings on Zoom. Registration has closed, but subscribe to the Cowan Archive Substack to learn about future classes.

(Photo credit: Peter Stackpole / LIFE Magazine)

Because we want our students to participate in class, we often fail to ask them tough questions—questions that probe their thinking, questions that get to the fundamental claims in the text, questions that test whether or not they truly understand what they’ve read. We don’t call on students who come to class unprepared or stop paying attention because we’re too sympathetic, too gentle, too worried about being “mean.”

But we need to stop acting like therapists who are overly sensitive to our students’ emotions and overly concerned with preserving their self-esteem. Instead, we need to start acting like journalists following a lead committed to the truth.

Mark Signorelli, in his new book Things Glorious and Ruinous, pulls no punches on this topic saying, “Educators do everything they can now not to correct, not to reprimand, not to impart consequences for student behavior because doing any of these things might seem to withhold some measure of affirmation from students, and to provide endless and unqualified affirmation is what the majority of American educators consider the sum of their duties to children” (94-95).

What Mark calls out is now commonplace, and it is high time for classical educators and administrators to cease believing that unqualified affirmation of students is the sum of their duties. Honestly, unqualified affirmation of students isn’t their duty at all. It creates students who lack prudence, fortitude, and temperance—students with a false sense of their own competence. To be this sort of teacher or administrator is to be practicing deceit—weaving a shroud by day that is unwound at night.

This spring, I have been doing a lot of teacher training on how to ask better questions of our students, and finding sympathetic audiences—audiences tired of playing the affirmation game Mark cautions against. I think both teachers and administrators are receptive to this presentation because we all know that in classical education, we are supposed to be doing something other than passing students from one grade to the next with an engorged self-esteem. Self-esteem shouldn’t be listed in the portrait of a graduate from your school—and I’m confident it’s not. Yet the culture of your school is most likely creating graduates who have been preserved and cared for like hot-house flowers who cannot survive in the real world because they have been “affirmed to death.”

The focus of classical education needs to be reclaimed and recentered now. Too long we have let the therapy culture influence our pedagogy and philosophy. We have taught scared. We have let parental fear and financial involvement sway our policies and procedures. Teachers need to be encouraged and expected to teach their curriculum with passion, conviction, and expertise. This means they will ask tough questions, talk about controversial topics, and give students grades that reflect their work not their effort. School leadership will have to be courageous standing behind their teachers, protecting them from parents who have come to assume that their tuition dollars have made them a customer, not a co-laborer.

Where Mrs. Gerth is speaking:

Holy Family Classical School, Tulsa, OK, March 19, 2026

Trinity Christian Academy, Addison, TX, March 20, 2026

Myth and Meaning, CiRCE Online Conference, April 16, 2026

Repairing the Ruins, ACCS, June 25-27, 2026

A Contemplation of Revolution, CiRCE National Conference, July 15, 2026

Trinity Knox Classical Academy, Waterford, CA, July 27, 2026

Evergreen Classical School, The Woodlands, TX, August 3, 2026

Faith Christian School, Roanoke, VA, August 5, 2026

Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, MI, September 2, 2026

For help creating a more classical classroom, consider reading Thoroughness & Charm as a faculty or homeschool co-op this summer. I’d love to come kick off your experience of the book with a day of professional development seminars and workshops. Now is the time to book for back-to-school training in August.

What Mrs. Gerth is teaching:

The Thales College Certificate in Classical Education Philosophy Program(CCEP) consists of eight courses taken in any order, culminating in a certificate. Courses cost just $300 each and are held through Google Meet once every other week. Next session begins mid April.

Louise Cowan on Greek Tragedy Spring Seminar at the University of Dallas. Five Thursday evenings on Zoom. Registration has closed, but subscribe to the Cowan Archive Substack to learn about future classes.

Today, we delve into Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5, a piece that began its journey in 1804 and premiered in December 1808. This symphony, famous for its iconic first four notes, has earned the nickname “Fate Symphony” due to its powerful thematic elements that resonate with the concept of fate knocking at the door.

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5

00:49 Beethoven’s Personal Struggles and Artistic Calling

01:20 Musical Themes and Variations in the Symphony

02:36 Beethoven’s Innovation in Musical Composition

03:33 Listening to Classical Music with Intent

04:29 Understanding the Movements as a Developing Story

05:23 The First Movement and Its Themes

06:33 The Role of the Finale and Instrumentation

07:31 The Significance of the Symphony’s Ending

08:19 Resources for Deeper Exploration

09:25 Engaging with Classical Music in Education

Resources Mentioned:

Listen to a performance by the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, Gardiner on YouTube:

Dr. Laura Eidt, Affiliate Assistant Professor Of Modern Languages

Essay on Symphony Number Five from the Eastman School of Music

Study Guide to Thoroughness and Charm

Mrs. Gerth Teaches

Thoughts on creating classroom culture, classical education broadly, and what it means to help our students love things worthy of their love.

By Mandi Gerth

The following is an excerpt from the talk I gave at the Great Hearts National Symposium this week.

The Little House Books take us right to the center of what life was like for pioneer families, but also show us a particular family: an endearing, courageous, and industrious family. We learn to love them because “in Mrs. Wilder’s stories, the characters are allowed to speak for themselves. The reader is not told what they are like, but sees their growth, their influence upon one another, and discovers for himself what kind of people they are” (Cooper, Bernice. “The Authenticity of the Historical Background of the ‘Little House’ Books”). In one harrowing episode, Laura and her family cross a creek as it rises swiftly, so swiftly that the family is in mortal danger. On the other side, young Laura, through the voice of the older Laura, makes a sobering realization: Her entire family could have been lost, and no one would have known or noticed. They could have disappeared entirely. This is a very existential question for a young girl to wrestle with, and it is one of the intentional choices Ingalls Wilder made consistently throughout her books. Pamela Smith Hill, in Too Good to Be Altogether Lost, makes this observation: “The characters and themes in her novels are complex and nuanced, often gritty, and rough around the edges. Wilder introduced a new kind of historical realism in fiction for young readers in the 1930s and 1940s, a realism that was intrinsically complex, despite the apparent simplicity of her prose. Her books pose difficult questions for young readers, yet she resisted the urge to provide answers. Instead, she trusted her audience to draw their own conclusions about the dynamic, harsh, and sometimes bewildering American frontier.”

Because we have been reading these books with our students for decades, we often miss that Laura’s decision to write historical fiction that was real and gritty for children was intentional, significant, and highly influential. Laura’s legacy began 95 years ago with the publication of Little House in the Big Woods in 1932. She wrote these books because she believed these stories were “too good to be altogether lost.” While her books have come under criticism for the way they represent Western expansion and the racism expressed overtly and subtly by some characters, the series remains one of the best ways to introduce our students to this critical period of American history while shaping their moral imagination.

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Sense and Sensibility (1995)

Today we are looking at a Shakespearean Sonnet that you may be familiar with or have heard quoted before.

It reads:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments; love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wand’ring bark

Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

Love’s not time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle’s compass come.

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom:

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

In this episode of Cultural Artifacts, we explore the claims made about love in Sonnet 116, focusing on Shakespeare’s use of metaphors and literary devices.

Chapters:

00:00 Exploring Shakespeare’s Legacy

03:22 Understanding Sonnet Structure and Themes

06:15 The Role of Metaphor in Poetry

08:37 Analyzing Sonnet 116: Love’s Unchanging Nature

11:04 Concluding Thoughts on Shakespeare’s Sonnet

Resources Mentioned:

Soul of the Age by Jonathan Bate

Shakespeare and the Arts of Language by Russ McDonald

Aeneas Fleeing from Troy by Federico Barocci | Borghese Gallery

Louise Cowan did much in her lifetime to advance and uphold the sacred authority of the teacher. She honored and revered teachers. Listening to a lecture of hers recently, I heard her describe why she believed teachers must be honored and revered.

She claimed that our history, our past ought really to be considered sacred. She defined kleos–a Greek word for renown or glory–not in terms of fame, but as the region of mystery and memory where heroes and great events reside. In this region, timeless virtues such as courage and prudence are attached to historical events–events and virtues that are just as real as empirical data. She said, “Teachers are the high priests of this region of communal memory. Without teachers only bits and pieces of it can emerge into ordinary life and perhaps in distorted form.” Without teachers, only fragments of communal memory break into the present day. Only bits and pieces of kleos emerge–distorted shards that fail to ennoble or inspire.

The teacher journeys into the land of kleos through history, literature, myth, even theology and philosophy. It becomes the standard by which a student measures himself and others. It becomes the imagination’s handle upon reality. It is a sacred region into which the teacher brings her students. She stands as the priest, the saint, the sage, the guide who can bridge these two terrains: the present with its contemporary events and concerns and the communal memory filled with soul-stirring kleos.

When we ask students to participate in liturgies that include the memorization of poetry, recitation of catechisms, singing of hymns, or chanting of scripture, we are asking them to transcend time. To journey with us into timelessness—a place where life is glorious, deeds are noble, and change is possible. Or as Cowan said, “where heroes and great events reside.” In that place, they are able to imagine what they might be called upon to do, and they can put on the virtue of others who have done it before them. They can dwell with heroes and heroic action as a normal course of the school day when their teacher is willing to take them there.

Jacques Maritain, in his work Art and Scholasticism, says, “Through the virtue of Art present in them, they in some way are their work before making it; they are conformed to it, so as to be able to form it.” When we journey into this land of communal memory, we allow students to “become their work before making it” and to be transformed by the kleos “so as to be able to form it.” By going into a land where you are not the hero and your self-expression is irrelevant, we actually equip students to become who they were created to be. By learning self-denial, they truly do find themselves.

One of the ways in which teachers can routinely journey into this land of communal memory is through the creation and observation of classroom liturgies. The content of our liturgies puts our students in touch with this communal memory which creates self-denial, but so also does the liturgy itself.

Teaching students to follow a liturgy is a form of virtue formation. In repetition we submit, we are choosing to say this is not about me. I am not the most important person in the room. This is about being part of a community.

This is about the words we are saying and why we are saying them. And all together this thing we are doing, is more important than me.

While the rote, routine, and repetitive nature of liturgy can rub us the wrong way, it can also be very liberating. James K.A. Smith warns in his book, You Are What You Love, that when we move away from incarnate modes of formation, specifically in the church, we start to equate extroversion with faithfulness. And I think this is a warning worth attending to. Smith makes a poignant point: “When you have only seen forms of piety that value spontaneous expression and cliched sincerity, to be given the cadences and rhythms of the Book of Common Prayer can be like receiving the gift of tongues.” By letting our students put on these beautiful words and ideas through repetition and memorization, we allow the words to shape their aesthetic sensibility and understanding of how language works—what it’s capable of. When they use them later, as part of their own expression or language, they are actually creating something meaningful and beautiful because it is an expression based upon something—informed by something.

Liturgical practices in the classroom create self-denial while at the same time charting a path for the teacher to walk between time and timelessness. These liturgical practices ask students to submit to repetition, to put on words that are not their own, to participate in a communal experience. They also act as touch points to the glory—the kleos—of our tradition and in doing so give students the ability to make the art of virtue within themselves before they are called to produce that virtue externally in real time and space.

This essay was originally published in Classical Ed Review.

Where Mrs. Gerth is speaking:

Great Hearts National Symposium, Tempe Mission Palms Hotel, AZ, February 25-27, 2026

Oak Hill Classical, Dacula, GA, March 2, 2026

Arrow Classical Academy, Dacula, GA, March 3, 2026

Northwest Classical Academy, Kennesaw, GA, March 3, 2026

Saint Agnes School, St. Paul, MN, March 6, 2026

Holy Family Classical School, Tulsa, OK, March 18-19, 2026

Trinity Christian Academy, Addison, TX, March 20, 2026

Trinity Knox Classical Academy, Waterford, CA. July 27, 2026

Faith Christian School, Roanoke, VA, August 4, 2026

For help creating a more classical classroom, consider reading Thoroughness & Charm as a faculty or homeschool co-op this summer. I’d love to come kick off your experience of the book with a day of professional development seminars and workshops. Now is the time to book for back-to-school training in August.

What Mrs. Gerth is teaching:

The Thales College Certificate in Classical Education Philosophy Program(CCEP) consists of eight courses taken in any order, culminating in a certificate. Courses cost just $300 each and are held through Google Meet once every other week. Next session begins mid April.

Louise Cowan on Greek Tragedy Spring Seminar at the University of Dallas. Five Thursday evenings on Zoom. Registration has closed, but subscribe to the Cowan Archive Substack to learn about future classes.

Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Luetze

Today we are looking at the exceedingly well-known painting Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Luetuze. While you may have this cultural artifact already solidified in your social imaginary, I’d encourage you to bring it to your students as something fresh and visionary this Presidents’ Day. Consider the size of the painting by showing your students a picture of it hanging in The Met. Consider the contrast of light and dark with your students. Consider the posture and facial expression of Washington in light of Phillis Wheatley’s poem. Look at this work of art from a different perspective this Presidents’ Day and go deeper with your students.

Show notes:

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/December-25/washington-crosses-the-delaware

https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/the-revolutionary-war/washingtons-revolutionary-war-battles/the-trenton-princeton-campaign/10-facts-about-washingtons-crossing-of-the-delaware-river

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Emanuel-Leutze

His Excellency General Washington by Phillis Wheatley

https://poets.org/poem/his-excellency-general-washington

The letter which accompanied her poem:

https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-02-02-0222-0001

Cultivating a classical way of being, thinking, and viewing reality is what you signed up to do when you became a classical teacher. You must learn to love the transcendent ideas and answers to the fundamental human questions present in your curriculum. The ideas and values that undergird classical education have become your ideas and values. While this can feel overwhelming, the good news is: you are not making any of this up. You are not waiting for new curriculum to arrive or more books to be published. Instead, you have tradition on your side and centuries of wisdom at your disposal.

As teachers, we need to create routines to structure our time in the classroom—this is just basic classroom management. However, we need to be intentional about those routines because they communicate values to our students, and what we value becomes the backbone of our classroom’s culture.

The cultural practices we ask our students to participate in form and shape them—this is especially true in the classroom because the practices are done in community, and the work of education is sacred work as Louise Cowan has observed. We are striving for liberally-educated students who are whole persons, free persons who are not slaves to their desires. The end of all of the work we do in the classroom is not a man who is self-centered and grasping for power, but a man with a mind and body habituated to act in accordance with what he knows, says David Hicks. This student will do what he ought to do, not what he can do.

So, when you think about how to create a liturgy in the classroom, we should be defining a classroom liturgy as: a set of repeated actions intended to bring order to a routine classroom event while communicating values.

In our liturgies, we hold up that which is lovely and teach our students to love it as we do. In our liturgies, we recite beautiful words and ask our students to make those words their own. In our liturgies, we extol virtues like courage and honesty, and we allow our students to imagine what those virtues look like before they are asked to produce them in their own lives.

Jonathan Haidt, in his book Anxious Generation, examined what happens to us as people when our experiences of reality become too disembodied, and I find especially appropriate his observations about the importance of ritual practices done in community. The rituals or practices that we participate in as a community form social cohesion by binding us to one another in a shared desire to transcend ourselves. Haidt says “we could create healthier environments for ourselves and for our children if we could reconnect with the rhythms of the calendar and of our communities” if we could “endow time and space with some of the social meaning they have lost” (204). But time and space have more than social meaning. Time and space have sacred meaning because the things we see and the rituals we participate in all use the temporal to point to the transcendent, calling us out of ourselves.

When you sit down to think about your transitions and classroom procedures, and you want to start building your liturgies, I would encourage you to approach them in one of these ways.

1. Build a liturgy around a goal you have for your students. Do your students need to get better at singing in four-part harmony? Find a hymn with a beautiful chorus and put it in your liturgy. Would you like your students to be able to translate Latin poetry? Find a beautiful poem they can commit to memory, and then weeks later, show them different translations and discuss which they like best. Do you want students to have a working knowledge concepts essential to geometry? Have them memorize all twenty-three of Euclid’s definitions at the beginning of Elements.

2. Pack the liturgy with artifacts that prepare them for future learning or build on something they’ve already learned. If you study Theodore Roosevelt, sing How Firm a Foundation, which was one of his favorite hymns. If your students will read The Merchant of Venice in high school, have them memorize Portia’s “quality of mercy” monologue in logic school.

3. Think “classically” about your current curriculum and use cultural artifacts that point your students to the bigger ideas present in your curriculum—things that help your students reflect more deeply on the noble ideas or virtuous deeds embedded in your curriculum. Recite Dreams by Langston Hughes while you read To Kill a Mockingbird. Recite an excerpt from Up From Slavery when you study Reconstruction. Recite O Captain, My Captain when you study Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War.

Then think about how long you want this liturgy to last based upon what transition they will be making or how many minutes of your class period you want to lavish on this liturgy. For help building your liturgies using this approach, you can use my liturgy graphic organizer for sale on Teachers Pay Teachers, and you can scour the appendix in Thoroughness & Charm and listen to past episodes of Cultural Artifacts.

But don’t underestimate the collective knowledge you have within your own faculty and administrators. Just by asking a few questions while you sip coffee or share lunch, you might find a wealth of resources exists within your own team.

Creating a plan like this takes time. You are making a huge investment by looking at your schedule with this kind of intensity. But I promise you, it will pay off one hundredfold. A classroom that runs more smoothly is a more joyful learning environment because more time is spent on ideas and learning, and less time is spent on correction and redirection. When you begin to map out your schedule, you can begin to see your day as full of precious moments where you can give your students a fuller vision of what it means to be human. You punctuate your day with culture moments, and you observe them regularly. You bring your students into a region of communal memory by journeying there with them through your classroom liturgies.

Where Mrs. Gerth is speaking:

Great Hearts National Symposium, Tempe Mission Palms Hotel, AZ, February 25-27, 2026

Oak Hill Classical, Dacula, GA, March 2, 2026

Arrow Classical Academy, Dacula, GA, March 3, 2026

Northwest Classical Academy, Kennesaw, GA, March 3, 2026

Great Hearts, Arlington, TX, March 6, 2026

Trinity Christian Academy, Addison, TX, March 20, 2026

Trinity Knox Classical Academy, Waterford, CA. July 27, 2026

Faith Christian School, Roanoke, VA, August 4, 2026

For help creating a more classical classroom, consider reading Thoroughness & Charm as a faculty or co-op this summer. I’d love to come kick off your experience of the book with a day of professional development seminars and workshops. Now is the time to book for back-to-school training in August.

What Mrs. Gerth is teaching:

The Thales College Certificate in Classical Education Philosophy Program(CCEP) consists of eight courses taken in any order, culminating in a certificate. Courses cost just $300 each and are held through Google Meet once every other week.

Louise Cowan on Greek Tragedy Spring Seminar at the University of Dallas. Five Thursday evenings on Zoom.

House in Winter by Gustave Loiseau

Today we are looking at the poem Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy. “Written to commemorate the close of the nineteenth century and first entitled ‘By the Century’s Deathbed,’ ‘Darkling Thrush’ was first published on December 29, 1900, and then appeared again just a few days later in a different publication. This poem offers us the chance to listen to sonorous language and contemplate complex images. Yet, this poem is suitable for younger children as well because the “plot” of the poem is easy to understand.

Show notes:

Full text of the poem

Biography of Thomas Hardy

Critical Essays:

SIMPSON, MATT. “MILLENNIAL THOUGHTS — HARDY’S ‘THE DARKLING THRUSH.’” The Thomas Hardy Journal.

SWIER, SUSAN. “‘SOME BLESSED HOPE’: HARDY’S DARKLING THRUSH.” The Hardy Society Journal.

Last year, I took a course through the Great Hearts Institute on instructional coaching from Mary Chin and Jennifer Ramirez. I learned a lot. I began to see my role in classical education differently. I developed a way of listening and asking questions that helped me talk to teachers intentionally and productively about their goals, their shortcomings, and how they wanted their classrooms to change.

The two books that anchored the course were: Never Underestimate Your Teachers and The Coaching Habit. (Amazon Affiliate links provided.) Reading those books alone is better than nothing, but it will only get you so far. The real transformation occurs when you enroll in the course and particpate in discussions with other administrators, submitting to the accountability generously offered by Mary and Jen.

While I’m still not sure if I believe that every teacher can become a master teacher, I do believe in investing in every teacher to help them become as good as they want to be. When I began to apply what I had learned from Mary and Jen, I started to see coaching as essential to the growth of faculty culture. If your teachers don’t believe that you are on their side, they won’t stay at your school. Other schools will offer them the collegial atmosphere they desire. Other administrators will take them seriously and make an investment in them.

Here are a few of the questions I found myself asking teachers in coaching meetings as a result of Mary and Jen’s course:

Read more

Today we are looking at the poem Birches, written by Robert Frost. A poem in blank verse that contemplates the loss of youth and the importance of nature to provide perspective when we are “weary of considerations, / and life is too much like a pathless wood.”

Information on Robert Frost from Britannica.

Critical Essay by George Monteiro

Read the poem on Poetry Foundation.

Hear Robert Frost read Birches on YouTube.

Tonight via Google Meet, Dr. Bainard Cowan and I begin teaching a class on Louise Cowan and Greek Tragedy. We will begin by looking at Louise’s essay in Tragic Abyss and Fergusson’s introduction to Aristotle’s Poetics. We will then go on over the course of four more sessions to hear from Louise on: Prometheus, Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, Eumenides, Oedipus the King, Antigone, Oedipus at Colonus, Medea, Trojan Women, and the Bacchae. (We will be using The Greek Plays.) The reading will clip along at a swift pace—all the better for appropriating and grasping, as Louise encourages below.

“Tragedy is primarily an experience, not simply a knowledge—an experience of seeing beyond our daily lives into the impenetrable and unchanging laws that govern existence,” she says. “It is not about good and evil. In it one sees, as Nietzsche has written, beyond good and evil, for none of the laws that govern the universe are evil. But tragedy shows us the way in which these laws, which in and of themselves are good, may be in conflict, so that if this conflict is played out, and not somehow redirected, the human enterprise will be rent from top to bottom, and that destiny to which the human race is called will be harmed…

So one of the things we must school ourselves in when we approach Greek tragedy is the temptation to assign blame. We ought not take sides, ought not label a character as wicked, for the grand Greek discovery is of these conflicting goods, as we might call them. We need to school ourselves then to look at all the issues sympathetically” (lecture to DIHC 2003, Cowan Archives).

“The task you and I have in reading these tragedies—that come to us from another continent and another epoch, so far away in time and space as to be virtually inaccessible as history—the task is to appropriate them, to grasp them, (and that means to experience them, to approach them with the willing suspension of disbelief and hence not so much to absorb them as to be absorbed) to go on to a few mappings, without, however, thinking that we are getting at the final meaning. Nor, without a lifetime of study as a classical scholar, should we think we are approaching the original meaning (what the Greeks thought of them, or what their significance was in their own culture). As serious readers of literature, as disseminators of the literary tradition, we have no hope of apprehending these Greek dramas except in the light of their universal qualities. It is the miracle of the work of art that it speaks across the ages: that, in fact, we know in principle that we may see more in it than those of the culture out of which it came” (Lecture on the Bacchae, Cowan Archives).

Please subscribe to the Cowan Archives Substack for more of Louise’s essays delivered to your inbox.

Teachers are life long learners. We want our students to become the same. We live for the light bulb moments. When we see learning occur right before our eyes. But most of our job is spent in the work of education. Or what Donald Cowan defines in Unbinding Prometheus as the “use of carefully and economically selected data purposefully arranged to indicate the whole of reality, working by condensation, compression, incompleteness, suggestion.”

“Carefully and economically selected data” sounds unromantic. But is it? Is “Golden Corral” where a girl dreams her date will take her? Or, would she prefer a restaurant with a focused and fine-tuned menu so that she is sure her dinner will be delicious no matter what she orders?

Teachers choose what information is vital to the day’s lesson, says Charlotte Mason. Teachers choose what to lavish their minutes on, says Joshua Gibbs. We must make “careful and economic selections,” setting before our students the best of what has come before them. But also choosing which activities, questions, read-alouds, and recitations will have the desired effect. Which tether students back to James KA Smith’s “Ultimate Story”? Which build upon the core curriculum? Which prepare for work done in a future grade? We make choices. We make careful, economic selections.

Read more

Last Friday, my husband and I said goodbye to Dallas and boarded a flight to Rio de Janerio, and then connected to Brasilia, Brazil. I am here to speak at Labore, a conference for Brazilian classical Christian educators, because Thoroughness & Charm made its way to South America via a school called Virtus when three administrators purchased a copy at the ACCS conference in Dallas last June.

Standing at the CiRCE booth signing books last summer, I had no idea that the one I had signed for the Virtus faculty was going to lead to this. In fact, I remain amazed when people purchase the book, and even more impressed when they actually read it. So, to be here amidst almost 200 teachers who are ready to purchase a translated version of Thoroughness & Charm from Classical Press in Portuguese feels surreal.

The first Virtus teacher to read Thoroughness & Charm immediately lead a faculty development teaching her colleagues to sing “This is My Father’s World.” When I saw her story posted on Instagram less than one month after the book made it’s way to Brazil, I began to cry.

I have met so many beautiful and dedicated teachers who are here to grow and desire to serve. They want to change their country by changing the way its children are educated, which is nothing short of glorious and more than a little admirable. The air is thick here with courage, determination, and sacrifice.

Each morning I give a plenary talk from the book with the help of a translator, who has become a dear friend. My prayers for the future of this movement now include Brazilian names and faces. Please join me in that prayer.