Tag: Boethius Fellows

Bulletin

The History of Astronomy: A Project Update

For the past two years, I’ve been quietly working on a project aimed at making science—particularly astronomy—more accessible and teachable, especially for educators who may not have a formal background in the subject. As someone who doesn’t have a science background, I’ve served as the project’s first test subject: Could I learn the material well enough to teach it? Could I find a way to convey these ideas in a way that felt intuitive, compelling, and grounded in evidence?

The answer turned out to be yes—but only after a great deal of trial and error. And now, I’m excited to share the next stage of the project: a simple, organized set of resources aimed at helping teachers learn the material themselves and feel ready to pass it on to their students. The goal is to make the story of the solar system approachable and teachable, even for those without a science background.

From Learner to Teacher

I came into this project without a science background. My goal was simple: could I learn the material and then teach it to someone else? That process helped me relate to what a new teacher might also struggle with. What was challenging to explain? What kind of details did I need in order to be able to pass the knowledge on to the students I was working with?

One thing became clear early on: having good demonstration tools would be essential. At first, I cobbled together resources I found online, but I eventually realized I would need to build them myself. There were a lot of tools that just didn’t exist, and I didn’t want teachers to have to scavenge for these resources on their own. I wanted everything they needed all in one place.

The Tools

The tools I’ve built are meant to make it easy for a teacher to demonstrate key concepts clearly. For example, take retrograde motion. I’ve integrated an open-source tool called Stellarium into the platform. This tool shows the night sky and comes preloaded with a date and time that demonstrates retrograde motion in action. I’ve added the ability to draw directly on the sky, so teachers and students can track the movement of celestial bodies over time. In the image below, one object is marked in red and another in yellow. Students can see how the yellow body moves with consistent spacing between markers, while the red body’s spacing varies over time—a visual cue that helps highlight the difference between stars and planets and their motion over time.

This is an interactive tool teachers can use with their students to guide them through the kinds of observations they need to make in order to identify two key ideas: first, that planets move differently than stars; and second, how to recognize the phenomenon we now call retrograde motion.

There are many more tools like this, each tailored to support specific learning objectives. They’re designed to help students move from direct observation to theoretical models by making abstract ideas visible and interactive.

The result is a platform that brings together these tools along with lesson plans—everything a teacher would need to teach the material, even without prior experience in astronomy.

What’s Next: Equipping the Teacher

The next stage of the project is perhaps the most important: equipping teachers themselves with the knowledge and confidence to teach the material well. 

Starting next month, I’ll be releasing a series called Tracing the Sky. These short, 10–15 minute videos will come out multiple times per week and guide learners through the course content. They’re designed for anyone curious about how we came to understand the solar system—whether you’re learning for your own interest or because you want to teach it.

I see these videos as the prerequisite step for teachers. Once they’ve followed along and built a basic understanding, they can move on to using the platform and lesson plans I’ve developed to teach the material to their students. These videos aren’t meant to be played in the classroom—instead, they’re designed for the teacher. My hope is that any educator, regardless of their prior familiarity with astronomy, could watch these videos and gain a solid understanding of both the historical development of celestial models and the practical tools available to teach them.

Each video is designed to be the teacher’s starting point—a way to learn the material themselves, step by step. Once they feel comfortable, they can take the next step and explore the platform and lesson plans I’ve created. These plans tie directly into the demonstrations and provide guidance on how each lesson fits into the broader narrative, what questions to ask, and which observations to emphasize.

Closing Thoughts

I’ve come to believe that science education doesn’t need to be intimidating or overly technical. At its best, it should be a process of wonder, reasoning, and discovery—and that’s exactly what the history of astronomy offers. It’s a story of humans looking up at the sky, puzzling over what they saw, and gradually learning to make sense of it all.

If I, as a non-scientist, can learn to tell that story, then I’m confident that others can too. And with the right tools and support, I believe we can help students not only understand the solar system—but appreciate the incredible intellectual journey it took to discover it.

If you’d like to keep up to date with the project and follow along with the videos as I release them, you can sign up for my newsletter here: https://mailchi.mp/7be3350a4b33/tracing-the-sky-newsletter

Bulletin

Fruits of the Fellows Formation Program

When I applied to the Boethius Institute Fellows Formation program, I knew it would be a challenging but fruitful opportunity. I had been involved in the classical education movement for over twenty years but was aware of many gaps and deficiencies in my own education, so I was excited to deepen my understanding of not only what is meant by “a liberal arts education” in its historic sense, but also to become better educated in the very arts themselves. There seem to be many opportunities for educators to sharpen their teaching skills, but I wanted to work toward acquiring for myself that education that the classical education movement seeks to impart to students. The Boethius Institute program was offering the opportunity to move toward becoming that which I want my students to become.
As part of the Fellows Formation program, we each proposed a project to work on throughout the year, and I rapidly realized what mine should be. As a former homeschooling mom, I have long wanted to see a classical learning center in my community – a place where the liberal arts are explored, imaginations are cultivated, and the greatest books, thoughts, and ideas of the past are preserved and passed on to the next generation. My city has a thriving homeschool community, with over two thousand families and several once-a-week classical communities, and I wanted to found a center where those families can turn for guidance, resources, and classes. I also wanted to begin working with several new classical schools in my area, offering workshops and support as they grow. I had already been teaching a series of classes, but I hoped to expand the classes I offer and begin to seek out like-minded teachers whose greatest love is learning to join in my endeavor. And so Legenda Classical Resources began to take shape.


As I have worked this year to learn about and understand more deeply the liberal arts of grammar, logic, rhetoric, and geometry, I have been changed as a teacher while my vision for a classical education center has become more focused. Delving into Latin and Greek grammar, as well as exploring and contemplating what language is and how it communicates thought, worked with our study of the rhetoric of famous speeches to give me a deeper love and reverence for the beauty of language itself. Logic and geometry, on the other hand, have challenged me with their precision, and this spills over into my teaching; I find my thought becoming more orderly, my questions to students more precise. It has also inspired me to eventually work with students through some of the speeches we discussed. This year I developed my curriculum for a Rise of the Modern World course, and I have incorporated several of Lincoln’s speeches which we analyzed together this year.


As part of the Fellows program, we met periodically in small groups with one of the Senior Fellows to discuss and receive feedback on our projects. A large part of my work this year consisted in building a website as a springboard to present my learning center to the community, and my small group, under the leadership of Dr. Matthew Walz, was helpful in guiding my choices as it was under construction. Dr. Walz encouraged me to craft a concise mission statement that would convey exactly what I hope to accomplish in my community: “Legenda Classical Resources supports and promotes classical education by nurturing and instructing students, parents, and teachers, encouraging them to pursue the good, true, and beautiful, and joining them in a lifetime love of learning.” I shared with him that there seem to be many in my community who are either unsure or mistaken in their perceptions of what is meant by classical education, and he gave me an idea to address this: to replace my description of classical education with an FAQ page, addressing many misconceptions and concerns sometimes associated with liberal arts education. My answers to several of these were guided and changed as I worked through this year’s fellows training, particularly the question “What are the liberal arts? Why should we study them?” Our working through the first four liberal arts enabled me to hone my idea of what they entail and the effect of studying them on the mind.

After publishing my website (www.legendaclassical.com) and an accompanying social media page (as this is the main means of communication among local homeschool families), I began developing new classes whose content has been shaped by my year with the Boethius Institute. As we have been reading and discussing Aristotle and Plato, receiving an overview of Latin and Greek, and following Euclid through his methodical propositions, I gained a greater respect for those whose minds, for generations, were formed by the same books and discussions. Three outstanding examples of this education are C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and G.K. Chesterton (who, although he had less formal education than the other two, still was formed by the greatest literature). I started development, therefore, of a new set of classes, a “Great Authors Series”, in which students at my learning center can spend a year with each of these great minds. Since my desire, as I stated above, is to have a place where imaginations are cultivated, I could think of no better authors to fire the minds and imaginations of students.


In addition to working with homeschooled students, Legenda Classical Resources also seeks to reach out to and work with classical schools, providing support, guidance, and materials to small, newly-formed schools. This year I laid the groundwork for this by working with one new school and another in the planning stages. For the former, I began coming into the school and offering classes once a week in history, literature, and writing, as well as providing some curricular guidance and materials. I was invited to attend a board meeting of the latter, set to open next year, and I developed a talk discussing “What is classical education?” which I will be giving at their initial meeting introducing the new school to the community. The Fellows program, along with my small group, were also helpful in outlining and developing my talk.


Additionally, Legenda Classical Resources also seeks to guide and nurture parents as they work to educate their children. To that end, I have begun offering workshops which not only teach students but guide parents as well. As a lifelong lover of Shakespeare, I read with delight Dr. Seeley’s account of a Shakespeare workshop he developed for younger children, and I am currently adapting his ideas and developing a similar workshop for my community this summer in which students and their parents can together discover the joys of his plays. I am currently teaching the second of two spring IEW writing workshops; I have been asked this summer to present an introduction to that writing program for parents.


As my vision for Legenda Classical Resources includes bringing multiple teachers together so that students can attend classes all meeting in the same location, I also began sharing my vision with like-minded homeschoolers who have a background in and knowledge of classical education. I discussed my plans with parents currently teaching in classical communities meeting once a week, and several expressed an interest in joining me and continuing to teach when their children have graduated. I also plan to launch a classical education reading group for parents and teachers this summer, where we can read, discuss, and grow together as educators and provide support and encouragement.


And this desire for a community of learning in my city has also been shaped and refined by my year in the Fellows Formation program. As we read through portions of Book I of Aristotle’s Topics, one particular comment he made struck me with special force. Discussing how to delimit the use of a word in any particular case by examining its contrary, Aristotle says that, while pleasure has pain as its contrary when discussing bodily pleasures, “there is no contrary and so no name to the pleasure of beholding that the diagonal of a square is incommensurable with the side.” The pleasure of knowing, of seeing that something is true, of having one’s mind opened – this is the distinctive pleasure we have enjoyed this year. We fellows-in-training have together worked through difficult material; we have learned from our Senior Fellows and from each other; we have grown as learners and teachers. And it is this idea of fellowship that I hope to develop locally – a place where people, children and adults, but all truly students, can come together and celebrate the joy found in exploring the wealth of the past. The groundwork has been laid, and I hope to continue to build Legenda Classical Resources into a home for the pleasure found in learning.

Bulletin

The Liberal Arts Renewal in Brazil

by Jean Guerreiro, Fellow

After High School in 2017, I received an invitation to apply to a six month program in Porto Alegre, Brazil, called ‘Intensive Program of Liberal Arts’ through my literature teacher in the local public school that I attended. I had never heard of liberal arts, but I saw that the Institute had multiple online courses on the Liberal Arts, and thousands of students around the nation. These students were all enrolled there not for professional training, resume building, or even for a diploma to get a job. They were studying Latin, Greek, literature, logic, among other subjects. I was surprised to realize that Instituto Hugo de São Vitor was not the only institution working towards the promotion of an educational renewal, a coming back to the classics, in Brazil. They were a part of a greater movement for the restoration of the pursuit of truth. 

As I was born in a small town in Brazil and went to a public school all my life, classical education was not in the radar for me or my family. Reading wasn’t a habit of mine, nor did I see why it would be. Little did I know that I would fall in love with classical education so deeply, that helping to restore education here has been in the forefront of my mind ever since.

I did go to Porto Alegre and lived there for six months, studying Latin, Greek, logic, and literature. It was like a rebirth to me. I didn’t have an appreciation for the higher things of culture such as music, literature, and art, and also was in complete oblivion of the fact that learning could be for its own sake. I loved it thoroughly and there was no coming back after such an experience. In 2018, I went to Thomas Aquinas College in its California campus, and was a member of the first graduating class of the New England campus, which opened its doors in 2019. 

My experience at Thomas Aquinas College was so rich that I could not help but try to share that with my fellow countrymen. During the summer between my sophomore and junior year, I tried to recruit students from Brazil to come to TAC, as I saw that this experience was very far from anything that anyone could achieve in Brazil. Thanks be to God, there were five students who got accepted to the College and were set to come that fall. An idea, then, came to my mind and I started co-teaching and co-organizing a program with another Brazilian student from the California campus to help these students, and others, to prepare for Thomas Aquinas College. That is when I started teaching online courses on the Great Books using the Socratic method. 

After my graduation in 2022, more and more students were seeking to pursue independent studies reading the Great Books with me. What was even more surprising: the students who started coming were not only the ones who were preparing to come to TAC, they were engineers, college professors, teachers, lawyers, among others. I have been teaching online and in person programs on the great books, attempting to give a taste of what I received at TAC with Aristotelian logic, Euclid, literature, natural science, amongst other programs. The students are grateful and only want to get more and more, and that is rewarding. 

But, teaching was not my primary occupation after graduation. I began working for the office of admissions on the New England campus of TAC, and was able to travel through many different states visiting many great Catholic schools, such as the Lyceum, Immaculata Classical Academy, Chesterton Academies, Gregory the Great Academy, amongst many others. These schools would allow me to speak to all of their students about liberal education, and why it was a natural follow up to the classical education they were receiving. Besides these trips, I got to know and speak to many fellow Brazilians who wanted to take their educations to the next level and make the jump to attempt to come to the U.S. and attend TAC. The experience of working in admissions only increased my love of Thomas Aquinas College, and its view of Catholic Liberal Education. 

Since then I have come back to Brazil and been more immersed in the classical renewal. I have been impressed by the amount of people who have been searching for such an endeavor. As a matter of fact, there are nine Brazilians currently attending Thomas Aquinas College, along with six alumni and over a dozen of applicants. This might be seen as a small number compared to the vast population of over 212 million people that Brazil boasts. But, going to TAC is the culmination of something much greater that has been happening in the past decade in the country. It is worth noting that the Brazilians who have gone to TAC have undergone multiple sacrifices in order to make it work – all to receive a true education.

How it all began, and who are the most important figures in this educational renewal, I cannot claim to know fully. But, certainly there were important teachers who influenced beyond the classroom. Some who deserve mentioning are Olavo de Carvalho, Padre Paulo Ricardo and José Munir Nasser. Olavo was a conservative teacher and writer. He founded a program called ‘COF’, which stands for Online Philosophy Course in Portuguese. The course boasts of 585 recorded classes on the various subjects of philosophy, without any particular school of thought being followed. The focus was on forming conservative thinkers. The course has taught more than 80,000 students. Many others deserve mentioning here, such as a priest called Padre Paulo Ricardo – a priest who is similar in many ways to Venerable Fulton Sheen in his work and popularity-  who has been responsible for an incredible number of conversions to the true faith in the country. José Munir Nasser also had a tremendous impact. He taught a five year humanities program very similar to John Senior’s, amongst many other great figures who contributed to this renewal. 

Nowadays, there are three different fronts that the classical renewal has taken: families starting Catholic schools, homeschooling, and independent learning and study of liberal arts and philosophy, mostly online.  Over a hundred Catholic schools have been starting in the previous five years in Brazil. While it is difficult to provide a true education without the previous formation of teachers and principals, the movement has been focusing on trying to do their best to educate their children in the light of the faith. This movement is very hungry for true formation, and is docile to learning from others. Homeschooling is becoming more and more of an option for families with a desire to remove their children from the woke ideologies presented in the schools. This is worth noting, because despite homeschooling being illegal in Brazil, parents are truly sacrificing their freedom to try to educate their children in the light of the classical curriculum. On the side of adults, there are thousands of students pursuing the truth. The truth that they felt was denied them while they were at school. There are many teachers around the country who are extremely influential, with thousands of students themselves. What do they teach? The classical liberal arts and philosophy. 

Beyond that, we have many people making remarkable progress in spending time for a solid formation. A couple of friends deserve mentioning. There is Rodrigo Ribeiro, who is now a tutor at Thomas Aquinas College and has a strong aspiration to help in the educational renewal in Brazil, but only after receiving many years of experience at the College. Marcus Porto went to Vivarium Novum in Italy, learned Latin fluently, attended TAC and was a distinguished student, and then went on to a masters in classics in Greek and Latin at Kentucky University. Lucas Fonseca – another fellow in the Boethius Fellowship – after studying law decided to take on philosophy as his passion, learned Latin fluently at Vivarium and now teaches the liberal arts in Latin and tutors teachers around the country, as well as getting his masters online at University of Dallas. Many others around the country are united in seeking the best education they can, in order to provide for the true education of others. 

From the numbers of converts to a more serious approach to the faith and to learning arising in every little town and state in the country, one can see easily that Brazil is going through a classical renewal in its education. Is it in the mainstream? Not at all. Not yet. From what I can tell, though, – and I am no prophet – there is hope for the future here. I don’t know if the movement will be able to be strong enough to overcome the strength of the other side, but we know we are on the winning side in the end, and so we keep fighting the good fight, hoping for the crown of victory at the end. 

Bulletin

The Power of Art: Making the Ordinary Romantic

For quite a number of years now, art has become an important part of my life. One of the main values I take from art is its ability to change how I see the world. It helps me see beyond the ordinary and see essentials. Each branch of art can do this in a different way. I’d like to share a story from a recent trip to Paris and Israel that I think can demonstrate the power of art and, hopefully, convince you to make it part of your life.

World War II has always fascinated me – the scale of the conflict, the righteousness of the cause, and the stories of heroism have captured my imagination and interest. When I found myself in France last spring, I knew I had to make the trip to the D-Day landing beaches in Normandy.

Throughout the day we toured the various battle sites, hearing tales of heroism. Our tour ended at the American cemetery at Omaha beach. It’s a beautiful place. The gardens are immaculate. The setting is beautiful and peaceful.


Overlooking the rows of grave markers is a statue of a young man. When I first saw it I felt like I had been punched in the gut. I was not expecting it. I couldn’t help but feel in awe looking up at him towering over me. His body is triumphant and yet there’s a sadness in his face. It’s beautiful and tragic. The title of this statue is “The Spirit of American Youth Rising From The Waves”. I felt overwhelmed. Even writing about it now is difficult.

This statue made everything I had experienced that day more vivid. It captured my feelings on the triumph and tragedy of World War 2 and the immense gratitude I feel for those people who fought for something they believed in. The statue embodies the spirit of the American youth who went on to defeat the Nazis but also the tragedy of the price that was paid. The statue and what it represented would come back to me in an unexpected way.

A week later I arrived in Israel. For those of you who don’t know, Israel has a mandatory army service starting at 18. Nearly every Israeli does at least a few years of service. It’s common to see young off-duty soldiers walking the streets of Tel Aviv in their army fatigues, a gun slung over their shoulder, enjoying their day. This is normal in Israel. It’s ordinary. I was expecting to see this. What I didn’t expect was how I would react. Each time I passed one of these soldiers, I saw the statue from Omaha beach. I would well up with emotion. Instead of seeing a young adult doing their grocery shopping, I would see “The Spirit of American Youth Rising From The Waves” and everything it represented to me.

My experience in Israel demonstrates one of the most powerful ways art can enhance life. Art can change how you look at the world. It can capture the essence of an idea and value and present it to you in a way that is intense and vivid. It can become a lens through which you can see the world in a different way. It allows you to see your values embedded in the ordinary world around you. Instead of seeing a young soldier, I saw the statue and felt a wave of gratitude.

As you go out into the world, I hope you’ll look for art that you can use in a similar way. I hope you will look for art that will help make the world around you more vivid and that will allow you to experience your values.

If you’re interested in learning more about how to use art in this way, I recommend visiting Touching the Art. Luc Travers has a method of reading artworks that can help you connect with art and make it part of your life.