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Josh Catron transitioned from the beer industry to education 13 years ago and has since taught mathematics at both the Logic and Rhetoric levels, coached athletics, and served in multiple leadership roles. He currently serves as Dean of Academics and Dean of the Logic School at Arma Dei Academy, where he supports faculty development and oversees curricular and pedagogical implementation. Josh lives in the Denver area with his wife, Chelsea, and their three children.
As classical Christian math teachers, our administrators expect us to deliver a product that is different from that of the Christian school across town or the public school down the road. We study the tenets of classical pedagogy – such as John Milton Gregory’s Seven Laws of Teaching, which urge us to “require the pupil to reproduce in thought” and to “review, review, review” – yet we often wonder: What does this actually look like in the math classroom? This session will translate these classical principles into practical classroom strategies. Drawing on 13 years of experience teaching middle and high school mathematics, I will share four concrete systems that strengthen student engagement, deepen conceptual understanding, and streamline lesson planning and grading. Attendees will leave with actionable ideas they can implement in the upcoming school year.
This session will illustrate several core principles of classical Christian education, particularly as expressed in John Milton Gregory’s Laws of Teaching (focusing on laws 2, 5, 6, and 7). These laws emphasize the teacher’s responsibility to awaken and sustain student attention, require students to reproduce knowledge in their own words and reasoning, connect new learning to the known, and reinforce mastery through continual review. The workshop will show how these principles can be faithfully and practically applied in the math classroom, moving students beyond rote imitation to true understanding.
Attendees will come away with concrete, ready-to-implement tools, including:
1) Assessment systems that increase student engagement while reducing grading time
2) Daily spiral review structures that build long-term retention and dramatically reduce end-of-unit or end-of-semester reteaching
3) Math discussions that require students to articulate and defend their mathematical reasoning rather than merely imitate the teacher or memorize algorithms
The session will be designed to address common frustrations – such as spending weeks reteaching because students “forgot” prior content, or, spending countless hours grading – and will equip teachers with strategies to overcome these pitfalls.
Teachers will leave with practical, classroom-tested systems developed over 13 years of experience – tools that they can immediately adapt for their own Logic and Rhetoric level math classrooms.
Josh Catron transitioned from the beer industry to education 13 years ago and has since taught mathematics at both the Logic and Rhetoric levels, coached athletics, and served in multiple leadership roles. He currently serves as Dean of Academics and Dean of the Logic School at Arma Dei Academy, where he supports faculty development and oversees curricular and pedagogical implementation. Josh lives in the Denver area with his wife, Chelsea, and their three children.