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Mandi Gerth

Plenary Speakers, Workshop Highlights

mandi-gerth
About Mandi Gerth

Mandi Gerth currently serves as the Administrative Director of the Cowan Center at the University of Dallas. Previously, she served alongside a dedicated team of classical educators at a collaborative model school in Fort Worth, Texas, where she taught upper school humanities. She holds a master of humanities degree from the University of Dallas with a concentration in classical education. Her work has appeared in The Classical Difference magazine and on the CiRCE Institute and Theopolis blogs. She and her husband have labored for over twenty years to build a family culture for their five children that values books, baseball, museums, home-cooked meals, and conversation about ideas.

Workshop Details

I. More Than Meter: Receiving And Using Poetry In The K-12 Classroom

Poems are not riddles, but they are education by metaphor. They are an imitation of an action within the human soul characterized by love, wholeness, and joy. Leaning on the wisdom of Louise Cowan and C.S. Lewis, Gerth and Norvell will explore the difference between using and receiving poetry as we first practice how to read poetry for ourselves as teachers. We will then model receiving for both grammar school and upper school students and provide recommended poems for different subjects.

Benefits & Takeaways

Both grammar school and upper school faculty will gain confidence in their ability to read and enjoy poetry, which will lead to their willingness to bring more poetry into the classroom.

Audience
  • Grammar School Teachers
  • K-12 Teachers
  • upper school teachers

II. The Center Cannot Hold: Myth And The Machine

Myth as a moral, organizing force provides society with security and purpose by codifying and preserving its moral and spiritual values. While it may be hard to identify the myth you are in when you are in it, the myth of modernity has been the myth of fact, which is now giving way to the myth of the machine. As such, more than fighting a culture war, Classical Christian Education is engaged in a story war. It’s the story behind the culture we need to recover. We need to present to our students a narrative that is more true than the myth of the machine, of technology, of the digital age. And we begin this work by bringing our students into a trinitarian myth that re-images man as an embodied creature living in relationships with other embodied creatures and in a natural world created and ordered by God. Unity and community must be accomplished through the preservation of culture because the truth we tell our students through what we love enough to pass it on to them codifies and preserves our moral and spiritual values. As such, it is the story we are fighting to save becuase the beauty of this story will reveal the danger and falsity of the myth of the machine. Showing our students how to read for the truth of the trinitarian myth in music, in science, in math, in art, and poetry allows them to perceive reality rightly and teaches them how to transcend the temporal to perceive the divine. It will place them in a narrative—a narrative that will save them from the soul-crushing myth of the machine.
Audience
  • Grammar School Teachers
  • K-12 Teachers
  • upper school teachers

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