The Torch
A deep dive into classical education
Principle 4: Songs and Chants
This last Saturday, my husband and I took ourselves down to the Palace Theater to see The Jayhawks, a band that we have been listening to for over two decades. As I experienced a wonderful night of music with my loved ones, I was thinking of this month’s newsletter theme of Songs and Chants as the fourth principle of classical education. I have written about playing music and its relationship to the trivium before, and in this month that may hold a bit more singing than usual, I hope you will find some notes that resonate with you.
As we learned last month, repetition is the “mother of memory”, so methods of repetition with our students are highly valuable. Chanting and singing are great ways to get information from working memory into the precious long-term memory referenced in the previous Torch. Students at Nova Classical sing songs about parts of speech, continents, planets, virtues, and historical figures (to name a just a few). Some older students are surprised when they can recall a song from their younger years, but it is no surprise to our teachers who know the efficacy of the method.
When Susan Wise Bauer was here in October for the Minnesota Classical Education Conference, she emphasized that, whether through songs or chants or spiraling of content, repetition is a comfort to students because they know what to expect. Chants are used much like songs in classical education, but are usually shorter in length and as such, hold information in bite-sized packages. I made a connection to the comforting nature of a chant when I taught the imperfect tense forms to my Latin 2 class. As I was going through the steps of how to form this verb, I came to the last step which was to add “bam, bas, bat, bamus, batis, bant”. Students immediately began to chant the endings as I was saying them aloud because they had learned these endings a couple of years beforehand. Now they were able to see how the sounds that they memorized in fourth grade were applied to a whole new verb form in sixth grade, and they were so excited that they “already knew them!”.
My final commendation for the power of songs and chants may be a little out of the mainstream, but I would be remiss if I did not address it. The reason I opened this month’s Torch with going to a concert is because there is something incredibly special about when people engage in singing and chanting together. I love to watch a band like The Jayhawks play together since it is a master class in how to be present to each other: listening deeply, harmonizing, working together, and making something incredible with instruments, lyrics, and voices. That presence is truly a gift of music.
May you all experience joy, peace, and a song together this month,
Dr. Missy Johnson
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As a teacher and student of Latin and Greek, the classical model was a natural choice for me as an educator. I hold the teaching of grammar, logic, rhetoric, and virtues in high regard for learners of all ages and backgrounds. Nova Classical’s community model is inspiring, and I hope to bring thoughtfulness and openness to the Great Conversation.