Teacher Bio - Bessie McClary
Kindergarten
When students graduate from SOCA, they will have read masterpieces from the last 3000 years: books like The Odyssey, Paradise Lost, and Crime and Punishment. They will have taken Calculus and Rhetoric and studied the history of Western Civilization in depth. But first, somebody has to read them the story of Little Red Riding Hood. Somebody has to teach them how to count by fives and what the Fourth of July is all about. We hope that you talk about these things at home, but we’re very excited for your kindergartners to also learn them from Bessie McClary. Today, we’d like to congratulate her on the completion of a 15-year career of homeschooling her three children (while serving in a co-op) and welcome her to SOCA for the next phase of her teaching.
As I have stressed in previous bios, our program at SOCA is rigorous and we hire accordingly. But it is not enough for our teachers to be smart and to love the curriculum. Perhaps more importantly, they must also love their students. Education is a very personal endeavor for Mrs. McClary, and to talk to her about teaching is to be reminded that the task involves cultivating hearts as well as teaching minds. Throughout her years of teaching, Mrs. McClary’s students have been her children and those of her friends; the personal stakes have always been high, and her teaching has always involved fostering a relationship and caring personally for her pupils. Now that she is in a different sort of institution that dynamic will change, but only somewhat. Most of the parents with whom she deals will begin the year as strangers and end it as fond acquaintances, but the virtuous disposition and habit of care which has taken root in her heart over the last two decades will be as strong as ever and leave its mark on the youngest students at SOCA.
Fundamental to the mission of SOCA is our effort to cultivate the hearts of our students in virtue. One important virtue that we hope to instill is wonder. While we lacked space for it on our list of core virtues, there is a long tradition of seeing the disposition of wonder as central to full development and the health and flourishing of the intellect. As Aristotle says, “Human beings originally began [to love wisdom], as they do now, because of wonder.”[1] Kindergarten is the best and easiest time to cultivate this virtue in the hearts of students, as they–to again quote Aristotle–“wonder at the strange things in front of them.” As they study science, our kindergartners will have the privilege of listening to Mrs. McClary read them Sleep Tight Farm. It’s a lovely little book, and as they read it with Mrs. Bessie it will not merely teach them about seasons and what it means to live in a place, it will open their eyes to the beauty of the world around them and instill in them a virtue that will grow and mature through the years. It will prepare them to, as teenagers, still be filled with wonder as they “find greater things puzzling” in the study of physics and astronomy. In the meantime, we are very glad that Mrs. McClary will guide their first steps into a wide and wonderful world.
[1] Metaphysics 982b13, in Aristotle: Introductory Readings, trans. Irwin and Fine, (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996)