But these uncertain times, at least for this teacher, have made the pangs of anticipation even sharper. I last taught an in-person class in early March. I finished the semester over email and video conference. I taught and the students learned, but, like many teachers, I saw how poor a substitute Zoom is for true, in-person education. I want to be in the classroom with my students.
Of course, education can take place in circumstances far less than ideal: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn found intellectual and spiritual renewal in the gulags; Fredrick Douglass learned to read and write as a slave under a cruel master; Lady Philosophy brought Boethius to wisdom even as he was on the brink of his execution. Generations of teachers and students lacked printed books, modern medicine, and indoor plumbing and have faced war, poverty, and famine. They still managed not only to learn but to create humanity’s amazing intellectual and cultural inheritance. But the greater challenges faced by our ancestors and heroes in bygone days do not negate or diminish the fact that what we all faced last spring was challenging and, I think I speak for most teachers, heartbreaking. We want to be in the classroom with our students. We want to see their faces with our own eyes and hear their voices with our own ears. We want the joy of learning together, in-person. And the time is fast approaching when we will be able to do these things.
The Faculty of JHCA is a truly brilliant group, not merely brilliant intellectually (though they are that too) but brilliant in their passion for teaching, love of the students, and commitment to true education. Since I arrived in Jackson in early July, this has been impressed on me again and again in the dozens of conversations I have had with my wonderful colleagues. I will simply quote, however, one fellow teacher who, after a long meeting spent working out school logistics, made a simple remark that sums up the animating spirit of our faculty: “We are here for the students and we are here for the Lord.”
We do not know what this year will bring. We live in an uncertain world. But the task of education can, and must, go on. C.S. Lewis, speaking to university students at the beginning of the Second World War remarked that “if men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure the search would never have begun.” And so we must always search, now as before, always persevering in the urgent tasks of teaching and learning.
Know our gratitude for sending your children to our school. You have entrusted us with an amazing task, one that, I assure you, each and every teacher here faces with both utmost seriousness and joyful gratitude.